Pete Nelson, Summer of Love, from The Restless Boys Club.
When I was fifteen and a man of the world, I was madly in love with a Catholic girl. She had gray Irish eyes, and the whitest of teeth, and a body that left the whole neighborhood weak. It was a body a fully-grown woman should have, in the spring of her years, in the “Summer of Love.” So for “gentleman callers” she’d a dozen or more, though I was the one her Dad let in the door. In the small hours, the whole town asleep, I used to crawl out my window and climb down my tree, and I’d light up a Lucky as I walked to her house where I’d climb to her window to lure her out. We’d go down to the park, where we’d lie in the grass and talked about life as it flew by so fast, and sometimes she’d kiss me, sometimes she’d let me touch her in the dark where I hadn’t touched yet. Sometimes at her window I thought I would die, she’d already be out with some other guy. I’d sing, “Shawn, where have you gone? It’s 1968 and The Beatles are on. I’ve got nine cigarettes that should last us ’til dawn. Oh, Shawn, where have you gone?”
…