“Good,” he
said, nodding his head slowly.
He kept it short and to the point, as if saying too much would cause him to wilt away.
I caught myself wondering if him wilting away would be all that bad.
“That’s great,” I lied, continuing to force my smile.
“So, did you go to Will’s high school?” the girl interjected, interrupting Will's and my stare.
Both Will’s and my attention turned to the girl, who had been fairly invisible in the last couple of seconds. He hadn’t told her. The girl’s innocent question struck me hard and made my heart sink to the pit of my stomach. It hurt, but of course, it had only been two months. I’d be surprised if he even knew her middle name.
I looked at Will, searching for a response that would make our chat a little less awkward than it alre
ady was. Then, the answer came.
For a second there, I thought that I saw a faint request in his puppy-dog eyes. I could almost see him begging me to answer the question simply, but I desperately wanted not to. I wanted to inform the girl that I was the ex-girlfriend. Just the word
ex-girlfriend
has such a stinging ring to it. I feel like it says that I’ve already won the game in play – as if it were a game to win. And now, it seemed like such a good word to use and such a perfect time to use it – but instead, I humbly took his hint and bit my tongue. He would owe me later.
“Yes, I did. I went to Will’s high school,”
I said, refusing to elaborate.
“Julia,” Rachel interrupted then. She had appeared out of nowhere. “Chris wants to ask you something about track and find out how outstandingly well you’re doing,” she continued, pulling me away, while staring straight at Will with her dagger eyes.
“It was nice to meet you,” I said to the girl over my shoulder. I was smiling and polite
– just as I was supposed to be.
“You don’t mean that,” Rachel whispered, whisking me away.
“I know,” I whispered back to her, sounding defeated.
But before Rachel could steal me away from the scene permanently, I glanced back at Will one last time. I saw his eyes were still on me. He mimed the words,
Thank you
. I could also see that the gesture remained undetected by the girl who sat next to him, and I chose, against everything in me, to keep it that way. I managed a half smile and then turned my head away from his gaze and exited the room with Rachel.
“It's a rebound, Jules,” Rachel whispered to me. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Just don’t pay any attention to him tonight and remember when life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.”
I habitually nodded my head in reply to my friend’s words, but not even everything in me could have forced my mind to think of anything but him then. He was with someone else. He was holding hands with someone else, and I wasn’t the one sitting next to him. How had my world changed so drastically in such a short amount of time?
I was all but crushed now, in pieces on the floor in the other room, yet I compelled my lips to smile as I greeted another friend
in the dining room with a hug.
New Year’s resolution – try not to cry.
A
s I threw on my gloves and flipped up my jacket’s hood, I stepped outside and immediately felt the cool, spring air cast a chill over my exposed skin. I hate being cold – almost as much as I hate ex-boyfriends, I found myself thinking as I crossed my arms around my body.
In the end, it had taken several months to get over my New Year’s Eve experience. And for now, I was over wanting to tie Will to that old caboose downtown and pay what tourists there were to pummel him with tomatoes. I thought it would be more fun than a photo.
And I guess I had eventually found a way to turn my bitterness into not-so-bitter bitterness as well – I found it’s called
time
, and it seemed to be the only thing that really worked.
“Time makes everything better,” I could hear Rachel saying in the back of my mind – in that little voice of hers that often overshadowed my own thoughts.
The outdoor track across the street was, at best, a five-minute walk, and within no time I felt the bounce and cushion of the track’s red, rubber surface under my feet as I stepped onto its eighth lane.
“Nice gloves, Julia. I must have missed the snow storm through all of the green on my way in,” a voice called out from inside a huddled group on the other side of the track. The voice was deep and carried a slight Northeastern accent.
“I haven’t heard that one in a while,” I said, sending a playful smirk in the direction of the chiding voice.
“Okay, okay, let’s get going, guys. Enough chitchatin’. Warm up well. We’ve got a six, five, four, three, two, today,” shouted a man with a clipboard and a stopwatch.
Lovely, I thought to myself.
“Hey, Julia, remind me to ask you something after the workout,” the Northeastern accent softly said as I neared him. It sounded like he knew something that I didn’t, and it peaked my curiosity.
“Ask me what?” I asked.
“Just remind me,” he answered back, smiling.
“Okay, sure,” I said as I tugged at my gloves, found an open eye in the wire fence, stuffed them into it and then joined the group already starting to jog around the track.
The workout came and went as usual – nothing out of the ordinary, and yet again I had survived. I reveled in my small joy as I fell onto the track’s rubber surface to pry my spikes off of my swollen feet.
“Phew, that – was – pain,” I said to no one in particular.
“Tired already?” the six-foot-one sprinter with the Northeastern accent taunted me.
I looked up from my disheveled state and smiled at the seemingly cool and collect figure staring in my direction. He had muscular arms and legs and strawberry blond hair and looked as if he were totally unfazed by the trial we had just endured. He was a year older than me, a sophomore, and he had become a good friend of mine in the time that we had known each other. A pre-med student and standout athlete, Brady had many alluring qualities that attracted my close friendship. Yes, I said
friendship
. Despite being coerced by the girls on the sprint squad to take him seriously, I was convinced that any relationship beyond a friendship with my now, good friend was completely out of the question. Even if I wanted a relationship right now, I was sure that Brady and I had crossed into the
just-friends zone
a long time ago.
“Tired. Never,” I said with a crooked smile in answer to his question. I tried with great pains to slow my breathing so it wasn’t quite so easy to see how out of breath I really was.
Brady laughed.
“Hey, you wanted to ask me something. What was it?” I asked. I had almost forgotten.
“Oh, yeah, there’s a concert tonight at the Blue Star, and I have an extra ticket. Do you want to come?” he asked.
“Who’s playing?” I questioned him.
“The All-American Saints. It’s a new band. You probably have never heard of them, but I thought we could try it,” he said, almost sheepishly.
He wasn’t acting his usual confident self. What was different about him?
“Okay,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. I didn’t really have anything else to do later that night, and I had already caught up on all of my homework over the weekend. Besides, it sounded fun – even if he was acting weird.
“Who else is going?” I asked as I successfully forced one spike off of my foot and watched it fall to the rubber surface in front of me.
“It’s just me and you. I’ll pick you up at seven,” he said as quickly as he could get the words out of his mouth.
And before I could ask anymore questions, he had disappeared behind the swarm of jumpers huddled together in the middle of the track. I paused from untying my other shoe and stared bemused in the direction in which the tall figure had just been standing. Just me and you? I knew that I had a puzzled look superglued to my face. We never did things as
just me and you
. It was odd, but I guess it wasn’t that odd. And it surely couldn’t be worth too much thought. Right? I had learned that guys were odd creatures many years ago, and besides, Brady probably bought the tickets only to find out that everyone he had asked was either too busy to go or didn’t want to see a band, the likes of which they had never heard. That was probably it.
I went back to untying my spiked shoe.
When I finished, I slipped on my tennis shoes, stood up, threw on my jacket, un-jailed my gloves from the wire fence and headed for the box I called home to get ready for the concert that I had concluded would just be part of another night with a good friend.
“I
like ‘em,” I said, almost shouting, so that Brady could hear me over the drums and constant hum of the crowd.
At the same time, I was trying unsuccessfully to drape my jacket over the back of my chair, while also juggling my phone and breathing in a combination of old building and a dozen perfumes and colognes. Aah, night life. Was it strange that I actually kind of liked the combination of juxtaposing smells? The scene and its attributes kind of reminded me of what life would look like – and smell like, I guess – if you bottled it up and kept it for a long time. I would bottle up tonight, I guess. Why not? I was watching a band with a good friend, who just so happened to be easy on the eyes, I might add. Life could be worse than tonight.
“Here, I’ve got it,” Brady said as he helped me force the jacket to latch on the opposite side of the chair.
“Tha-nks,” I said – almost as if it were a question.
My eyes tracked his expression. I was waiting for him to make fun of my inability to perform a simple task – as if the endless banter never got old. But nothing came. He simply steadied the jacket on the chair, caught my stare, smiled and refocused his attention back onto the band.
A smile?
His reaction made me giggle quietly to myself. He must love this band. It had him acting…well, smiley.
“Where are they from?” I asked, straining my voice. I was sure he knew and would be eager to tell me.
“
Memphis
,” Brady shouted back.
“Hmm,” I said, shaking my head. “They’re pretty good. I wonder why they haven’t been discovered yet.”
“They’re an alternative rock band from the
Midwest
. It takes a while, I guess,” Brady replied, a permanent smile planted on his tan, chiseled face.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I said, smiling also and following his gaze to the four-member band on the tiny, worn-in platform.
The band just barely fit onto the modest stage that was maybe three feet off of the ground. People, mostly in their teens and twenties, lined the wooden edges of the raised area, holding out their hands in hopes of touching the hand of a star – well, before he was a star anyway. Of course, they might have well have been famous. They had managed to captivate the attention of the entire hall of young adults, which each had an attention span of no more than 30 seconds.
And I wouldn’t have taken my eyes off of them again either if it weren’t for my own depleted attention span. My electronic distraction, also known as my phone, and its obnoxious glow suddenly caught the corner of my eye. My hand instinctively darted toward it and scooped it up.
But before I tossed it like a hot potato into my clutch, I glanced at the name on the screen.
Will.
My heart raced for a split second. I hadn’t talked to Will since New Year’s Eve. What could he possibly have to say?
“Do you need to answer it?” Brady asked, taking his attention away from the band as well to flash me a gentle smile.
Another smile?
“No,” I said, the corners of my mouth rising, forcing my heart to slow again.
“Okay,” he said, nodding his head and returning his attention back to the band.
My eyes followed his lead, but my mind fell onto some kind of misguided safari. And by the time the band was wrapping up its last song, I had already jumped off of the safari and had entered an imaginary dream land – complete with time machines that allowed you to go back and forward all at the same time.
And on the outside, from my corner of the playhouse, I was methodically dissecting the way each member busily unplugged amplifier cords and took swigs out of water bottles and exchanged glances with fans that just knew that he was going to be the next big thing someday. But on the inside, and for a fleeting second, I imagined it was Will doing the same things. I imagined his deep, soothing voice and crooked, half smile and his new, scruffy facial hair.
My eyes followed a band member to the corner of the stage, and I watched as he took a napkin and a pen from a brunette with long, silky hair. It was the girl from Kathy’s New Year’s Eve party. Well, it wasn’t, but it was in my head anyway. And suddenly, Will’s voice didn’t seem so smooth and his facial hair just made him look lazy and like a bear.
“Are you ready?” I heard Brady ask me, breaking my stare, my lapse from reality.
“Yeah,” I shouted, noticing for the first time that I no longer had to shout. “That was fun,” I added, forcing myself back to where I actually was.
I was smiling when I caught Brady’s gaze. And for a strange moment, his peculiar smile – that he had been displaying all night – appeared mesmerizing, as if no one was moving around us, no one was pushing out chairs or brushing past us or trying to get the band members’ attentions. For a moment, the room seemed silent and completely calm. Maybe I was still in
Dream
Land
.
“Hey, do you want to get some hot chocolate at the shop down the street?” Brady asked me eventually, puncturing the vacuum that I or he or we had just either created or had just so happened to find ourselves in for the last several moments.
“That sounds like a good idea,” I said, nodding my head.
It only took a couple of minutes for us to walk down the street and find our way into a small, local coffee shop. It was three stairs down and we were completely underground, surrounded by drawings of bridges and tall weeds and roads that wound into fields of clovers – images that would fit pretty well in “the country room,” I noted. The drawings were all signed and for sale by local artists trying also to make their big break. The narrow, small room was cozy, dimly lit and full of soft, leather chairs. Brady and I made our way to a small counter with a chalkboard displayed behind it and planted our feet.
“It’s on me,” I said to Brady after I decided on a triple chocolate hot chocolate and he chose the regular hot chocolate.
“No, no, no,” Brady said, reaching for his wallet in the back pocket of his dark jeans.
“No, you bought the tickets,” I said, trying my best to persuade him.
“Your money’s no good here, Julia. Plus, ladies don’t pay,” he replied, smiling and pulling out a bill from his wallet.
Ladies? Brady had never referred to me as anyone but “one of the guys,” much less a lady. The gesture seemed kind of misplaced, but then again, he had always been pretty gentlemen-like, almost like an old soul.
“Thanks,” I said, smiling, opting eventually to give in and let him pay.
The barista handed us each a steaming cup of hot chocolate within minutes, and then we made our way out of the coffee shop and to a small, downtown city park that wasn’t too far down the street.
I could feel the smooth hot chocolate glide down my throat as I took short, frequent sips to ward off the night’s brisk air. The smooth chocolate felt good after a night of shouting over the band.
“How about here?” Brady asked me as he pointed to a small, wooden bench under a maple tree just starting to grow back its big, green leaves that the winter had stolen from it.
“This is fine,” I said cheerfully, taking a seat and resting my back contently up against the back of the bench.
“Thanks for asking me to come. It was fun,” I said, after I had turned toward my friend now sitting beside me.
“It was nothing,” he said, resting his hot chocolate cup on his knee. “I’m glad you said
yes
.”
His comment set me back for a second. I had heard that phrase before. It had come from a bear – a scruffy-faced, lazy bear. I guess I was still working on the bitterness. I shook it off and kept my eyes on my friend. There was something different about him tonight. Maybe it was his hair. It had gel in it. I rarely saw him with gel in his hair. No, maybe it was the way he was dressed. He was wearing dark denim jeans and a black, long-sleeved shirt under his dark leather jacket. It seemed to compliment his deep brown eyes exceptionally well, and it was a far cry from sweats and a tee shirt. Though, he could hold his own in either outfit.
Just friends –
It would always be a blessing and a curse, I thought, smiling slightly. I looked away and took another sip of hot chocolate.
“Julia,” Brady said then, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.
I could hear the breath escaping through his lips. I looked up at him with a concerned expression. His whole demeanor had changed, and I wondered what had caused it. Was there still something he had to ask me? Was everything okay? My breaths quickened then. Were there still more surprises? I waited on my answer as he continued.
“I’ve liked you for awhile now,” he sputtered and then paused, awaiting my reaction.
I swallowed quickly as my eyes darted back to the ground in front of me. I wasn’t completely sure what I had heard. I sat frozen, puzzled and shocked. A foreign excitement churned in my stomach, though I still wasn’t quite sure where he was going with all of this.
Moments went by in silence. I slightly panicked.
“And I like you too, Brady,” I said, smiling.
I had taken the safe road, not really knowing if there was even a different road to take.
Brady smiled and shook his head back and forth as he looked toward the ground, seemingly at his shoes, seemingly frazzled.
“No, I mean, I like you, Julia. I like you, like I-want-to-take-you-on-a-date, and I-want-to-kiss-you like you,” he confessed sincerely.