Chapter Thirty-Two
I ambled down the stark sidewalk, looking at the various houses and few cars go by in a slow haze. For the time of year, it was abnormally warm (probably a repercussion of global warming— or “climate change” for the conservatives out there who believed it only to be a “theory”). There was a light breeze, and the temperature couldn’t have been less than sixty degrees. Besides being perfect walking weather, it also created the perfect conditions to ponder over life.
For the past few years, I had felt slightly disconnected from the world, not wanting to partake in some of the obstacles surrounding my life. As I moved from place to place, nothing had been overly constant with me. My appearance to the outside world had changed drastically from the girl I once was at fourteen, and yet, my intentions, ambitions, and dreams in life had somehow managed to remain the same.
I had moved around a lot, and most people I had at one point grown fond of had slipped through my fingers in someway, becoming a mere name and memory. Back in Boston, I had real friends. I could count on them for anything. They were loyal, trustworthy, and pretty damn great basketball players; they were also boys.
Something about the male gender was so much more endearing to me than the female. They didn’t keep grudges about stupid things like talking behind one’s back and were upfront about everything. I liked that. No bullshit. Everything was real. Boys were easy to understand. Well, some boys.
Sometimes, I felt as though girls got slightly (or, more than slightly) intimidated by me. I was the girl they saw their boyfriend talking to in a more animated conversation than they could ever have. At some of my previous schools, girls had threatened me about talking to their boyfriends. I spoke to whom I wanted— that was never going to change. Sure, I had come across girls as enthused by the sport I loved as myself, but, generally, they weren’t able to keep up with me on an intellectual level and let petty things get in the way of friendship. I liked hanging with boys.
“Lizzie!” someone shouted, jolting me out of my nostalgic thoughts. I turned, taking out the headphones that had been on my ears, and hung them around my neck. Dylan.
“Hi,” I breathed, becoming aware of the fact that I was wearing only a T-shirt, mesh shorts, and Jordans.
“Nice kicks,” he commented, looking down to my feet.
“Yup,” I said, noting that when walking around the neighborhood, wearing more “feminine” clothes was a must.
“So, what’cha doing?” he asked, dropping the subject of my shoes.
“Riding a horse,” I stated, using the wonderful gift that was bestowed to the world long ago: sarcasm.
“Chill.”
“What are you doing?” I inquired, eyeing the area around me.
I was in front of a gray house on the smaller side, the disarranged garage wide open. From where I was positioned, I could just make out the jumble of rakes, trash barrels, power tools, discarded furniture, arbitrary pipes, and a heap of other miscellaneous things generally found in the depths of garages. In the driveway beyond, an aged truck was parked, the color a rusty shade, though, an odd streak of vivid red was slashed across the hood, looking to be recently applied.
“Oh, ya know, I was about go around and tag some shit,” he said, holding up a can of spray paint I had completely overlooked. The canister had a red streak surrounded it, leading me to the brilliant conclusion that the color within was indeed the reddest of sorts.
“Sounds illegal,” I commented.
“That it is, which is why I don’t really plan on painting the town red.”
“Oh? So, you’re not going to go deface property for the pure fun of it?” I asked, allowing sarcasm to seep through into my tone once again.
“Nah! Getting arrested really isn’t my cup of tea,” he shook the bottle in his hand to create a rattling sound from the two balls I knew were concealed within.
“Oh? Then what is?” I began to approach him.
“Talking to pretty girls in Jordans,” he said, bringing up my choice of footwear once again.
“Uh huh. What’s with the spray paint?” I asked, pointing to the cylindrical object in his hand.
“I was going to paint my truck,” he explained easily.
“Oh.”
“Wanna help?” he offered.
“No, I’m not really the artsy type,” I declined. As learned from previous endeavors, art and I didn’t quite mesh well.
“Then what type are you?” There was something about the sheen in his eyes that told me he knew or wanted to know something that made my stomach clench. Curiosity wasn’t a good attribute for people to have when it came to me. Not now, at least.
“I don’t know,” I said thoughtfully, his gaze corroding into my own, searching for something.
“You ever play basketball?” I opened my mouth to respond to his hazardous, rash question, though his mouth continued to jabber away. “I mean, you’ve got the Jordans and the height; all you need is the skill and you’re all set to go!” he took the red cap off of the spray paint.
“Right,” I said, allowing my eyes to roll, as something deep down in my soul told me that he knew. He had to. Somehow, Dylan Collins knew that I played. He knew I was formerly a tomboy, and he knew my history. If god were a concept I believed in, then I would definitely start praying that my suspicions were incorrect. Everything I had worked up to would be gone. Nothing would matter. If Dylan Collins did truly know about my past, everything would be destroyed.
“C’mon,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of his car. I sighed, and reluctantly walked over to him. The second I reached his side, he retreated into the nadirs of the garage.
“Where are you going?” I called.
“Here,” he said, underhandedly tossing an unopened bottle of red spray paint my way. I caught it with two hands, hating the fact that he was now smirking at me. Jerk.
“So, what exactly am I doing with this?” I asked, studying the bottle.
“Painting my car,” he replied, brushing past me and going over to his vehicle. He shook his bottle once more, creating the jingling noise, and then aimed it at the car. Pressing down on the nozzle, he sprayed the liquid red back and forth across the hood of his truck. The dull color I was accustomed to was now being replaced.
I moved over to where he was and set my elbow on the edge of the hood, an area that evaded all traces of paint. “I want to try,” I proclaimed.
“Go right ahead,” he said, continuing to redden the vehicle.
I twisted the cap of my bottle off, the plastic seal breaking as I did so. Shaking the bottle in the same manner Dylan had, I watched him paint. After a few seconds, I popped the cap off, and pressed down. Out came a stream of red, landing on the car. I mimicked his back and forth motion with my own hand, and covered a needed area. It was pretty sick.
“So, Lizzie,” he said as we moved around the car, meticulously spraying until an area was fully covered and the undercoat was completely masked, “tell me about Boston.”
I froze for a few brief moment, before returning to the task. “Let’s save Boston for another time. How about California? Texas?”
“Okay, I’ll take a story about L.A.,” he said, thankfully allowing me to dodge another lie about my hometown.
“What do you want to know about?” I asked.
“Your past relationships,” he said after thinking about it for a couple seconds.
“Don’t you want a longer story?” I asked, my mind already formulating upon how to express to him the small aspect of my life most couldn’t believe: I didn’t date.
He bit the bottom of his lip, and then his mind changed, “Fine. Tell me anything about L.A.”
“Okay,” a sigh of respite washed over me. “I moved to L.A. when I was about fourteen. When I got there, the only thing I liked about the place was the weather. All year round you could wear shorts and T-shirts—”
“And Jordans,” he interjected.
I laughed lightly, wondering why he kept pressing. “Or flip-flops.”
“Sure, sure,” he agreed, though he wasn’t sold.
“I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t know the place and I didn’t want to. Eventually, I adjusted, and made friends. The end.”
“That was a crappy story,” he commented, mindlessly moving his hand about.
“Eh, I never said I was a great storyteller,” I shrugged.
“Who was your first boyfriend?” he questioned casually, though it came off blunt as hell.
“I don’t know,” I replied truthfully.
“How can you not know?”
“You know what? Now, it’s my turn to ask something,” I declared, avoiding his inquiry.
“Okay, shoot,” he said, not persistent on the interrogation.
“Who was your first girlfriend?” I asked, though it didn’t actually matter to me; it felt like the natural progression from the questions he had asked.
“You know what,” he diverted an answer by throwing my words back at me.
“What?” I gave in, also not pursuing my query.
“Tell about your first kiss, and then I’ll tell you about my first girlfriend,” he countered.
“Oh, writing an article about my life for a gossip magazine, are you?” I raised an eyebrow, continuing to spray about the truck.
“A book, actually,” a smirk played at his lips once again. “Friends, assuming that’s what we are, generally like to have a grasp of whom they’re dealing with when socializing with one another.”
“Course,” I said, finding his words making some amount of sense.
“So, do we have a deal?”
“Absolutely,” I said, biting my tongue to stifle the overflow of sarcasm that was bubbling up inside of me. “I was fourteen. I was with one of my, uh, close friends, and we were talking. We were in a park, lying on the ground. He somehow managed to get on top of me, leaned down, and kissed me. The end.”
“Huh,” he said, not satisfied with my somewhat-fictitious tale.
He didn’t need to know that the boy I had kissed was Justin. He didn’t need to know that it was with my best friend. And he most certainly didn’t need to know that we had been playing an intense game of one-on-one when it had happened. We were wrestling each other for the ball, our faces inches apart. Justin reduced the distance between us, and, out of nowhere, he kissed me. It was the most unexpected thing that had ever happened to me, and I was in complete shock.
I didn’t move my lips, and went along with Justin’s lead. It was a slow kiss, tender and genuine. The ball slipped out of our grips as it only deepened. I wasn’t fully aware of what was occurring, but I wasn’t opposing. It was one of those kisses a girl would brag to her friends about for months after. Having no friends of the same gender, I kept it to myself at the time. It was perfect; the best kiss I had ever shared, really.
“Her name was Abby. She had hair the color of chocolate that lay in perfect curls on her shoulders, and she was the sweetest girl you’ve ever met,” Dylan said, ceasing to paint in order to focus on the memory he was relying to me. “She had these amazing green eyes that sparkled when you looked into them. They were one of her best qualities. She was shorter than me, but the height difference wasn’t too substantial between the two of us. Getting jealous yet?” he questioned as a ploy to avert my mind away from the passion in his words.
“Nah,” I said, cringing slightly at the thought of some of the conversations I had been apart of over the years in regards to my gender. The things some guys will say…
“Okay, well, she was incredible. She moved here from the city, and was different than all the other girls; kinda like you,” he added.
“What time period in your life are we talking about?”
“Freshman year. I was about fourteen,” he answered. “We met in geometry class, and bonded over a lack of understanding of trapezoids,” a melancholy smile fitted his expression. “After about a month of working my charm, she agreed to finally hang out with me. Then, my former best friend met her. It was downhill from there. She fell for him, and managed to destroy our lifelong friendship in the process,” he said completely truthfully. His eyes didn’t display an ounce of insincerity, and his words were real.
“Who was the friend?” I asked.
“Stick around in my life a little longer, and you’ll learn. Or, better yet, you’re smart— figure it out,” he said regretfully. I thought about it, but my mind was blank. “Well, anyways, I was in math class one day a few months later, and she turned to me, and told me that she made a mistake. I was the guy she wanted to be with. She broke up with my former best friend, and we went out for a good two months… until she screwed us both over, and moved out to Arizona.” His tale had concluded. He was done reliving his past.
“Ah, that’s always a blast,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” he mumbled, shaking his head, and returning to the act of spray-painting his truck. He didn’t do strips like he had, but rather an odd motion of his hand that couldn’t be distinguished from my vantage point.
I walked around to where he was, and saw he had made a heart shape on the side of one of the doors. I smiled, and sprayed my bottle inside the form most generally associated with romance, creating a “D” in the middle. He looked at my addition for a moment, before looking at me and smiling, trying to hide the minor level of dejection that his face still wore. A plus sign and then the first letter of my nickname were added beside my creation. He then propped his elbow on my shoulder, admiring our joint effort.
“You should be an artist,” I said.
“Nah, I think I’ll keep painting initials on the sides of cars as just a hobby,” he said, messily spraying over our masterpiece. I laughed, as I felt a vibration coming from my pocket, and then heard the less than pleasurable alarm. I reached within, and withdrew my buzzing phone. The words “WHERE ARE YOU?” were flashing across the screen, the contact name “Monica Turner” above them.
“Hate to paint and dash, but my mother is currently requesting my presence,” I said, setting the bottle of spray paint down after closing it.
“Ah, well, I suppose I will see you later, Ms. Turner,” he replied to my sudden news.
“Maybe,” I said, “but, in the meantime, I hope you finish your little art project.”
“Will do,” he saluted. I waved to him, retreating from the driveway, slightly confused, but satisfied with the encounter that had taken place. For some reason, I turned back, unsure of why, only to have him wink at me in a way that sent shivers down my spine. He knew.