I figured that I could make that bathroom break I left class for a bit longer, retroactively turning a one into a two, and I sat on a bench outside by the music building with a girl who beckoned me over, having seen me leave the classroom a moment ago.
I reluctantly took a seat next to her on the bench, recalling the moment from the lunch break that laughed at me from inside my mind. We were alone, the wind blowing slightly chilly with the green leaves, our sole audience.
“They didn’t put me up to it,” she started, “they were just trying to give me courage.” From the back of the hall in the music building a couple hours ago, a gaggle of girls stood, pointing, laughing, and whispering at me. She was among them.
“They just seemed like bullies,” I replied, their fingers still jabbing at my brain meat like a toddler discovering a grocery store steak for the first time.
“Yeah, they were bullying me, saying I was a wuss. So I walked over and humiliated myself in front of you. Weren’t you single? Why’d you shoot me down like that?”
“I can’t date anyone right now,” with honesty, wondering exactly how much was too much to disclose, but throwing caution to the wind; she thinks well enough to sit alone with me out here when we should be in our respective classes, “my home life is a bit of a disaster and I never really know how my mom’s going to undermine me next. It’s not you, it’s me. I keep my head down, for both doing my homework and dodging dishes that she throws.”
“Oh,” she understood, slightly relieved that the previous rejection in front of an audience ready to betray had secretly been softened after the fact, “do you even like me? I never even notice you looking at girls. Do you even like sex?”
“No— no, not really,” I stammered out before I could adjust it. Plain and bare. “I’m nonsexual,” I added, not yet having learned the word is asexual. “I mean, like, I like girls romantically, but really only romantically. And since I can’t take anyone home cause I don’t want to inflict my mom on them, I just don’t. I keep to myself.”
“Shame,” she watches a bug crawl on the sidewalk between her feet. “Would you want to do something tonight with me? Just for tonight. No sex or anything, and we’d be away from her. There’s a coffee place I go to, the Coffee Cottage, and they have concerts at night. Would you come tonight?”
I mulled it over in my head. “I’ll have to think about it,” I spat out, more thinking about the new and terrible traumas I’d get into when I was back at home for the night.
“I’ll be there at 6:30, and they start playing at seven, gives us a chance to talk, if you want. I’m gonna be there either way, my parents are taking me, so if you don’t show up, I’ll still be there and I’ll tell you how it went afterward.” She got up from the bench, smiled at me, and headed back inside, her brief truancy complete.
I dwelled on it for the rest of the school day, almost positive that I was set up and was gonna get laughed at for turning up. I could always say I was there for the show and a hot chocolate or whatever, if all those other girls turned up.
When I got home I had a couple hours of tenuous peace that I used to catch a shower and dash through some algebra homework and sweep all the fake hardwood floors. I heard the crunch of the gravel shortly after half past six, and the slam of the car door finished freezing my blood. My mother was here.
The very first thing my mom said when she saw my brother, and I overheard it, was a complaint that he left time on the microwave, followed by a snap of a hand on his face.
That was about a good enough signal for me to get out of there. As he was being berated and abused now for not getting the dishes done, I slipped my bedroom door quietly shut, and I worked on removing the screen on my window. She would soon discover the fake hardwood, and it was impossible to tell if it was clean or dirty with all the dents, chips, and scuffs all over it. I wasn’t planning on being here for her verdict.
Legs out the window, followed by torso and head and arms, I gingerly snapped the screen back in place and crept carefully around the side of the house. I heard my name being yelled progressively louder and more frantically, and I knew I didn’t have long before she realized I wasn’t in her domain anymore. I walked my bike through the driveway so no one could hear the crunch of the gravel, and once I got to the street, I took off as fast and as hard as I could, pedaling with fervor until all I heard was highway noises.
Highway ninety-nine west went downhill into Newberg, and I used this slope to keep my speed up, in case my mother got the idea to get in her car and go looking for me, but it was a two-mile straight shot into town. All she’d have to do is pull into the shoulder and clip my back tire with her bumper, and I’d be a meat crayon. I didn’t look back. Looking back would cost precious seconds.
A few minutes later, my bike glided over the Newberg city line, and with just a bit more effort, I got it to the library without incident, locked and safe. The Coffee Cottage was across the street, and I hustled over that way, checking my wrist: twelve ‘til seven.
She was there, sitting at her own table, arms folded, looking down at a bug between her feet, but she lit up just a smidge when she saw me approach, sweaty and gross despite a shower not long ago. It would have to do. She was wearing the same clothes from school, but her hair was done up a bit nicer, her long sideburns flowing in front of her ears, just touching her collar. It was a heartwarming look.
“Hey,” I said, the music started up a bit early. We were the only two people under thirty here. No gossiping teenage girls around the corner, this was for real. Deciding to save face, I didn’t tell her about the events that brought me here. “I rode my bike here all the way from Dundee!”
“I can see that,” she says. I almost missed her breathing just a bit of my scent. I never thought my sweat smelled good. She didn’t let any of the sweat-related disgust I was feeling appear across her face, still with that slight smile and pointed interest. “This here is Peanuts and Jam, it’s a weekly thing.” The guitarist and drummer made sonic way for the vocalist, who opened her lyrics.
“I see the peanuts, but where’s the jam,” I asked over the music. She pointed at the band. I just up-nodded. Turtles are not fast. We kept on talking for a bit, and I saw an older couple, a man and a woman both wearing cargo shorts sitting next to each other, looking over at me, smiling.
“Those are my parents,” she mentioned, “and again, my dad has the sheer audacity to wear cargo shorts, tube socks, and flip flops. I swear to god,” she trailed off. They looked warm and content. She may have felt embarrassed, but I felt safe. Her parents held hands under the table, and her mom flicked a peanut shell at her dad.
The sun buried itself in the hill to the west, and the band played on. I got a hot chocolate and scraped off the whip cream on the top with peanuts, savoring the sweet and salty combination. She looked at me weird until she tried it. She relaxed around me and I relaxed around her, and we just lounged around the table underneath the trellis with the ivy and those hipster-looking string lights with the round bulb. The band was running out of energy as the darkness took over, and they finally settled on one last slow jam.
She took my hand and pulled me up, dragging me over to the corner next to the stage. I had no idea what I was doing, and I settled on a lazy, can’t-dance, two-step side shuffle. She seemed to have the same thought. She had her hands around my waist, and I held her up around her shoulders, and she nestled her head into my chest. We stood there swaying like that for the song and her parents never screamed or threw things.
It was a calm end to a great evening.
The band called it there, and the Coffee Cottage closed up, and with trepidation back in my heart, I hugged her goodbye, and began the long, slow, dark, uphill pedal back home into a defensive existence.