Waiting on Justin

Chapter 2

Before I get to the night I fell in love with Justin I have to share a little more about us when we were kids. Back then it was three of us—me, Justin, and Lizzie—for life. We would get off the bus together and walk the long dead-end road to the house.

The two other kids on our street were brother and sister. They were spoiled losers who called us poor because our parents couldn't put us in designer clothes like theirs did. We didn't talk to them much at all. They ran in a different circle, one for the "cool kids." We weren't good enough for them, and I knew it. I hated Kim for her perfect hair and her mom who brought cupcakes to class on her birthday. I had tried to make friends with her in first grade, we had the same teacher, but a week later she told another classmate I got my shoes at the Goodwill, and it embarrassed me. I knew my shoes weren't new, they showed up one day and Mom said she found them for me. I thought they were nice. I had no shame about them until Kim made fun of me. After that I hid them in my closet and said they were lost. The only other shoes I had were jellies that I wore until it was too cold, as if wearing summer shoes in winter was somehow better than used tennis shoes. It worked though: I got another pair of shoes from Payless, brand new, for $9.95; Justin scored a pair too on a BOGO deal.

"How do you lose a pair of shoes?" Mom asked me the day she finally took us. "You've gotta be some kind of an idiot to lose the shoes off of your feet. I just got those for you, Haylee. They fit you fine. You think we have the money to get you shoes every month?"

It was easy getting yelled at by Mom. Clayton was harder, but while he was dribbling spit in my face I squished my toes into the soft padding of my new Pro Wings and smiled on the inside. Yep, it was worth it.

The only other time we talked to those spoiled kids was once when Justin heard them call us losers. It was the last time he wanted to hear it. Justin was smart about it, he waited until the bus was out of sight, then ran right up to an unsuspecting Michael and kidney-kicked him from behind.

"You ever call us losers again and I'll beat your face in; you got that?" he yelled in a fashion I'm sure Clayton would have been proud of. Michael tried to look tough but complied.

Sometimes, after that, we would kick a pine cone between us, and of course we all played nice at Gramma Diaz's house on cookie Wednesdays, but we weren't ever friends with them. Other than those two, the only other kids on our street belonged to a youngish couple who drove an older Volvo and a minivan, and they were too young to go to school. And so the three of us played alone together. Clayton and Mom called us the Three Musketeers, but we didn't know who they were.

We were left to ourselves most days after school. Mom didn't care what we did as long as we left her out of it, and Clayton never got home before dark and usually after a long layover at Brewer's, his favorite bar. We liked outside best because it was away from the parents, but there was more to it than that. Outside, in our secret places, we traveled the world through time, space, and history.

Justin was amazing at building things: forts, toys, wooden guns, furniture, bunkers, and contraptions for any number of schemes. He was a creative genius, and Lizzie and I were his helpers.

We had this perfect shack of a hide-out in the woods not too far from the house. It was hidden under years of overgrown ivy, sticker bushes, and rotting leaves, and we were certain no one else knew our secret place. The adults probably knew about it, but they never spoke of it in our presence, and neither did we. Inside the safety of those rotten plywood walls we would pretend to be cops having a shoot-out with bank robbers or hijackers, pioneers in a covered wagon, Native Americans in a teepee, travelers stuck in a sandstorm hunkered down in a Bedouin tent, or adults living in our own house (OK that was me and Lizzie, but every so often Justin would allow us to play a girlie game like that). Most of the time, we would pretend there was a war and that we were hiding from the Nazis or Japs or Charlies, shooting out Justin's windows and snipe holes. I didn't get the names but played along for fun. We could disappear for hours, and no one cared. When Mom or Clayton called us for dinner, we had to stop everything and run home as fast as we could, hoping to avoid trouble for being late.