NEXT DOOR.

I remember the day she moved next door. 

My mother said, “Don’t stare, Peter.  I know she doesn’t look like you do, but there’s nothing wrong with her.  There’s nothing… she’s just different.  She doesn’t process things the same way that you and your sisters do, but that doesn’t make her different, okay?”

“But you just said—”

My mom rolled her eyes.  “Forget what I said.  You need to be nice, okay?  Her name is Eden.”  She laid her hands flat over the front of my shirt as if pressing it for wrinkles.  “Are you gonna be nice?”

I nodded and took her hand as she practically dragged me across the thick grass toward two people.  One was a man with bright red hair.  He was probably the same age as my dad with legs the color of baking flour, sitting inside of a sandbox across from a girl about my age.  Her hair was dark brown and curly—so very curly—cut close to her head in short ringlets tipped with sand. 

She rocked back and forth and stared at the man, clapping her hands together until he broke the spell by pointing to us.

“Eden, look,” he said in a near-whisper.  “Do you remember Jean?  From yesterday?”

The girl looked at my mom, slowly taking her in, before nodding.  “Jean,” she said softly to her father.

“That’s right.  And this is her son.  His name is Peter.  Can you say Peter?”

She looked over again, her eyes having trouble focusing on my face.  When she found them, she gave me a gentle, lazy smile.  “Peter,” she said.

“That’s right.  Do you think that maybe Peter could sit in the box with you?”

She shook her head.  “No, I don’t think so,” she said calmly.

“Oh, come on,” the red-haired man said jovially before standing.  “He’s not gonna bite you.  He’s just going to help you build a castle.  I bet Peter is great at building castles.”  He looked over at me and smiled widely.

I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say, so I just nodded once and looked up at my mother. 

I was supposed to be nice.  I was supposed to be nice.

“Eden,” the red-haired man repeated.  “Can Peter sit here with you?”

“Peter,” she said quietly.

“That’s right.  Peter.  Peter, do you want to sit here?”

I didn’t.  I really didn’t want to sit there with this girl I didn’t know and build anything.  I wanted to sit in my room and listen to my new record.  I mean, did this Eden girl even have any records?  It was too hot out and she had sand in her hair and she wasn’t even bothering to try to get it out and… her dad didn’t even notice.  Or if he did, he didn’t even say anything and… I was supposed to be nice.

“Yeah.  Okay,” I said.

I took a seat on the hot sand across from her and picked up a small rake and a few cups.  There was a little bucket of water next to the box and a few shovels.  Eden stared at me as I started to dig.

Before long, our parents were gone and I was stuck there with the curly-haired girl with the gap between her teeth who kept repeating my name every time I packed the cup with sand and dumped it over to add to what was quickly becoming a castle.

Sometimes she added a clap, but she always said my name, even if I was doing nothing other than tolerating the miserable day and her existence.

Even if I was just being nice.

But the next day, I came back.  We built another castle—well, I did and she watched—until it was time for dinner.  Eden was quiet that day, scratching behind her ear a lot and moaning a few times.  I’d asked my mom about it when I got home, but she just used the same excuse she had before—that she was “different” and that she didn’t “process things the same way” that I did.

Fifty-seven days, I went to that sandbox.

On the fifty-eighth day of summer, she was gone.

The red-haired man had sent her to go live with her mother.  My mom explained to me that sometimes grownups made decisions that were hard for kids to understand, but that I would get it when I was older.

I’m still waiting.

THE BUMP.

I’d thought about Adam Curtis more times than I’d cared to admit, but I was me and he was… well, he was everything I wasn’t.  I was the boy in the background.  The boy with the girls for friends because the other boys were too intimidating or just too goddamned much for me to deal with.

So I avoided them.

But Adam—well, I’d always watched him.  He was in my Spanish class freshman year.  Tapping that heel over and over against the well-worn tile as if his leg had a high-powered battery in it.  That one piece of overgrown black hair hanging into his face, nearly brushing his super rosy lips.  They were always shiny as if they had a clear coat of gloss on them—sometimes I wondered… did they?  Did Adam wear makeup?  A little mascara on his long lashes?  Just a hint of blush on those rounded cheeks?

But surely not.

Surely the other boys in his fucking ultra-masculine squad would have noticed by now… applying lip-gloss in the locker room wouldn’t have gone over without a fight, so no… I had to have been imagining it.  Fantasizing about it even… thinking about the way those shiny lips would taste against mine.

Would they be sticky?  Would they leave a tacky residue against my own, thick enough that I could taste it on my tongue for hours afterwards?  Would they taste like strawberry with just the slightest hint of kiwi?

Sometimes I imagined Adam was looking at me.  Even now, in our senior year, I would feel his eyes on me from time to time, but… every time I looked—every single time—he would look away quickly, as if something else had caught his eye.

As sophomores, we were required to take an awkward gym class where I avoided every ball in sight.  Adam seemed to be a magnet for them.  We were all forced to take showers at the end of the period.  There was no getting out of it; I’d begged my mother to do something—please, Mom!  I’ll do anything!  Just write a note… just… anything!—but she wouldn’t.  She said that the class would be “good for me.”  It might help to “make friends.” “Be less shy.”  “Be more social.”

All that it did was obligate me to shower with thirty other teenage boys who knew nothing about me… who wanted to know nothing about me.  So, I kept to myself.  Looked down as often as possible at the cold gray tile as I washed the humiliation of the hour before from my skin with the medicinal soap they provided and quickly rinsed it from my too-thin body before wrapping a towel around my waist as abruptly as I could.

But one day, I saw it.  I knew I wasn’t imagining it.  I glanced up on accident, opening my eyes a fraction as I rinsed the shampoo from my hair.  Adam was looking.  He wasn’t focused on my eyes like he usually did, but his gaze was fixed lower, almost as if lost in thought, as he rubbed a bar of soap absentmindedly in between already sudsy fingers.  He just stared between my legs for a good fifteen seconds until I turned the water off and covered myself, causing him to drop the bar and quickly turn toward the wall.

Junior year, I got a job at the mall.  Again, my mother said it would be good to “meet people.”  I will admit that I had met a few girls and they had let me into their quiet fold.  It wasn’t bad to know a few people at school.  It also helped the constant questioning from my father.  “That Ashley… she was really cute.  Are you dating her?”  Sometimes I would shrug my shoulders and smile shyly.  “I don’t know, Dad.  We work together.  It would be pretty weird to date her.”

I had no intention on dating Ashley or any other girl, but it was easier that way.  It was easier to lie to him.  So, Ashley and I continued to work together in the evenings, folding jeans and rating the cute boys at school—“so, scale of one to ten, Brando… what do you think about Kyle Molner?”—and everything went on as planned until… he walked in.

Ashley knew immediately, her eyes scanning over my ashen face before nodding toward Adam’s hulking body hunched over a rack, eyeballing a few t-shirts and holding them up for size.

“Adam Curtis?” she whispered.

“Shut up, please.”  I walked away from her and headed for the back room.  If I were about to vomit, I at least wanted to find a toilet to aim toward.

“Brandon!” she called.

And when she did, Adam Curtis looked up.  And I ran.

 

Now, here we were.  Seniors.  Finally. 

So, I would be gone in three months and there was nothing my high school crush could do to internally squash me.  I was stronger now (maybe) and had even kissed a guy (once, on a dare), so I could handle it when he bumped me (hard) and sent my sketchpad flying, the loose pages fluttering everywhere, just like in the most humiliating of all films.  Sketches I’d drawn—not of him, of course, because that would be just like in the movies—but of other boys… boys together… some of them kissing, some wrapped around one another, some clothed… some not.

Adam collected them—each one of the brutal fucking sketches—and looked over them individually, a shy grin creeping across his face before he handed them over.

“I… sorry,” I stammered.

“No,” he responded, making actual eye contact now, for the first time in three years.  “I’m sorry… Brandon.”

I USED TO...

A while back - I don't remember when it was - I used to have an enthusiasm for Arcade Fire.  I'll call it an "enthusiasm," because obsession sounds crazy and crazy doesn't sell paper, so we'll stick with "an enthusiasm."
I read about them.  I studied their music, their lyrics, became "enthusiastic" about the smallest of things.  Why this insistence on being "Canadian" when they weren't so much Canadian at all?  I mean, half of the band was from Texas, after all.  So, why not just be from fucking Texas and be done with it?  I mean, I wasn't from Texas and never had been, but how bad could it have been?  I was from Indiana, after all.  Indiana could be pretty fucking gloom-and-doom.  Indiana had a misogynistic-slash-homophobic governor that practically the entire state elected.
But, here they were, an entire band sort of claiming that they were Canadian when they weren't... I mean, not really.  Yet, I still loved them and their sort of oh-god-I'm-in-a-hole-how-did-I-get-in-this-hole kind of sound.  They had this weird French-Canadian female sometimes-lead who had taken up with another lead and they sang songs, mostly to each other, about fucking heartache and growing up and falling in love and basically wanting to rip each other apart so that neither of them would ever have to live another day without the other.
And maybe I wanted that.  Or wanted to write about a love like that. 
Or was it that I just hadn't experienced that?
In "Crown of Love," Win sings:
"I carved your name
Across my eyelids
You pray for rain
I pray for blindness"


Well... okay.  So, the way I see it, he only wants to see her name for the rest of his life, you know... across his fucking shut lids.  That right there is true dedication.  I guess it could be looked at different ways, but either way, it's love.


But my focus isn't on this band.  It's on my actual focus.  I DO this.  I find a subject and I "get enthusiastic" about it.  Maybe it's a model.  Maybe the curve of his ass makes me follow his Instagram for a month.  Maybe it's a singer.  Maybe one line in a song makes me fascinated with her... "why did she write that?"


It's rarely a "real person."


"Real people" are terribly disappointing. 


"Enthusiasm" is best left to enjoy from afar.