Permanent Adhesives (12 page)

He nodded.

“So, that’s why you are now in Molly’s English class?”

“Yeah, I just started speech therapy last week, and they had to switch a couple of my classes, so I could meet with the speech therapist when she’s here.”

“So, for that you’re special ed.?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, according to the state, I’m disabled.”

Brian laughed.

Elias sucked on his bottom lip and looked down at his phone.

“You are so insensitive,” I said. “You’re kicked out of lunch.”

“You can’t just kick me outta lunch.”

“Afraid so, see you later bucko.”

“I have better places to be anyways,” Brian said, getting up, bringing his nachos with him.

“So you’re just starting speech therapy in your senior year of high school?” Kate asked.

Elias sighed. “Can we talk about somebody else now?”

Kate drummed her fingers on the table. “No.”

I kicked Kate under the table.

“Molly,” she snapped, then turning her attention back to Elias. “So, Elias.”

He shook his head no.

“You can’t just stop talking.”

He nodded and that was that.

The rest of lunch we talked a little about my new site and the really bizarre book Roberto was reading, and Kate continually poked Elias in the shoulder, but he remained silent.

“How much longer Molly?” Kate whined.

I went to her house after school with Roberto. Well, we all actually did I guess you could say because she drove us from school to her house. I had her leaning back a bit on her butt. She was complaining because her legs were out in front of her in the air. One was pretty straight, and the other one was bent and drawn up a little. The position was hurting her abs and she wanted to stop. She held a high belief that teenagers were not to exercise. I was kind of with her on that one.

“Hold on just a few more secs. Just a couple more pictures.” I was taking pictures of her from all possible angles, but especially from the front. I was working on a scene where Sasha is being blown back by an explosion, and I was having issues drawing it; that darn foreshortening again. Thankfully, I always had friends on hand I was able to use as models when I came across such conundrums.

“My telenovela will be over soon,” Kate said.

“Okay, last one,” I said, snapping a pic from the floor where I was lying in front of her. “Okay, thanks, you’re good.”

Kate flopped backwards onto the hardwood.

“Oh, this is getting good,” Roberto said from the couch.

“What, what?” Kate asked, scrambling onto the couch next to him.

“Kate, is the only reason you invite Roberto over here is so he can translate for you?”

“That’s just one of them, now shush.” Kate’s favorite telenovela focused on the life of a teenage girl who moves to Mexico City with her mother and attends a school where everybody is rich, and the guys are all hot. It also delves into the lives of the parents and oh boy, the drama that ensues.

“Margarite just told Alejandro that she’s leaving him,” Roberto informed Kate. Kate picked up a couch pillow and screamed into it. “Why?” she screamed. “He is sooooo hot!”

I laughed and sat crossed legged in front of the couch on the floor. It went to commercial and Kate asked, “What about you and your little hotness?”

“Who?”

“Like you don’t know. Uh, Elias.”

“Oh,” I said. “I dunno.”

“You’re not holding it against him that he’s all special ed., are you?”

“No, of course not. I just feel that I should still be mad at him or something.” Even though deep down I knew I still liked him, but I couldn’t seem to let go of our argument.

“This isn’t about him calling you self-righteous is it?” Kate asked.

“No, you know it’s not.”

Kate glanced over at Roberto. Roberto then looked at me and shrugged.

I sighed. “Kate, as of our phone conversation the other day, I am now fully aware that you have filled Roberto in on my life story, so we can talk about the real reason I’m on the fence about Elias. He knew exactly how to hurt me, and he did, and I don’t know if I can let myself like a vindictive person like that.”

“Okay, let’s analyze this further,” Kate suggested, sitting up straight on the couch, hugging the decorative pillow she previously screamed into.

“Okay,” I said.

“You said he apologized, what were his exact reasons?”

I summarized the conversation Elias and I had.

“He actually said he was scared?” Kate asked.

I nodded.

“God, I would never admit anything like that to someone. So the question is…what’s he scared of exactly? So you know all about his jacked up life, and he knows about yours. I think that’s a front. I think he was just acting out cuz…” Kate said.

Roberto sat up and snapped his fingers. “Not long before the party he started up with all his speech stuff, so maybe he’s embarrassed about that, maybe not sure if you’ll accept him for being him, and he’s dealing with all these emotions. He starts drinking, his head gets all jacked up, you yell at him for drinking. He looks at it like you’re judging him, and somehow it gets distorted in his head as you’re judging him for who he is and not cuz he’s drinking.”

“That’s some deep stuff,” Kate said, high-fiving Roberto. “We so could start our own talk show.”

I drummed my fingers on the wood floor contemplating their theory.

“Oh, and you beat the crap outta his face, and he made you a website,” Kate said, high-fiving Roberto again. “What’s that look for?” Kate asked me.

I was unaware that I had a particular look on my face. Maybe it was my contemplative look because my mind was going in five hundred different directions, and I started thinking about how I thought I drew a short straw in life, but Elias’ might have been a tad shorter. He had an alcoholic mother who pretty much neglected him it seemed, my dad lived with them, and he hadn’t really spoken in school until just the other day. He definitely one-upped me, or maybe two or three-upped me. Plus, it seemed he had no friends he hung out with and was greatly embarrassed by the way he talked, but I still had a right to be unsure about him.

“I don’t know,” I said, sighing. “He’s my friend now. That should count as something.”

“God Molly, you can be so stubborn!” Kate shouted.

“I’m entitled to my feelings. Maybe once they fizzle out, I’ll like, like, him again.”

“He most definitely likes you. He might be in love with you, infatuated even,” Kate said.

I sighed again. I wanted to change the subject, so I asked, “Isn’t it time for karaoke practice?”

Kate forgot all she was speaking of and her face lit up. “There’re only a few minutes left of my show after the commercial. Then it’s time to get our sing on.”

“Oh geez,” Roberto said.

“What? Remember Roberto, I’m Filipino. It’s like my God given birth right. Karaoking is in my blood.”

And when I said practice, I wasn’t joking. She seriously practiced. She would sing the same song over and over until it was perfect. It was almost like a competition in her family. I once went to one of her family functions, and all the cousins gathered in the front room, and all they did was karaoke and woot and holler over who got the highest score. So, Kate got ready for her practicing, and I logged onto her computer, so I could do some blogging, ridding us of our conversation about me liking Elias.

After a horrible gym class where I was forced to participate the whole time, I wandered into English, walking over a couple of backpacks, and plopping into my seat. Elias moseyed in right as the bell rang. He gave me a head nod as he settled into his chair. I’m not too sure what all went on a good chunk of the class period because I was busy doing some thumbnail sketches in my notebook and writing out some story ideas.

Cecile and Emile stand side-by-side with their arms crossed, smirks on both their faces; the bank robbers lying unconscious on the floor. The gold bars that knocked them unconscious lying next to their heads. One-by-one, customers pop their heads out from where they hid.
Man, I thought, taking down bank robbers, no, I needed something cooler. Busting bank robberies had been done how many times before? Hmmm, maybe, I contemplated. But then I didn’t continue my thought because my attention was caught after I heard Mrs. Gomez call Elias’ name a few times. It appeared, he had fallen asleep.

“Top of page 142,” she told him.

He looked up at her in a daze. His eyes were at half mast, and his lips were partially parted.

“Read,” she said.

Elias nodded and flipped to the page we were supposed to be on. He put his chin in one hand, held the book open with the other, and in a very low mumble he started reading.

“We can’t hear you,” Mrs. Gomez said after a couple of sentences.

Elias sighed and continued. If he was reading louder, I sure couldn’t tell. All I heard was
rrmmmbbbmmmmmm
or something like that.

“Project your voice Elias,” Mrs. Gomez told him.

He looked up at her. Mrs. Gomez gestured with her hand for him to continue. Elias continued on in the same ultra-low mumble. Mrs. Gomez shook her head and called on someone else.

*************************

I caught up with Elias in the hall once the bell rang. “Um, okay, I have to ask, what’s with the whole projection thing, and Mrs. Gomez?” Because I noticed she also mentioned something about it the other day in class too.

Elias clicked his tongue and looked around the hall at all the students passing by, some trying to rush to class in the measly four minutes they gave us, and some just mindlessly going along the route they took every day, an occasional one shouting my name, or acknowledging me with a head nod or wave. “Okay,” Elias said softly, very softly, almost too where I couldn’t hear him. I’m thinking he didn’t want anyone to hear what he was going to tell me. “I never really finished telling you about all my, well, ya know.”

“Okay,” I said, curious about the rest.

“So when you’re in special ed. or receive special services you have what is called an IEP, an Individual Education Program, I think I mentioned that already, but it has like all your goals and things you’re supposed to work on and stuff. So, mine is full of my sound errors, which are sounds I can’t say and letter combos I have to work on and stuff, and it also says that I have to work on my voice projection, which is pretty much me speaking up,” he said, then chewing on a nail.

“You speak up just fine when you’re around me.”

“You’re different,” he said over the finger he was gnawing on.

I pursued my lips out at him. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

“So, in most situations, I just talk really soft or mumble, but then it’s not really related to my speech disorder. Well it is, and it isn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“My projection issues are more in my head as my whole lovely team of teachers and therapists say, so lucky me, they are also making me talk to a counselor cuz I guess when you talk funny it’s hard on your psyche or some junk like that.”

“Well, that might be good, right? They’ll help you out and stuff?” I asked, squeezing in a little closer to Elias to let through a mob of students trying to squish past us—since we were standing in the middle of the hallway, totally blocking the way.

Elias shrugged. “So not only do I have an official disorder now, speech articulation disorder as my speech therapist calls it, I also have problems with my head. It’s like welcome to your senior year, you’re a mess.”

“You’re not a mess.”

“I kinda am,” Elias said, inspecting his fingers.

“Nah, you’re pretty cool.”

Elias sucked on his lip in response.

“So, are we gonna meet up to figure out what we’re reading and stuff for our project?”

Elias sighed. “Crap, I work tonight.”

“What time do you get out? I can meet up with you or something.”

After a short amount of deliberation, we decided that evening I would meet with him where he worked and from there we’d go to Gimmieyourbucks Coffee and talk about our project.

*************************

I got off the bus and stood at the corner with a crowd of yuppies waiting to cross. I zippered my ski vest all the way to the top. We were closer to the lake, so the wind was a bit nippier. The walk sign flashed, and I crossed and headed down the sidewalk to where Elias worked. The store was on the left. I stopped a moment before going in to observe the window display. It was full of mannequins wearing Mexican wrestling masks and brightly colored hoodies. When I was done with my observation, I pushed open the glass door covered in stickers and flyers. The store was dimly lit, and I was greeted by a rack of belts with various designs. I walked around some of the other racks and found Elias behind the counter with his back facing me. He was sitting crossed legged on a stool wearing a hot pink and black striped hoodie. He was bent over the counter typing on a laptop. I walked around to the front and tapped on the glass display case part of the counter. Elias looked up and smiled.