I'll Be Here (10 page)

Oh my…    

I knew Alex Faber from school. 

He was two grades above me and therefore completely off-limits socially, but that didn’t keep me from looking at him.  I’d noticed him way back on the very first day of sixth grade.  Somehow my schedule had been messed up and I’d been placed in the wrong math so the teacher sent me down to the office to get it worked out.  Alex was leaning against the receptionist’s counter and when I walked in he turned around. 

He grinned at me. 

Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat

My heart swelled.

And so did the world.

He was tall (which I could relate to) and the type of thin and gawky that accompanies adolescents whose bodies grow too tall too fast.  His complexion was pale and marked with a few reddened pimples and his electric blue eyes loomed out from his face like two giant blinking moons. 

He was wearing loosely tied sneakers and pinstripe shorts and he had a black leather cord tied around his neck.  It held a small stone but I was too far away to be able to see what kind it was. 

He was filling out a form and when he turned back to it to finish, I stared at the back of his head.  I decided that it was a nicely shaped head.  A perfect head actually.  An older boy’s head.  He wore his dark hair spiky, sticking out in every direction.  I could tell that he used hair gel and to my eleven year old self, that seemed quite sophisticated. 

Alex left the office and I got my class switched and that was pretty much the extent of the interaction.  Alex Faber was older and exceptional and I knew that every thought in his head would be profound.  What could he possibly say to me?

What he finally said was: “Try this.”  He placed a bright yellow ball in my hands. 

I swallowed.

“You’re left-handed?”

I just nodded completely flabbergasted and overwhelmed by his nearness and the fact that he was practically touching me.  It was my first time in a bowling alley.  The place smelled like rubber and popcorn and among the florescent lighting and smacking sounds of balls against pins, I felt distinctly out of place. 

His father was behind him with a similar quirky smile.  A thin mustache lined his upper lip.  “Call me Pete,” he told me with a firm handshake.  “Mr. Faber is my father.” 

I didn’t normally like mustachioed men (mustaches are just cheesy, right?), but I liked Pete.  I learned that he drew comics for a living.  How cool is that?

Alex and Pete were shocked when I explained that I’d never bowled before.  Pete chided my mom and Jake for not “rounding out my education.  Alex helped me pick out a six pound lime green ball that Pete said would
do me
.  They explained some of the basics like how I should stand and how to adjust my aim by lining up my thumb with the arrows on the floor. 

I’d always thought of bowling as a crass non-sport that was mainly played by rednecks and losers.  But this was different.  Alex was far from being a loser and suddenly bowling seemed a rather interesting leisure activity.  I pictured Alex and me (along with our parents of course) forming a league with matching shirts and embroidered ball bags. 

All right.  Maybe I was getting ahead of myself. 

It was our family against theirs, and considering that a third of our team was me, and the last time that mom and Jake had bowled Kurt Cobain had been alive, we didn’t put up a very competitive fight. 

In between turns, Alex and his father gave me tips on how to become a better bowler.

“Tilt your torso.”

“Cross your leg like
this.
”

“Put your weight into it.”

Stuff like that.

And once our parents were on to their second pitcher of beer, Alex and I were comfortable enough to talk about school—about teachers that we’d both had and the assembly three months earlier when Noah Watkins had gotten up and mooned the teachers.  He and Noah were friends and he said that Noah had gotten a three-day suspension and a month of after-school clean-up for the stunt. 

Alex knew Laney’s name though he couldn’t think of her exactly.  He asked questions about my life and I answered.  I told him about deciding to become a vegetarian and how much I loved art and then I mentioned that I wanted to start a compost program at the school which he thought was a great idea. 

Alex wanted to be an architect. 

He said it like there was no question that he would one day become an architect and I liked that.  When I asked him why architecture, he looked down at his hands and I couldn’t see his eyes through the dark lashes that lay on his cheeks. 

“I want to make something beautiful from nothing,” he said finally and I thought that his answer was beautiful. 

Alex told me about Antoni Gaudi and Carlo Scarpa, who were two of his favorite architects and I loved the way his eyes brightened and his hands moved as if he could shape his words into the buildings he described.

And at the end of the night Alex handed me his box of hot tamales and told me that I could finish them off. 

I tried not to read into that. 

I tried not to imagine us at the winter dance together, in coordinated outfits swaying to a cheesy love song. 

I tried to play things cool through six more family outings, sixteen “hellos” and four casual waves in the hallways of our middle school.  Then I gave up. 

Of course I loved Alex Faber.

But I couldn’t
tell
him about it.  That would ruin absolutely everything.  So I kept my romantic inclinations to myself.  Laney knew and I think that my mom suspected as much, but for the most part, I crushed hard core on Alex in secret. 

I was content to watch him go out with Clarissa Kelly for exactly twenty-seven days at the end of his eighth grade year because I knew it wouldn’t last.  I was okay when Marina Hattersfield talked to him for far too long at his middle school graduation party because her laugh was frightfully high-pitched and I knew from an incident involving a whistle months earlier that his ears wouldn’t be able to withstand that laugh of hers for any significant period of time. 

Alex and I ended up going to different high schools because of zoning lines (I cursed the county commissioners), but I stayed current on his life through the constant gossip of our mothers.  When I would overhear Brooke telling my mom about the girls that called the house or the one that slipped a note under the front door on Valentine’s Day I can’t say that my stomach wasn’t churning in protest, but I lived. 

There were boys in my life too.  There was Clay Allen who I had a one-day romance with that began on the morning bus and concluded by the fourth stop of the afternoon bus.  And Jared Teague, an older boy who escorted me to the fall homecoming dance freshman year and attempted to grope me gracelessly all night.  When he tried to drive me somewhere other than home after the dance I threatened to call his house phone and tell his mother what he was up to. 

And there was the other Jared that I met on vacation at Aunt Delta’s.  He was fifteen months older than me and had a cute smile and muscled stomach that he liked to flaunt on the deck of his dad’s speedboat.  He had square fingers and a mole just above his collarbone that I kissed one night out on the dock in a sudden burst of recklessness. 

I had kissed exactly four boys a total of eleven times.   

And it was nice.  Not great, but nice.

I figured that “great” was being saved for Alex.  The rest was practice.

Because, Alex Faber wasn’t just a boy that I thought about from time to time.  He wasn’t just a boy that I spent time with when our parents threw us together.

Alex was a world.  He was an entire galaxy.  A universe of possibilities.

I could write a ten page essay about his hands alone.  There was the way that he talked with them—rolling them in the air to describe something.  Or how he brought them to rest in his pockets when he was being particularly thoughtful.  Or the way that he held a pencil so tight that he had a permanent callus on the middle finger of his right hand. 

I could describe in detail how his face lit up when he had a good idea and how his brow furrowed into three lines when he was confused.  Or the way he stood with his shoulders rounded slightly forward and his head cocked to one side when he was listening.

These were the things I noticed about Alex.  In fact, I noticed
everything
about Alex.  Like that his left nostril was slightly larger than his right nostril.  And the way he ate a Kit Kat bar: chocolate first and then the layers of wafer separately. 

I could pick his one sneeze out of a room full of sneezers.   

His voice talked to me in my dreams.  Low and soft with a touch of huskiness that made him sound a bit older than he was.

“Try this,” he said, handing me a roll of masking tape. 

“Thanks.”  There I was struggling with a strand of white paper garland for my mother’s winter solstice party.  She was trying for something “out-of-the-box” so the standard red and green holly berry theme had been passed over in favor of frothy white paper decorations and twinkling metallic stars and moons. 

By the front door there was a table set up with little slivers of colored paper and those tiny pencils that you get when you play mini golf.  Her idea was that each party guest should write down a wish and at midnight we would all throw our wishes into the backyard fire pit.  Mom theorized that the winter solstice was the perfect time to make wishes come true even if Wikipedia didn’t mention it as a traditional part of any of the worldwide rituals.

My job was twofold:  to set up the coolers and cheese trays and to hang the garland over the French doors that led out to the patio.  Alex’s sudden appearance almost an hour before the party sent a shiver through my entire body.  I was probably lucky not to fall off the ladder considering that his presence generally resulted in a severe uptick in my rampant klutziness.

Without meeting his infinite eyes I tore off a piece from the roll of tape that he held out to me and attached the end of the white strand to a shelf that housed stereo equipment.  Alex’s left hand rested casually on the ladder near my leg.

“My mom’s trying to stay green this year so she wanted me to use tacks instead of tape but there’s environmentally
responsible
and then there’s
ridiculous
.  I mean—I’m hanging
paper
decorations.  I don’t think that using a few measly strips of tape is going to increase the size of this party’s carbon footprint all that much.”

He laughed and the sound killed me.  “I think you’re right and if you want, the use of tape can be just between us.” 

I looked down at him from where I stood braced on the second rung of the ladder.  I noted the changes in him since the last time we’d seen each other.  It had only been about two months, but something had changed.  I
felt
the shift in the air that surrounded him. 

Alex’s squared jaw seemed somehow squarer; his cheekbones, always high and angular like his mother’s, were even more defined under his skin.  He was wearing slim pants and a soft corduroy jacket and a pair of beat-up black chucks on his feet.  He looked like he’d just rolled out of bed and I mean that in the best possible way.  His rumpled inky hair stood out in all directions like he’d just pushed his hands through it to keep it from his forehead. 

My fingers itched and it took all my willpower not to reach out right then and touch the dark strands the way that I’d dreamed about.  The half-smile he wore was all crinkles and secrets as usual, but it was those insistently bright blue eyes that did things to me.  And with the way that they were looking up at me, I thought “this is it.” 

I was fifteen.  Alex was seventeen.  We were at a party.  I had a winter solstice wish to make and I knew exactly what it would be.

So, after I’d finished with the garland and arranged two cheese and cracker trays under the supervision of Brooke and my mother, I took extra time getting ready.  With a large round bristly brush I pulled my hair out under the blow dryer until it was as smooth and shiny as it had ever been.  Leaning closely into the mirror, I applied a second coat of mascara to emphasize my lashes and shiny coat of reddish lip gloss. 
Pomegranate Pout. 
That’s what it was called. 

I went through three outfits before I decided on my favorite pair of jeans and a light green raw silk top that I’d purchased the week earlier.  The long sleeves billowed gracefully around my arms and the neckline was trimmed with silver embroidery.  My earrings were silver stars.

“Knock, knock,” Laney called out, not waiting for me to respond before she opened my bedroom door. 

She took in my makeup, my hair and the new top and her eyes widened.  “Alex?”  She asked.

I smiled crookedly and I guess that was enough of an answer.

Laney laughed and clasped her hands together.  “Finally,” she squealed.

If I had dreamed up a night, I couldn’t have made it more perfect.  I was all anticipation and spin and flustered breathing.  I couldn’t remember Alex ever looking at me the way that he was looking at me and it made my heart go thump, thump—stop—and then thump some more. 

This night was special. 

I could feel that truth like it was the salty wind kissing my hair. 

It was a promise. 

And I would be more than I had ever been.  This was also a promise.  Because I looked pretty good and I was clever and full of witty party banter like I had never been before.  And I didn’t trip even when there was a chair where there shouldn’t have been on the walkway between the grill and the shrubs.  And when I told the story about the missing library book, Alex laughed along with mom’s friends from work. 

I decided that we were in love. 
Mutual
love.  A far better thing than
singular
love. 

There were too many clues to just ignore it.  By the food table when I was sorting out the silverware situation, Alex commented that the shirt that I was wearing brought out the green in my eyes and that my earrings matched the festive decor.  Were those the types of things that guys that were exclusively “friends” noticed?