Stealing The Show (Such Sweet Sorrow Trilogy, Book One)

8

YOU KNOW HOW, when you want to be alone more than anything, you go to the place where you've felt the safest from everything that can crush you and destroy you and ruin your life?  

For me, that place has always been with Paps when we were working on "The Funniest Kid in The World." It didn't matter how much Jubilee was breaking my heart without knowing it, or how outside of the world I was from watching and thinking too much. Going there and writing with him always felt safe and good and right. 

And that's where I go straight to after I see them kiss. I duck down in my seat and Dave Underwood drives past me, probably to go to McDonald's to stuff his face and then to go watch the football game. I can't call Shoe because he's at work until midnight, and my other best friend who I'm also in love with just kissed another guy. Who happens to have a talent for shoving processed food and pink slime down his face.  

I shut the door to my room and lock it for no reason. I pull out the pages and the typewriter. He's the only person I ever knew to use a typewriter. It makes you learn to not make a mistake the first time, he always told me.  

I think about the last page we wrote together, which was the night before he told me his cancer was back.  

I don't even have to read it, because I know what's going on in the book it's usually like watching a movie in my head. But I try to remember the last scene we'd written and I can't see even one word of it in my head. I can't stop thinking about that kiss. That Dave Underwood touched Jubilee's lips with his. Before me. 

I glance at the page. The page is still full of words and those were the last words that Paps and I wrote together and I can't even read them. They're just black squiggles on a white page.  

So I put a blank sheet into the typewriter. And I stare at it. 

And stare at it. 

And stare at it. 

My dad knocks on the door to see if I want to get some pizza and watch a movie or something. I tell him I'm good. That is a lie. 

I stare at it. 

And I keep seeing that kiss. 

So I push one of the keys. I don't even look at which one. I just start pushing them one after the other and then I feel my fingers make a word and then another one and they come one after the other, words and more words, and they write about what it means to be a wallflower and why I do it, and what's so wrong with that anyway and maybe nothing. But maybe life isn't for sitting in the bleachers in a dark empty gym. And I'm not even a spectator--I'm alone in a dark empty gym, I'm alone in my room on a Friday night, and outside it's turning to winter and there are football games across town and there is pizza down the hall and there is a girl I'm in love with about seven blocks away sitting in her room not calling me. And what am I to do about this, what am I to do with what I saw, why him, why am I just a watcher instead of someone who does impossible things? Am I doomed to stay this way? Can I be better than I am?  

The page is full, I see. It's got typos and the margins are all fucked, but it doesn't matter. I take it out of the typewriter. 

I hold it up in front of me. 

And I rip it in two, right down the heart. 

Then I put in another sheet. And I type some more words. 

Because maybe I can be. Maybe I can. I'm not sure because I watch other people so much I forget to watch myself, and forget that I can be watched, too, if I want to, and that in the bleachers in the dark may not be the best place to sit because the view isn't so good, and maybe this is my manifesto, like the manifesto Paps said he wrote one time about telling the best story he could and knowing what was the right story to tell in his heart and not what his boss said it was. And is this mine coming out of me, I wonder?