(no subject)
On nights when I have absolutely nothing to do with my life, I sometimes experience bouts of narcissism and wind up scrolling through and re-reading old entries.
Tonight is one of those nights, except that for the first time, I realized that when I went through and dumped the fics I wrote for Creative Writing during winter quarter, I left a couple out.
So because it's something to keep me busy, and also because I find it really funny that I don't actually remember writing half of this stuff, here they are:
Title: The Highway Kind
Word Count: 589
I wasn't happy with the ending of this one and could never come up with anything better, so I think I opted to pretend it didn't exist. Good call.
He plans the trip during his lunch breaks - fingers tracing blue highway lines over the wrinkled ridges of yellowing pages. Twenty-seven miles north to Portland to start, then a curving right down toward Nevada, pit-stops when necessary.
It’s always the same routine; turkey sandwich with wilting lettuce on rye, Diet Coke from the finicky vending machine downstairs, and dog-eared roadmap from his back pocket spread out over the paperwork littering his desk. Three bites, sip, a stop marked in yellow highlighter on repeat until Barry inevitably sticks his head over the cubicle wall, puts his Nice Boss face in place, and says something like, “When you have a second, can I see you in my office?” or “Roger, those numbers?”
In a place like this, the numbers always come first.
-
There’s a burger joint somewhere deep in Tennessee that he saw on a documentary once; one of those hole-in-the-wall spots started by someone’s great-great-granddaddy, where grease is synonymous with authenticity, and cholesterol levels are little more than bad jokes a doctor told once at a convention.
Roger’s been on a strict no-carb, no-fat, no-grease-or-sugar-or-anything-good diet since last February, when Miriam pulled the overbearing wife card and made it her mission to “get him healthy.”
Circling Roy’s Grille twice in black ink feels suspiciously like rebellion.
-
“Going somewhere, Rodge?” Carl from Billing asks every day. And every day, Roger ignores the nickname, smiles, shrugs a little, and says, “Thinking about it.”
“Can’t go too far, can you?” Carl always grins, tie-tack drooping. “Not much vacation time around here.”
“Guess not,” Roger says, and shoves a bite of turkey into his mouth.
-
For Christmas one year when he was a boy, Uncle Mike gave him a set of army men, faces painted camo and miniature guns soldered to miniature hands.
Mother disagreed with guns on principle - thought they were dangerous and barbaric and a whole slew of other negative adjectives - and confiscated the box the minute Uncle Mike’s flight back home took off, saying she’d get Roger something much better.
He reads about a toy soldier museum in Pennsylvania in a travel magazine one evening while waiting in line at the supermarket to pay for soymilk and asparagus.
Highlighter covers the city the next afternoon.
-
“You know, that may not be the most effective route,” Earl from Data Entry tells him one Tuesday. “New Mexico to Louisiana to Nebraska? You’d be backtracking.”
“Thanks, Earl.” Roger pops the top on his Coke and crams the map back into a vaguely-rectangular shape. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
-
He never listens to the Blues anymore. Miriam doesn’t like them - says they’re slow and monotonous and just plain depressing - and switches the radio dial to her favorite Top 40 station whenever she drives his car.
There’s a club in Chicago with live Jazz and Blues every night of the week; his pen route makes a sharp turn in Alabama to accommodate it.
-
A hole tears through Kansas and Oklahoma on the third of June. “If you hadn’t crossed back and forth so much, the paper wouldn’t be that worn down,” Earl offers as he passes by.
“You’re not actually going anywhere anyway, are you?” Carl peeks his head around the corner.
“Got those numbers?” Barry calls from his office. “You know I need them ASAP.”
The lettuce in Roger’s sandwich wilts a little more and his Coke tastes flat.
He leaves them on his desk as he grabs his keys and the map, and heads toward the parking lot.
Title: Scratch Paper
Word Count: 2,340
Final assignment for the class was an edited version of an earlier, workshopped story. I posted the first draft, wrote the expanded one the night before it was due, and wasn't a fan, which I guess is part of the reason it disappeared. Go figure.
The first is an old Safeway receipt, salvaged from the crack between the seats of his mother’s rusty Datsun and smoothed out over the sun-split leather of the steering wheel. One long strip of register tape: smudged stories of “oranges,” and “Tampax,” and “Your Cashier: Ellen,” in fading purple ink on the front, his handwriting in black BIC on the back.
You make me so angry sometimes.
It comes out of nowhere, really, except that it’s been on the tip of his tongue for a week and a half - the product of some argument or another with his sister - and has gotten to a point where any conversation he has with anybody he’s around is in danger of segueing to this one line.
So he writes it down that first time; scribbles it into the first paper product he can find after a stilted encounter at Jack-in-the-Box (“Regular or curly fries with that?” You make me so angry sometimes), and vows to let it go.
The funny thing is, it helps.
By the end of the week, there’s a pile growing in the glove compartment. Envelopes, napkins, scraps of homework he started but never finished, all filled with things he wants to say but doesn’t know how.
It isn’t that he’s shy, exactly; he can strike up a conversation about sports or the weather with any random guy on the street, get to know almost anyone without any real effort. But when it matters - when it’s thoughts and feelings and other things he doesn’t understand - then he draws a blank. There are words in his head but they sound stupid until later, when he puts them in Sharpie on the back of his graded Economics worksheet and adds them to the collection.
-
The list of People in His Life is short and succinct, limited mostly to blood relatives and people who have known him since he was born. His parents and sister, Taylor, Grandma Lorraine, Aunt Jill, who lived with them for awhile when he was younger before “finally growing up, thank God,” (Mom’s words), and Rachel, who’s been his best friend since the day she moved to the neighborhood in third grade and wowed him with her extensive baseball card collection and Nintendo prowess. They’ve grown up together, he and Rachel, and after ten years of playing in his backyard, swapping lunches, and eating dinner together, habits and traditions have formed.
Tuesdays have always been Slurpee days. When they were twelve, that meant hopping on ten-speeds after school, biking to the 7-11 on 5th and Llewellyn for grape and blue raspberry, and sitting on the playground comparing tongue colors until 3:30 when the janitor came around to start locking up. At eighteen things are a little different, what with classes and jobs and modes of transportation, but the basic premise never changes; always comes down to the two of them and plastic cups and brain freezes.
It’s a night like this in October when his phone vibrates with her name flashing red across the screen and her voice on the other end of the line saying, “I can’t do this. I really, really can’t write this essay right now. Come pick me up?”
The Datsun’s idling in her driveway two minutes later, motor hiccupping as she cuts across the lawn and slides into the passenger’s seat.
“You,” she says, shoving the shoulder strap of the seatbelt behind her back. The buckle locks with a click. “You are officially my hero. God, this day.”
“Long?” He eases his foot off the brake and backs out onto the street.
“Let’s just AMPM it, all right? I can’t even go there yet.”
-
He parks in the middle of a deserted back road and turns on the emergency flashers for no-one. Their drinks wait in holders affixed to the center console, strawberry condensation sliding in drops down wax paper cups.
And this is how it’s gone, once a week, every week, for what feels like forever. Pour the Slurpees, pay for the Slurpees, park somewhere and talk. Real talking, revolving around topics other than homework and music and people they know from school, but only as long as the drinks last. That’s the unspoken rule. Complete honesty, no long and unnecessary pauses between questions and the answers they deserve, and an end to the conversation with the last few sips.
She starts this night, head falling against the seatback. “What am I doing?”
“Sitting,” he starts, shifting to face her. “Having a drink. Wondering what - ”
“You’re a comedic genius,” she says. “It’s one of the reasons I like you or whatever. But that wasn’t what I was going for, smartass.”
Maybe it’s the way she says it, maybe it’s just him, but his mind catches on “I like you,” this night and won’t let go - weaves each word around the others until they cease to make sense as a whole, and he can effectively stop trying to remember if she’s ever strung them together in this order before, and why it feels so significant.
“Huh,” he says, because it sounds offhand enough. “And I was so sure.”
She rolls her eyes. “Seriously. Where am I going with my life? I have seven months left of high school. I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know what I want to be. I’ve spent the last six hours staring at a computer screen, trying to fill out college applications and scholarship forms, and it’s ‘Describe yourself in two hundred words,’ and ‘Tell us who you are,’ and I feel like I’m making it all up. It isn’t math and it isn’t science - it’s me - and I should be the expert on myself, you know, but I’m not even sure where to start.”
It’s silent for a full minute after she stops, and he knows he should have something to say - she always does - but instead of inspirational quotes or words of encouragement or anecdotes for reminders, he’s stuck on sophomore year, and a memory of the day Grandpa Earl died; when she found him sitting alone by Taylor’s old tire swing in the backyard and stayed until it turned dark and he was finally ready to go back inside. Two hundred words can’t begin to describe the warmth of her head resting against his shoulder or the comfort of her fingers tracing soft circles over his back, he thinks, and realizes in the next second that the swelling sensation this causes in his chest probably complicates things more than he’d like to admit.
“You’re a good person,” is close to what he ends up with, though he’ll never be able to recall exactly. It’s the gist of the response he gives, and it seems to make her a little calmer as she sits back and finishes her drink, hashing out ideas over the next half hour. She visibly relaxes, which is great, he’s happy - pleased with himself, even - except for the fact that he can’t shake the sense that certain feelings definitely aren’t as simple as he used to think.
-
The glove box holds stupid, pointless truths for the longest time until Wednesdays start rolling around, and the transition from Last night’s casserole wasn’t as good as I pretended confessions for his mom to paper bag I like you’s and I’m afraid I’ll ruin our friendship’s becomes complete.
It’d be different if she knew, he thinks, which is a stupid thought to have because obviously things would be different if he told her. Probably, it’d make things awkward, and maybe they wouldn’t talk anymore. Or maybe they would, but she’d always have this look in her eye like she could see what he was thinking, and that would make him feel ridiculous and pitied and eventually uncomfortable.
The optimist in him says it’d be all right, that nothing could ever get in the way of such a strong and long-lasting relationship, but pessimism’s always spoken louder, and the what-ifs keep him quiet.
-
“Have you ever felt like you needed to say something?” she asks three weeks later. “Like there’s something inside of you waiting to come out if you’d just let it?”
The heat’s blasting in the Datsun because although it’s mid-November and beyond cold, frozen drinks are non-negotiable. Still, he doesn’t remember it being this warm five minutes ago, and concentrates on looking anywhere but the compartment situated opposite her spot in the front seat. So much honesty in such a small space, but as long as the sentiments continue hiding behind a closed door, an element of secrecy remains.
He takes a long sip and closes his eyes for a moment before putting it off a little longer. “Like what?”
“Like.” Her eyes move from the interior of the car to the park they’re stopped next to as if she’s looking for inspiration. “Like, I don’t know. What you’re thinking. What you’re feeling. When it’s so strong it stops seeming like just another sentence and turns into this thing - this huge, inescapable thing - that threatens to swallow you and any logical thoughts you’ve ever had whole if you don’t say it out loud?”
There’s a certain density in this moment, an intensity in her eyes and a heaviness in the air that tells him she feels it, too. Part of him wants to ask what, exactly, she’s referring to - wants more than anything for her to relate the thoughts that are tearing at her throat like his words tear through his fingers and onto the scraps of paper hiding three feet away. The other part is in survival mode, just looking for a quick and easy means of escape.
“I guess so,” he says. Surviving, it is. His next pull from the straw takes the last of the cup’s contents with it and when it comes, “I’m done,” sounds more like a song of praise than a statement of fact. He wonders if she notices.
Regardless, a half-finished crossword puzzle takes its place with the rest of the pack after she’s gone inside, YES scrawled on the diagonal across the front.
-
November passes and December starts, and waiting for the perfect moment, or for her to say something first, gets to be an almost preposterous concept. He may or may not lose sleep over it, but all that may or may not do is cause the pile of paper in the driveway to grow.
-
She shows up on his doorstep following Christmas with her relatives laden with packages and baked goods for his family. “Hold these, all right?” is all she says, transferring a stack of Tupperware containers wrapped in colored cellophane from her arms to his before he has a chance to react. “I’m about to drop something.”
Four batches of cookies and three muffin baskets later and she’s at the kitchen counter with a cup of cider his mother shoved into her hands, telling him about great-aunt Darlene’s ever-present bottle of cough syrup and disrupted holiday dinners.
“I missed seeing your face,” she says when she’s finished, nudging his right leg with her knee.
“Hmm,” he says, to cover for the way his heart’s started beating double-time.
“I also missed the AMPM,” she sets her mug down and grins. “What do you say?”
-
Left-over heart palpitations make him jittery behind the wheel. He punches the gas at a yellow light a block away from their destination without thinking, flies through a new red before he registers the police cruiser idling at the entrance to the adjacent parking lot.
This may be his first red light violation, but years of television-watching have prepared him for this moment, so when the officer standing at his window asks for his information, he plays the role of repentant driver to a tee, and automatically opens the glove compartment to grab the registration papers buried inside.
It takes a flood of scrap papers to remind him what’s gone wrong, and then it’s too late; his secrets sit in a pile on the floor while his ticket’s written out in what must be exhaustive essay format.
“Stashing a few parking tickets, huh?” Rachel breaks the silence after the flashing lights in the rearview mirror have pulled away.
“They’re not. They’re just.” He grabs lines by the handful and shoves them back inside the box, face burning.
“Take a breather, I was only joking,” she says, touching his shoulder. “Here, you missed one.”
I can’t stop thinking about you is caught between the toe of her sneaker and the floor. Her eyes run over the crumpled envelope as she picks it up and hands it over, brow furrowing. “What are these?”
“I don’t know,” he says. His hands are moving from the steering wheel to the open glove box to the radio dial of their own accord.
“This was your mom’s car, wasn’t it?” she asks after a moment, plucking an index card You looked nice today from the stack and giving him an odd look. “Are they from your dad?”
“Maybe,” he says, slamming the door shut and turning the key in the ignition. “I haven’t opened that thing in forever.”
It’s almost funny how convincing the lie sounds.
-
She pats his knee before unbuckling her seatbelt when they reach her house. “Sorry about the ticket.”
Not my dad’s is playing in his head on repeat.
“You should really think about cleaning this thing out.”
Over and over again.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah,” he says.
She hesitates for a second. Her fingertips burn imaginary holes through the leg of his jeans. “Truth?”
“Of course.” Somewhere, his conscience is shaking its head in disgust. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
-
He leaves the recycled cookie tin on the Welcome mat outside her front door the next morning, inconspicuous except for the receipts and newspaper bits that stick out around the edges and keep the lid from shutting all the way.
They were about you, the post-it stuck on top confesses. They were about you.
Tonight is one of those nights, except that for the first time, I realized that when I went through and dumped the fics I wrote for Creative Writing during winter quarter, I left a couple out.
So because it's something to keep me busy, and also because I find it really funny that I don't actually remember writing half of this stuff, here they are:
Title: The Highway Kind
Word Count: 589
I wasn't happy with the ending of this one and could never come up with anything better, so I think I opted to pretend it didn't exist. Good call.
He plans the trip during his lunch breaks - fingers tracing blue highway lines over the wrinkled ridges of yellowing pages. Twenty-seven miles north to Portland to start, then a curving right down toward Nevada, pit-stops when necessary.
It’s always the same routine; turkey sandwich with wilting lettuce on rye, Diet Coke from the finicky vending machine downstairs, and dog-eared roadmap from his back pocket spread out over the paperwork littering his desk. Three bites, sip, a stop marked in yellow highlighter on repeat until Barry inevitably sticks his head over the cubicle wall, puts his Nice Boss face in place, and says something like, “When you have a second, can I see you in my office?” or “Roger, those numbers?”
In a place like this, the numbers always come first.
-
There’s a burger joint somewhere deep in Tennessee that he saw on a documentary once; one of those hole-in-the-wall spots started by someone’s great-great-granddaddy, where grease is synonymous with authenticity, and cholesterol levels are little more than bad jokes a doctor told once at a convention.
Roger’s been on a strict no-carb, no-fat, no-grease-or-sugar-or-anything-good diet since last February, when Miriam pulled the overbearing wife card and made it her mission to “get him healthy.”
Circling Roy’s Grille twice in black ink feels suspiciously like rebellion.
-
“Going somewhere, Rodge?” Carl from Billing asks every day. And every day, Roger ignores the nickname, smiles, shrugs a little, and says, “Thinking about it.”
“Can’t go too far, can you?” Carl always grins, tie-tack drooping. “Not much vacation time around here.”
“Guess not,” Roger says, and shoves a bite of turkey into his mouth.
-
For Christmas one year when he was a boy, Uncle Mike gave him a set of army men, faces painted camo and miniature guns soldered to miniature hands.
Mother disagreed with guns on principle - thought they were dangerous and barbaric and a whole slew of other negative adjectives - and confiscated the box the minute Uncle Mike’s flight back home took off, saying she’d get Roger something much better.
He reads about a toy soldier museum in Pennsylvania in a travel magazine one evening while waiting in line at the supermarket to pay for soymilk and asparagus.
Highlighter covers the city the next afternoon.
-
“You know, that may not be the most effective route,” Earl from Data Entry tells him one Tuesday. “New Mexico to Louisiana to Nebraska? You’d be backtracking.”
“Thanks, Earl.” Roger pops the top on his Coke and crams the map back into a vaguely-rectangular shape. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
-
He never listens to the Blues anymore. Miriam doesn’t like them - says they’re slow and monotonous and just plain depressing - and switches the radio dial to her favorite Top 40 station whenever she drives his car.
There’s a club in Chicago with live Jazz and Blues every night of the week; his pen route makes a sharp turn in Alabama to accommodate it.
-
A hole tears through Kansas and Oklahoma on the third of June. “If you hadn’t crossed back and forth so much, the paper wouldn’t be that worn down,” Earl offers as he passes by.
“You’re not actually going anywhere anyway, are you?” Carl peeks his head around the corner.
“Got those numbers?” Barry calls from his office. “You know I need them ASAP.”
The lettuce in Roger’s sandwich wilts a little more and his Coke tastes flat.
He leaves them on his desk as he grabs his keys and the map, and heads toward the parking lot.
Title: Scratch Paper
Word Count: 2,340
Final assignment for the class was an edited version of an earlier, workshopped story. I posted the first draft, wrote the expanded one the night before it was due, and wasn't a fan, which I guess is part of the reason it disappeared. Go figure.
The first is an old Safeway receipt, salvaged from the crack between the seats of his mother’s rusty Datsun and smoothed out over the sun-split leather of the steering wheel. One long strip of register tape: smudged stories of “oranges,” and “Tampax,” and “Your Cashier: Ellen,” in fading purple ink on the front, his handwriting in black BIC on the back.
You make me so angry sometimes.
It comes out of nowhere, really, except that it’s been on the tip of his tongue for a week and a half - the product of some argument or another with his sister - and has gotten to a point where any conversation he has with anybody he’s around is in danger of segueing to this one line.
So he writes it down that first time; scribbles it into the first paper product he can find after a stilted encounter at Jack-in-the-Box (“Regular or curly fries with that?” You make me so angry sometimes), and vows to let it go.
The funny thing is, it helps.
By the end of the week, there’s a pile growing in the glove compartment. Envelopes, napkins, scraps of homework he started but never finished, all filled with things he wants to say but doesn’t know how.
It isn’t that he’s shy, exactly; he can strike up a conversation about sports or the weather with any random guy on the street, get to know almost anyone without any real effort. But when it matters - when it’s thoughts and feelings and other things he doesn’t understand - then he draws a blank. There are words in his head but they sound stupid until later, when he puts them in Sharpie on the back of his graded Economics worksheet and adds them to the collection.
-
The list of People in His Life is short and succinct, limited mostly to blood relatives and people who have known him since he was born. His parents and sister, Taylor, Grandma Lorraine, Aunt Jill, who lived with them for awhile when he was younger before “finally growing up, thank God,” (Mom’s words), and Rachel, who’s been his best friend since the day she moved to the neighborhood in third grade and wowed him with her extensive baseball card collection and Nintendo prowess. They’ve grown up together, he and Rachel, and after ten years of playing in his backyard, swapping lunches, and eating dinner together, habits and traditions have formed.
Tuesdays have always been Slurpee days. When they were twelve, that meant hopping on ten-speeds after school, biking to the 7-11 on 5th and Llewellyn for grape and blue raspberry, and sitting on the playground comparing tongue colors until 3:30 when the janitor came around to start locking up. At eighteen things are a little different, what with classes and jobs and modes of transportation, but the basic premise never changes; always comes down to the two of them and plastic cups and brain freezes.
It’s a night like this in October when his phone vibrates with her name flashing red across the screen and her voice on the other end of the line saying, “I can’t do this. I really, really can’t write this essay right now. Come pick me up?”
The Datsun’s idling in her driveway two minutes later, motor hiccupping as she cuts across the lawn and slides into the passenger’s seat.
“You,” she says, shoving the shoulder strap of the seatbelt behind her back. The buckle locks with a click. “You are officially my hero. God, this day.”
“Long?” He eases his foot off the brake and backs out onto the street.
“Let’s just AMPM it, all right? I can’t even go there yet.”
-
He parks in the middle of a deserted back road and turns on the emergency flashers for no-one. Their drinks wait in holders affixed to the center console, strawberry condensation sliding in drops down wax paper cups.
And this is how it’s gone, once a week, every week, for what feels like forever. Pour the Slurpees, pay for the Slurpees, park somewhere and talk. Real talking, revolving around topics other than homework and music and people they know from school, but only as long as the drinks last. That’s the unspoken rule. Complete honesty, no long and unnecessary pauses between questions and the answers they deserve, and an end to the conversation with the last few sips.
She starts this night, head falling against the seatback. “What am I doing?”
“Sitting,” he starts, shifting to face her. “Having a drink. Wondering what - ”
“You’re a comedic genius,” she says. “It’s one of the reasons I like you or whatever. But that wasn’t what I was going for, smartass.”
Maybe it’s the way she says it, maybe it’s just him, but his mind catches on “I like you,” this night and won’t let go - weaves each word around the others until they cease to make sense as a whole, and he can effectively stop trying to remember if she’s ever strung them together in this order before, and why it feels so significant.
“Huh,” he says, because it sounds offhand enough. “And I was so sure.”
She rolls her eyes. “Seriously. Where am I going with my life? I have seven months left of high school. I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know what I want to be. I’ve spent the last six hours staring at a computer screen, trying to fill out college applications and scholarship forms, and it’s ‘Describe yourself in two hundred words,’ and ‘Tell us who you are,’ and I feel like I’m making it all up. It isn’t math and it isn’t science - it’s me - and I should be the expert on myself, you know, but I’m not even sure where to start.”
It’s silent for a full minute after she stops, and he knows he should have something to say - she always does - but instead of inspirational quotes or words of encouragement or anecdotes for reminders, he’s stuck on sophomore year, and a memory of the day Grandpa Earl died; when she found him sitting alone by Taylor’s old tire swing in the backyard and stayed until it turned dark and he was finally ready to go back inside. Two hundred words can’t begin to describe the warmth of her head resting against his shoulder or the comfort of her fingers tracing soft circles over his back, he thinks, and realizes in the next second that the swelling sensation this causes in his chest probably complicates things more than he’d like to admit.
“You’re a good person,” is close to what he ends up with, though he’ll never be able to recall exactly. It’s the gist of the response he gives, and it seems to make her a little calmer as she sits back and finishes her drink, hashing out ideas over the next half hour. She visibly relaxes, which is great, he’s happy - pleased with himself, even - except for the fact that he can’t shake the sense that certain feelings definitely aren’t as simple as he used to think.
-
The glove box holds stupid, pointless truths for the longest time until Wednesdays start rolling around, and the transition from Last night’s casserole wasn’t as good as I pretended confessions for his mom to paper bag I like you’s and I’m afraid I’ll ruin our friendship’s becomes complete.
It’d be different if she knew, he thinks, which is a stupid thought to have because obviously things would be different if he told her. Probably, it’d make things awkward, and maybe they wouldn’t talk anymore. Or maybe they would, but she’d always have this look in her eye like she could see what he was thinking, and that would make him feel ridiculous and pitied and eventually uncomfortable.
The optimist in him says it’d be all right, that nothing could ever get in the way of such a strong and long-lasting relationship, but pessimism’s always spoken louder, and the what-ifs keep him quiet.
-
“Have you ever felt like you needed to say something?” she asks three weeks later. “Like there’s something inside of you waiting to come out if you’d just let it?”
The heat’s blasting in the Datsun because although it’s mid-November and beyond cold, frozen drinks are non-negotiable. Still, he doesn’t remember it being this warm five minutes ago, and concentrates on looking anywhere but the compartment situated opposite her spot in the front seat. So much honesty in such a small space, but as long as the sentiments continue hiding behind a closed door, an element of secrecy remains.
He takes a long sip and closes his eyes for a moment before putting it off a little longer. “Like what?”
“Like.” Her eyes move from the interior of the car to the park they’re stopped next to as if she’s looking for inspiration. “Like, I don’t know. What you’re thinking. What you’re feeling. When it’s so strong it stops seeming like just another sentence and turns into this thing - this huge, inescapable thing - that threatens to swallow you and any logical thoughts you’ve ever had whole if you don’t say it out loud?”
There’s a certain density in this moment, an intensity in her eyes and a heaviness in the air that tells him she feels it, too. Part of him wants to ask what, exactly, she’s referring to - wants more than anything for her to relate the thoughts that are tearing at her throat like his words tear through his fingers and onto the scraps of paper hiding three feet away. The other part is in survival mode, just looking for a quick and easy means of escape.
“I guess so,” he says. Surviving, it is. His next pull from the straw takes the last of the cup’s contents with it and when it comes, “I’m done,” sounds more like a song of praise than a statement of fact. He wonders if she notices.
Regardless, a half-finished crossword puzzle takes its place with the rest of the pack after she’s gone inside, YES scrawled on the diagonal across the front.
-
November passes and December starts, and waiting for the perfect moment, or for her to say something first, gets to be an almost preposterous concept. He may or may not lose sleep over it, but all that may or may not do is cause the pile of paper in the driveway to grow.
-
She shows up on his doorstep following Christmas with her relatives laden with packages and baked goods for his family. “Hold these, all right?” is all she says, transferring a stack of Tupperware containers wrapped in colored cellophane from her arms to his before he has a chance to react. “I’m about to drop something.”
Four batches of cookies and three muffin baskets later and she’s at the kitchen counter with a cup of cider his mother shoved into her hands, telling him about great-aunt Darlene’s ever-present bottle of cough syrup and disrupted holiday dinners.
“I missed seeing your face,” she says when she’s finished, nudging his right leg with her knee.
“Hmm,” he says, to cover for the way his heart’s started beating double-time.
“I also missed the AMPM,” she sets her mug down and grins. “What do you say?”
-
Left-over heart palpitations make him jittery behind the wheel. He punches the gas at a yellow light a block away from their destination without thinking, flies through a new red before he registers the police cruiser idling at the entrance to the adjacent parking lot.
This may be his first red light violation, but years of television-watching have prepared him for this moment, so when the officer standing at his window asks for his information, he plays the role of repentant driver to a tee, and automatically opens the glove compartment to grab the registration papers buried inside.
It takes a flood of scrap papers to remind him what’s gone wrong, and then it’s too late; his secrets sit in a pile on the floor while his ticket’s written out in what must be exhaustive essay format.
“Stashing a few parking tickets, huh?” Rachel breaks the silence after the flashing lights in the rearview mirror have pulled away.
“They’re not. They’re just.” He grabs lines by the handful and shoves them back inside the box, face burning.
“Take a breather, I was only joking,” she says, touching his shoulder. “Here, you missed one.”
I can’t stop thinking about you is caught between the toe of her sneaker and the floor. Her eyes run over the crumpled envelope as she picks it up and hands it over, brow furrowing. “What are these?”
“I don’t know,” he says. His hands are moving from the steering wheel to the open glove box to the radio dial of their own accord.
“This was your mom’s car, wasn’t it?” she asks after a moment, plucking an index card You looked nice today from the stack and giving him an odd look. “Are they from your dad?”
“Maybe,” he says, slamming the door shut and turning the key in the ignition. “I haven’t opened that thing in forever.”
It’s almost funny how convincing the lie sounds.
-
She pats his knee before unbuckling her seatbelt when they reach her house. “Sorry about the ticket.”
Not my dad’s is playing in his head on repeat.
“You should really think about cleaning this thing out.”
Over and over again.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah,” he says.
She hesitates for a second. Her fingertips burn imaginary holes through the leg of his jeans. “Truth?”
“Of course.” Somewhere, his conscience is shaking its head in disgust. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
-
He leaves the recycled cookie tin on the Welcome mat outside her front door the next morning, inconspicuous except for the receipts and newspaper bits that stick out around the edges and keep the lid from shutting all the way.
They were about you, the post-it stuck on top confesses. They were about you.