Chapter 16

Chapter 16

I awake to the dulcet sound of the sweeping stream beside our laying bodies; an affluent unison to the gentle concord with the trees and the wind between them. I don’t remember falling asleep or being asleep at that. I attempt to rub moisture back into my eyes, parched, as is my mouth which is like hot vinyl car seat against my tongue. My mind is as dimly lit as the day is. I look up to a high overcast sky with silent lightning rolling deep in its face like ideas in the sky. London is still vast asleep beside me on the blanket in which I must have somehow missed when I decided to go to sleep. She looks peaceful. I feel like crap. I haven’t felt this kind of crap before. I believe it is normally entitled a ‘hangover.’ Which is something I surely I didn’t see myself feeling in any form of the near future.

“It might rain, you may want to wake up.” I nudge, disrupting her peacefulness.

“Nuh uh.” She murmurs stifled with closed lips and squirms into a new sleeping position.

I don’t think its going to rain anyway.

I can tell she’s not the type to let herself be woken up by anything against her will so I don’t continue to try. Out of the hundreds of times I have been here, I have never had such a ferocious urge to drink out of the stream.

My mouth.

Is…

So dry.

I drink from the stream.

As much as I feel the effects from the wine last night, the esoteric events of these epical past few days looms as a much more palpable hangover. I feel a little bit like I was just in a car crash, you know, drowning in the shock value and surreal sense of it all. But the surprising thing is that there is this ‘life will never be the same’ type effect that I feel. Do you know what I mean? It feels good.

“Where do you think it goes?” I hear London ask me hugging me from behind.

“Where what goes?”

“The river. It’s got to go somewhere doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I guess I never really thought of it.”

“That’s it? ‘I have never really thought of it’? Come on lets think of something better than that for our little magic river’s end.”

“Well I like it here. That’s all that matters to me.”

“So you’re not curious where the end of it is?”

“Not particularly.” I say unintentionally condescending.

“So you never believed in a pot of gold at the end of rainbows when you were a kid?”

“I never really believed in the end of rainbows at all,” After a few moments of silence, “so I take it that you thought there was a little shiny pot of gold waiting for you?” I ask further seeming condescending. Unintentionally.

“Well no, unfortunately my father pre exposed me to a scary movie called “The Leprechaun” when I was four so I was terrified of rainbows or even anything the color gold. Or Irish.”

We sit there in this position for awhile. I say awhile but really, its only about a minute, but I feel like we said a lot to each other in that minute without actually saying anything. I don’t know if I have ever had a hug from behind before. Silly as that sounds, I think that is my favorite kind of hug. It’s a kind of hug that gives you at least three different feelings. One feeling is surprise. That one is pretty self explanatory. You cant see behind you and when someone does something to you without seeing it enhances what it is they intended for you to feel. Especially when that expression is affection. The second feeling is reassurance. The sort of ‘oh that’s just so and so giving me a hug from behind, not a six hundred year old leprechaun trying to bite my neck off for stealing his gold‘ feeling. The third feeling is…hang on…let me get the right word for this…love? No. Inspiration? No. Comfortable? No. Lovecomfiration. Yes that’s it! No but seriously, it’s a good feeling. In the sliver of the time between specific and insignificant moments that is the surprise and the reassurance is what inescapably comes next. Just a really good feeling. Especially when it’s the most beautiful girl you ever seen in the entire tiny world whom happens to be named London McGuire.

I try to turn to look at her but with her arms wrapped gently around my shoulders and her weight fulcrum upon my back, I cant turn my head, so I strain my eyeballs till I pull a muscle in my back to see that she had fallen asleep, reassuring the fact that we actually have been sitting there for awhile. Or she is just really tired and can fall asleep in the sliver of insignificant moments. Either way, I smile with the lovecomfiration that a human being whom I am in love with could actually fall asleep on me. I kiss her forehead and gently lay her back down on her blanket to sleep deeper into the day.

I get up to walk around this personal garden of my Eden and wander through the woods. I almost feel like I am not walking through this forest to find anything, or see anything, or do anything but to enjoy right now. All I can really do is just think about all that has happened and how it seems like how my life took seventeen years of sequences, and random events, that have been weaved together to only create the canvas of my life that is just starting to be flickered with paint. After wandering and sulking in the shrillness tone of how things are right now, I come across a dead bush with branches like skeleton fingers, with a patch of misfit roses grown below its twisted frame. There are about six or seven roses colored orange and lavender. I can’t remember what those colors stand for but I decide to take my chances and pick one of each color for my love awaiting my return.

I get back to Eden and see two bottles of empty wine, one ruffled blanket, and minus one brunette. A gust of wind blows a storm of flowing pollen around me. She didn’t say goodbye? Why wouldn’t she even say bye? Does she not like me? Is all of this happening too fast for her? Did I scare her off?

After a few more moments of feminine bantering the real panic starts kicking in. I immediately start scanning the tree line, staring into the surrounding woods. My mom warned me about this. She told me to not be alone too much. There is a serial killer reeking horror in Eden and I leave, quite possibly the love of my life, alone? In the middle of the woods!

I feel the heartbeat heavy in my hands and the relentless sheet of brown doom encompasses my vision of all that surrounds me. I can’t tell if this sensation is blood running into my head or away from it but it feels as if I am going to pass out. Repetitive glimpses of a beautiful women I don’t recognize but feel like I have known for years flash on and off like a cartoon flip book in my head. Sound is now starting lose me and I silently drop to my knees. Sound shoots back into my head as my head hit’s a pile of sticks on the blanket. I look up to see that it isn’t a pile of sticks but its sticks put together in the form of a house. As the brown dissipates the femininity returns but in a gleeful array this time. I’m not sure what she even means by this house but I know it is something London would do. I am especially confused of why she put the letters S and J next to it but I’m sure its something cute and clever. I’ll ask her later.

I’m now walking home and can feel he sun breaking through the overcast sky as if the clouds were just morning breath and the day just brushed its teeth. I haven’t felt this good in an eternity. I don’t know when I will see London again. I mean we have a long weekend so I will at least see her in school in a few days. Either way I think I am going to just let London just pace her own way into my life. As much as I would love to be in every moment of her life, I am just going to let our dance take the steps that it takes for it to be a natural act. Not something forced or contrived. Just--right. Basically what I am saying is, I would of course love to turn the corner and see her again right now but I just know its going to be a little before that happens.

“Are those for me?” London asks startling me as I walk up to my porch.

“We’re going swimming!” Jack screams as he, JP, Kyle, and Norah come sprinting down the stairs nearly taking me with them.

“They are beautiful.” London swipes the roses from my hands. Smells them. Kisses me on my neck behind my ear.

“Swimming huh?” I say finally getting a word out.

“Yep. You’re not the only one with a favorite spot.” London smiles.

Jack and JP of course are walking a good fifteen foot pace ahead of us while Norah walks to the left of London. London is just ahead of me with her right hand on Kyle’s head, fingers immersed in his thick red locks of hair. I am just now noticing that my jaw muscles are concentrated elsewhere for my mouth is ajar as my eyes are fixated on a sure testosterone arousing sight. London’s super short cutoff jean shorts with pockets flailing to the side is just wrong in so many ways at the expense of adolescent virgin teenagers like myself. The muscles in her lean and long, naturally tan legs act as two vigilantes taunting me with brute force toward my arousal, yet with the grace and subtlety as a paper airplane landing perfectly upon the floor. Each of her butt cheeks seem as if they are in competition to see which one can jostle higher with each stride, flip of her flip flops, and every sway of her mirage like hips. Her dark hair along her back looks as if it is whispering to the sun about me for the sparkles in her hair uniform with each strand as its own separate energy of that of flirting children. She looks back at me as if she knows I am staring at her and winks at me, enticing me even more than any flailing pocket vigilante mirage could.

We reach London’s house and walk around to her back yard. There isn’t much back here besides a shirtless man in coral Hawaiian swim shorts, a ridiculous straw hat, and an acoustic guitar to his side passed out on a lawn chair.

“Is that your--”

“No that’s Bob. He just lives with us,” She answers casually, “He’s a musician.”

“Some water, fucking would be nice.” Jack yells as they stare baffled, towels looking disappointed furrowed to their ankles, their heads slung towards the sight of a waterless in ground pool, bottom overlaid with a seaweed like substance.

London walks over to Jack with mischief in her eyes and haste in her step. She grabs Jack by the chin squeezing his cheeks pursing his lips together.

“Fucking in water is overrated,” she says to all of our shock, “Would you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Jack stands intimidated with a demeanor that he has never been touched by a girl before and represses through squished lips, “I don’t know.”

“Would you kiss me?” She says sternly with sincerity; eyes blazing with sexuality. After a breath clinging pause, London slowly moves her face towards Jacks lips. I feel like I can hear his heartbeat from here as London pauses--looks into his eyes-- and kisses the air a slight centimeter away from Jacks lips. She unhinges her fierce grip from his face and gives a light smack on his cheek snapping him back to reality and into puberty, perhaps a year too early.

“There is just something so unethical about swimming in a man made pit of water when you have what awaits us just through that amassing labyrinth.” London says like a French poet as her hand exhibits along the tree line ahead of us like the women on the price is right unveiling our prize. She skips towards Norah wisps through her hair and looks at it through her fingers in the shape of a rectangle like a movie director, steps back and says, “ Now you are a voodoo child.” I can tell Norah doesn’t have any idea what that means but I can tell she liked it. London now runs towards me and swings around my shoulders and onto my back and screams like a wild women and pointing ambitiously ahead. “Lead us to our fate sir William!” Like a women from the middle ages.

“You’re becoming more and more weird everyday.” I say amused.

“See, that’s where you are wrong about me darlin,” she says over my shoulder. She takes her hand and acts as if she took a cigarette from my hand, puts her two fingers to her lips, takes a fake drag, and blows imaginary smoke warm against my face, “I’m insane.”

We exit the woods and duck under the shaggy dwindles of the massive low swooping willow tree to envision nothing but a knurly, anti social dock, lopsided in ten different directions kamikaze-ing itself into the perfectly round and seemingly archaic lake, sprinkled with pollen and wild flower seed. Everyone stops and stares at it. Everyone for reasons of their own. I stay paused longer than everyone else as they all kamikaze their selves into this lake as if it is the only way to approach it. It’s like this place has a presence about it almost divine. Like it has a face that does not boast nor does it welcome warmly.

I see London out of the corner of my eye staring at me. I think she knows by now that I do these little cognitive binging sessions. I however pretend that she is admiring how I look mysterious and inept, immersed in thought, in a way that makes me a likable protagonist in her story. Not only likeable, but somebody just flat out unique. Different. Able to be loved. And want to want to tell things that they have never told anybody. I want to be that person. Does wanting to be that person make it impossible to be that person? You know, like how if I considered myself, lets say, a funny guy, doesn’t that automatically make me a much less funny guy? If I wish to be mysterious, likeable, and conceited enough to assume that I was a protagonist in somebody’s story, does it mean that I can’t be those things? I guess it’s strange how things look different out of the corner of your eye. They become something much bigger, literally and symbolically. A stray eyelash could seem like a person walking, which would then enable your instincts as a human to reason, and then conclude, most likely an arid assumption (also a very common human instinct) and further reinforce your belief in ghosts. We believe in ghosts to make our lives seem more interesting, we believe in what we see out of the corner of our eye to make what isn’t interesting seem alive, tangible, touchable, something that has a hollow reflection off the surface of what you want to see, not actually know. Some people only look at things out of the corner of their eye and don’t even know it. Me? I don’t know either.

I look at London and she isn’t looking at me at all.

“Where’d ya go just now?” She says to me out of the corner of her eye.

She must have meant that question to be rhetorical because without waiting for me to even exhale she runs to the slumping trunk of the willow tree hanging its branches out over the lake and climbs up into the tree and screams to everyone in the lake “I will walk on water!” She now pulls a rope attached to an even higher branch and runs and swings into the air into a perfect swan dive crashing into the water. After being under water for a second long enough to make you nervous for a second she breaks through surface of the water and her eyes wide and mouth gasping for a breath. After barely even getting a breath JP dunks London’s head under the water. Norah then sticks up for London by dumping JP’s head under and then Kyle does to her and so on and so on. After about twenty seconds of this dunking and splashing of bonding they burst into a ravaging frenzy of laughter. As soon as their laughter dissipates and their breath returns they look up to see me flailing through the air plummeting backwards and upside down heaving right towards them splashing all of them with amusement to my mind but with fanatical pain to my ass.

I transpire from the water with a limp body, in a lot of pain of course, but mostly hoping to get some good ol’ London McGuire hospitality and accord. Which of course I receive.

“Nice form on the back tuck champ.” She says as she ducks her head under my arm while laughing. Laughing for sure at my expense. She pulls my deadened body through the water to a floating dock in the middle of the lake and plops me face first onto the warm and ardent surface. She climbs onto the dock and straddles me from behind whispers with a desperate yearning in her voice. “no quiero que usted se despierte.”

“What does that mean?” She just lays on my back, both of our bodies warm, a flaccid mold, with cool beads of water falling down our backs like finger tips on our skin.

As soon as I accept the fact that I will probably never know what she said she lifts her head slowly from my back. She presses her wet lips against my ears and whispers, “Si vous vous reveillez je meurs.”

As much as I want to ask her again what that meant I can’t take my mind of how turned on am right now. All I can think about is rolling over and just ripping her black bikini from her--

“A storm is coming!” I hear in a collective voice from afar. London and I sit up with our legs submerged in the water and watch everyone run for cover. I have always found in odd when people run for cover when it rains. I don’t know why but I have never felt that urge. Are they just afraid to get wet? I suppose this is a reasonable time because lightning can be dangerous in the water but standing under a huge willow tree isn’t the best solution to that either. Ever since I was a boy I used to just let the rain wash me over like it was some kind of cleansing. Cleansing of what? I couldn’t tell you. It just always felt peaceful, comfortable, calming. I guess I’m just weird. I know I’m not like most people. I find calm in the things people find I highly uncomfortable. I feel uncomfortable in situations most people run to. I glance over to see London smiling with her eyes closed and her head hinged upward, welcoming the rain.

“Will you go to prom with me.” I ask.

“Do I look like a cliché to you?” She snaps casually.

“A little obsessed with being a nonconformist are we? How many languages can you--”

“Fine I will go to prom with you. Only if we make it interesting. A prank perhaps?”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“What’s the matter Willy.”

“I don’t know. Can’t we do something normal? You know, go to a nice dinner, go to prom dance, have a few glasses of probably drug or alcohol induced punch. Possibly go to a fairly romantic spot afterwards.”

“Something normal? Wouldn’t you be a lot less obsessed with me if I were normal?” I don’t respond. “Don’t worry okay? Trust me. Prom is going to be great. I did a normal prom last year and it isn’t anything that we will like. Especially you. We will do all the normal things…just with a slight twist. Oh and don’t worry I will bang your brains out after everything is done. It won’t be weird that you are a virgin either so don‘t fret.”

“I am not a virgin.”

“Oh well great! Then you can be the one in control since you know what you are doing. I love when the guy takes control.”

“Yeah I am a virgin.”

“I know.” After a moment, the PMS-mood-swing-like-weather stops raining and the refreshing chill of the water and meets the reemerging sun.

“Hey.” London chimes softly.

“What’s up.”

“I came up with the prank.”

“Oh yeah?”

“What are your thoughts on ecstasy?”

“The word?”

“No Will. Not the word.”

An excerpt from chapter 12

Lately, the pollen has been clinging to the air vastly and aloft like butterfly ghosts defying gravity, wilting, and dancing through the new seasoned air. Almost as if angels have flown through the town and the remnants of their wings are floating behind them like ash.The beginning of summer is underway and the heat is starting to smolder the atmosphere with a touch of crisp air still lingering. With the blaze intensifying, and the angel wing debris collecting, an annual event is arriving which defines the homestretch of the school year into the summer. EPAC. The concert of the year is coming like a mini Woodstock vigorously wielding its way into our anticipating hearts. No more ghosts, nor wishes, could possibly cocoon into our so called adolescent dreams as this weekend event could create. My mind is collecting these dandelion souls out of the air as hopes of what could happen. A story eagerly yearning to be thought of, told, and lived. EPAC...
It makes you strip down to the most ancient state of your human spirit. Like we have been alive for thousands of years, roaming from body to body, life to life, same soul, different bones, different face, same eyes. Same heart, spinning under the same sun, just waiting for certain moments that not only define you but define the wait. Define everything in us that attached itself to thousand of strings. Passions, responsibilities, love, and people, to only be tugged and pulled one way and to the next way making us our own puppets by the decisions we make to just get us here. Here. To listen to music. To connect thousands of people with thousands of different fingerprints and problems and hurts to just all be the same for a twilights passing. Everyone enjoying and feeling the same thing at the same time. Inhaling the same air to only remind us that we can only exist for flashes at a time. We are glimpses traveling at the speed of sight to freeze ourselves to this moment only. To do nothing but let ourselves go. To live free, ancient, naked. Until the moment is gone. Flash of silent lightning in the sky. Then we dress ourselves accordingly. Living in between dreams. Till the next one.
I’m rambling now, I know. But I believe there is sense in my nonsense. Just like there is a tame in the wild, order in the chaotic, chance in the timid, and the naked in the waiting. For this moment. To cry out from the bottom of your lungs and the deep in the bones of your past existences and sprawl your everything down this watery slope and just be liberated of everything you have ever worried about, or looked forward to, for thousands of years.

~In This Glimpse of Eden

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

This is one of those good weekend mornings. Waking up early with no struggle, cool sheets against your skin and the scent of brazen air and musty windowsill filling your morning sun drenched room. One of those mornings where all it takes is one stretch to be ready for a day which has no obligations or expectations. Where you would be completely content with hanging out in bed for hours, or to get out of bed right away and see where the day takes you. I take my one needed stretch and right on cue for a perfect morning, I hear aluminum clanking against the walls in the hall outside my bedroom. It stops at my door. It’s closed so I hear patting trying to find the handle. She struggles momentarily to twist the door handle completely till it finally opens. There is one final clank of the aluminum stick against the floor and then rapid steps of Rose’s bare feet against the hardwood, and a tiny grunt, and thud, onto my bed, lofting the fresh laundry detergent smell, and cool air from the crisp sheets.

“How was the music show last night? Did you sleep well? Did you see the bad man?”

“How do you I wasn’t sleeping Rose?” I playfully ask rubbing my eyes.

“I didn’t hear you breathing.” I guess she can hear the difference between sleep breathing and awake breathing.

“So how did you know I wasn’t dead then?”

“Will!” She says smiling as she sprawls backwards hanging halfway off my bed exuding a perplexing display of energy for the morning.

“And what is a music show anyway. I went to a concert silly.”

“Yeah concert. Was it fun?” She says as she pops up from being halfway off the bed and transfers effortlessly into an Indian style sitting position looking directly into my eyes. I look at her and smile.

“It was beyond fun Rose. It was amazing. Perfect.” I kiss her on her forehead and mess up her hair. She goofily blows the strands of hair away from her face with her bottom lip.

“Did you see the bad man?”

“What do you mean? What bad man?”

“On TV. The news.”

“What about it?”

“They said somebody was killed at the music show. The concert. Mommy said a bad man did it.”

I pick Rose up and carry her down the stairs to the living room and sit her on my lap and turn on the news. Rose was right. Somebody was killed at the concert. Her name was Abby Reeves. I don’t know if you remember but she was the girl that was talking to me at the party where Trent was murdered. The girl that liked me. They said that like Trent, Abby’s friends said the last time they saw her she was really upset and said she wanted to kill herself, however, all evidence said it was clearly a murder. It actually happened in the middle of everyone as people were exiting the crowd but, it was so chaotic and crowded that there were no witnesses. She was stabbed multiple times in the back. The police are unsure of why she declared she was going to kill herself and ended up being murdered but, it shows that it is likely that the two murders of Trent and Abby are linked.

“Did you know her?” Rose asks.

“Yeah. I did know her. She was really sweet.”

Rose kisses me on the cheek. “She’ll be okay where she is going. Don’t worry.”

I’m kind of sad by all of this. I didn’t know her that well but I can’t help but to feel really upset. Especially, since out of all people, for some reason, she saw something in me that she liked. What if I was her mystery boy or something. Why do I feel guilty?

“Will did you hear?” My mom says as she walks in from the kitchen.

“Yeah.”

“Did you know her, honey?”

“Yeah he did. She was sweet.” Rose answers for me.

“Will I don’t want you to be out by yourself. It’s not safe until they find this guy.”

“Why do you think they said they wanted to kill themselves?”

“I don’t know it sounds to me like whoever is doing this is brainwashing these poor kids. Maybe it is some kind of demented cult leader or something. I don’t know.”

“What’s a cult?” Rose curiously asks.

“Rosie, honey, come help mommy make some chocolate chip pancakes for Will. He’s sad”

“Okay!”

“I’m not sad mom.”

“Okay well we’re going to make them because it’s a beautiful day, aren’t we Rosie?”

“Uh huh!”

I continue to watch TV to hear more details about the murders. This is really creeping me out. I can’t stop thinking about that man that I keep seeing. Why does he always seem to be looking at me? Am I one of his targets? For some reason I can’t seem to find the courage to tell anyone about him. Maybe this isn’t going to be a good day. I wonder if they are going to cancel tonight’s concert.

“Will can you get the door?” My mom yells from the other room. I open the door and see her.

London.

Maybe this will be a good day.

“Come on.” She says with an energetic smile and leads with a nod of her head.

“Where are we going?”

“Just come on. You’ll see.”

I look into the kitchen at my mom and she is smiling already and shoos me away. I hear Rose yell I love you as I shut the door.

As we walk, London is excitedly skipping ahead. She doesn’t skip like a child. It’s more of a graceful prance. She is really happy today. She has her camera that she usually has around her neck. She didn’t have it last night at the concert. She continues to playfully skip around, urging me to hurry even though I don’t know we are going to be late for anything. She talks a lot about how happy she was that we ran into each other last night. Just before we ran into each other she says she was having a terrible night. Brad was giving her a hard time. She also says how a lot of the girls she was friends with are immature. Not because they are bitchy and mean but, because they are really sweet people and they feel like they have to act bitchy and mean. She says she has a lot of hope for them and thinks they will learn to be more indignant rather than being angry at themselves. She says for now, she doesn’t really want to be their friends since they changed when her and Brad broke up. She says all this while taking pictures of me and flowers and fences in between sentences.

“You don’t talk much do you?”

“I talk. I just think more than I talk, I think.

“It’s not me is it?”

“No I like you.”

“So you’re shy?”

“No not really.”

“It doesn’t matter I like you too,” she pauses, “you’re just mysterious.”

I laugh to myself when she says that. The mystery girl calling me mysterious.



We walk into town and up to a tiny shop in town called Pieces of Eden. I must have walked passed this place my whole life without even noticing it, let alone even going in it. That’s strange for me to not notice something. I notice everything. I don’t know I how I could have walked by this shop almost everyday and never see it. Or choose to see it.

The letters that read Pieces of Eden above the screen door which is bordered white, with chipped paint, are faded and not large, along with a cursive script, with a color that seemed to be once gold but now, rubbed by the hands of time to a color of stonewashed rust. Maybe that’s why I have yet to see this place. It certainly doesn’t stick out. I don’t think so though. You would still think I would have seen it by now, right? For some reason I think have just always chose to not look. Pieces of Eden huh? Hmm I don’t know.

London opens the screen door and the rusty spring hinge yells at us. She lets go, and the door slams behind us like it’s pissed at us for opening it. London walks in with a composure like she has been here a million times and dealt with the moody door like a patient nurse tending to a stubborn old man that secretly loves the company. This store has a lot of character. Further displaying a perpetual sense of character, we walk into a wall of thick air, with a scent of black pepper incense and wet leaves. Irish bagpipe music softly immerses throughout the dim lit store. Filled with antiques and dream catchers and old records and Native American clothes and Persian style rugs and along with a myriad of other random things, leaving us merely no room to walk through.

“Hey Dmitri, are you in the back?” London affably calls out as she meanders through the store picking up random things and putting them back as she gracefully bounces around, leaving me trailing her like a confused puppy.

“Is that you Bella?” He answers hard pressed and stifled as if he’s struggling with something.

“Yeah, What on earth are you doing back there old man?” She asks amusingly confused.

“Ahhugh!” He grunts as he walks out of a back room carrying a giant moose head three times the size of his body.

“Dmitri! Jesus, let me help you with that, crazy!” London yells as she quickly helps him place the moose head on the dark unfinished hardwood, revealing Dmitri’s tiny body. He’s an old man with a very thin layer of grey hair over his pail walnut shaped head, going along humorously with his tiny walnut shaped body. When I say tiny I am not exaggerating by any means. He isn’t a thin gray hair over four-foot-ten. He isn’t skinny but he’s not all that fat either, he’s sort of just round. Ish. Like a walnut. Like I said.

“Ah Bella! Such a pleasure to see you. A man can only wish to see something so beautiful in one day, as you.” Dmitri bellows out with a high pitch and resilient Italian accent.

London smiles and lightly hits Dmitri on his shoulder with the back of her hand, “What the heck are you doing with a moose head?”

I love how she talks and smiles at the same time.

“Ah, you know, customers eh, they are always right, no? Is that not how the American phrase goes?”

“Somebody seriously requested you to order a moose head for them?” London asks amazed but familiar to Dmitri’s ability to never cease to amaze.

“Well, life is like a box of chocolates eh, as the Forest Gump would say.” He says into a bellowing Italian wheezy laugh. He seems to try very hard to relate to American customs. Except, he is more like a retro baby blue tuxedo, with the white ruffled button up, and bowtie at a party of black and white suits when it comes to trying to be American.

“Where do you find something like a moose head?” I ask him.

“E-bay.” He says excited again with that wheezy laugh, sounding like an applauding accordion, as he hooks his thumbs under his bright red suspenders.

“So Bella, what can I do for you today?”

“I was wondering if those candles I asked for came in?”

“Ah, yes, yes, they came in early this morning,” he says with his continuing excitement leading us to the candle section of the store (that is if you could call anything a section in this store,) “St. Valentino, the patron saint of love.

“Why does he call you Bella?” I whisper to London in attempt for the eccentric little Italian to not hear me.

“It means beautiful. He thinks I am beautiful.” London answers playfully batting her eyes like she is impersonating a women from a classic movie.

“Yes! Beautiful! Is she not a beautiful girl young man?” He joins in.

“Well, young Will, aren’t I just beautiful.” She says continuing to impersonate a temptress from an old movie.

They both look at me as I pause uncomfortably and they laugh in a teasingly manner.

“We’re just messing with you dude!” Dmitri bursts out.

“Yeah dude,” she says kind of mocking Dmitri and smiling at me, “But seriously I am just kidding you don’t have to ans--”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me?” She says confused.

“I just don’t like to throw that word around because it gets used too often, A sunset is beautiful, waterfalls, abundant skies, flowers, butterflies, are all beautiful. You are something more than that. Yes--I think you are beautiful.”

I am and idiot. I can’t believe I just said that.

In my peripheral vision I see her looking at me. She looks at me like she just fell in love and knows she isn’t supposed to. I don’t know why or how she would look at me like that but I do know that has these amazing big silver blue eyes. And I know that at certain angles they twinkle green when she is thinking about something. A lot of things are beautiful but she is beautiful. A caterpillar’s dream to fly.

“Where’d you go just now?” London asks in a soft tone I have never heard before.

“Huh?”

“You were just somewhere else.”



There has been something I have always wondered about people. Whenever I read a book or listen to a song I always take it with me through my day as some form of different life I am living in my head. I think we all sort of do that, maybe without even noticing it. I think we just naturally find some temporary form of escape from our usual lives. So we take a story that isn’t ours with us and pretend that it is. Without knowing that we do it. I have always wondered when I watch people pass by through their fleeting lives that move a lot faster than they probably realize, I have wondered what book or song is in their head at that moment. What story that isn’t theirs. Are they pretending to help them with their own story? Does it help them slow it down? I hope so. I think this world needs to do a lot of slowing down sometimes. I so badly want to walk up to these people and ask them--what song is in your head. What book have you been taking with you. Even though I want to--I never ask them. I like to think that one day I will go up to everybody and ask every person what song is in their head at that moment. I’ll write it down and at the end of the day I’ll take all of the songs and make a CD and give it to a random stranger. Maybe you?

“If I fall. If I faaaaall. Will you catch me?” London subtly hums to herself in a high pitched tone.

“What song do you have in your head?

“If you fall by aqualung.”

Track one. If you fall-aqualung.

Her dark hair shimmers in the sunlight as she prances delicately ahead of me as the tall grass field seems like moving water with the trail of deadened grass around her legs. We continue to walk through this copious field with the high clouds above our heads like paint splattered meticulously spread across a twilight canvas. This is a world too beautiful in a way that it seems as if we are spoiled. This new moment and the continuing moments to come are going to be always good enough. We walk aimlessly through this world of unknown beauty to a place of an unknown destination in which she seems to be aimlessly leading me. It doesn’t feel like we have a destination at all, but in a game in which we are learning how to play it as we walk. She seems to know more about this game more than me.

“So are you going to actually tell me where you are taking me?”

“Nope. I have always believed that the journeys we take are much more devious and endearing if you don’t know where you are going.”

“Is that how you are? Devious and endearing?” She looks back at me and smiles. Deviously and endearingly. But doesn’t answer. Two butterflies swoop up to our sides and float in the air like little rose peddles that just learned to dance. They fly besides us as if they are dancing to the sounds of our conversations.

“They don’t know where they are going either, do they?” She says without looking back.

Hmm.

“So wait, you don’t even know where we are going?”

“Yeah well I do actually,” she says laughing at herself, “but come on, lets do those kinds of things that nobody do,” she turns and grabs both of my hands walking backwards, looking into my eyes, “Don’t you want to, Sweetie? When is that last time you have walked nowhere but everywhere with that girl of your dreams.” She is so devious and endearing.

Never.

We continue walking through the scenic views and a lot of open and closed landscapes. We reach a cemetery and begin, with out knowing how or why, playing a game of tag. The flirty kind you would play with a girl in fourth grade when you first become attracted to the opposite sex. This is the first time I have laughed in a long time. Like really laughed. We are just having so much fun. It is sort of ironic that we feel most alive in a cemetery. I don’t know if that is wrong of us or not. We however, respectfully of course, just don’t care. I know if I were dead I would prefer to have life waltzing around my place of rest. I can almost feel the deceased smiling watching us reminiscing of their moments of love and solace. We are just living. It is comfortable here.

We get to London’s house which is not large but very new, clean, and untouched by chaos. Basically it is the opposite of my house. We walk up to the front porch and I blurt out.

“A little early to meet the parents, huh?” Of course I say this completely joking. She doesn’t seem to think it was funny. She doesn’t look mad but she just looks at me like she didn’t like me saying that. She reaches down to the welcome mat and grabs a key from underneath.

“Lets go.” She says sternly further exuding her displeasure with my comment.

“Wait, I was just kidding. I want to meet you parents and family. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Isn’t a little early for that?” She snaps.

“I’m sorry. I know nothing about you. At all. I am anxious to know everything about you. I really do want to meet your family. I’m just having trouble finding things to say. I should have realized that I am not funny. I am really not funny. I’m sorry. Shit.”

She turns and looks at me, her eyes sharply pierce my nerves with that ‘London look’ that I am just learning about now. I can’t help to think about how cute her face is when she is pissed. Her bottom lip slightly puckers up and a tiny wrinkle forms just above her nose between her eyes. She continues to pierce me with this stern look waiting for some kind of reaction. I am not sure how I look right now but I probably look like an idiot at a loss for words. Her face beautifully, yet, mockingly transforms to a smile with laughter stifled just behind it.

“I’m just giving you a hard time! You’re funny. Hey, don’t be nervous around me. I’m not that kind of girl.”

“I’m not nervous.”

That definitely sounded nervous, shit.

She answers with a smirk that looks like a sarcastic, yeah sure. She walks to the passenger side of her car and tosses me the keys.

“Get in you’re driving.”

“Wait no. I can’t drive, I don’t have my license.”

“Ha I know.”

“But I have never even driven before.”

“You have never driven before?” She asks curiously and excited.

“No.”

“I thought you people around here started driving at like thirteen?”

“Yeah I don’t know. I live life at my own pace I guess.”

“So you have never driven a car before?”

“I have never even been go-carting before.”

“This is going to be--absolutely--” she pauses to think of a word, “amazing!”

She begins to laugh hysterically and sits in the passenger seat regardless of what I just told her.

“London I am not driving this car.” I express to her adamantly and firmly.

Continuing to laugh, “Oh yes you are.”

“No I’m not, I can’t drive. I told you.”

“Yes you are, great time to learn.”

“I don’t want to learn.” I think I am beginning to sound bratty.

“William, I will dump you right now if you don’t get in this car and drive it.”

As soon as she says that I pause and swallow. “We are together?” I ask faintly.

She half smiles and looks at me, “Yeah. Aren’t we?”

I half smile and put the keys in the ignition.

“That’s my boy.” She says excitedly.

I turn on the ignition and the car starts and a power from underneath the seat that I have never felt before. Certainly never in the passenger seat. I begin to get nervous, my vision starts to get blurry, so I put my head on the steering wheel and close my eyes. My knees start jumping and shaking.

“Hey,” She says comfortingly and gently runs her fingers through my hair, “You will be fine.”

God that feels good. I have a girlfriend. London McGuire is my girlfriend. Screw it. I am going to drive this car! I can do anything! All hail Will Evans! Man I am crazy.

This upbeat song begins to play on her CD player.

“What is this song called?”

“Take this to heart by Mayday Parade.”

I peel off much harder than I ever thought I would have the balls to do. London squeezes my leg and starts laughing wildly as I completely drive off the dirt road and through the grass field.

“You might want to get back on the road!” She screams over the loud music.

“I’m trying!” I shout over her laughing as well.

We could both die and all we can do is laugh.

I finally get the hang of the steering and find the road. Breaking isn’t like I thought it would be. London can’t seem to breath she is laughing so hard as the car jerks us back and forth by my impeccable breaking skills.

“So where are we going Ms. McGuire?”

“Just keep going straight for about five minutes. I will tell you when to turn. You’re a good driver.”

“Yeah sure.” I say laughing at myself.



“Turn here!” She yelps just before the turn. I frantically yank the car left as the tires squeal like dying pigs around the turn. London once again begins to laugh like a crazy women.

“You did that on purpose didn’t you?” She shakes her head for she is laughing too hard to get a word out.

“I forgot. I swear.”

“I am beginning to think you are crazy, you know that?”

She shrugs her shoulders, “Better than the alternative I guess.”

“And that would be?”

“Boring.”

She certainly is not boring. I am feeling a lot less boring of a person myself lately.

“Okay Will, there is another left turn about twenty seconds away. Lets take another crack at that left turn, what do you say?”

“Ha yeah ill try to preserve our lives for a little bit longer.”

She giggles, “We’ll see.”

“Whoa wait isn’t this the turn onto the highway?!”

“Yup!” She shouts, blazingly laughing.

“I think we should stick to dirt roads and grass fields. You know, where there is no traffic.”

“Well this is the only way to the city that I know. So you are going to have to suck it up, Mr. Evans.”

I pull onto the five lane express way like a child who skipped the slide at the playground and went right for the rollercoaster. I guess I have always been comfortable with that.

“Not too bad, Willy. You’re a natural.”

“Willy? Yeah I guess so. What if I wasn’t though? We would probably be in a ditch right now.”

“Ha-ha yeah probably.”

“How did you know I could do this?”

“Because I told you that you could.”

“That’s it. Just because you told--”

She quickly throws her right leg over in between mine, grabs my face with both hands and starts kissing me passionately. Not quite romantic slow kissing but more like sexual hard kissing.

God that feels good. Wait, I’m still driving!

“London! Stop London I am driving on a highway!” I say loudly but muffled by her passionate kissing.

Her lips are so soft. Man.

As I try to pry her off my face she begins to laugh still kissing me. I give one final strong push and throw her back to her seat and we swerve into a lane next to me almost creating what would probably be a fifteen car pile up.

“You really want to kill us don’t you?

“Ha oh come on. You don’t think we are meant to die here like this. We will be fine. I’m never really afraid to die. Are you?”

“Actually--no I’m not.”

“You sure seemed like it about ten seconds ago.” She yelps into a now unsurprising frenzy of laughter.

“Very funny,” I pause and smile and look at her. “You laugh a lot don’t you?

Her face changes and she shrugs. “Better than the alternative.”