Wished for You

by KD Robichaux

  “Oh, my gosh, let’s go on that one!” I gasp, looking up at a spinning one. It looks like the riders lay on their stomachs, making it seem like you are flying like Superman.

  I look around trying to see where to buy tickets, when I hear Gavin say, “Fuck no.”

  I spin around and look at him, seeing he’s shaking his head while pulling out his pack of cigarettes. “What?” I ask.

  “I said fuck no. I ain’t getting on any rides. One, we just ate and I’ll barf, and two, I don’t do rides,” he tells me.

  “Come on, please?” I beg, looking over at Adam.

  “I’m with Gavin, girl. I’ll throw up if I get on that spinning deathtrap. I’m sorry,” Adam says.

  I slump forward, heartbroken. The whole reason I wanted to come to Kemah was to go on some of the rides. There’s no way I’m going to be the dork who goes by herself. How lame would that be? It wouldn’t even be fun getting all strapped in and riding it alone. A huge part of the fun is sharing the adventure with another person. I admit defeat and walk toward the exit.

  “I’ll do it with you,” I hear called behind me.

  I stop, turning slowly on my heel with a look of surprised confusion on my face. “Huh?”

  “I’ll go on the ride with you, but we have to go buy tickets first,” Jason says, and he points to his left toward a booth with a big sign above it with ticket prices listed.

  “Really?” I squeal, unable to contain my shocked excitement.

  “Yeah, but just the one. You sure that’s the one you want to ride?” he asks.

  I spin around in a circle and make sure it’s the winner, and when I see it’s the only one I’ve never ridden at any other amusement park, I answer, “I’m sure,” and then skip ahead of him to the ticket booth. After purchasing one ride apiece, we go and get in line. I don’t have a clue, nor do I care where Gavin and Adam have gone. All I know is at this moment, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. What could be better than doing one of my favorite past times with a guy I’m crushing on?

  But it’s so much more than a crush.

  Shhh, don’t ruin this moment with all the brain activity.

  Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  Duly noted.

  My heart is racing as we wait our turn. It’s not a scary ride, so I know my heart rate has everything to do with the handsome man standing beside me. I don’t know what to say to him; I want to break the quiet tension, but have no idea how. Thankfully, he puts me out of my misery. “I haven’t been on an amusement park ride in years. Not since I went to Astroworld a couple years ago.”

  “Oh! I love Astroworld! My brother Tony took me there. He made me get on the Dungeon Drop…twice. That’s the one ride I can’t stand. I will ride any rollercoaster you can put me on, but I hate the droppy ones. There’s this one at Islands of Adventure in Orlando called Dr. Doom’s Fear Fall, and instead of taking you up slowly and just dropping you, like the Dungeon Drop, it shoots you up fast and bounces you down. I like that one better,” I ramble.

  “I’m not big into rides,” he admits.

  “Then why are you doing this one?” I ask, confused.

  “You wanted to do it. I promised tonight was your night, and you looked so bummed when they wouldn’t come on here with you, so I told you I’d do it. No big,” he says with a shrug, and we step forward in the line, slowly making our way to the front.

  I don’t say anything for a few minutes, absorbing what Jason said. I look around at all the bright, flashing lights of the swings, the ship that goes back and forth until it finally flips over, the Rock-n-Roll Express with its loud music blasting as it slows to a stop and then starts going backward, and hear the clinking sound of the rollercoaster car as it makes its way up to the top of the wooden hill. I smell the potent aroma of funnel cake and popcorn, and I look up above us as the ride full of people fly above us, squealing and laughing as they go round and round on the big, metal machine. I don’t really understand why he wouldn’t enjoy this, but the fact he doesn’t and yet is still willing to do it, just because I want to, makes me all squishy inside.

  On a whim, I turn to face him and wrap my arms around him, giving him a spontaneous hug. “Thank you for doing this. Not only the ride, but this whole night. I’ve had a blast, and it’s all thanks to you,” I tell him.

  “You’re welcome,” he says into my hair and rubs my back. “Plus, I felt like I owed you. That was really thoughtful of you to have a girls’ night out with my mom. None of the girls any of us have dated, or even the female friends we’ve had for years have ever done that before.”

  I smile into his chest, and then only let go because the ride ends and it’s our turn to get on. I skip over to an empty slot and try to figure out how to mount it. One of the workers makes his way over to us and tells us to slide up onto the padded bench on our stomachs next to each other. After lining us up, having us spread our legs a little, he lowers a padded bar and locks us in place. There is a joystick-looking thing between where our two bodies rest on our elbows. The worker tells us that after the ride rises to its full-height, we can use the shifter to make us fly high or low, and then leaves us to lock in the next set of people.

  Jason immediately grabs onto the shifter. “Hey! Why do you get to control the joystick?” I ask playfully.

  “I’m the man, goddamn it,” he says, thickening his Texan drawl, and I giggle.

  “All right. I guess since you’re only here to make me happy, I’ll let you play with the stick,” I tease.

  “I’ve got a stick you can play with,” he says, and when I look up at him in shock, I see he’s just as surprised he let that slip out as I am. I burst out laughing as he pulls his lips in between his teeth, shaking his head. “Was that my outside voice?” he asks.

  “Yup,” I reply, popping the p, and before either one of us has a chance to say anything else, the ride jolts into motion.

  From the ground, the ride looked fun, but not that wild. But from up here, locked into this position, it’s a lot more exhilarating, feeling just like we’re flying. As we rise to the very top of the structure, we see the people ahead of us start to tilt up and then down, and Jason begins to move the shifter, which makes us dip and then rise again, causing it to take my stomach. I squeal when he makes us dip again, and reach out to put my hand around his on the joystick, flying us upward once more.

  The ride ends way too soon, and I’m sad when it’s time to get off, not only because I was having so much fun, but because I don’t want my alone time with Jason to end. We find the guys at a table, Gavin carrying on and pointing at a group of girls in Daisy Duke shorts and fur-covered boots, who look absolutely ridiculous because it’s only about fifty degrees out. I stick my hands into the pockets of my hot pink hoodie and roll my eyes.

  I have to admit I’m partly jealous they have the balls to wear the shorts at all. I only own a few pairs myself, opting only to wear them at home alone or get-togethers with just my family. Growing up being picked on for having toothpicks for legs will do that to a girl. Sure, it can get pretty miserable during the heat of summer, but it’s better than having to deal with assholes in parking lots yelling out of their car windows at me to ‘Eat a cheeseburger’ while I make my way into the grocery store. Yep, that happened.

  “Y’all ready to go?” Jason asks, pulling out a fresh pack of cigarettes from the front pocket of his dark burgundy wool shirt and starts hitting the top into the palm of his hand. I’ve seen his routine a million times now, and I say the steps in my head as he completes it.

  Hit the pack in his hand ten times, then spin it around. Repeat.

  Unwrap the cellophane from around the top half of the pack, ball it up, stick it in his jeans pocket.

  Lift lid, and tear out the silver paper. Ball it up, stick it in the same pocket.

  Take out one of the front cigarettes, flip it over, and slide it back into the pack upside-down. His ‘lucky’ that he’ll smoke last.

  Pull out another cigarette, clo
se up the pack, stick it back into the front pocket of his shirt, and then light up.

  It’s probably weird I notice these different things he does, but during one of our twenty-question games, he admitted he’s OCD about certain things. He has an obsession with numbers, adding, multiplying, and formulating problems in his head to calm himself down if something is bothering him. He’s also super anal about symmetry. If something is off by even a couple millimeters, he can spot it. The dude doesn’t even need a measuring tape. He can tell you how big something is in inches just by eyeballing it.

  And then there are these routines. The cigarettes were the first one I noticed, but he has a few more, like the steps he takes drinking a bottle of beer versus a mixed drink. After popping the top off a bottle, he can’t just hold the beer in his hand; he takes a swig, and places it on the table, before picking it back up for another drink. If it’s a mixed drink, he keeps the skinny straw it’s served with in the glass, but doesn’t actually drink through it. He uses it to stir the liquid, then bends it over the side of the glass and holds it pressed between the tumbler and his fingers. I’m sure there are endless routines he has, and I absently wonder if there is one he uses to get ready, which is probably what takes him so long before we go somewhere.

  By the time I’m even conscious we’re moving, we’re already at Jason’s truck. Back on the highway, we pass an oncoming car that has one headlight out, and out of habit, I yell, “Padiddle!” causing Jason to turn and look at me strangely. I laugh and say, “Sorry, it’s a game from back home.”

  “What’s the game?” he asks curiously.

  “Well, whenever you see a car with only one headlight, you call out ‘padiddle’, and the first person to get three gets owed an article of clothing. So like, if I got three in a row, you’d have to take off your shirt…or something,” I say the last part quietly, realizing what I’m telling him.

  He chuckles and asks, “Is this one of your weird North Carolina things, like how you make a wish every time the clock either hits 11:11, or 12:34. Next thing you know, it’ll be, ‘Oh, look, a stop sign! Make a wish’ or ‘Hey! It’s a Starbucks! Give me your pants’.”.”

  I elbow him in the ribs and he grunts, making me laugh as he rubs the spot I hit like it actually hurt. “Shut up. You pick on me all the time for being from NC. First the way I say pecan, then you called me a Yankee…oh, and don’t forget when your dad was raking and I called it pine straw. It is pine straw!” I complain.

  “No, it’s pine needles…Yankee,” he adds.

  “Ugh! It’s pine needles when it’s still attached to the tree, and pine straw when it falls off. And again, North Carolina is below the Mason Dixon line. I am not a damn Yankee,” I growl.

  “Whatever you say…Yankee.”

  Pulling into Jason’s driveway, Gavin hops out and immediately walks over to his truck. “See y’all later. I’m beat,” he claims before sliding himself into his driver’s seat. With a short wave out of his lowered window, he backs out of the driveway and then heads home. Ooookay, he’s never left without at least trying to get me to come home with him before, but I’m glad he didn’t. I wouldn’t want him to taint the amazing night I’ve had.

  Adam climbs out of the back of Jason’s truck and walks over to us to do the normal bro-shake with him and to give me a light one-armed hug before telling us goodnight and getting in his own vehicle and going home. Jason looks down at me, the automatic floodlights attached to his house at his back casting shadows across his face. He looks expectant, like he’s waiting for me to say or do something, but I don’t know what.

  “Well?” he prompts.

  I feel a swarm of butterflies take flight in my belly. What does he want? If I did what I really wanted, I’d freakin’ pounce on him right here in the cold driveway, but I don’t think that’s what he’s asking for. In my dreams. “Well what?” I ask with a nervous smile.

  “I told you to pick three things you wanted to do tonight, and you reserved one. We’ve only done two, the movie and Kemah. So what’s you’re third pick?” he asks.

  “Seriously? I thought I forfeited that last pick when you agreed to get on the ride with me,” I say with a grin.

  “Nope, that counted as part of number two, Kemah. You can choose one last thing to do tonight,” he tells me.

  “I can’t just save it for another day?”

  “Uh-uh. Told ya, babe. Tonight is your night. You gotta use it or lose it,” he says with a shrug.

  I laugh lightly, then try to think of something to do. I pull out my cellphone and check the time. It’s a little past 10pm. It’s too late to go see any type of attractions; I don’t really want to go play pool; I know he won’t go to a dance club, and I certainly don’t want to go to another strip club. Hmmm, what to choose, what to choose…

  “Ummm…want to go to Walmart?” I ask him.

  He cocks his head to the side and furrows his brows. “You can choose anywhere you want to go in the greater Houston area, and you choose Walmart? If I was a genie, that’s what you’d pick as your third wish?”

  “I’m not going to ask to go where I really want to go,” I say mysteriously, thinking ‘Your bed’, “but Walmart is fun late at night. You go and there’s hardly anyone there, and you can just look at all the stupid shit you never have time to look at during the day. The rule is though, you gotta set a budget before you even walk into the store. If you don’t, it’s hard to leave there without spending at least a hundred bucks.”

  “Well, where is it you really want to go? I told you I’d take you anywhere,” he replies.

  I can’t exactly say ‘Poundtown’, knowing one, he still thinks Gavin has some kind of claim on me, and two, I’m not his type and don’t want to make it awkward between us by making him turn me down flat. So instead, I sing-song, “I’ll never tell,” while turning on my heel and making my way back over to the passenger side of his truck. I close the door behind me and see him shaking his head, still standing in the beaming floodlight. Eventually, he gets back in and we go just outside his neighborhood to the closest Walmart.

  “Okay, what’s our budget?” I ask as we walk through the parking lot toward the sliding glass doors of the supercenter.

  “How about $30 a piece?” he prompts, and I smile over the fact he’s joining me in my dumb little shopping game.

  “$30 is doable. I just got paid, so let’s do this,” I say, all pumped to spend money on shit I don’t really need.

  We walk up and down aisles I’ve never even seen before, mostly because they’re in a section I’ve deemed the ‘man-zone’. It’s that dark and mysterious place in the back of the store hidden behind a fortress wall of black rubber tires and fishing poles. I see him pick up random tools before setting them back down, moving on to the next object I have no idea what it’s used for. He ends up holding onto a new stick shift knob in the shape of a red-eyed silver skull as we make our way to the entertainment department.

  We stroll through the DVD aisle before coming to the end, where there’s a giant bin of $5 movies. We spend a good fifteen minutes shuffling through the plastic boxes, making comments about them and asking each other if we’ve seen this one or what we thought about that one. Finally, he picks up one and excitedly says, “No shit! I’ve been wanting this one forever!”

  “What is it?” I ask curiously, walking around to the other side of the bin, where he’s holding up the DVD package and reading the back. I bend down around him to see the front. “Boondock Saints? Never heard of it.”

  “You’ve never seen Boondock Saints? Holy shit, one of my all-time favorites. It’s a classic,” he claims.

  I take the box from him and read it came out just six years before, and the critics proclaimed it a ‘cult-phenomenon’. “I don’t think you can really call it a classic, but it looks interesting enough,” I tell him.

  “Oh, it’s a fucking classic. It’s badass and I’ll probably watch it until the damn DVD player breaks, so it’s a classic,” he says with convicti
on, and I giggle at how elated he is over his find.

  “If you say so.”

  “You’ll just have to watch it with me and see for yourself,” he says, setting off the butterflies that had finally calmed down after the conversation in his driveway.

  “I’d love to,” I reply quietly, and start heading toward the grocery section.

  I end up coming way under budget, only leaving with two extra-large dark chocolate candy bars—one for me and one for Mr. Robichaux, who I found out loves them just about as much as I do—a milk chocolate one for Jason’s mom, and I pick out a giant bottle of the sparkling Moscato wine she got me hooked on, which Jason has to buy for me. I trade him for his movie, that way we’re even when we check out.

  We get back in his truck with all our goodies and he drives the short distance to his house. We decide to enjoy the rest of the night by pigging out on the junk food he picked out, drinking the wine, and watching his beloved movie. By now, it’s close to midnight, but I don’t have to worry about letting Mark know I won’t be coming home tonight, because he and Kim went to visit her parents on the east coast for the weekend.

  When we enter his kitchen from the garage door, we set down our bags in the middle of the dining table and unpack everything, setting up for our vegging. I don’t bother with a wine glass, instead opting for one of their large, thick plastic cups, which I fill nearly to the brim. He uses a knife to open the giant plastic tray of cold cuts, cheese, crackers, and grapes, and then grabs a beer from the back fridge. He balances the tray in one hand and carries his Shiner in the other.

  After arranging two of the candy bars on the kitchen counter along with a sticky note telling the Robichauxs they are for them from me, I grab the plastic bag containing the DVD, French onion dip, and potato chips, my cup of wine, and my chocolate bar, and follow Jason out of the room. I assumed we were going to watch the movie in the living room like we usually do, but he continues walking, leading me down the hallway to his bedroom.