And It Was Called Yellow

Maybe my decision to go out with Jimmy was biased because he was a junior and I was a freshman. It wasn’t something that I thought about, really, just nodded and said yes and I was his girlfriend. Charlotte thought that it was a load, him wanting to go out with me in the first place, and I think that I did, too, beneath the whole lovestruck teenage girl thing. She didn’t trust anyone, especially Jimmy—neither had Gram, narrowing her eyes from the window as I climbed into the passenger seat of his car and chastising me for my choice in boyfriends when I got home. She thought I was turning into Mom. Jimmy never understood why Gram hated him so much.

He came over a few days before I was leaving, pulling up not even a minute after Gram had left to go grocery shopping. I was going to be gone for the entire summer, anyway, and Sasha—my half-brother—had told me how much calling collect from Austria to the States was in one of his e-mails. It wouldn’t be possible to call anyone more than twice a week unless I had an extra twenty bucks to shell out. And I wouldn’t, unless I got a job while I was there.

“Hey, come here,” Jimmy had said, holding his arms out for me, and motioned for me to come to sit by him. “I want to talk to you about something.”

When I sat down beside him, he moved away and fidgeted, sighing, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.. I rolled my eyes and leaned back on my hands, dangling my feet off the edge of the front steps. The sun was out for the first time in a while, and it felt good on my skin—Jimmy hardly seemed to notice the warmth, tugging the hood of his sweatshirt up and over his head as he began to talk again. My ears were buzzing with the sounds of my neighborhood, but as his voice changed to be the dull, serious tone that he used only when discussing school or something that he hated, the rest of the world went quiet.

There were too many paperback romances novels and television shows not to know where this was going. He was going to say something like “I can’t do long distance” and then run off, leaving me behind, crying. Most Lifetime movies revolve around plotlines like that, relationships turned sour and families torn apart or something stupid like that. I wondered if this was how it had happened for Mom and Dad—if Dad had said that he was leaving to go back to Austria, and Mom had watched him disappear into the sunset with me in her arms, sobbing and crying.

“I guess I should go, then,” Jimmy had said, seeming far away. No goodbye kiss or moment of passionate staring at each other before he started walking toward his car, just silence. He turned his back to me and drove away without looking back.