What Happened That Night

2 ~ o c e a n

He was almost ten then, with little knobby knees that were crisscrossed with healing scabs from playing baseball because he was on the team at his old school, and he wore a pair of cargo shorts that shook around his thighs as he jumped down and his flip-flops made a smacking noise against the beige pavement. He had black, curly hair with short ringlets around his ears and, even though I couldn’t see from across the street, dark blue eyes that sparkled like ocean water underneath a glimmering sun on a perfect day. His shirt had Buzz Lightyear across the chest with the words TO INFINITY AND BEYOND! stamped underneath his feet. Griffin was holding a Nintendo DS game chip in his hand, his fingers long and tanned, and he was reaching for the Nintendo DS from his brother, Brandon, and I saw his lips moving, and even though I couldn’t decipher what he was saying, I heard the faint pitch of a whine emanating from across the street.

I saw the shoulders of the woman I assumed was their mother slouching as she sighed, gazing over her shoulder at her arguing sons as Griffin stood on the tips of his toes and shouted while Brandon evaded him, simply holding the game higher and walking away without even taking his eyes off of the screen, the little stick in his hand still skating back and forth. “Can you two learn to share?” I heard her exhausted, annoyed voice say from across the street, her shoulders falling with another sigh as she glanced over the hood of their dark minivan at the man I thought must have been her husband, who instead of returning the gaze or looking at his children, stared at the house with his hands on his hips. He let out a whistle as he looked at it, one that was drawled out, and he scratched the side of his head, finally glancing over at his tired wife. He had black hair, just like Griffin. “Look at that. Couldn’t have done a better job fixing up the place if I did it myself.”

Quietly, I heard her mutter, “You did do it yourself, dear.” And he laughed, throwing his head back, almost as if in agreement, and then, when Brandon finally shouted at Griffin to leave him alone and sulked toward the front porch, flopping down on the second step with his knees close to his chest and the faint glow of the screen illuminating his slender, freckled nose and lips, his father looked over to them. And then glanced over his shoulder, to where I was sitting, with my legs crossed in front of my turtle shaped sandbox with a half empty pail of sand in front of my bare knee, and I blinked. I grabbed the handle of my pink plastic shovel and buried the tip into the sand and scooped up the grains and poured it into my pail as I heard Mr. Tomlin say, “Griffin, why don’t you try to make some friends instead, huh?”

Griffin looked away from his brother sitting on the front porch, little electronic sounds emitting from the game device in his hands, and glanced in my direction, eyeing the green plastic turtle and the cracked pink, plastic shovel in my hand and then sighed. Fine, I saw his lips saying as he walked, kicking the toe of his flip-flop into the pavement, and his mother smiled at him and then me, waving slightly, and then told Griffin to be nice, to be polite, and that ladies always go first. He responded with yeah, yeah, yeah, as if this had all been told to him before.

“Hey,” he said to me when he was reaching the middle of the street, the sound of the soles of his flip-flops smacking against the road alerting me to his steady approach, and he nodded a greeting in my direction as he stepped one flip-flop clad foot onto the neatly trimmed grass of my front lawn—my father took great pride in how well and frequent he was at mowing the grass—and he crouched down in front of me, placing both scabbed knees onto the grass, and he tilted his head to the side as he looked at me with sparkling ocean blue eyes as he asked, “Can I play?”

I looked at the sparkling ocean for one more moment before I replied, “Okay.”

.

My parents don’t know it, but every day I’ve been driving Emily’s car to school.