Around May 21ish I learned it was Short Story Month. As a sucker for just about anything book related, I decided I would fit a collection in before month’s end, in between book club, Book Bingo, Snotty Literati and all the other book commitments I have made. Somehow, some way, I would do it. But what would I read?
Fortunately, the speed at which I purchase books far exceeds the speed at which I read them, so there’s always something on hand. Enter, Aryn Kyle’s collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me. I picked up a mint-condition, used copy of it at a favorite independent book store a few years ago for a steal and I remembered liking her debut novel that my book club had read a few years back. So that made things easy. It also didn’t hurt that this collection features written stories of women and girls messily making their way through life and love. And before you start doing the math and thinking that women/girls + drama + love + sex = dumbed down, porny, chick lit. You are wrong. Try again.
Boys and Girls Like You and Me features 11 stories, all of which tackle topics we have all faced: love, loss, betrayal, despair. Rather than being overdramatic, Kyle shares the awkwardness, pain, and humor that so many relationships experience, wether involving a parent and child, friends, siblings, lovers, or even acquaintances. In the collection’s opener, “Brides”, Grace loses her virginity and her best friend Dilly after the friendship of convenience experiences an irrevocable breach of trust.
The first man I slept with kept his eyes closed the whole time. We did it in a prop room of my high school theater on the leather sofa my parents had donated to help me get a part in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It would have been better if my mother could have sewn costumes or if my father could have built scenery. But since my mother didn’t sew and and my father said he would rather drive a nail through his tongue than building cardboard shrubbery, they gave the theater department two hundred dollars and the sofa we’d kept in the garage since our dog chewed through the arm rest. And voila. Townsperson Number. I had a line too: Somebody get the pastor!
Grace and Dilly aren’t boiled down to catty caricatures, rather they make choices that girls their age make. While they may not be the choices all high school girls would make, they are highly probable ones and certainly not out of character.
Kyle captures character well, presenting each stories’ protagonist with perspective changing moment. For 12-year old Tommy, the heart of “Captain’s Club”, it’s the night he sees an uncommon Blood Red Moon while on an unlikely Spring Break cruise and his first time away from home.
But when, at last, Tommy began to cry, it was not because of fear or loneliness or disappointment, but because there was so much beauty, too much beauty for his small body to hold, because some people, most people–his mother and sisters and sweet, pretty, Tree, who would never, ever love him, people he had not yet met and strangers he would never know, his father–would live their whole lives and never see this moon, because here he was, only twelve, and already he had seen it.
My favorite of the collection is the title story. Haven’t we all stayed too long in a job that didn’t challenge us, with a partner who couldn’t appreciate us, in a house that wasn’t right for us? And how did we break out of that funk? When it has been my rut, it has always been a break in the monotony or drama or whatever through which a sliver of light illuminated something completely unexpected. That’s what happens when the unnamed protagonist, who is in a dead-end relationship with a married man, working in a job where she writes term papers for students, living in a shitty apartment’s life changes when she meets Iris.
The girl working the register is the teenage vampire from my apartment building, and when I set the movie on the counter, she looks down without touching it. She is pale and razor-thin, with dark, frightening eye makeup and dyed black hair that falls over her face like a hood. “Have you seen this move?” she asks, and I say that I have. “This movie’s fucked-up.”
—
She runs one hand through her hair, and when it lifts away from her face, I realize that she’s younger than I thought–fourteen, fifteen at most. This surprises me because I have more than once seen her drunk outside the apartment building kissing her boyfriend and, on one occasion, puking in the bushes.
—
When she pushes the video across the counter at me, her nails are short and jagged, her cuticles raw. I should make sure to return the the movie by Friday, she tells me. The late fees here are ridiculous.
The video is not returned on time, fees are racked up and the two seemingly different characters’ lives become shockingly similar. Much to the dismay of the narrator, she is forced into a situation where she must help Iris. It’s this moment, the break in the chaos that shakes things up, breaks up the chaos and changes her perspective and trajectory.
This is a solid debut collection, and one where each of the stories has a clear beginning, middle, and end. This genre is a tough one and tough to do well. Kyle has proven in her first attempt that she’s a talented storyteller and one I hope we see more from in the future.
AMENDMENT! So, when you purchase faster than you read and you read all the live long day, you don’t even catch that you already read a short story collection this month! Thankfully, both were delights; even though I forgot about the other one. Read my review of the other one. It really was good. Promise.