"Place Your Hands" by Reef

By Nick Confalone

In his seven years down south, Jason Bigelow had learned a thing or two about girls, he told me, sitting in the hot tub at our new house, his newly acquired southern accent contaminating the water with y’alls, fixins, and all sorts of twangy incomprehensibilities. He’d left South Carolina and come back to Delaware to live with us for two weeks that summer before junior year, and he told me I didn’t have to worry about girls anymore. He’d teach me everything he knew.

Girls had been mastered, beaten, easily defeated. Girls were Contra after the Konami code.

For two weeks, the soundtrack to exploring my new neighborhood was Place Your Hands, by Reef. Whether or not we carried boomboxes on our shoulders while we plotted out the cul-de-sac didn’t matter; the song was always with us, an angel on our shoulders, urging us to place our hands on someone’s hope, to run our fingers through someone’s soul.

It was a brain virus that grabbed us and wouldn’t let go. For two weeks, we couldn’t hide from what’s inside. I might have even been humming the song when we met Amanda Hollins for the first time, my new neighbor, out for a run, a dream come true.

I smiled at her. She smiled back. Things, as far as I could tell, were going well.

But then Jason stepped in front of me—he’ll handle this, thank you very much. He puffed out his chest, gave her a smile, and fired a shot of southern charm straight into her beautiful face.

Years later, in a college linguistics class, I learned that the official dialect family is called Southern American English (SAE). Shared features include “short front vowel drawl,” a tendancy to glide vowels up from their original position on the palette, and a relaxation of the nuclei of upgliding diphthongs.

Standing in front of my house that day, he spoke for ten unbroken seconds and we didn’t understand a goddamn word he said. He repeated himself, this time with a sly wink, but the accent came out even thicker. She shook her head and glanced at me. Neither one of us had any idea what was going on.

I guess Reef was his backup plan, because he only floundered for a moment before saying, slowly and articulately, to a tune that only he and I could hear: “Oh place your hands… on my boner.”

For the rest of high school, two full years on that beautiful cul-de-sac, I never spoke to Amanda Hollins again.