Fireworks

I take a deep breath and slump my shoulders. Without removing my ear buds, I mutter, “God, you could’ve been a pedophile for all I knew.”

His lips are moving in reply but I don’t register his words. I will myself to keep my eyes focused on the screen of my iPod, where I’m playing solitaire. Red Queen of hearts on black King of spades.

We sit in silence for a few minutes. I’m starting to wonder why he came up to me and why he’s still sticking around. The song I’m listening to is fading out, and I make a deal with Fate: if the next song is ‘Somewhere In Between’ by Hawthorne Heights, I will turn and commence a conversation.

Fate is not on my side.

Then again, I suppose it never was.

Grudgingly, yet with my heart fluttering like a live butterfly, I pluck out my left ear bud. Robin notices and half-rotates his face to scrutinize at me with his right eye. I fidget uncomfortably.

“Hey.” My voice is uncharacteristically hoarse from lack of use to him. Was it just me, or were his eyes more striking against his porcelain-pale face than before?

“I thought you were never going to talk to me,” Robin divulges, blinking ingenuously.

“Were you going to sit there until I was?”

“Yeah.”

There’s an awkward silence in which I try not to jump at every movement he makes, deliberately or otherwise – his index finger tracing nonsense in the bark, the tips of his shadowy hair vaulting in the breeze, the faded writing on the backpack at his Vans-clad feet. Finally he knocks his head back onto the rock and closes his eyes.

I berate myself not to listen, that he’d abandoned me.

I just fell in love for the first time.

“I’m sorry, Sara. I shouldn’t have left you, but I thought that was best.” He chuckles bitterly. “You must’ve seen how that turned out for me, from the video and all…”

Watch as I pick myself up off the ground.

“I don’t know if you’re better. At least, I’m hoping you are.” I feel his eyes attempting to peer through the layers of my clothing sleeves, to analyze the circumference of my arms. “When you didn’t come back to school…I was so worried, I didn’t know what was up.”

In the dark, I’m so far from the spotlight.

“All my friends were asking me what was wrong with me. ‘It’s just a chick,’ they said. ‘You’ll find another one.’ Yeah, to be honest, that’s what I thought too. It was just a chick, now I can leave her behind and worry about the next one. Rebecca Williams asked me to homecoming and I couldn’t say yes. I don’t know if you were there.”

Can you see me now?

“I was.” The words are anxious to be heard. “I saw you there.”

“Who’d you go with?” His voice is forcibly nonchalant, but I pick up the loose ends of irritation.

I say, “No one,” because that’s the truth and it’s what he wants to hear.

Robin’s eyelids quiver like overactive bees’ wings. “I didn’t go with anyone either.”

I’m dreading bringing up the subject, because I know guys don’t like the sticky topics, but I say it anyway. “Why? I mean, I know you asked me, but we had that sort of official breakup….”

He sits up straight and turns the upper half of his body to face me, a look of earnest on his face like this is a debate and he wants to prove his point. “Obviously I wasn’t over you. Jesus, even a blind man could see that, Sara.” I scoff like I’m offended but he plows on. “You seemed to be moving on in life fine without me. On the night of the homecoming, I was planning to ask you to dance but I couldn’t find you.” He paused. “Oh, and there was that rebound thing – you know, you have to wait a certain amount of time before moving on otherwise you look like you’re using the next chick as a rebound. But of course that didn’t even come close to applying.”

I pull at my sweatshirt strings, not quite meeting his apprehensive eyes. “So,” I say slowly, dragging the word out.

“So,” he agrees.

“Where does that leave…us…now?”

He sighs and resumes staring out at the parking lot. He shrugs and accompanies it with a halfhearted chuckle. “Wherever you want it to be. I’m not making you do anything you wouldn’t.”

“You obviously want it to go a certain way, otherwise you wouldn’t have come over here,” I point out. I turn off my iPod and stuff it away into my pocket.

“I guess,” Robin says, his tone no longer light. “But…I mean, I…don’t want to tie you down.”

It was easy to tell that that wasn’t the exact way he’d been meaning to phrase it.

“What about the video?”

“What about it?”

“You know…everything?”

“What about…everything?”

“Did you mean everything you said?”

This is the longest silence of all, and every second that passes I’m dreading the answer. This is the moment where I will fly the plane or crash and burn.

“I did.”

I’ve been holding in so much air that when I exhale in relief, my chest visibly deflates. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. The song, too. If you’re going to get better, if you’re going to move on – I’ll stay behind for you.”

I slam the door on my conscious as my arms wind their way around him. I don’t want to think about how I’m letting him back so easily, I don’t want to remember what had happened. I lean into his chest and feel his breath on my hair.

“I love you, Sara.” His voice is more confident than the video.

“Do you really believe that?” I murmur into his shirt that smells of him. My emotions are all fighting to be felt, warring with swords and shields and machetes. My nerves are jittering, and I don’t know what is should be – elated, excited, plaintive? I suppose this is the moment my world has been waiting for, because it’s holding its breath with so much intensity there’s vines constricting my lungs.

“I do.”

I close my eyes. Time can stop now. “I love you too, Robin.”

“Sara!” Reluctantly I lift my head from his chest and search for who called my name. It turns out to be Chelsea Martin from biology.

She’s tall and willowy and beautiful and I find myself gripping Robin a little harder than I should have, because he pries himself from my grip, chuckling softly.

At least Chelsea has the decency to look embarrassed. “Sorry, was I…?”

“No,” I reply pleasantly, genuinely in a good mood. “It’s cool.”

Chelsea giggles shyly. “Can you help me with the homework? I saw you over here so I figured I’d ask. It’s something really confusing about chemistry or whatever.”

I roll my eyes, breaking the last of the tension between us, since I usually didn’t talk to her much. “Sure.” I make a phone sign with my index finger and thumb and waved it to Robin. He grins in understanding and I trail Chelsea to the library, who is mouthing amiably away about something that happened in biology that I missed.

“Did Tyler seriously do that?” I exclaim, surprised that I’m listening.

“Yeah! I got it all on camera too!” She whips out her phone and we collapse into laughter, me for the first time in what feels like years. And it feels fantastic.

190 + 35 + 0 + 130 + 70 =425.