Title:Blueberry Avoided
Author:
miri_awayDate: Mar 3, 05
Type: Original/autobiography
Genre: Fantasy, romance
Rating: PG
Summary:This town is not her own. She smiles.
AN: Because I thought I’d write my own version of my birthday challenge. Thought of Blueberry, a boy I used to know back when I was wis wittle. Thought of how I want to see him again. Am listening to Mae if it helps. Posted on my FictionPress account.
For: Tom. Until next time, then. Thanks for the gum and the laughs.
Blueberry Avoided
How it was supposed to be…
It was only that one time on the playground that he came to her, concerned for her tears, and asked if she was okay.
She nodded, despite knowing that the runny nose threatening to leak and the red eyes were all he could see, and kept walking in the crowd. He kept pace, blue eyes doubtufl. He had known something was wrong, had spotted the little tiff from across the dusty grounds, but he asked anyway, because no one else had. He walked with her as where before he’d saunter into class just before the bell, minutes after she sat down.
This small gesture of acknowledgement made Joy bubble up in her chest, made her sure she was in no way going to stop sniffling because too much was going on. It was the joy only a nine-year-old could feel at finally being noticed by her crush, the clown, at being the one he came to rather then the equally sobbing girl beside her. It was the tired irritation at the timing, at the situation. It was in a dog's nature to inquire to a bleeding wound, why should this matter? But it did, and she caught her breath, eventually.
In truth, the girl had always been shy around him. Seeing such an outburst had shocked him silly. From across the playground he’d spotted the small crowd surrounding the mixed girl and the paler girl; by the time he’d gotten off the monkey bars the bell had sounded and the surge of kids was thick...he could have picked her out even without the wide berth.
“Are you okay?” he had asked once she’d looked up at him. Her eyes widened a bit, surprised, and then she wiped them with her hand, a shaky tick of a smile on her mouth. She nodded too eagerly.
They’d gone to school together for two years. Then, in fifth grade, they finally talk to each other, and it’s only three words and a nod. Not for the best of reasons-stupid, silly reasons, they both admit now-- but still, he noticed and she felt safe.
This was how it was always supposed to be, him arriving at just the right times to make her feel better, spotting her above everyone else. But by the time Halloween howled through that time was forgotten and she moved.
It was always supposed to be sweet, uncertain sincerity, dusty dirt, stupid tears, blue eyes and cat eyes.
Something Old…
Five years later, she still hasn’t forgotten that day and often looks for him in crowds. She wishes she had a better memory, wasn’t so shy back then, wishes she’d bought a yearbook. Fifth grade seemed so long ago. Arizona seemed so long ago.
Sometimes she wonders what it would be like to actually look out during a game and spot him. If they ever got to meet face to face, would he have changed? Was he still funny, still blond, or had he died his hair again? What were the chances of him showing up in Georgia anyway? Really, he’s just a culmination of all the good things from the desert and she just wants something constant, someone to tell her those memories are real. Sometimes she muses about going back to her old towns, old haunts, but knows they’d have changed beyond recognition; Arizona is just a thousand miles away, but the Arizona she knew would be swept away under rain and sneakers. Sometimes she wishes the old things would stay.
He is still called Berry for the stunt he pulled with his big brother --even by people, new people, who did not go to elementary school with him, did not see his blond locks turn turquoise blue for Halloween. Of course, his brother, being his brother, went all out and did not seem to mention their hair would stay that color the rest of the year. He showed up at Dana’s party and the few people there were the first to see him, the first to brand him. The girl who’d dressed as a pale witch with frizzy hair told him tonight they were not who they’d been that day on the playground, so his new name was Blueberry. He smiled then.
Now, miles from that place, no one knows why that’s his nickname. He used to tell people a witch gave it to him, cast a spell where his hair turned blue. When they were younger, in 6th grade, they believed him, asked him what he did to make her do that. He thinks of her sitting as she had in 4th grade, with her back to him, content to dream the class away with cat eyes, and tells them he doesn’t know.
We start breathing…
If she blew the candles hard enough, she’d cause a tornado somewhere across the country. She thinks, not for the first time, of the bloody noses she’d wake up to and how it became habit to put the percolator on; of the sting when a dirt devil got too close. Smiling, she tells them what her wish had been. She doesn’t think of blue hair being tussled, doesn’t think of him at all. Seven years takes its toll on her memory.
They shake their heads, tell her it's against the rules...you’re not supposed to do that. The wish won’t come true then.
She'd known that already, had stopped wishing for stuff like that. It could, she tells them.
It couldn’t. They insist. There isn’t enough gas in the world.
They leave an hour later, on the road trip on her sweetest hour. From the back seat, squished between hastily packed bags and a disgruntled friend, she opens the window and lets her hand flow with the wind. Closing her eyes, she imagines she’s leaving phantoms behind, leaving herself again, saying good bye to a town and heading to ones she hasn’t visited in years, full of hazily remembered people.
They don’t have enough money for a hotel that first night and wake up in sleeping bags before someone discovers their wallet. They pummel him with their pillows, laughing in the cool morning air. These are her friends, in need of this independent journey of abandonment as much as she does, and she can’t remember a time when it had been any other way.
Getting back in the car for another few hundred miles, she feels like she’d dreamt the same dream she’d had for years, only now she can’t bring it back. This doesn’t bother her, the space is empty and she lets be filled with off key songs and the wind from the window.
His girlfriend has broken up with him. He laughs now, realizing the argument could have been avoided and reveling in the thrill he'd felt whily he hadn’t even tried. He’d let her yell at him about whatever and how a strange old thought kept him from listening. By the end he had a headache and had walked out.
Sitting on the hood of his car some miles later, he realized what had happened. He was free. Taking a sip from his can of soda, he toasts all the unnamable gods above him, looking down from icy stars. Good riddance!
A bit indignant, yeah, but still relieved. Without her something was gone, something he knew he could live without. Damn her. He hated having extra baggage.
Something else was gone too but he can’t bother with that. It was baggage he’d carried around for ages and now that it’s gone he can’t remember what it is. He knows it was the secret something he slipped into in those quiet times between dusk and school, during boring conversations/lectures, when he was looking out at the lake from the bridge. A stupid memory of years ago.
Strangely vacant, he accounts it with his newest loss. Driving home, he decides he’ll save the feeling sorting out for later. This feels like the breath one takes before diving, and when he wakes up he lets it out, forgetting why he’d ever held it in.
Something New…
Waking up in a strange place was disconcerting. The bed was not her own, the snores were not hers, and looking around--God, she’d never decorate like this.
Someone mumbles It’s okay, voice slurred with sleep. It’s her friend, sleeping on the twin bed, blankets kicked into a whirlwind around his feet. On the couch snoozes his girlfriend, drooling.
They won’t wake up for another hour she tells herself, flopping back down.
I’m not who I was yesterday, in the city. She tells herself.
Who were you, then?
Squinting her eyes shut she starts a slide show of defining things because she can’t find the energy to think them into words. They go by so fast she can’t grasp them and they seem distant now anyway so she lets them go.
I’m in a new town, in another room, clean as a slate. A ripple of giddiness flows from her toes to the crown of her head until she thinks she’ll explode. I could be flying I’m so light!
Or you could be lying on a cheap hotel’s bed. Open you eyes.
She does, is greeted with the water stained ceiling. Ok, she thinks, turning towards the window. Better view.
This town is not her own. She smiles.
His sister graduates today so he finds he is facing the high school for the sixth day in a row. Groaning, he endures his mothers fretting: tuck in your shirt, stop frowning, didn’t I teach you how to do your tie?
Seniors in thin gowns or half on-half off versions of the vermillion gowns are all over the place. He wonders where he’ll be when he graduates. Talking in a loud group with his friends, and if so will their gowns be on all the way? Will he be with his parents-his mother fretting over his hat, his shoes? Will he miss this place?
Take the picture, Berry! his sister orders. He snaps without really making sure they’re all in it. People he won’t see again, all made to look pretty on the outside for this occasion when they’re ready for parties underneath or wearing pj’s, waiting for naps.
His brother grins from across the room and beckons him to join the little gaggle he’s arranged around him. Juniors, people who he’d half hated and half admired as a kid who were now not so big compared to him. His brother had always reigned over them and they’d always complied with big smiles.
Things would be different if we hadn’t moved, his brother tells them as he gets closer. I would still be with people who remember me when I was wis wittle.
Tugs laughs: I remember Berry that way. He won’t have it so hard; I bet you don’t even remember that old desert town, do you, Berry?
Turtles. It’s an odd thought, so he keeps it to himself but finds he’s still curious, lets it come into form. His brother still thinks he’s listening. A dusky skinned girl holding a turtle cautiously, the only non-smiling kid in the crowd.
His sister is freed once she has the paper and he feels another string snap slightly. Now’s the time for loosing, he thinks. Everything’s going away.
Grinning from the stage, she waves at them. He offers a weak smile, knowing she can’t see because the crowd is dimmed in the overhead lights. The rest of the family offers cheerful claps and woops.
Elbowed from the side, Berry looks at Tugs, who’s grinning. Look who’s one step closer to starting the New Adventure (something their principal always said when referring to the Real World) welcome to the Junior class.
He realizes he has taken a step up while his sister had stepped back and can only think he’s standing on this new plateau and he hadn’t even moved to get there. It’ll take some time to get used to; it’s like he’s wearing a gown now too, waiting to rip them off along with the hat. He’s wearing them a year in advance and he’s not sure how they got on.
It’d take a miracle…
She’s gone through three cameras in one town already and her friend despairs because they were supposed to last the whole trip.
You, she says without looking at him from behind the lens, should know me better.
At least take some with you in it. He grumbles.
Handing the thing to him, she walks into the French Quarter after telling him to fire at will. She’d always wanted to come here, had wanted to since forever. It was a good idea resting here and it was an even better idea of his to get proof they’d been.
After a while she forgets he’s there and walks around freely from stall to stall, shop to shop. The girl beside her has apparently forgotten as well.
Later, they developed them and they come out beautiful for all their randomness. She pays for the food and the next batch of cameras.
Looking out from the café, she feels free to watch people, strangers, people she’s never met. Never would meet. They are so different. It’s nothing new to her, imagining what they’re lives are at that moment, who she is to them. It reminds her she used to do this all the time, looking for specific people. She sighs into her cappuccino, ignoring the couple before her, thinking it’d take a dose of fairy dust to let her actually meet anyone old. Everything here is so new it seems impossible-no, it’s so old it seems impossible for any other history to be crammed into the town.
No other ghosts but the shades of voodoo witches or Creole dancers can enter here, they’d wait at the border, hitchhiking with their haunted. She hopes she’ll recognize them when they enter the car.
He’s traveled the many miles to the city to get away from the domestic fights of his neighborhood, from the snuggling pre-teens, from the crummy beer and his pot-head friends. When did things get so dirty?
Here he can be anyone. He’s not Berry here, because no one has heard his story of the phantom witch with frizzy hair, and if they have they’ve dismissed it as child’s play. City people were a lot more shrewd when it came to stuff like that. He liked them for that.
The dirtiness of the city is more of an aesthetic thing, rather than a certainly wrong jagged smile of his town. He doesn’t mind the small litter, the cracks in the sidewalk, in fact, they comfort him because, looking at his reflection in some shop window, he looks innocent against their grimy back drop. At home he looked like everyone else, albeit less enthused.
He wonders if he’d ever been able to really look that innocent on his own.
Yes. He concludes. Before they moved. Life was much sweeter then.
The elementary school he’d gone to went from k to 8th grade. One thing he won’t forget is how tall and big 8th graders looked back then. He chuckles at the memory, confusing the cashier lady at the desk as he pays for his donut.
The plains were not threateningly bare, just bare and that was all; a sea of tan grass and specks that mooed when you got too close. The mountains weren’t scary, just tall and jagged rocks that looked blue or too far away to touch. Coyotes were a threat but no one was stupid enough to let them too close, and when they wound up in the yard no one bothered them. Cacti, interesting creatures, quail, the pests of the morning. The pretty paintings in the sky when the sun was leaving or arriving. Tumble weeds. Recess. Roller blades, dresses. Witches, blue die and his grinning brother. Screaming girls and hot summer days.
Shaking his head, he wipes the desert memories off as if they’re dust of a recent sand storm. This state is so green it’s sickening.
He’d feel this complicated now whether he’d lived in Canada or anywhere else. He assumes it’s just grieving for the old days he keeps forgetting. He feels himself being molded now under so many hands, under his own, but wishes to just be that innocent little clump of clay drying under the sun.
Something Borrowed…
She takes one look at the school and tells him to keep driving. Nothing about this new façade endears the old building inside to her. Sighing, he complies. They’ve been through this so many times already he just drives and brakes on command.
One place they’d stopped at that had held a distant memory proved much more satisfying. She’d only gone there for a year and to find the people she wanted she had to go to three high schools and the surrounding neighborhoods. She could be ruthless when it came to treasure hunts like this. Many doors opened to many uncomprehending smiles, many, many questions.
She felt like a vampire bleeding them for answers, people who hadn’t seen her in years. She looked at the other two, sitting politely in each new place they visited, waiting for her to give the signal she was done, and wondered what they thought of the stories pouring out of these people. If they heard them at all or if they were only there because she’d asked.
What friends she had.
With each new old-person, she ironed out things and adapted to their versions of her-trying out different smiles they said she had, trying on clothes they said looked like the ones she used to wear, picking out pictures in the year books of other people she knew-and each time dropped them like masks.
However, she found if she wore a bit of each, it was easier for the people to recognize her. So, when the times when explanations would not help, she took a bit of each and formed a sloppy semblance of her old self -then they knew her. She wishes she could find someone to do that without all the masks, the too small smiles and beaded necklaces.
He finds someone to take his place at the record store and leaves before they can ask when he’ll be back. In truth, he doesn’t know.
Hours later, he finds he’s in some sunny town near a strip of interesting looking shops. Getting out, he thinks of his appearance: dirty blond hair in every which way, band shirt, jeans, and thinks of how plain he must be compared to these festive people. He must look so lonely.
Without any of his friends here, he must find a way to be comfortable. He thinks of their interesting reactions to things he sees in this town, adapts some of them to himself. He takes Tug’s trademark smirk, SuPa’s way of superior walking, Jain’s eyebrows, Nase’s smile….he’s not really alone. This is boring.
He challenges himself and adds things from people farther and farther away. He gets back to fifth grade and can find no one interesting enough to copy. He thinks of Emily with her calm eyes, of Tammy and her strange quirkiness (and even stranger smell), of Kevin and his magnetism, of Shane and his appearance, of -of a witches displaced self-certainty. He smiles. He can’t take that from her for she had been playing the same game he had been.
If she were here, he wonders who would win.
Part of the problem…
They are almost to the final stop, are mid way, and she thinks of turning back.
Why? The other two ask.
She pauses, looks at the mile mark and the plain ahead, subtly turning sandy, and then shakes her head. I know a place she tells them, hungry?
Honestly, she has no memory of how to get there, but the roads begin to become predictable and they stop at a restaurant she’s surprised still stands. She should be happy but she’s forgotten why she wanted so badly to come. What if this was one of those good things that are only good for wanting and once you had them the magic left? She couldn’t stand that.
But she was so close.
They ate grasshopper pie and the other two marveled at the place. They aren’t surprised she’d want to come back. She cannot agree with them.
He’s gone halfway across the country without realizing he’d decided to do it. I’ll have to call mom soon, he thinks. I’ll have to tell her I’m sorry for the car.
Stopping in a familiar part of the town, he goes and knocks on a friend’s door. He’d never lost touch with most of the people, and when he’s welcomed heartily into their house he realizes that’s half the reason he couldn’t get this place out of his head. He watches football with them anyway and waits for the second commercial before excusing himself. When they call him Blueberry, they mean it.
Say good bye, he tells himself. The desert looks strange in the dark, not so hot, but he can still taste the dirt. This place isn’t home anymore.
He stops beside the old high school before walking around the block to the elementary school. The fenced in area used to be part of the playground area. He can’t tell what the building in its place is. He looks away from the new-probably county donated-jungle Jim. These kids didn’t know what they were missing, they thought this small lot was the best. They didn’t know it had once been big enough for sand soccer and basket ball and swings. They didn’t know the secret to the stairs…that building was gone as well.
He never let go. It would be easier to accept life how it is now if he’d let go of the used-to-be’s a while ago. It would be easier to look at this park and think, how cute, without remembering his years spent there.
Well, he thinks, driving away from the place and towards the old Mesquite Tree. That did nothing for me.
Something Blue…
They’ve done the whole food thing and are now onto the talking around the issue thing. Does she want to leave or not? Oh, look at the train, look at that kid. Tell us when you’re ready. Ooh, can we go out there? It’s so pretty.
She sits and wonders whether leaving now would be a complete waste. Well, she’d come home with pictures of other towns, with stories from people she was now reacquainted with-she now knew where to look for them when in crowds. That wasn’t a complete loss.
As the other two bicker, she looks out the window and wills herself to remember what lies down that long road. Her old house, the dirt road that always seemed too long to walk, the plains on all sides, the school. She didn’t want to see how they changed and yet that’d been the whole point, right?
The other two are dancing under the Christmas lights that are rapped around the branches of the tree the restaurant is named after, feet tapping on the tiles. They don’t know the legend of pumas just a few feet away and she doesn’t warn them-there’s plenty of food in the mountains, it’s not Halloween and there are no juicy kids around. She wishes she could be swept into someone else’s past because her own seemed so ill used. She’d never danced to goofy music in this place, though there’d been plenty of chances.
She wants a reason to stay, but that reason, it seems, has gone and won’t come back. If it does, she decides, I want it to announce itself. Too many signs had been in her face for so long that she thinks they’d have to say it in her face now. She smiles into her hand, seeing the reflection of a blue haired boy, die fading to reveal blond hair in the window.
He asks for whatever table is open and the waiter asks if he is expecting anyone. It takes a second for him to say no. He can’t say how he’d love to meet one of the few people he’d not met up with yet as that was impossible.
The waiter shows him to a table for two and asks what he wants to drink. He remembers his brother laughing over a glass of Kool-Aid, saying they could die their hair that way instead of die. He orders a water.
On the patio of the restaurant is a dancing couple, totally absorbed in each other and the country slow tune. They seem perfectly at ease with each other and unaware of the people staring at them; because of this, he envies them.
He turns away after wondering what they’d see if they looked at him and stares out the window, passed a girl who, sitting alone, could be watching reflections as well. He thinks he recognizes her but she’d have to be a sad thing to him if it were true and he’d have to be blue to accept it.