Baby Blue Elephant (Harry Styles)

Baby Blue Elephant: Chapter One

       She always wears this comical smile, Oatus does. It’s composed of crooked lips and a closed mouth (no teeth, never teeth). Perhaps the amusement behind it is the result of my jokes. Boy does she love my jokes, and boy do I have many to tell!

        "Knock knock."

        

        "Who's there?"

        "Oat."

        "Oat who?"

        "Oatus."

       That’s the worst one, and that’s also her favorite one. (We’re quite loopy, the two of us.)

       Oatus often has pigtails on either side of her head, and they remind me of Twizzlers candy. I hate licorice, but I love her hair style.

       She has a baby face, despite the fact that both of us are twenty three years old.

       Our neighbors refer to Oatus and I as the "Dorky Married Couple." We’re always up to something, whether that be dancing around the kitchen with banana milkshakes in our hands, or racing each other down Adlington Street at four in the morning.

       I met her on a shabby train to London Town. Plopping down in the seat across from her, letting out a huff.

        I stared, the bags under my eyes painted by the hands of sleep deprivation. My shoulders slumped after I proceeded to drop all of my belongings on the floor. The edge of my seat was my current home; my resting spot after so long.

       Her features were the color of the rainbow sprouting across the sky that day. One look at her, and you knew she was exceedingly friendly. I liked those kind of people. I liked all kinds of people, but those were my absolute favorite.

       She felt me staring at her, I knew she did. A smile spread across her face like butter spreads on a piece of toast. That comical smile; the one I was telling you about earlier.

       "May I watch?" I asked her, gesturing to a bobbing hand and a Mickey Mouse pen that was scribbling on a piece of paper.

       "Of course," she responded, as if my question wasn't even the least bit intrusive.

       I took notice to the words "abuse" and "adoption" swimming upon the sheet, my eyes tracing over each sentence. Once I caught up with her writing, I would patiently wait for her to scrawl out the next line of letters.

       She would occasionally stop and straighten out her fingers, presumably to rid them of the ache of continuous movement. I wanted to reach out and wrap her hand back around Mickey Mouse, reminding her that the stretching was useless. The ache would just come back.

       I opened my mouth when her writing seized.

       "You're an adoption agent, trying to find a home for a little boy who's been abused."

       She nodded eagerly at that, and spent hours upon hours telling me about her love for kids. I found myself adoring the fondness she displayed when she spoke about children, and as a journalist, I most definitely wrote about it in my column the following week. I was a fan of little ones myself.

        Speaking of children, that brings me back to where I left off; this hot afternoon in late July when Oatus pees on a stick. She lets it sit on the countertop for three minutes exactly. Not a second under, not a second over. When it comes to directions, she follows them to a T. She closes her eyes, wraps the results in a napkin, and clutches my hand. My heart’s beating a hundred miles per minute as she throws open the front door to our tiny house and pulls me to the playground that’s 1 1/2 minutes away from our sidewalk.

        The park is our go-to place. Our second home, if you will. It‘s where we fly on swings on cool afternoons and have picnics and ride our bikes. If we’re going anywhere to find out whether or not we’re having a baby, it’s definitely going to be the park.

        “Do you think I’m pregnant? Do you?” Oatus yells into the humid air, the tone of her voice making it clear as day that she is just so excited. She’s dying for me to answer that question with a nod of my head or a “Yes” and a smile.

        She runs as fast as she possibly can, the sound of her converse hitting the sidewalk making my head whirl. My hand remains intertwined with hers, no matter how much I struggle to keep up with her lightning speed.

        “I do, darling,” I respond, a dimple forming an indentation in my cheek.

        As we each plop down on the cool sand beside the swing set (we’re just too wound up to actually sit on the swings), crinkles form beside my eyes as I squeeze them shut.

        Please God, if it’s your will, let Oatus be pregnant.

        It’s then that I feel a fingertip touch the tip of my nose, and my eyelashes flutter open in a rush. Oatus’s cherry lollipop lips meet my line of vision, the cracks upon them heaving in and out as she struggles to regulate her breathing.

        She’s holding something up in the air, just to the right of her almond-shaped eyes that are filled with crocodile tears.

        The unwrapped pregnancy test. Two pink lines.

        I cried all night.

 

A big thank you to @maddidg7 for the adorable cover. :-)