It's a Band Thing

The annual band picnic. Usually something I look forward to. But not this year; this is my senior year and the picnic is always the day before the senior’s last day. That means that tomorrow is the last time I will see a lot of these faces. The last time I’ll see her. The girl I’ve liked for over two years; Lauren Vanity. Well, that’s what everyone calls her, but her real name is Lauren Ann Gillespie. And she’s gorgeous…absolutely gorgeous. She’s not the type of girl a guy like me would normally like, but it’s one of those things your heart makes you do. I was drawn to her from the moment I saw her, but when I realized I liked her, I didn’t want to. It was the one football game of the year that the seventh and eighth graders played with us highschoolers when I first met her. She was a trumpet player, just as me, and I remember thinking our director was playing a prank on us, because she was the only girl, and we usually don’t have many girl trumpets. It’s almost like having guy flute players, but less homosexual, I guess you could say. But then Mr. Rotech introduced us to all the middle schoolers, and we found out that she really was a trumpet. That’s when I felt a sort of connection to her, but im not sure why. I mean, she was a seventh grader. Of course, I was just a freshman, but that’s sort of a big gap. I saw her a few times in the next two years, but it wasn’t until she was a freshman that I realized I liked her. I denied it for a few months, but then I decided to just go with it. Then things kept happening that made it seem as if she liked me too, but even if she did, there was no way I was going to ask her out. She was just a freshman and I was a junior. Not only would my friends all make fun of me for it, but I was afraid of what my parents would say. Or what hers would say. But mostly, I was afraid of what she would say.

Then prom time rolled around and everywhere I looked, kids in my grade were pairing up for the dance. I debated asking her but figured that it would be kind of socially awkward if a junior went with a freshman. So I just decided that I wasn’t going to go at all. My friend Jane kept bugging me to go, but I told her no every time. At first I thought she wanted me to ask her, but then she asked someone else; a ninth grader named Tim that she really liked. That made me think; if she could go with a freshman, why couldn’t I? Then, Lauren posted something on her facebook that made me almost ask her. She said she just went shopping and saw all the ‘pretty prom dresses’ and they made her kind of want to go. I came so close to asking her, but in the end, I was too chicken to go through with it. I never went to that prom either.

As that year progressed, she and I were constantly flirting in the morning during band. Or at least, that’s what it seemed like to me. Even Tony, another guy in our section, said he thought she liked me. But nothing more than flirting happened between us last year. This year was a little different; not much…but a little. The year before, the only class we had together was band, and even though we were in the same section, there wasn’t really a whole lot of time to talk. But this year, we had band, study hall and lunch together. See Lauren’s been friends with Jane since the first day of marching band camp her freshman year, so when she ended up not having any of her sophomore friends in her lunch period, she sat with Jane. And guess who else sits with Jane at lunch? Yea, me. As for study hall, ours is silent, but we’re aloud to pass notes, text, listen to music, and other things like that, just as long as we’re quiet about it. And we don’t have assigned seats either, though most of us sit in the same spot everyday anyways. Well, for some reason, all of us band kids (which was only seven) decided to sit at the same table in the library. That doesn’t really matter, though. My point is, Lauren and I ended up sitting next to each other in study hall too. A few days into school, she pushed her iPod towards me. It was an iPod touch, so it had that feature where you can type things out on it. She had typed out, “How was your summer?” “Pretty good…boring though. Yours?” I typed back and slid it over the table, earning a smirk from Tony that I’m glad she didn’t see. He rose his eyebrows a couple times, still smirking, so I flung an eraser at him that hit him in the eye. He flew back a little in his chair and I heard Lauren chuckled as she passed her iPod back to me. “Eh…uneventful for the most part. Got a lot of writing done though. (I write stories if you didn’t know) do you have texting and do you have your phone with you? Because that would be a lot easier.” So from then on, almost every single day, Lauren and I would text back and forth all study hall, even though we were sitting right next to each other or across the table. We’d even do that at lunch when things got boring. I can’t tell you how many times I came close to texting, “u wanna catch a movie sum time?” or just, “whatcha doin this weekend?” or something like that.

And then there was homecoming. Somehow that I still can’t figure out, both of us got nominated for our grades; me with some Bethany girl, and her with David something-or-other. Neither four of us were dating anybody at the time, so we were all baffled that we got picked. But, either way, the king and queen were crowned during the halftime of the football game the day before the dance, so with us being in the marching band, we had to run back into the band room and change clothes as fast as we could. We were the only ones in the band that got nominated, so we were in turn the only ones in the band room while we changed into our uniforms. The whole thing was just so ironic and weird that I didn’t think it could get any worse. But it did, definitely. It was a fairly warm night, so it didn’t surprise me that Lauren wasn’t wearing much under her uniform, but what did startle me was when I turned around to grab my jacket and saw her in just her bra and underwear, pulling the black jumper over her legs.

“Don’t turn around for a minute, Shane,” she said over her shoulder, thankfully not turning towards me. I turned around quickly to stop myself from staring and mumbled out a quick;

“Okay.” I pulled on the red and white jacket and skillfully zipped it up the back (an easy task for a band kid) before slipping on my black marching shoes and hat. “You almost ready?” I asked, grabbing my dress clothes and placing them in my instrument cubby.

“Yea, but while you’re in there, could you grab my shoes by the trash bin? I forgot to get them with the rest of my uniform,”

“Sure, here,” I said, handing them to her, trying so hard to get the mental image out of my head of her in her underclothes.

“Thanks Shane,” she smiled, sitting down to put them on. “Come on, let’s go.”

And with that, we ran back out to the side of the football field to get our trumpets and head to our positions as we waited for the opposing team’s band to finish their show so we could do ours. I’m not too sure if either of us went to the homecoming dance either.

Senior prom didn’t go how I’d wanted it to either. I was planning on asking her to go with me, and this time I had actually grown the balls I needed to not chicken out on it. Then on the day I was going to ask her, she texts me during study hall with a message that says, ‘so i guess ill c u @ prom” That confused the crap out of me, and it must have shown on my face, because my phone buzzed again and she sent, “cody renea asked me this mornin” and, well, the next day, Patty Farth asked me. So, yes, we both went to my senior prom, but we didn’t go together.

My phone went off, throwing me back into reality. It was spouting “Blame me, blame me” by Anberlin, so I knew that it was someone in the band texting me (it was the tone I had set for them). It’s not too hard to figure out who I wanted it to be, but I was just Tony. “where r u?” I sighed and typed in “on the hill above the beach y?” “ur missin out on all the fun” “im just thinkin” “bout lauren?” “yea…ima miss her the most” “turn around” “y?” “just do it” “fine” I turned around and came face-to-face with Lauren.

“Hey Shane. Mind if I sit with you?” she asked, already sitting down as I shook my head ‘yes’. “Tony told me where to find you. Or, rather, his phone told me,” she chuckled, holding up his cell.

“Wait, so I was texting you?”

“Yep,”

“Then how’d you know I was thinking about you?”

“Tony told me you liked me…” she said with a smile, looking from her hands to me.

“Damn him…”

“He only told me because he heard me telling my friends how much I’d miss you after tomorrow. He said that you’d miss me too, and I thought he meant you’d miss me as a friend, but then he said you’ve liked me for two years, and he gave me his phone so I could find out where you were without you knowing it was me,”

“Why’d you want to find me?” I asked, not picking up on what was probably really obvious.

“So I could do what I’ve wanted to do since my freshman year,” she said, turning her whole body towards me, putting her hand on my shoulder and kissing me. I was taken aback by it, but as I got over the shock, I out my hands on her hips, pulling her closer to me and deepened the kiss. Her grip on my shoulder loosened and her hand slid a bit so it was curled slightly, just setting on my chest. It was perfect. That is, it was perfect until we saw a flash and we realized our nut-case of a band director was taking a picture of us.

“Took you two long enough to figure it out,” Rotech laughed. “My god, sometimes the flirting was just plain sickening. It was cute at first, but after a while it kinda made me want to throw up.”

“What are you going on about?”

“You two,” he said as if it was completely obvious. “You’ve both liked each other since at least midterms two years ago. And apparently, it’s taken Tony telling Lauren about it for either of you to realize that you liked each other. But anyways, I’ll leave you two lovers to each other. I wouldn’t want to lose a finger or anything.” And with that, he was off, back to doing whatever it was he was doing before he took that picture.

“You know he’s going to go show everyone that, right?” Lauren asked, chuckling a bit.

“Yea, let him. I don’t care if they know,” I shrugged. “Apparently it’s so obvious that we like each other, so none of them will probably be too surprised by it.”

“I don’t care anyways. They’re all basically like family,”

“One big dysfunctional family whose minds are permanently in the gutter,”

“Well, hey, if our minds weren’t in the gutter, they’d be homeless,”

“And we don’t want homeless minds do we?”

“Just like I don’t want to waste any more time not being with you before you head off to college,” she said, leaning her forehead on mine.

“You’ve got a year before that happens,”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m still not sure what I want to do with my life. I’m taking this next year to figure it out. So I’ll be a freshman in college when you’re a senior in high school,”

“So we’ve got all of this summer and next year before you leave?”

“I probably won’t even leave. Or at least, I won’t go too far away. No Princeton or Yale for me,” I laughed, playing with her hair like I’ve wanted to for so long.

“Good; I just got you. I don’t want to let you go any time soon,”

“I don’t either,” I whispered, capturing her lips with mine. Things were just getting a bit hot and heavy when a phone vibrated between us. Then another. And soon enough, another. Mine, hers, and Tony’s all got the same picture message. I’ll give you one guess as to what it was of.

“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” I read aloud as I scrolled down the message.

“Well, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, then your touch is worth them all,” she said, closing hers and Tony’s phones and putting them back into her pockets.

“Dance, Dance, Christa Päffgen,” I realizes, smiling. “You just quoted Anberlin to me.”

“Yes, yes I did,”

“Since when have you listened to them?”

“Since I noticed how much you liked them. I decided to check them out and have loved them ever since,”

“You realize that I’m falling more and more in love with you with every passing second, right?”