Two Fish

four || elver

The next morning, Elver found himself sitting at the bottom of a tree in the park, keeping well away from the pond and spying on a particularly pretty girl. In some way, he needed to thank that annoying friend of his mother’s. She was right; it was crazy that he didn’t have a girlfriend yet. In fact, he’d never had a girlfriend. After she had gone, his mother had pulled him aside.

“Don’t listen to her, hun, there are plenty of fish in the sea,” she had said. Elver grimaced at the remark.

“If girls are like fish, I’m turning gay,” Elver had joked. His mother had rolled her eyes and batted the comment away, kissing his forehead before she busied herself with a continuation of Cathy’s crisis.

Elver wondered if he was the problem: he knew he was slightly awkward, but as far as he was concerned, there was nothing wrong with his appearance. He wasn’t hideous. All the girls he had ever liked already had boyfriends. The problem was, Elver wasn’t that cool. He had plenty of friends and he went to parties, he just wasn’t part of the cool group. That’s not to say he was uncool, he just sat somewhere in-between.

The girl  was sitting like she owned the bench, one leg swung over the other, her face blank and staring.  She looked like a lost child, glancing around her every now and then. She hadn’t seen Elver. After a few minutes, she got up and walked over to the edge of the water, staring down into the rippling water. Her face was hidden by a torrent of dirty blonde curls, her shoulders hunched up to her ears. She looked cold but the cool breeze had warm undertones in the weak, early morning light.

She kept having to hitch her jeans up as they slipped down without her even moving and Elver watched, fascinated. When she crouched down by the water, her skin was exposed from her waist to the small of her back. Her long-sleeved maroon t-shirt had ridden up a little and Elver could see the slight dip where her spine met her hips, the contours of her waist.

It’s now or never, he thought. His mother’s friend couldn’t be all wrong; after all, she had three sons, about whom she never shut up. He stepped forwards and then back again, wringing his wrists and shaking his head. She was probably older than him, cooler and way out of his league. But then again, it was the summer holidays and she was on her own by a pond. A girl like her should have been our with her friends or on the beach: girls like her were the kind who liked the beach, he imagined. This pond girl couldn’t be afraid of the water.

He stepped forward again, slow baby steps, and he flinched when the girl so much as moved an inch, if even her hair blew in the breeze or she shuffled her feet for better balance.

“You will never see her again anyway,” he murmured to himself. “Just be a man.”

So he walked a little further, scratching the back of his neck and dragging his feet along the coarse, dry grass.

“Um, excuse me?” he said, but she didn’t hear him. She had one hand in the pond, tickling the water and disturbing the  rushes. He noticed with a shiver of disgust how the fish seemed to flock to her and the last thing he wanted to do was go anywhere near the pond, but he didn’t want his mother’s insufferable friend to be right. He could get a girlfriend if he wanted, he told himself. He could have any girl he wanted. Oh, how he made himself laugh.

“Excuse me?” he said again when he was a little closer, but her mind was in neutral and she didn’t hear him. She was too busy thinking about nothing at all. He shuffled from foot to foot, twisting his fingers in the hem of his t-shirt. Closer and closer he got, until he was maybe only two feet from her. “Hello?”

He didn’t like to be so close to the water, though he couldn’t tell if his heart was racing from the fear of the slimy creatures below or being so close to a girl, who didn’t even know he was there. The breeze blew through her hair again and wafted her perfume up to him. Sweet but not too sickly, unlike his sister’s.

“Hello?” he said. This time she heard him and she jumped up, losing her footing when she bumped into Elver, falling into the murky pond with a shriek and flailing arms.