by Fields, MJ
Brad’s brows rose.
We’d just started dating, and he hadn’t come to my last dance competition to know what we had been working on.
“It’s guerrilla warfare with her bom, bom, bom!” I hopped up on the bed, and instead of doing the routine, I busted out with some freestyle dance moves. “Get nasty! I get loose! I get crazy! She’s so loose! It’s Master Craze, and the girl’s in a daze. I just can’t help myself.”
Brad’s face lit up in amazement. His embarrassment was long gone. In its place was elation. He climbed up on the bed and started jumping and dancing with me.
“She’s freaky! She’s so fine! I want to make her all mine! With that sleek red hair and a devilish stare, I’m about to lose myself.”
We crashed onto the bed, and Brad mercilessly tickled me. His fingers moved up and down my sides, igniting laughter from me. I curled in to protect myself from his roaming fingers, laughing and trying to catch my breath. He wouldn’t let me up, so I did the only thing I knew that would make him stop.
I kissed him.
It wasn’t our first kiss. That had been after school in the park behind the building. It had been quick and awkward, but it was my first, so it was special. He had just asked me to be his girlfriend, and the kiss was some sort of commemorative marking of the occasion.
Not this kiss. This time, I caught him by surprise. When my lips brushed his, his fingers stopped. His eyes were wide open. So were mine. We stared at each other for a moment.
I had never been alone with a boy on a bed, and I was pretty sure it was his first time, too. I didn’t know if he was as scared as I was, but I was so nervous that my body went completely stiff.
A small breath escaped his lips as he leaned further in. My body melted into the mattress as he deepened that kiss. It was my first true kiss, and it was beautiful.
“I’m going to draw you.” He looked down at me, his eyes roving over my face.
I raised my brows. Brad was an excellent artist. I knew from seeing the drawings all over his binder.
“I’m going to draw you every day until I get it right.”
“Get what right?” I asked.
“How pretty your face looks right now. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase it from my memory.”
“Then, don’t.”
I open my mouth to breathe in the burn radiating in my throat. My jaw trembles, and my mouth curves down in a frown. My foot pushes on the gas, and I pull away from the curb.
“You are not going to eat that?”
My jaw hung low in mock horror.
Brad leaned forward and took the last slice of pizza, held it in the air with the tip of the triangle pointing down, and bit the end.
I groaned in disgust. We’d ordered a whole pie, and I’d only eaten one slice. He was now devouring his seventh.
“You are such a boy!” I took the long white paper that had been removed from my straw earlier, rolled it up, and threw it at him.
He grinned with a mouthful of cheese. “Lucky for you.”
I rolled my eyes and put my feet up next to him on the plastic booth.
I watched as he ate, that cropped black hair cut close to his head. He had these perfectly arched eyebrows that highlighted his blue eyes. He was a genetic anomaly—the kind of guy I had taped on my walls. And he was mine.
He wiped his mouth with a napkin, his lips quirking into a smile.
“What?” I asked, touching my face to see if there was something on it.
He leaned back, took my feet, and placed them on his lap. “I love you. That’s all.”
I blushed ten shades darker than the booth in the pizzeria. “You should.”
“I should?” He laughed.
“You should.”
“I should.”
The strip mall we used to hang out in is still standing strong. The pizzeria is there, but the arcade is long gone. In its place is a pottery studio, the type of place where you pick out premade items and paint them. Brad would have liked that.
“Do you think there’s really a heaven?” Laying on the wooden floor of the tree house in my parents’ backyard, I turned to Brad, who was drawing on a large white pad. A piece of charcoal was in his hand, the dust all over his fingers.
He paused, his light eyes roving over his work. “No.”
I lean up. “That’s morbid.”
“You asked.” His face was pinched in, and the deep lines by his brows were thick.
Rolling over, I crawled over to him and took the sketchpad from his hands. It was a drawing of me. He drew me often but was never satisfied. He captured the almond shape of my eyes, the lashes bending at the ends. My heart-shaped face was shadowed beautifully, making me look prettier on paper than I was in real life.
“This is gorgeous,” I praised.
He looked annoyed, his grimace unavoidable. “I can never get your lips right.”
I looked back at the picture. “What’s wrong with it?”
“You have this Cupid’s bow at the top of your mouth. That dimple, I can’t get right. Never. I mess it up every damn time.” Brad was agitated, and it was unlike him. He never got upset with the world. Just himself.
“You’re obsessing.”
“If I can’t draw a simple picture of my girlfriend, how am I going to make it through art school?”
“I have a solution!” I declared. I grabbed his hands and put them on the sides of my head. “You’re just going to have to kiss these lips more.”
He tried to move his hands, but I pulled them back onto my face.
“You have charcoal all over you now.”
“Good. I like getting dirty.”
“Your dad’s gonna know I had my hands on you,” he said.
“Then, you’d better make it worth the week’s worth of grounding I’m gonna get.”
I take the boulevard that runs along the outside of town and drive toward the high school. The large brown building looks the same as it did when I went there. The same as when my parents had been there, too. I drive around toward the park where Brad and I had our first kiss and further to the basketball courts where I spent many nights with Adam.
“You mind if Adam and Nina come with us tonight?” Brad asked.
“More, the merrier.”
Adam had just started dating a college girl. It was the first girlfriend he’d had, as far as I knew. Brad and I had been together for ten months, and this was the first time we ever had a double date with Adam.
They met us outside the candy shop on Main Street. Nina had curly blonde hair and was wearing skinny jeans with a red long-sleeved shirt and a Coach bag in her hand.
Adam was holding a white bag in his. He was wearing jeans and a button-down, his copper hair long and styled perfectly. He looked good with a girl by his side. Usually, he was the third wheel.
I introduced myself to Nina and complimented her on her patent leather heels. She told me she liked my top. It was Matthew McConaughey pop art.
We started walking to the Chinese restaurant. We were going to dinner and then a movie. As we walked and talked, Adam handed the white bag to me. I opened it and saw an assortment of my favorite chocolates. I took out a caramel-filled candy that I loved and handed the bag back.
He put his hand up. “They’re for you,” he said. I smiled in surprise, and then he added, “Nina doesn’t eat chocolate.”
I opened the bag and offered him a piece. He took out two pieces.
Brad tried to put his hand in, but I snatched the bag back.
“Adam bought them for me; therefore, he gets one.”
Adam laughed at Brad’s grimace. “Dude, you found the only girl who eats candy for dinner.”
Brad started to laugh. “And a friend who enables her crazy.”
It was a fun and easy time, as high school should be. I had dance class and a regular babysitting job on the weekends. Brad worked at a CVS and worked on his art portfolio when he was off. We went to keg parties and house parties, school dances and clu
bs. We watched movies in his basement and parked his car in the woods when we said we were at the arcade. He drew pictures on all of my notebooks, and I doodled his name and mine to the point of obsession. It was typical high school love.
I can’t remember exactly when it started to go downhill. It was subtle. Looking back, I wonder how many signs I ignored.
“Babe, I don’t want to be gross, but are you okay in there?” I had gotten to Brad’s house fifteen minutes before. Lying on my stomach, flipping through a magazine, I waited for him to come out.
“My stomach is acting up. I’ll be right out,” he said through the bathroom door.
I went back to reading an article about how to dismember a bomb. Men’s magazines were silly. A faint flicking sound caught my attention.
“Are you using a lighter in there?” I called out.
“Lighting a candle.”
I gagged. “Sorry I asked.”
Closing the magazine, I walked over to his desk. His portfolio was spread out—a masterpiece of hard work and dedication. He was a master at drawing people. His mom’s kind smile lit up one page, and Adam’s pensive look whenever he was trying to figure something out was on another.
Brad would draw random people he saw around town. He didn’t like to draw kids but had a penchant for old people, capturing their spirits with a brush of charcoal. I lifted one in my hands of an elderly woman. She was sitting at the diner with a coffee cup and a smile. She was holding on to a Keno card, the winning numbers on a television screen in front of her.
When the bathroom door opened, Brad stepped out, looking as handsome as ever. He walked over to me and kissed me. I pulled him in, soaking him in. He smelled like leather even though he wasn’t wearing a jacket. It was kind of manly.
“You want to go to my basement?” he asked.
I winked at him. “To watch a movie or get handsy? Because I am totally open to both.”
He kissed me. “Both.”
We walked down to his basement and turned on a movie. Around ten o’clock, I passed out and around two, I woke up in a frenzy.
“My parents are going to kill me,” I said as I popped up and looked at the time.
The television was on, and an infomercial was playing. Brad wasn’t in the room.
The house was dark, closed down for the night. I looked around for him on the first floor, but he wasn’t there. I walked upstairs, careful not to wake his parents.
Brad’s bedroom light was on. I pushed open the door to find him sitting at his desk, his hands covered in black dust. He was drawing.
“You let me sleep past curfew.” I was annoyed.
It wasn’t like he’d passed out, too. It was the middle of the night, and he was sitting there, feverishly working like it was two in the afternoon.
He turned to me, a cool calm on his face. “I’m so sorry. I was staring at your mouth, so I came up here to get it on paper.”
There was a ton of paper with half-started pictures of me. Even the worst was magnificent.
“You have to drive me home,” I demanded.
He didn’t have the same sense of urgency as I did, but he understood enough to get his ass up and drive me home.
“I can’t believe you let me sleep,” I said as we drove through the streets.
I had a ton of missed calls from my mom. I called her to let her know I’d overslept. It must not have calmed her because she was waiting on the front steps when I got home, her hand clenched on her necklace.
“I’m sorry. I just…I got in my head. I’ll make it up to you,” Brad pleaded.
I shook off my annoyance. He was a really good guy. The fact that letting me sleep in was the worst thing he had done as a boyfriend was pretty remarkable. We never even fought.
“I’ll call you tomorrow.” I leaned in and gave him a quick kiss.
I was grounded for a week. It wasn’t so bad because my grandma stayed over, and she provided some much-needed entertainment.
“When I was sixteen, I used to sneak out to listen to rock-’n’-roll with my friends. That Elvis knew how to shake his hips,” my grandmother said as we sat on my front porch.
I was unimpressed. “That doesn’t sound very rebellious.”
She lowered her eyes at me. “Neither does falling asleep on a couch.”
“I do plenty of things. My friends and I sneak onto the golf course to have keg parties. And we once broke into the school to—wait, are you goading me, so I’ll tell you all the bad stuff I do?” I said.
She casually glanced away.
My mouth fell open. “You traitor!”
With a shrug, she rested her hands on the top of her cane in front of her bent knees. “If you’re nice, I’ll show you how to make moonshine.”
I practically shot out of my chair. “Really?”
She shook her head. “Heavens no. You are so gullible. We need to work on that.”
A bouncing ball pulled our attention away from each other. Adam was walking over, dribbling a basketball into my driveway.
“Is that the boy you’ve been spending time with?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“He’s very handsome.”
I give her the side eye. “He’s also very much Brad’s best friend.”
She smiled and said, “Interesting.”
I stood up and waved toward Adam. “What’s interesting?” I asked out of the side of my mouth.
“Why is he here and not your boyfriend?”
I ignored her and walked toward the driveway. He was wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt. His hair was combed, and he smelled like he’d just taken a shower.
“I heard you’re grounded.” He held the ball to the side of his body.
I crossed my arms and swayed. “Yeah, can’t go anywhere for a week.”
“Well, we usually play basketball at this time,” he said.
“I’m usually not grounded,” I joked.
“I was thinking…you have to practice, and since basketball is homework, I don’t think your parents would mind if I tutored you.” His face was stone-cold serious.
I tilted my head at him. “Uh, as much as I appreciate the creativity of your rule-breaking, I don’t think that would fly.”
“I’ll allow it,” a little old lady said from the porch.
I yelled to her, “We don’t even have a hoop!”
“Great! Then, we’ll work on defense,” Adam said as he started dribbling the ball around me.
I rolled my eyes and pointed up at Grandma. “This is all on your watch.”
She sat back, as if she were about to watch a riveting show. “If you get in trouble, I’ll take the fall.”
When I looked back at Adam, he had a grin on his face. “So will I.”
Taking the boulevard further down, there is an abandoned paper factory. The building has been used sporadically through the years. A movie was filmed here. The town was so excited. The production took twelve weeks, but you would have thought it was a year by the way people revamped their businesses and dressed differently in anticipation of celebrities strolling by.
That movie eventually finished filming, and the building was abandoned once again.
For a short time in high school, it housed a club. On Thursdays, they had teen nights. We went there a few times. Adam’s mom or my dad would drop us off. Even after Brad and Adam had their licenses, we would still get dropped off. Our parents didn’t like the idea of us walking to our cars in the darkened areas. We weren’t up to anything secretive, so we welcomed the free rides and cabbed it home.
As I’m staring at the building, I can’t help but fight the haunting feeling as I recall the last time we were here.
“Come on.” I tried pulling Suzanne up with me onto a giant speaker.
It was four feet tall and just as wide. Girls were always dancing on top.
She voraciously shook her head. “No way! I’ll look like an idiot up there.”
I stuck my tongue out at her and climbed up onto the speaker. Suz
anne pulled down my skirt to make sure I wouldn’t show off my backside.
As soon as I got up there, I started to dance. My arms and elbows shot out to the sides. Swaying my hips and mixing in some samba and hip-hop moves, I let the music take over me—the pulse of the song swimming through me, the beat making my feet slide and my back twerk. I ran my hand through my hair and swished my head to the side. My knees rose up as the beat kicked it up a notch. Using every move I had in my choreographed body, I felt the rhythm, felt the energy…felt alive.
As I danced, Suzanne danced with me from the floor. She thumbed over toward the bar and mouthed the words, I’m gonna go find my brother.
I nodded, letting her know I’d heard her. Brad was somewhere in the club, too. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I looked around, trying to find his dark hair.
When I spied the front of the bar, I saw Adam. He had his back to the counter, and he was staring my way. I waved, and he waved back.
I gyrated and ground my body, my moves getting more sensual with each song. I closed my eyes and let my hand roam down my throat and across my chest. The low-cut top I was wearing made my skin visible all the way down to my breastbone. It was a backless halter with a long gold chain down the back. I’d worn another shirt over it, so my parents would let me out of the house, and then I’d ditched it as soon as I got in.
When I opened my eyes, Adam was still at the bar, still looking my way. We had been spending more time together lately. The four of us would go on double dates, and Adam and I would play basketball after school.
His eyes were straight on mine as I got a little more daring. My hands moved down my stomach and over my thighs, sliding up the insides as I dipped my ass, nearly touching the top of the speaker, and then I shot up with a curve to my back.
I was having fun, dancing and being crazy, when a guy climbed up beside me. The speaker was too small for the two of us, so I knelt down to climb off. The guy pulled me by the shoulders and tried to make me stand. I shoved him off and jumped down.