Repose Memories (reposememories) wrote in repose, @ 2017-06-06 02:57:00 |
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Entry tags: | connor baird, dylan michaels, ~plot: memories |
[Memory]
What: Memory.
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing it.
Warning, this memory contains: Teens. One brief mention of abuse.
God, this is so stupid.
It's a week until summer break, and instead of counting down the hours, you're wishing for more. Adding them up. Doing long division in your head. Remembering you can't math for shit, and then throwing it all out to count them out again. Man, where the crap is your best friend when you need her? You could ask her how many hours were left and she'd just spit it out like a robot, no calculator required. One of many rad perks to having a genius for a bestie.
Anyway.
School's almost out. You're still hanging with those other friends of yours, thinking about how you're gonna be fifteen in a month, and you're thinking you need more time. You're waiting. Thinking—this is some grade school bullshit, man. All this for a chance to see her again. Once last chance before the season ended, and school was out, and you blew it until next year. A whole three months until then. That's basically forever.
Is it weird, hanging around in hopes to catch her? Maybe it's weird. Shit. You didn't think it was weird, because you know her. Sorta. Shared a lab in chemistry with her a couple times. Maybe one of those times was the time you accidentally lit up a bunsen too hard and set the sprinklers off, but it was just—part of the plan. Right. Totally. She laughed as she ran out with a book held overhead, and your best friend congratulated you on mad pranx. You got detention for a week.
But it gives you one kinda in-joke to share with her, and nobody else. It's enough to say hi whenever she passes in the hall. Sometimes? She even beats you to it.
You coast back and forth a while on your board, practically pacing on the asphalt. You're probably just reading into it. You're definitely trying too hard. One of the guys, John or Joe or whats-his-fuck, nearly clips you as you drift around. You trip off the board, cuss him out. He cusses you back. There's a tense minute, like just before a scuffle, but nobody here wants to actually throw down with you. Mike made the mistake of doing that once. Apparently you cheat—by which he means you wiped the pavement with his ass. But, whatever. You huff and puff, and then somebody cracks a joke, and laughter breaks the tension. The scrape and sigh of plastic wheels on asphalt continue as if never disturbed.
Anyway. That's why you're here, hanging out with a bunch of ain't-shit kids grinding the paint off the rails every day after school, when you honestly kinda wished you were down at the arcade with your bestie. Like, Maria's cool and whatever, and she has the hookup whenever they wanna head down to the end of the tracks to smoke, but the rest of them, eh—take or leave. They're all jerks, though. Which is probably why you fit in just fine.
You don't even really care about skating. It's just the thing everybody else does here, and you're just trying desperately hard to blend in. Problem is, you need a board for that, and you have no older siblings to pawn one off of. It doesn't even cross your mind anymore to ask your parents for the money. So—sort of a problem, but not that much of a problem. While sitting stuck for two hours a week in an uncomfortable pew between your mom's old lady perfume and your dad's suffocating aftershave, you learned long ago how to palm cash from the collection plates. Like, not enough so anybody noticed it go missing. Duh. But most times your mom coughed up ten bucks to God, which was a whole ten bucks more than she ever gave you. And you felt entitled to your cut. What would happen, really? A first-class ticket to Hell? The threat scared you shitless when you were tiny, but you were older now. You were gonna be fifteen in a month, and fifteen-year-olds weren't afraid of the bogeyman that told you came out born wrong.
You're okay. You remember two words, periodically. You remember being younger. You're up at two in the morning, downstairs, watching late-night TV on mute, tiny and restless and full of dread over something you got in trouble for looking up on a school computer that day. The TV flashes pictures of pretty women and a telephone number. Call this. Talk to girls, it promises. You want to talk to other girls. Maybe they'll know what's wrong with you. You're ten, so you call the number, obviously. The woman on the other end is in no way prepared for a tiny voice, squeaking for tiny life advice about what to do when you like-like girls.
But bless her for trying. Swallowing her working voice, she coaxes you off the line after a minute or two, but just before you hang up in red-faced confusion, she says, "Honey, it's okay to like a girl. You're okay." You hang up, and cry hard enough into the couch that you get hiccups.
You remember your mom flipping shit on your dad over a phone bill shortly thereafter. You, then, as a very wise ten-year-old, don't say a word.
Anyway. You, now, almost fifteen, you'd stuffed enough righteous bills up your sleeve after a month that you could afford a deck off some friend of a friend's college-aged brother who outgrew it faster than he outgrew the town. All the old tape and shit stuck to the board made it easy to pass off as borrowed, from a friend. Your mom didn't even try to pressure you out of it. She just sighed wearily like she always does and reminded you why she's going to an early grave, blessed be to Jesus, what-fucking-ever. You spent a whole weekend just trying to get a kickflip down before Monday and skinning the hell out of your elbows and knees. Even now, you still really don't know how to ride, but at least perpetually bloody knees kinda match the faded bruises across your jaw.
You're sweating in the almost-summer heat. Absently, you shove up the sleeves on your shirt to your elbows, then fingers anxiously check the placement. It's fine. It's fine. The bruises on your upper arms, the ones shaped like a screaming match you lost, they're still covered. You're okay.
Anyway.
You drift lazily around the parking lot, thinking. You're pacing. You know that. You think about just heading home, and hiding in your room for the next century or so. That's probably long enough. This is stupid. You just don't know her well enough to know-know. Y'know? Like, you know her. She wears earth tones and pinks. She wears her cap backwards on the field. Her ears are pierced. She chews bubblegum and wears lotion that smells like coconut. She gnaws on pencil erasers when she's thinking. Her feet fidget. She's full of energy. Mostly, you know her by the back of her head. Blonde hair, wild and wavy, pulled into a thick braid when she's in a good mood. Down, straightened, when she isn't. On those days, you can tell she hides behind the curtain of hair. You imagine what it would feel like between your fingers.
It's just—she just always does something that makes you second-guess your second-guessing. Even on hair-down days, she still says hi. Man. Other people got it easy. If only this was as normal as plain-and-simple rejection. You sigh, anxious.
You're okay. The sound of approaching chatter of girls and the clacking of cleats on pavement jolt you back to the present, the now. The doors to the gym and locker rooms are just around the corner from the lot. Practice is over. This dog day of almost-summer, and this is the moment you were waiting for.
Rolling across the lot, you see her. Talking animatedly to teammates. But then she looks over. She sees you. Something kneejerk twists hard in your gut. Holy shit. Holy shit. And then the unthinkable happens.
She smiles.
Twang, goes the metal rail as you catch it right across the ribs. Wheels slip out from under you, and you fall back, smacking the pavement with force enough to drive the wind and all of your dignity out from your lungs. There's an uproar of laughter, mostly from the asshole crew, and you slap you hands over your reddening face with a groan.
You lay there as the laughter dies. From between fingers, you see her lean into view. You're clearly dead now, so her golden braid dangles overhead, and this must be your one lifeline to Heaven. "Hi," she says. She's still smiling, but not just at you. More like—with you.
You lower your hands. You try to not gape. "Uh. Hey." You fail.
"You okay?" she asks. You wheeze. Smooth. She still offers you a hand.
Yeah. You're okay.