February 6, 2013

  • Love Parade (stories #1)

    #1

    The Meet-Cute

    I just turned 16. I go for walks daily.  It gets me out of my house.  It adds freckles to my arms and legs.  I can develop my love affair with the wind and the sun.  I always plug my headphones in my CD Player and put my favorite songs on repeat.  It's not uncommon for my walk down the street to become a dance down the street.  I live in the middle of nowhere.  Trees outweigh neighbors 20 to 1.  So, I guess it gives me my fix of alone time.  As I come around the second curve, to my surprise there are people ahead.   Two guys around my age are talking on the side of the road.  One is sitting on a lawn mower.  I grow a little nervous realizing I am about to meet two new neighbors.  Fast forward one foot in front of the other.  The guy on the mower is Lance.  He's a Senior, a year ahead of me in school.  The other guy is Cory.  He's only a sophomore, a year behind me.  They had both just moved into the neighborhood.  Cory was going to be the new kid at school.  Lance had been in the school district for 3 years, but we had never talked to each other.  That was about to change.  It's a few weeks later.  I've headed out for another walk.  By the time Lance's house comes into view, I see his grey shirt bobbing through the trees.  He meets me in the road, and asks me for my phone number so we can talk other than in the middle of the road.  I give it to him.  He calls.

    The Friendship

    We start talking a few nights a week.  Most days we will talk online, and when it's lights out we will finish the conversation on the phone from my closet.  My walks become more frequent and more nocturnal.  By October I'm sneaking out of my window to climb onto a church roof with him.  (no that's not a euphemism we actually climbed onto the roof of the church down the road).  In real life, when the sun is out, we aren't that close.  We don't have any mutual friends.  No classes together.  Our lockers are in different hallways.  In time, I introduce him to all my friends.  This backfires quite a bit.  Somehow he manages to date each one in turn.  Awesome.  I get to hear about it all on a church roof.   Then he gets an actual girlfriend, Cooper, from a different town.  This is much better.  I can handle hearing about someone I don't know.  I also get to spend time with the guy who is becoming one of my best friends without stepping on anyone's toes.  It's a great time of rock music and no sleep.  

    The Crossover

    It's 2004, now.  Lance is still dating Cooper.  We sneak out one night.  We commandeer a can of weedkiller, and head for an open field near his house.  For the next 30 minutes we blindly spray the shape of a smiley face into the grass.   Over the next week we see the shape become more and more pronounced as the grass dies.  You can catch glimpses of the smiley as you drive by for months.  A few days later, we head out for another night of fun.  I decided we should turn left instead of right this time, and we head towards ground I am familiar with.   His eye is swollen, and his nose looks broken because he had just lost in a boxing contest.  I was trying to take his mind off of it.  I subtly grab some mud out of a puddle.  I ask him a question.  As he answers, I slowly smear the glob of  mud down his cheek.  Well, I accomplished my goal of distraction, but I was now under attack.  An hour later, on our way back home, covered in mud we come upon a freshly erected STOP sign.  Add the muddy element, and you've got yourself an easy steal.  No need to even take the sign off the post.  Lance carries the contraband slung over his shoulders the rest of the way home.  Including when he slipped trying to get over a ditch and fell on his ass.   I was done.  All I wanted to do was kiss the poor boy, and he had to have a girlfriend.  

    That changed after a couple of weeks.  Soon we weren't just sitting on the church roof.  That is, if we made it that far.  Usually, I spent a few nights out of the week in his bedroom.  One particular night, his aunt was out of town and he cooked for me and blasted Hoobastank's The Reason over and over until the wee hours.  He would always fall asleep, and I would take my ass out his window down the street and into my window.  I was late for school all the time.  enough times that I was put in In School Suspension (ISS) much like solitary confinement.  The lunch time office aid was given the duty of delivering our lunches.  Lance bribed the aid to smuggle me in a bag of gummy bears.  Only appropriate since he was the reason I was in there.  One night he fell asleep as usual, but this time I ended up falling asleep right there on top of him.  A couple hours later I open my eyes and see light.  Holy shit.  The sunrise.  I never ran so fast before or since.  

    The Breakdown

    Prom was an issue.  He wanted me to go with him.  The problem came from the fact that I had acquired a date while he was still dating Cooper.  I couldn't switch.  He was mad.  So he brought a slutty ex-girlfriend.  I cried in Nicole's lap.  We got over it.  I apologized by making him our own prom for just the two of us.  (really it was just a CD player and a country CD planted in a secluded place. Did I say I was 16?).  A few weeks later we were arguing about nothing and I was crying again.  A few weeks later he decided to sleep with four different girls and cause girl fights in math classrooms the day before graduation.  I wasn't involved physically, though I was told my name was mentioned.  He graduated and left for the marines.  I got one letter a few months later telling me he was in hell.  I sent one back saying that sucks I'm amazing.  I marked out his name in every journal entry I wrote for the entire year.  I got quite a bit more sleep.  

     

    Leah K.

    I use nicknames when I talk about people to my friends.  For the longest time his was Jackass.