A languid summer vacation takes a distressing turn in this short story by Argentine writer Ju Donzelli, translated from the Spanish by Grace Penry. A group of high school friends abscond to a nearby town to swim, drink, and hang out, but the relaxed atmosphere slowly grows more tense, leading to an altercation between two boys—one of them being the slender, soft-spoken Flaco Luna, an anomaly among the guys and beloved by the girls. The sudden outbreak of violence reveals the unspoken tensions of adolescence, when masculinity must be achieved through publicly dominating others, including your own friends. Between the electrifying fascination of otherness and the terrorizing brutality of conformity, the boys’ fragile ecosystem is fiercely shaken by the incident.
I don’t go on vacation with the guys from high school anymore, but with Flaco, I’d go again. The last time we were all together we went to Guayamba, one of those towns where we Santiagueños will spend a couple of days because it’s nearby, because there’s a river, because it’s cool and cheap.
In the evening, the giant cicadas started getting on our nerves. It’s always like this, but on this day in particular they screeched and screeched. They look like other cicadas, only much bigger and rounder, the area around Santiago is full of them because of the carob trees. They’d zoom past us and hit things like projectiles, making a dry sound when they slammed into the wall. That’s what’s so funny about them: they sound empty when they bang into something and they’re always acting like they want to kill themselves. If there’s a pool, the first thing they do is head straight into the water and buzz their wings until they drown and die. And if you take them out, they’ll jump right back in. It’s an infinite loop lasting half the summer.
Whenever we’d go to Guayamba, we’d stay in Manso’s parents’ house because it’s pretty big and has a pool. Us guys had taken our clothes off, it wasn’t that hot out, but we were drunk, the humidity made the air dense, and during the siesta we’d sunbathed at the river. Plus, the power kept cutting out because it had rained, and the fans kept turning off. The girls were still in their shorts and bikinis, with their feet in the pool and hair dripping with the smell of chlorine.