Someone Like Summer by M. E. Kerr

to take an AIDS test.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI don’t know why. He couldn’t tell me why. He just said everyone should take one.”
    â€œOh, Mitz, do you think maybe he has AIDS?”
    â€œI don’t know what to think. And now it doesn’t matter what I think. He’s dumped me.”
    â€œIs there any chance you could have gotten AIDS if he has it?”
    â€œYes. But he says he does not have it.”
    I’d wondered if they were having sex, but the fact I didn’t know for sure showed how much we’d lost touch. Just last year we’d bet that by the time we were seniors, we’d be the only Vestal Virgins at school. We figured most juniors and seniors at Seaview had or were having both intercourse and outercourse. Mitzi and I agreed intercourse was okay if you were really in love with a guy, but we swore we’d never do outer-course, even though oral sex was no big deal anymore. It was to us. It was too one-sided, we’dheard, too much the big male ego trip.
    â€œI want to be tested now,” Mitzi said, “tested for everything! But I can’t go to Dr. Oliver. I’m afraid he’d tell my mother.”
    â€œJust go to Seaview Hospital. Women for Women will set up an appointment for you. Mitzi? I’ll go with you if you want me to. Then we can catch up with what’s going on in our lives.”
    â€œThanks, Annabel. I’d love to have you go with me!”
    â€œDefinitely. Say when.”
    â€œI’ll make an appointment. I can’t talk anymore now. I’m meeting Jackie Goldman to read each other’s F. Scott Fitzgerald papers. Have you done yours yet?”
    â€œThanks for reminding me. I almost forgot.”
    â€œI’ll tell you everything when I see you.”
    Â 
    I’d brought Corazón Libre with me, the Mercedes Sosa CD. I wanted to hear it with Esteban, but I played it for myself again. I’d heard it five or six times. Besides the song about the forgotten children, there was “Todo Cambia,” “EverythingChanges,” and “Tonada del Viejo Amor,” “Song of an Old Love.”
    When Kenyon listened to her sing, he said her voice was haunting. He Googled her and found out she was in her sixties. Her voice had been compared to Billie Holiday’s and Edith Piaf’s. She was to Argentina what Joan Baez had been to America: a folk singer with her country as a cause.
    It made me love Esteban even more, to know that was his first gift to me, and that Sosa was his mother’s favorite singer. I had asked him to show me photos of his family. He said they were all back in Providencia, but he would have some sent.
    Then I listened to some music Kenyon had brought there, realizing it was really from Mom’s collection of old forties and fifties singers he must have transferred to CDs. Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett: the ancient sad crooners rhyming heart with part and miss you with kiss you .
    Next I heard knocking on the downstairs door, and Esteban calling my name.

SEVENTEEN
    â€œY OU LOOK muy bella , Anna!” He was standing in the moonlight by the garage, wearing his Canul Jr. Number Two: the yellow guayabera with the four pockets. It had the shine of a few hundred washes, but he had told me a guayabera could be worn anywhere, even to a formal dance. The writer Ernest Hemingway had worn guayaberas , he had told me proudly. He had his gold holy medal under it, and he had on cargo shorts. I loved his little butt and his long, thin legs, unusual for ashort guy. He was grinning.
    â€œI am late because I could not call you. I had to work late, and buses weren’t running. Then your line was busy for a long time. I lent my car to Dario, and so I hitched here.”
    I had to laugh at myself, chiding Dad for agonizing over what to wear to Larkin’s when I’d spent a long time trying things on for a date with Esteban. We weren’t even going