I am waiting all by myself, listening to the echoing clatter of my boots as I tramp around the lower atrium of the mall, near KB toys tore thinking about how last summer Dawn Michelle and I inadvertently knocked over a waterfall display of Treasure Trolls before nonchalantly evacuating the store. There is an arctic dip in temperature—somewhere Patrick has spent the hours leading up to early dusk listening to Metallica and looking into the mirror before Mama McReynolds called upstairs, telling him its time to go in five minutes—the blue McReynolds mini-van that comfortably seats eight will cruise through the damp leafy avenues of West Peoria, hanging a hard right on Martin Luther King Dr., skirting just above the precipice of the south end as a child on a balance beam, tumbling down Harmon Highway, forming a clover and escaping into the feral vastness of Creek road where college kids smoke dope and go skinny dipping in the summer, all the while Patrick, giddy with excitement, telling his mom how he has been talking with Amy an average of four hours a night and how she just can’t wait to meet him, while all the while his mother stares at her own reflection in the windshield and smiles like she is sipping Bailey’s and watching an Irish Sunset, informing her nearest and dearest first born named after the emerald saint that she met her own husband in high school via blind date—Patrick raking his fingers across the top of his head once again, lowering the overhead visor-like flap so that he can peer in the rectangular mirror, his cheeks lathered with some alchemical musk he found in his father’s bedroom while filching two of his moms Bensons and Hedges, the kind where he always removes the menthol from out of the filter first because he can’t stand the goddamn taste of clover in his mouth when he smokes, hoping to fire up the cigarettes somehow post-coitally. As the Mcreynolds carriage turns off of creek road and creeps up the bulbous hills of lower Bartonville Helen comments about how nice it is that Patrick is having friends from Limestone to socialize with the move pending and everything. Three beeps and Hale is seen taking his sweet little ol’ time walking out to the van, Patrick, steps out and tells Hale to sit in front next to the Queen bee, nudging Hale in the ribs so that he can be in back and see the Lady’s. Hale will comment that he saw Renae today and she just plain scowled at him between classes while Amy asked how Dave’s cute friend Pat was. Somehow I can see all this as I look into the blue jello-mold of the fountain, holiday carols chirping overhead through the PA of the mall, trying not to dwell on the memory of the college girl next door dancing through her bedroom window with what looked like some kind of African mating ritual in her tight jeans, squatting with the caps of her knees out and thrusting her pelvis in meted intervals all the while I crouch on my desk with an aortic Z slabbed in the center, the desk where I keep my role-playing utensils and hide underwear ads from the Sunday paper, trying to marshal my thoughts with each of the light blue splashes, the pool fraught with buttons of copper and nickel and steel, trying to picture the smile on Renae’s face as I turn around the moment she walks into the lower level of the mall.
***
As I wake up Sunday morning my father has a smile on his face.
"David, look!!! They finally announced it. They finally announced the trip!!!!"
Dad is holding the placard up. He is excited. I feel that entering the contest three years in a row might be considered excessive. Dad is telling me that this is my year.
The trip is to England this year. I hobble when I am on my paper route. My body is hurting. I just can’t heal.
The trip is to England this year. I hobble when I am on my paper route. My body is hurting. I just can’t heal.
“Do you think you will enter it, son?”
The way my father has the newspaper bag flung over his shoulder it looks like he is playing the bagpipes sans wearing checkered skirt. I don’t know how to answer him. I don’t know how to tell him that it feels like I have failed in my first season as an athlete. I don’t know how to tell Dad that I’ve already failed twice while trying to win the Young Columbus. I don’t have it in me to get the recommendations, get hyped up, dressed up, work for a month on delivering the perfect speech and then win again.
London, I think to myself.
The picture of Big Ben in the journal star looks like a deformed penis.
“I was hoping it would be Paris again. I was really hoping I would see France.:
I think about Madame Suhr and her French class. Briefly I think about ICC last summer and Madame Bretons class and Andrea who sat next to me and always smelled brand new.
“I was hoping it would be to Paris. I really wanted to see Paris. Especially now that I am taking French.”
Dad smiles. Whenever my father smiles I can see his silver fillings.
“You never know. This may be your year. London definitely is not bad.”
I tell him that I know. I walk on the other side of the street and slip papers into screen doors so the customers don’t have to g o into the frigid November cold to rad about their world upon waking up in the morning.
“You never know David,” My father says again, “This may be your year.”
“Maybe if I’m nominated I’ll enter.” I tell him.
I am walking with a limp.
I don’t know how to tell him that I don’t have it in me to fail again.
I am exhausted. There is a fissure whose sonogram looks like it could
seriously evoke seismic-registering trembling’s. I overdid it all last summer,
continuing to push myself, continuing to run three times a day, to over-exert
my anatomy, to catch my cousin’s freshman cross country record, running through
the swerves of Bradley park, gliding across the faraway at Madison golf course
after delivering my papers, thinking about Ambra Haake, thinking about Kim
Zemeskal, envisioning my body in the Olympics come four years time, myself,
doing exactly what I feel called to do with my life. An athlete a runner.
There was Renae Holiday’s lips last night when we just couldn’t stop trying
to unlock the area of each other’s respective anatomy above our chins, our
mouths cut open like a welt.
Everything about her is warm.
There is the scent of coffee and the college girls who live next door and dépêche
Mode and Tori Amos and enya.
And there is myself having nothing left inside of me, pushing myself as if
paddling with my limbs. Inside, nothing left at all.
***
She walks to me as if on stilts wearing her Limestone 95
jacket, the one that says BAND on the back. She is doing nothing but
smiling. Laura and Kritstie are next
Renae. I walk up to her and embrace her body with my arms, kissing the side of
her thoroughly make-upd visage, nasally lost in an ocean of pinetrees.
Behind Renae Patrick and Amy. Amy is a foot taller than
Patrick. Patrick what looks like shoe-polished streaked across his hear. He has
a crooked smile on her face. Amy has a look on her face that looks like she
just missed her period.
Patrick says that his mom just loves Amy.
“She practically gave us an Irish Blessing then
uttered something about some St. before stating that she met my old man on a
blind date.”
“You have to stay put for a minute.” Renae says
“What.”
I need to go pick up your Christmas gift. Amy walks next to renae. Renae orders me to
stay put and not follow her. I ask if its okay if I go upstairs to get a cappuccino.
I don’t know what to say to Patrick.
“I utter a long overdrawn uhm as if I am chanting a Buddhist
mantra. Patrick seems naive to the
truism that Amy is a different person is person than she is on the phone.
Patrick says the word dude again.
I tell Patrick that I care about Renae.
We scuttle into Gloria Jeans. As is routine Patrick quotes Hudson Hawk’s adage inquiring to anyone who will listen how come you always have time to buy
a cappuccino but never have time to drink one. The mall is a littered with
holiday garb. Human beings dressed in trench coats and stocking caps warding
off the incipient snap of winter slush back and forth over roving like
independent windshield wipers.
Patrick takes a sip of his cappuccino, a foam goatee
sprouting below his chin, before commenting that he can’t believe just how hot
Renae is again.
“I mean, maybe if you don’t mind sometime we can do
the old switcheroo, giving me several elbow thrusts before I look back at him
stating that I don’t think Renae desires to do the old switcheroo with anyone
least alone him.
“Anyway, Pat, you’ve been talking with Amy every night
for two weeks. Is she everything you thought she would be?”
Patrick says the word dude. He is wearing his stone
washed jean jacket and looks like Bryan Adams. He hushed me over to the corner
next to Alladins, near the orange locker where always insist on getting a
locker and planting in coat inside even though we will only be at the mall for
15 minutes max.
“Check this out,” Patrick looks both ways as if he is
ready to drop a bag of weed. He then opens up the front pocket of his jean
jacket and whips out two condoms.
“Dude,”
Patrick says shh, don’t let Hale see or he’ll tell his
mom and his mom will tell my mom.
“Where do you get those at?”
Patrick smiles and says that he has his sources. He
says something about having to place his helmet on before hitting the ball out
of the park and circling the bases.
Judging by the
look on Amy’s face when they were next to each other I have a hard time
envisioning Patrick will even get to see a pitch.
We are fifteen years of age. Sex is called Doing it.
“Patrick, where are you going to Do It anyway? You
guys are going to be in a movie theater.”
Patrick seems to stutter as he responds, telling me
that dude, there are places.
“The movie starts in half an hour. Plus it’s a fucking
ice storm outside. What are you guys gonna do? Go into the woods? Fuck next to
the interstate.”
Patrick nods his head again commenting that dude,
there are places.
“Besides, Amy and I are going to a different movie.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she wanted to see Sneakers instead of Singles.”
“What? But I thought the whole point of this was
to double date and…”
Patrick places the condoms into his top pocket,
fastening the button where ever a ubiquitous pack of smokes will one day all
too soon reside. He gives them a little tap before perusing his lips, raises
his eyebrows in a certain way like he is trying to communicate something
incognito without Hale knowing.
Hale is drinking some sort of caffeinated concoction
on ice which he literally paid ten dollars for by goading the barista inside
Gloria Jeans to add a shot of every single syrup behind the bar. The drink look
mango even though it started out a three shots of espresso and steamed
milk. As is customary Hale takes three
swigs and then shuffles the extra-large concoction in my hands, telling me to
hold it for him, meaning that he wishes me to finish it.
Right when I am trying to communicate with Patrick
while taking a swig of Hale’s house specialty I see Renae. She has a non
descript brown bag from a store I have never heard of before.
“I had it specially made just for you. I hope you like
it I can’t wait to give it to you at Christmas.”
Amy is looking like she just chugged something that
had a rodent at the bottom. Patrick is goggle-eyed and smiling. He taps his
heart where the condoms are cached. I feel any moment that he is going to break
out and perform and Irish jig.;
“Guys, we got to get going if we are going to make the
flick.”
I grab Renae’s hand. Patrick tries doing the same with
Amy but she steps back and he pretends to be running his fingers through the
slave of grease he shot through his routinely unkempt hair. Hale publically
bitches and says what, no Street Fighter.
Both Laura, Tim and Kristie are walking ahead.
As we exit the upper entrance of the mall next to Garcia’s Pizza in a Pan we step out into an ice storm. The world is coated in a fresh coated December glaze. It looks like an ice rink. Patrick keeps trying to cavalierly shield his hand around Amy’s shoulder and waistline and Amy keeps walking ahead of him with her gloveless hands tucked under opposite shoulders. She is not looking at him at all in the eye.
Everything
looks brand new.
events chronicled above took place Friday Dec 4th and Sunday dec 6th.....
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