Chapter or Story
I
For the few days that I’d lived in my new house, I’d woken up after 11:30, laid in bed for a couple of minutes, and then ventured to the kitchen for a late breakfast after washing my face. As everything in the house was still in boxes, including the toaster and the pots and pans—my family wasn’t settled in yet and I was secretly hoping it was because we were going to be moving back to where we came from—I could only have fruit or cereal.
Once I’d gotten my fix of the most important meal of the day I would plop down on the sofa, where my brother Garrett would have already been sitting for at least an hour after waking up and immediately starting the video games. I would join him and play Guitar Hero for a while. It was like we were engaging in brother-sister bonding, I guess, because my brother and I weren’t that close. The reality was that we’d been here two days and didn’t know anybody yet. We had no choice but to be mildly social with each other.
“Internet working yet?” I sat down beside him.
“We just got the phone working yesterday, Dusty,” he shook his head.
And apparently Garrett wanted me to leave him alone because he wasn’t playing Guitar Hero. For today at least, he’d traded it in for Kingdom Hearts 2.
“Did Evan call?” I wondered.
“No.”
I sighed and lifted my feet onto one of the brown boxes where the coffee table was supposed to be.
Changing my mind about sitting with my brother, I stood up and headed back to my room where my cell phone was. I picked it up and pressed the green phone icon, pressed it twice because I knew the number I was dialing was the last number I’d dialed anyway. I sunk into the unmade bed and waited for any of the rings to be interrupted by my favorite voice in the world. Instead it headed straight to voicemail and it was my own voice I heard.
“You’ve reached Evan’s voicemail. He’s probably too busy hanging out with his best friend Dusty to bother taking your call. So leave a message and if you’re lucky he’ll call you back,” my bubbly fifteen-year-old self had spoken.
That had been recorded over a year ago. We thought we were so funny and so creative, recording each other’s outgoing voicemail messages, my best friend Evan and I. What I’d said had been true up until Tuesday, earlier this week. The two of us hung out with each other for most of the hours in a day. But that was before I moved to the other side of the country. I had to remind him to update his voicemail when I finally did get a hold of him again.
Lying back in bed where I’d risen from just a little while ago, I stared not at the ceiling but out the window. It was a few yards adjacent to my feet. My old room—the only room I’ve ever had before—was a little bit larger, but this had a much better view. From my new room I could spy on people as they made it up our driveway.
My eyes moved their stare down, under the window to the ivory white walls (my dad promised that I was going to get to choose my own color to paint them on the weekend so that I could have my room painted the following week) and to the soccer ball idly placed in front of it. I rolled onto my side and then chewed on my lip. In my head I pictured the scenery that I witnessed through the tinted glass of the car; I remembered the rows of houses that we passed before getting to our house. And I swear, maybe a quarter of a mile away, I’d seen green space that resembled a park.
With the prospect of finally having something better to do than sit around the house with my little brother all day, I quickly changed into sports shorts and my former club team’s practice shirt. I pulled my golden-brown hair into a quick ponytail. I grabbed the ball and my shoes. I ran out to the living room, stuffing my phone into my pocket along the way, and sat on the couch again to lace up my Pumas.
“I think I’m going to go dribble the ball around,” I informed Garrett.
His eyes never left the TV screen. “You’re a goalie.”
“Well it’s not like you’re going to offer to go with me, right?” He shook his head immediately, almost before the words were out of my mouth. “Didn’t think so.”
“Where will you go?” My brother asked.
“I could have sworn I saw a park a couple blocks away when we were on our way here,” was my reply.
He wondered, “And what if you get lost?”
“Well I know our address,” I responded. “It’s the middle of the day. There are always old people outside at this time. And it’s the end of July, summertime, so there should be others around. I’ll ask somebody.”
With the laces of my shoes double knotted, I was out the door before Garrett could confirm to me that he would tell our mother where I was if she called, or wish me a good day. My brother was such a lazy kid. Can’t say I blamed him though. He was, after all, fourteen.
The sun was almost at its highest peak when I stepped out. I didn’t think to bring sunglasses and regretted that not even a minute after I’d been walking. Luckily, I didn’t think that I would start to break a sweat until after I began moving the ball around with my feet. Since my parents had decided to move us to a beach city on the west coast, the breeze from the Pacific Ocean kept the climate pretty mild and even the whole day.
I got through two and a half blocks of single-family housing before running into any trouble. Walking slowly, I spotted someone talking on their handy dandy cell phone. I admired said someone’s house and the next thing I knew I was gone—I ate it—literally tripping over a stray skateboard that was wheeling perpendicular to the direction I was traveling on the sidewalk.
The cell phone person whizzed around to get a better look at my embarrassment and spoke into the phone. “Shit. Okay, something just happened. Let me call you back.”
My onlooker rushed over and stopped at my heels, casting a shadow over me and blocking the sun. The ‘someone’ was a boy who was obviously more used to all the sun than I was. His skin was toasted, a naturally tanned brown, and his cinnamon-colored hair uneven, lightened by the sun in certain areas. I would have tried to determine his eye color, but he was too far away and he had sunglasses on.
“Hey…” he spoke to me. “Hey, are you okay?”
My palms were both a little red, they hit the ground quickly, loose pebbles on the concrete digging into them so I wouldn’t fall on my face. My left knee had a scratch but it wasn’t skinned, a good sign. All my time in net had prepared me well for my collision with a skateboard. It must have if my body position for the rough landing left me without any new potential scars or bruises.
“I’m fine,” I answered as I stood up.
I wiped my clothes free of dirt and then brushed my hands together. The boy took that opportunity to scoop up my ball, which had rolled to the middle of the street. When he’d retrieved it, he came back and held it out to me, “Here.”
With a half-smile I accepted it. “Thank you.”
Then he picked up his hazardous skateboard. “Sorry. I had no idea anyone was walking by when I let it go. You’re not hurt are you?”
“No,” I shook my head. “I’m alright.”
“Good,” he answered with a relieved smile. “Because it was just like a lawsuit waiting to happen.”
I chuckled. “I would never sue anybody for accidentally tripping me.”
“I haven’t seen you around here before,” he crossed his arms over his chest, skateboard dangling from his fingers, as if to try and figure out if he recognized me. “Do you go to San Marcos?”
I assumed that ‘San Marcos’ was a high school.
“Actually,” I revealed, “I just moved here. Two blocks down.”
“Oh, fresh catch,” he nodded. “That sucks for you.”
I agreed. “Pretty much.”
“But you know your way around already?” The boy asked. “I mean, you were on your way somewhere until my current mode of transportation put your life in danger.”
“Oh…actually…the plan was to keep walking this way until I reached my desired destination,” I replied. “Would you mind pointing me in the direction of the park? I’ll probably end up two miles from my house with no possible means of making it back on my own.”
He said a single word, “Google.”
“What?”
“You have a cell phone with you?” He wondered.
“Yes,” I replied.
“You can text any type of location keyword to Google—466453—like gas or pizza or mall or park, in your case, with the zip code and you’ll get an instant reply of the three nearest ones,” he explained. “And you can also text your starting address with the word ‘to’ and then the ending location for step-by-step directions.”
I was wowed. “You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “Technology is amazing.”
“So…” I pulled out my phone and flipped it open. “Wait, can you tell me how to do that again?”
“Forget it,” he smiled with the click of his tongue. “I’ll take you to the park.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I told him. “You can just point me in the right direction. I can manage, really.”
“It’s no problem. That’s the way I’m going anyway, I’m on my way to the skate park,” he responded. “Besides, I owe you for almost causing you injury.”
I asked, “The skate park is there too?”
He shook his head from left to right. “Skate park is at the beach. But you’ve got to pass the regular park on the way from here.”
“Oh, okay,” I answered.
“Shall we…?” He held his hand out in front of us, a gesture that we might start walking.
I nodded.
“I’m Kyle, by the way,” he held his left hand out for a shake and used his right to tuck his skateboard under his arm.
“Dusty,” I introduced myself, talking his palm and shaking it quickly.
“So tell me, Dusty,” he wondered, “where are you from?”
“Westport, Connecticut,” was my answer as I fell into step with him. “It’s like a little more than an hour away from Hartford.”
“I’ve never been to Connecticut,” Kyle answered. “Or the east coast, for that matter.”
I responded, “It’s really…different.”
“I guess it’s too cold to go to the beach most of the year, huh?” Kyle asked as we crossed the street. “It’s definitely no California.”
“You’d probably get hypothermia from the water in the wintertime in New England,” I agreed.
“Are you a junior?” Kyle questioned.
“Yeah,” I answered. “In the fall. Um…Vieja High I think.”
“Oh, that’s cool. You already know what school you’re going to.”
“I have to,” I replied. “I’m trying out for soccer there on Monday next week.”
He wondered, “Is that why you’re going to the park now? Practice?”
“Not really. Just something to get me out of the house,” I shrugged. “I’m a goalie. I can’t kick the ball and try and block it at the same time.”
“I go to Vieja. Our school’s girls’ varsity team has been really good for the last five years or so,” Kyle mentioned. “So your stuff must be pretty hot if you’re trying out.”
I chuckled. “Something like that.”
The span of green I thought I’d seen when my family arrived from the airport came into view when we turned a corner. A corner. I figured something like that. I would never have found the park on my own because I would have kept going straight. I didn’t remember turning a corner.
“Well I’m a junior too, so maybe we’ll have class together,” Kyle speculated. “Most of my friends are seniors so I don’t talk to many people in my grade.”
“I don’t know why,” I answered. “You seem very friendly, Kyle.”
“My friends and I kind of keep to ourselves,” was his reason. “Not that we don’t like people. We just get along the best, I guess.”
“That’s cool,” I understood. “I have a serious best friend back home. We spent most of our time just by ourselves.”
Kyle and I reached the park. There was a tennis court area on one side. A baseball diamond took up a large sum, and then there was my area of expertise, a soccer field. An unoccupied soccer field. It was still early so if any teams practiced here, they wouldn’t be around for a few more hours. Kyle put his skateboard down on the sidewalk—more carefully this time, letting his foot cover one of the ends—and took off his sunglasses. I was finally able to determine that he had very clear blue eyes. “Well we’re here.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” I spoke. “I appreciate your help.”
“No problem,” he responded. “I owed you remember?”
I laughed.
“I hope I’ll see you around. There’s like a month left before school. You should walk by my house more if you’re going to come here again. We can be walking buddies.” He actually sounded sincere.
“Sounds good,” I nodded. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow if I come to the park again.”
“Alright. Well,” he put his sunglasses back on before skating off, ”Welcome to Santa Barbara, Dusty.”
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I love all this cliche so far. Because I like taking cliches and twisting them.
Isn't this beginning so much more fun than the last one? Oh, you don't remember what the last one was like. It's probably for the better. Vieja High doesn't exist. San Marcos, however, does...which is why they're not gonna go there. There is sooo much you can do with 466453. Check it out. Or not. I am going to have so much fun with this story. I feel like I'm really ready to write it and finish it this time after spending three years observing people that I think Kyle and his group of friends would be like. As Jack Johnson is a surfer, and an alum of UC Santa Barbara, his song "Sitting, Waiting, Wishing" is the title. I feel like it will make sense as the story goes on. |