white boys (river phoenix)

24

Chapter Twenty Four **unedited!**

(Friday). The next few days preceding Friday were normal. Nothing extravagant had happened. Her and River had been having normal, friendly conversations. It was like they had an on and off switch- as if they had their days where they were lovey dovey and quite sickening, and other times they had their days were they acted like normal teenage friends who felt no attraction towards each other. Wednesday and Thursday, the switches were off. Robin hadn't had any run-ins with her parents about River or her job, and accepted the fact that she'd gotten the job for whatever reason- she didn't know.

On Friday, Robin woke up feeling ecstatic, for whatever reason, she couldn't determine. Perhaps it was the faint sunrise that was escalating, though she knew that soon enough the sun would shrivel and darkness would take over. She didn't mind those times though, but they did seem a whole lot more dreary sometimes.

However, this time she felt anything but darkness. Her heart was all aflutter in her chest and she felt oddly superior. Most times, if not all times, she hardly felt anything. She was always neutral, in some type of unspecified area between black and white, a dark gray color. For some reason, today she felt nearly off-white. Only nearly, not simply off-white.

Anyway, that day she dressed a little cuter than usual, only because she felt like it. She had an average amount of confidence. She wasn't extremely cocky nor was she extremely insecure, but perhaps she was on the verge of insecurity. She had been knocked down so many times in her life that it was hard to feel anything but miserable about her outward appearance. Luckily, she wasn't always only around white people back in Georgia, and she had a set of friends who weren't white and wanted to look like her, which took her by surprise when she first met them.
She remembered the first time she saw Jesus a few years after she had met her best friend Ariella. He was staring at her like no one else was in the room and he kept hanging around her and being touchy feely in the most innocent sense of the phrase for the rest of that evening. Other boys would do that too, and girls would shower her with compliments. It was rare for her to face catty tactics when she was with that group of friends. Maybe the people who bullied her were jealous because they wanted to be like her, wanted to have her features as a black woman. But that had never crossed her mind, which had been manipulated about the idea of beauty too far into the deep end.

Today though, she walked around with a lighter aura around her. She was flouncing on the air around her and she felt slightly elevated off the floor. It was like her feet were skipping a few feet above the ground. In fact, on her feet, she was adorning white Air Force 1s, blue denim overalls similar to the pair she was wearing yesterday and a tight floral blouse underneath. Her lips were painted with clear lip gloss, her brows were brushed and filled in, her cheeks were rosy with blush and her lashes were elongated with black volumizing mascara that she had laying around in her dressers. She looked like she wasn't wearing makeup, but her face looked fresher and slightly more juvenile.

Of course River had noticed this first things first, bringing her into his side when he first saw her and squeezing her into a hug from beside her. She squirmed away but laughed anyways. Though she had been more accepting to the fact that she did like River back, and that perhaps maybe they were more than just friends, she didn't accept it enough to publicize that realization. They could be seen speaking casually to each other in the hallways, but there was no flirty intonation to their conversations when they were around others.

River was ecstatic too, knowing that he had grown closer to Robin and was getting closer to her in the way he wanted to, not too close and not too distant. It was perfect. She'd kissed him a number of three times by now and it was from her own conscious decision. It was as if the apprehensive feelings she had that he'd felt so strongly at first were drifting away, and she was picking up the pace each day.