When they walked home together Patrick’s mind was a jumbled mass of very strong emotions. Part of him wanted to walk with Rachel forever, wished the quiet street would stretch on for a hundred miles. The other part of him wanted to cast off his backpack and tear away into the woods, slipping into this other self that he wanted so desperately to grow acquainted with.
Rachel’s smile kept him securely anchored to her in a slow stroll.
“A little bit of Mr. Poulton’s comb over was sticking up today in geometry,” she mentioned as they walked down the steps onto the school’s front lawn, the student body flowing down with them and breaking apart at the bottom like a river coming finally to the ocean. Everybody seemed to be in a mad hurry to get home, but the two of them couldn’t get themselves to move any faster than a zero mile-per-hour drift—so slow that either of them could naturally stop moving at any time to accentuate a point, then continue without even noticing. And to Patrick, that was just perfect.
“It was like that in biology!” he returned, stricken with intense amusement.
“Really?” she almost shouted. Her smile was enormous. “Those were hours apart! It must have been like that all day!”
“It bugged me so much!” Patrick started to giggle.
“Me too!”
“I just wanted to tape some scissors to a yardstick and reach up there and cut it off!”
Rachel laughed loudly at this. He hadn’t heard a full-on belly laugh like this from her yet, and it was wonderful. It was silly; not at all controlled or dignified. It was sincere, just like his father’s. He laughed himself at the thought of saying something Rachel found so funny, then ran it through his mind a second time and realized that it was funny, and the two doubled over laughing, stopped momentarily where the grass met the dusty shoulder of the cracked street. They both made little reaching and snipping gestures with their hands, which fueled the laughter further.
Patrick had the sudden urge to put his hand on Rachel’s shoulder for support while he laughed and came startlingly close to doing so, but thought better of it. As they sobered from their brief spell of hysterics, drying their eyes and trying to stifle straggling giggles, Patrick wondered if she had ever felt a similar urge.
They turned right and continued their casual stroll toward their houses, still smiling at the image of Mr. Poulton’s defiant tuft of hair.
“So what did you think of your first week here?” Rachel asked once they got moving again, albeit slowly. She had probably wanted to ask that question at the end of Friday, but didn’t get the chance for obvious reasons.
The question held firm the smile that had already threatened to weld itself to his face. He turned to her and she looked back, her lingering grin turning into a smile just as big as his.
“It was a lot better than I thought it would be,” he said, locking eyes with hers (an action which, up to this point, had always been very difficult). He felt silly, like he were some guy in a movie, trying to be as obvious as possible that Rachel was the reason it was such a great week.
But he meant it.
*****
Dinner that night was undoubtedly the most pleasant he had experienced in the house yet, but Patrick couldn’t seem to appreciate it for the growing urgency in his stomach, the butterflies that were trying so hard to get out. Through the kitchen and out the window above the sink he could see the last yellow rays of sun sinking into the trees. He bobbed his right leg on the ball of his foot compulsively.
Just as he had at lunch, Patrick didn’t originally seem very interested in eating; but when his mother brought the tray of pork chops into the dining room and set it in the middle of the table, the smell seeped in through his nostrils and down his throat into his stomach, temporarily parting the butterflies and calling to the gaping chasm that had apparently found home there.
The smell of the food pulled him back into reality and he caught the last bit of a conversation his parents were having.
“Something about their usual guy not being available,” his father called to his mother in the kitchen, and a moment later she appeared with a pot of steamed vegetables. She set it on the table and the lid was instantly removed by Lizzy, the veggies assaulted before the woman could even sit down.
“Said something about maybe some pictures as well, so I gave him the link to your portfolio,” his father finished as he rubbed his beard with the back of his hand (or scratched the back of his hand with his beard, Patrick could never tell which).
“That’s excellent!” his mother said as she pulled up her chair. “I could certainly use the work. RevelCo is postponing their update until next Spring.”
As Lizzy had with the vegetables, Patrick beat everyone to the pork chops, lumping two onto his plate and grabbing a dinner roll. He almost started digging into the meat right away, but plopped a meager serving of veggies beside the roll first to avoid grabbing the attention of his ever-vigilant mother.
“Rough times, I guess,” she said as she buttered her own roll. “Glad to see you’re hungry, Patrick!” She flashed him a brief smile, then spooned broccoli and carrots onto her plate. Of course he had gotten her attention anyway. He didn’t mind though, curiously enough. Let them ask their questions. It didn’t matter at all today.
He smiled back at her as he started to cut one of his pork chops. He sliced off a sizeable chunk and brought it to his mouth, but before indulging he said both to his mother and the table at large, “I had a really good day today.”
Patrick sensed the tiniest pause in his parents’ movement—the most barely noticeable little unheard gasp. It seemed he had developed quite the reputation for only giving information that was specifically coaxed out of him. Teenagers, he thought to himself in a mock-version of his mother’s voice as he shoved the juicy meat into his mouth.
His parents went on dishing food for themselves, trying to pretend that they hadn’t paused at all.
“That’s great to hear, Pat!” his father said, sounding genuinely pleased. “Might I dare ask just what might have made this such a good day?” There was more than a little insinuation in his voice. This somehow made Patrick smile behind his mouthful of pork, where a red face seemed much more appropriate.
“Is it because of your girrrrrrlfrieeeeeend?” Lizzy inquired. There was no genuine malice behind what she said, but on any other night (particularly one at their previous home) he would have jabbed her in the ribs with his elbow. He didn’t even feign an attack in jest, however—just cut himself another piece of meat.
“Rachel and I are developing a healthy friendship,” he started as he did so, speaking in a calm, matter-of-fact voice and only allowing the faintest of smiles to stay on his lips so as to not suggest or confirm that any actual romance was going on, “and I am getting used to my new surroundings more quickly than I anticipated.” For a moment he was back in front of the school with her. He remembered with a little jump in his stomach how close he had come to putting his hand on her shoulder.
“’Healthy friendship,’” Lizzy said mockingly as she began to slice the little green ends off her broccoli with her fork and knife as if they were tiny bits of pork chop.
“I’m so glad to hear that, Patrick!” his mother said with a big smile, putting down her silverware and taking a moment to look right at him. He noticed that they used his name a lot whenever they were proud or happy with him. They didn’t speak Lizzy’s name half as much when they were happy with her, he thought. Patrick wondered if that said something about his relationship with them… but if it did, he couldn’t think of what it was now.
“I didn’t—,” his Father paused, clearly running a check on what he was about to say. He apparently realized that it was obvious what it was going to be anyway, so he continued, “Well to be honest I didn’t really think you’d get adjusted so quickly, Pat. I mean, of course I knew you could do it, but I thought it would take…” He seemed to gauge different amounts of time in his head for a moment.
“Well, a little longer than this,” he settled with and stuck a hunk of pork in his mouth, probably happy to rid himself of the possibility of saying anything discouraging. His transparency brought an odd comfort to Patrick. In such a world of secret thoughts and hidden meanings, it always had.
“This is really great, Mom.” Patrick gestured both to the remaining meat on his plate and the wad in his mouth. He wasn’t trying to change the subject; it was just really good tonight.
“Thank you,” she responded with another smile. “It’s hard to believe how much better the meat is around here. The beef is almost all grass-fed. Can you believe that?”
“Ooh!” his Father’s head bolted up at those words. “We should have burgers tomorrow!”
“The produce is better, too,” his mother continued. “Isn’t that right, Lizzy?”
His little sister had skewered several chopped bits of carrot on her fork, making two parallel stacks that went from the tips to the bases of the tines. She was attempting to grab the entirety of one row with her teeth and slide it off.
“Uh huh,” she managed through her currently occupied mouth, having withdrawn from the boring turn the conversation had taken.
Talk went on normally for the rest of the evening; his father told a story about how one of his work buddies had a coyote bust into his chicken coop and kill all of his chickens a few nights previous, which segued into a story about some particularly interesting road kill that almost made Lizzy shoot carrots out of her nose.
*****
After dinner Patrick rushed upstairs under the pretense of a large load of homework, which was actually gloriously small. Just a simple hunt-through-the-book-and-answer-the-dumb-questions biology assignment, and a quick set of algebra problems.
Algebra wasn’t incredibly hard for Patrick, but he much preferred geometry. This of course, like so many things, led to thoughts of Rachel. She was taking geometry this semester, and much preferred algebra. She also preferred biology over chemistry, and Patrick vice-versa, so at least next semester they would each be happy in both categories when they did a perfect swap. (Well, sharing every single class would obviously be preferred to anything else, but it couldn’t always be perfect, Patrick thought.)
The small bit of homework took longer than it should have, but even by the time it was done it was only eight o’clock. His family wouldn’t be going to bed for another few hours at least. There was nothing for it but to wait, though. There was no way to get out of the house unnoticed while everyone was awake, and he couldn’t get his mind to focus on anything else.
Desperate to pass the time more quickly, he walked to his bookshelf and plucked a random graphic novel from the top. This one was ‘Power Up’ by Doug TenNapel (his very favorite artist) and he took it to his bed and plopped himself down heavily. He turned to the beginning and held the book over his head, but after five minutes he hadn’t made it past the first page. Every time he tried to read a word bubble he would find his eyes drifting off into the art, focusing on a random line or blurb of ink and then blurring, his mind wandering uncontrollably.
When he dubbed reading an officially failed experiment, he dropped the book on the nightstand and simply lay on his bed with his hands folded on his chest, staring up at the ceiling. The texturing of the paint above him made little pictures, albeit mostly nonsense ones, but it had the same effect as the book. One blob of paint that stood flat against the primarily rough surface looked a little like a boot, another like a turtle with a cat’s head, and soon his eyes rested on the little tail, lost focus, and he found himself recapping the day as a whole.
How he could have done this for so many hours seemed fairly amazing to him. Smiling at the image of Mr. Poulton with a turtle’s body, staring down at him from the ceiling with several exasperated little tufts of hair sticking up on a head that would most certainly not fit into his shell, he was surprised to turn his head and find that his digital alarm clock read 10:53.
He sat up and cracked his back, feeling a little stiff but not at all tired. He stood and walked out of his room, attempting to see where his family was in regards to sleep preparation. Peeking over the top of the stairs he could just see the back of his Mother’s head as she sat on the couch, probably reading. By chance his father walked by just at that moment and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. He had already changed into a ratty old shirt—the kind he always preferred over normal, fully-intact shirts any time after eight o’clock. She glanced at him as he walked away and stood up, reading a few more sentences as she rounded the couch, finally placing her bookmark and heading to the kitchen.
His instincts had been good, he thought to himself. They were just now getting ready for bed. The excited feeling in his stomach turned into a tumult.
Just a little longer.
He forced himself to be patient and play it cool. It wasn’t as though anyone could ever possibly suspect this sort of activity, but he didn’t want to draw any more attention than he had at dinner anyway. He walked down the hall to the bathroom. Through the crack in the door he could see his sister brushing her teeth in the reflection of the long mirror. Patrick thought it a pretty good idea to follow suit, seeing as he was very good at forgetting such things when distracted. It had probably been days…
He pushed open the door and walked inside. His sister kept brushing her teeth with hardly a glance at him as he got his own toothbrush (his was green and Lizzy’s was purple) from a little ceramic holder which he was pretty sure held pencils at some point in his life. He put a dab of paste on it and set to work.
The two of them watched themselves in the mirror, side-by-side. His sister was a good foot shorter than he was, and was very lean, like him and their mother. Her face was fair like their mothers as well with the same slightly upturned nose and pronounced nostrils. She also had rather large eyes with the very beginnings of darkish rings under them. If she grew up to look anything like their mother they would somehow look very becoming—very wise. He had always thought so.
If Lizzy had inherited anything from their father however, it was his dark brown hair. That, and his boisterous demeanor.
Although relatively thin like his sister, Patrick found that he shared most of his facial features with his father. He lacked the broad chest and upper body build, but he had the same slightly high cheekbones, the same sort of forehead (his grandmother called it the “Proud Reed Brow,” but Patrick always thought it more inquisitive and thoughtful) and a somewhat larger-than-average nose (not a hook nose—just a little bigger). His hair was a sort of sandy-blonde, like his mother’s.
Patrick had only really begun to notice these sorts of things in the last year or so. He wondered when Lizzy would, if she hadn’t already.
When his little sister had finished and rinsed and drawn a capful of Listerine to her mouth, she paused.
“So do you like this girl, or what?” she asked casually, then threw back the mouthwash and began to swish. There was no teasing in her voice. It was a question, plain and simple.
(Definitely their dad; or more accurately, Grampy.)
Patrick finished brushing and leaned down to spit. He then filled a little cup with water and held it in front of his face for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said. In the midst of everything he really didn’t. Then he took a swig of the water and rinsed his mouth.
Lizzy gave the slightest roll of her eyes, emptied her mouth into the sink and left the bathroom.
Patrick pondered this question on the way back to his room and as he lay on his bed. For the moment his mind seemed a little more calm.
Did he like Rachel? So far it had been enough just to find someone who was so similar to him—someone to make him feel comfortable in this strange new town. He hadn’t thought much beyond that yet. He knew the question would come, and indeed it had already been flying around them like incessant seagulls trying to get at a scrap of food. His family asked the question, ev
en when they weren’t asking. His teachers and all the other students asked the question even when no one was talking to anyone at all. The question was just there every moment the two spent together, begging to be answered, crying to be fed. But he had refused to answer it, because he shouldn’t have to. There was nothing wrong with befriending a member of the opposite sex; there shouldn’t be so many assumptions and expectations being thrust at him.
But he couldn’t ignore the question for long, because no matter how many times he told himself it didn’t matter, it was a completely valid one. And one that he would probably have to answer soon.
He thought about the urge to put his hand on her shoulder. It would have been a completely plutonic gesture; one to simply suggest that he was comfortable enough with her to touch her shoulder casually. He had merely decided against it due to the risk of her taking it the wrong way or becoming uncomfortable.
But was that the reason? Maybe he didn’t do it because deep down the thought of touching her was like reaching out to the unattainable—as if it would have counted as physical affection toward a figure of significant interest. Two friends wouldn’t hesitate to give each other a chummy pat on the back, right? Unless that is, of course, if they weren’t just chums…
The house had gone quiet. He strained his ear toward the door and didn’t hear a thing. He clicked off the lamp on his nightstand and walked quietly to his door, opening it a crack and peeking through.
His parents’ light was out. He poked his head through a little further and saw that Lizzy’s was out too. He withdrew from the hallway and shut his door. He forced himself to sit back down on his bed. He would have to wait a little longer, just to make sure they were all completely asleep. Half an hour. Half an hour just to be absolutely safe.
He waited for twenty-four minutes and fled quickly and silently from his room. He made his way downstairs without a sound, his eyes already adjusted to the dark from sitting in his room with his light out. He practically ran to the sliding glass door, fumbling on his shoes along the way. He didn’t think he would need his jacket. The question of what exactly happened to his clothing when he changed definitely threatened to stir up some odd thoughts… but he ignored it for the time being and continued out the door. He slid it shut behind him as slowly and quietly as he could. The act required such patience, and the friction created by it and the savage need to get going, now, threatened to pull him apart. He did it however, and without the door making the feared rumbling sound that would surely wake his entire family.