History Project

***
There he was, in my room. His medium length blonde hair and green eyes transfixed me. He wore a white polo shirt and jeans. I lay on my bed, typing our project, trying to forget that there’d once been a time when he’d have been laying with me instead of sitting in my desk chair, listening to music sung by someone else.
***
I’d never seen her room before, not even when we were together, which was only for a short time. Like two weeks or so. Maybe one hour and fifteen days. Her red hair was tied back into a ponytail, which I didn’t like. But I guess I didn’t deserve to see it down anymore. I guess she didn’t think of me when she did her hair that day, and she wasn’t supposed to.
She was wearing lip gloss. Some of it had smeared a little, though, and I know it’s crazy, but I couldn’t stop wondering who’d smeared it—I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d smeared it by accident herself, or if some guy had been over before me, some guy who would break her heart, and he’d smeared it. I couldn’t ask her though. She’d think I was crazy. She probably already thought I was crazy. She was right, though.
My music was so loud, and my foot was tapping hard, and it was embarrassing, but I couldn’t help it. I was nervous. I looked around her room and saw all sorts of neat stuff--music boxes, jewelry boxes, trophies, shells, globes, books, and pictures of her and all her friends, and even a letter somebody’d written her. It got me excited, all that stuff. Everything was a key to her soul. A secret to her personality.
Finally, I couldn’t help it. I took out my ear buds.
***
“Can we not work on our project right now?” I looked up to stare at Ryan. First he shows up at my house to work on our project, without a call or anything, so that I had to cancel my afternoon plans, then he goes to my room and lets me do all the work, typing our paper, while he just plays his music on his ipod obnoxiously loud, and then he complains about the work he’s not even doing! He was really getting on my nerves. “Actually, ’we’ are not working on this project—it’s just me. And why did you come over here if not to work on the project?”
Ryan shrugged, the way he always did every time he didn’t know what to say. I hated it. When we were dating, it was always something he did after letting me down. “I don’t know.” He looked down at his white Nike shoes, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and my gaze followed his. “I really don’t.”
It was funny, actually, because really he didn’t know anything.
“Can you tell me something, Julie? Do you miss me?”
His words caught my emotions, and pulled at them so that they hurt. I looked away, and my gaze landed on a statue of a ballerina my mom had given me after my first recital. I stared at it. Anything but him.
***
I waited in cold fear for her reply. I knew I’d done something stupid, and that it had been months since then, but girls forgave guys for doing stupid things all the time. Hell, that’s how most marriages worked.
***

I bit my lip, unsure with path to choose. Should I be honest, or should I continue to play the ideal, untouchable girl, who would look into the distance, shrug one shoulder, and say, “What’s there to miss?”

I couldn’t help it. I was too much of a romantic. “All the time.”
***
I couldn’t believe it. “Then why didn’t you say something? Why don’t you even look at me in the halls at school?” I was real worked up now. I’d gotten up from the chair and had actually started pacing back and forth. “How come when Mr. Bernsen paired us up you told all your friends you were gonna be sick?”
I looked at her, and for once she was speechless. I’d put her right on the spot. Finally she came up with something, and the words stung, so I guess it was worth the wait. “Do you even remember what you said to me that night?” Her blue eyes were full of pain, and I felt bad, knowing they’d been full of it for months and I hadn’t even noticed.
I thought back to it, the homecoming game. All the football players’ girls were there, right on the bleachers—except for mine. She’d decided to go spend time with her friend, Cindy, and come to the game late, which was just about the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of. During half time I told her off.
“Where were you?” I asked her. I probably shouldn’t have, though. I probably shouldn’t have talked to her until I’d cooled down. We were losing bad and I was blaming it on her. I was all hot and steamy too, which didn’t make things any better.
She was sitting on the front bleacher, wearing a brown leather jacket and jeans. I guess it was pretty cold it you weren’t sweating your guts out on the field.
“You know where I was,” she answered, and it wouldn’t have been so bad an answer, since it was true, if she hadn’t said it the way she did—all prissy and stuck up, like she was smarter than me or something. Like she was better than me.
“Sure as hell I know where you were!” My voice was getting loud, and I should have shut the hell up, and everyone was looking at me and I didn’t even realize it.
“Please, stop it! You’re embarrassing me!”
Boy she made me mad. Boy I felt like she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand it at all. I was mad because I felt like she should. She was my girlfriend and she should have understood. “I’M embarrassing YOU?” I shouted, amazed. “You’re the one who doesn’t even show up to my last game! As if you’ve got something better to do than go to the homecoming game, where everyone else in the world went, in case you didn’t even know, to see your own boyfriend play!”
“Actually, for your information, I did have something better to do.”
I laughed at her then, mocking her. “Like hell you had something better to do.” I embarrassed her in front of everybody, and I’m ashamed. “Like hell you did. You just wanted to make me mad or something, or jealous. You’re just another b****.” By then she was walking off the field, definitely pissed off. Man I was dumb. She made me so mad. Calling after her, instead of apologizing, I just had to yell, “Go ahead, keep walking. And you better not come back!”
I looked at Julie now. Her eyes had been on me, watching me remember. I knew she was dying to hear what I had to say.
“Yeah,” I said, “Sure I remember. It was the dumbest thing I’d ever said in my life. I made a huge mistake.”
Julie managed a weak smile. “Thanks. And I just want you to know, the only reason I didn’t come to your whole game that night, right from the beginning, was because Cindy’s parents were getting a divorce, and she wanted to tell me somewhere private. She was my best friend, so I had to listen to her. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t feel like I had to.”
Man I was a jerk. That just goes to show that there’s two sides of a story, I mean really there are. But instead of telling her this, I just nodded and stared at the purple carpeting, wondering what she wanted me to say, and what she expected me to say, and if they were two different things.
***

He’d just apologized. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been waiting for months and finally it had happened! Was it a real apology, though? Did he mean it? Or was he saying it just because he’d rather kiss me and get me back than work on our history project? I didn’t know. I hated not knowing.

I guess he was trying to change the subject, because Ryan asked me, “What’s the strangest thing you have in this room?”

I smiled. “The strangest thing, or the thing that’s most special to me?”

He shrugged, grinning too. “I guess special is better.”

I walked over to my bookshelf and grabbed something. It was a mini violin case the size of my hand, and inside of it was a violin music box. You could wind it up and it would play the sweetest melody. That’s what I did, I wound it up.
Ryan smiled and walked towards me, confident and swaying slightly. He put his hand on my shoulder and tried to sway me gently back and forth. “Sing.” He told me.
I shook my head.
“C’mon,” he said grinning. “Just sing.” And then he started, “So many songs so many stories, the lonely hills recall…”
I laughed. It was the song from our school recital. I couldn’t help it anymore. I sang, “Around her heart my city carries a lonely ancient wall.”
We were about to hit the course when the music stopped. Ryan moved to wind it back up again, but I put my hand on his arm. “No, don’t.”
He looked up at me, and his eyes looked innocent and genuinely confused. “Why not?”
“There’s one more thing I want to tell you about.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a felt heart. It had a pin attached to it. Obviously, it had been homemade, by a child even. “A girl named Amanda made hundreds of these and handed them out at my old school the day after he best friend, Shara, died. Shara was my camp counselor for three years straight, and she used to go to my old school. She died from heart failure at age eighteen. Blue was her favorite color.” My eyes were teary and I hadn’t even been talking that long.
Ryan was staring at his shoes, but his right hand was holding my left. “I’m sorry.”
I laughed, a sad laugh. It’s one of those laughs girls like me use to keep from crying. “It’s crazy,” I told him, “Because yesterday was the anniversary of her death, and today I found this.”
Ryan took his hand away from mine and put it in his pocket. Then he nodded at the pin. “Can I see it?”
Reluctantly I gave it to him, and watched as he pinned it on my white blouse. “For Shara,” he said. I tried to smile, but I couldn’t. Seeing it there, like it was after the day she died, just made me so sad. I started to cry.
***
There she was, in front of me, crying. I couldn’t help it. It was just the way her tears would slide from her blue eyes, to her eyelashes, down her pink cheeks, to her blue heart. I kissed her. I know I wasn’t supposed to, because she was sad and all, and thinking about deeper things than me, but I had to. Anyways, she seemed to like it because she kissed me back.
After she pulled away, we were still holding hands and all. She smiled and I smiled back. “I guess this means we’re a couple now,” she said.
I shrugged. “I guess so.” Then I looked at her laptop, all closed and almost forgotten on her bed. I grinned harder. “And I guess this means we’re failing our history project.”
She laughed, and I wanted to take a picture because I’d never seen a girl have a genuine laugh with tears on her face before. It was beautiful. “I guess so.”
***
“Want to go to the movies?” He asked me, and I couldn’t help but notice how perfect those words sounded coming from him.
I thought about what movie we could see, and then decided. “As long as it’s nothing interesting…We have too much catching up to do.”
Ryan’s brow raised, and he put his hands around my waist, pulling me closer and swaying me gently back and forth. “We sure do.” Then he pulled me close, kissing me, and I closed my eyes, thinking about how we were right then and there, and hoping with all my heart that we’d last.