The In-Betweeners

I guess I should have been more prepared for my family's reaction than I was.

I had asked for a ride to Shane's house Saturday morning at breakfast, and the moment the word "friend" passed through my mouth my entire family turned to stare at me. Alexis was standing by the toaster, her bagel slowly being burnt to a crisp. Tom had paused in the act of bringing his bowl of cereal over to the table and he was now frozen, hovering over the chair with his mouth slightly ajar. My parents had been talking by the coffee maker while they waited for their coffee to be finished, but were now staring at me as well.

"What?" I said, a little defensively.

"You have friends?" Tom asked.

I knew he didn't mean it to hurt my feelings, and it really didn't hurt at all. In his eyes, I didn't have friends because compared to him, I didn't. Tom wasn't the most popular kid in his grade, but he was in the whole scene with the friends. He was on the football, wrestling, and baseball team and because of that had a bunch of people considered to be friends. But even though it didn't hurt my feelings, it apparently hurt my mother's.

"Tom!" she scolded him, and smacked him across the back of the head with the newspaper.

"Ow!" he complained. "Sorry, it's just...weird." he tried to defend himself.

"Hush," she replied. "Leave him alone."

And then she turned to face me again.

"Who's house? Will their parents be home? Is it a party? Will there be drinking? What time?" she rattled off at me, counting off each question with one of her fingers.

"Shane's. Yes. No. No. Twelve o'clock." I answered.

This was typical, maybe not for me but it was typical of my mother to ask Tom and Alexis these same questions whenever they asked to go out. The last time I had asked to go to a friend's house was when I was seven. I used to go to my friend Liam's house all the time, but then he moved to Arizona at the end of second grade and later we had moved into a bigger house in a new town when Alexis became too old to sleep in my parent's bedroom anymore.

"Are you sure there won't be alcohol or drugs there? Maybe I should call the boy's parents..." her voice trailed off, worry creasing her forehead.

"Melissa, relax. I think James is telling the truth, get off the poor boy's back." my dad cut in.

I didn't bother correcting my mom and telling her that Shane was a girl not a boy. It was an unnecessary piece of information that would only cause my mother to worry more. Our little baby boy has a girlfriend! I could hear my mother exclaiming, and I could hear Tom's incredulous You have a girlfriend?. I decided to avoid that particular family drama for the moment.

"So can I have a ride?" I asked again.

"I'll drive you," my dad said.

He had poured himself a cup of coffee and didn't even bother to look up at me from the newspaper he had taken from my mom as he spoke. My mom was still standing by the counter, nervously tapping her fingertips on the granite as my brother and sister gave each other incredulous looks.

"Thanks," I said.

And then I left the kitchen before anyone else could shove questions down my throat about my newly acknowledged friendship with Shane.

I spent the rest of the morning holed up in my room listening to music and trying to decide what to wear. I know that by this point you're probably wondering when Shane is going to become my girlfriend, and maybe some of you are expecting me to have considered this my first date (if it had been a date it would have been, in fact, my first date) but it wasn't a date and I didn't consider it to be a date; and neither, as far as I could tell, did Shane. However I was nervous, because this would be the first time since the second grade that I had been invited to somebody else's house to hang out other than family occasions or for school projects. I wanted to look good if nothing more for the sake of looking good. And really, can you blame me?

When twelve o'clock rolled around I walked downstairs. I had decided on wearing blue jeans and a Blink-182 T-shirt Tom had gotten me for Christmas a few years ago along with my old gray Nike sneakers. My dad was waiting for me in the living room, watching a baseball game with Tom. I don't remember who was playing, but I do remember the way Tom howled in anger when the pitcher of his favorite team gave up a homerun, and the way my dad watched with quiet disgust.

"Ready?" he asked me, without looking up.

My dad had a knack for knowing when somebody was around even when he couldn't see them. We always called it his sixth sense when we were little, but my dad just chalked it up to peripheral vision, saying "God gave you eyes, evolution made them better."

"Yeah." I answered.

I grabbed the keys for him off the table by the front door and tossed them to him as he got off the couch. Tom waved goodbye without taking his eyes off the screen and we left.

"Where are we headed?" he asked nonchalantly.

"Baker Street." I replied.

As we drove he turned on the Sirius radio to his favorite station and began to whistle the tune to a song I did not know.

"The Cars." my dad said suddenly.

I looked at the dashboard and saw that he was right, the song was by The Cars. Ever since I had been little by dad always liked to announce the song and the artist playing to show off how much he knew about music, which was in all honestly quite limited to his own taste but withing his taste was quite vast. I had always loved to check him, waiting for that moment when my dad, the person who I thought knew everything, would be wrong. Over the years it had turned into a kind of game, there were no points really but I always felt a little triumphant whenever he got the song wrong, and he always looked smug whenever he got it right.

"Maybe," I said, which my dad knew really meant that he was right.

"Who's better than me?" he joked, turning onto Baker Street.

"Me," I said. "That's the house right there." I added, pointing to number three.

We pulled into the driveway, and he surprised me by not stopping the car.

"What time can we expect you to be home?" he asked.

I looked at him. I didn't know the protocol for this. Was he supposed to come inside? Or was that just something parents did when their kids were in second grade? Regardless, I knew my mother would have come inside with me if she had driven me. But it was by dad, and apparently he thought it was unnecessary to accompany me inside.

"Umm," I said, still a little caught off guard. "Can I text you later?"

"Sure."

And that was that.

I got out of the car and walked up to the front door. My dad didn't even wait to see if anybody opened the door, didn't wait to see if I would go inside or if I would just leave. I know my mom would've, she would've wanted to see just exactly who I was hanging out with. She would have waited to see if I would go inside or if I had made the whole story up to seem like I had friends. My mom was very paranoid about everything. But it seemed that my father didn't have any of those nagging doubts in his mind, or at least if he did he kept them to himself.

I knocked on Shane's front door. I waited for a few moments. I could hear voices inside but couldn't make out what they were saying, and then I could hear footsteps and the dark wood door swung open to reveal an older version of Shane.

"Hi, you must be James," she said, smiling at me kindly.

"Hi Mrs. Dorsey," I smiled back.

"Shane told us all about you, come in come in! Don't be shy."

Mrs. Dorsey ushered me through the front door and into what must have been the living room before I could think of anything to say. There was a man sitting on the couch who must have been Shane's father. He stood up when he saw me, and I could see the football player he had once been. He towered over me at what must have been six and a half feet tall. He had broad shoulders and even though his T-shirt was a little loose on him I could see all of his muscles.

"Hello," he said, smiling down at me.

"Hi, I'm James." I said, and stuck out my hand to shake his.

"I'm John," he replied.

And then Shane appeared on the steps that led up to the second floor. She gave me a sort of half smile, which for anyone else would be the equivalent of running up to an old friend and hugging them in greeting, and walked over to where her mother stood by the coach.

"It's so nice to finally meet you, James." Mrs. Dorsey said jovially. "I know she's going to want us to leave you alone, but can we get you anything to eat or drink?"

"Mom," Shane interrupted before I could answer. "If we get hungry we'll get food. We're going to be out back, okay?"

She didn't bother to wait for a reply before she motioned for me to follow her through a doorway that I could see led into the kitchen. I waved goodbye to her parents and murmured a quick "Nice to meet you" before following her through the kitchen to a set of french doors that led to her backyard.

"They're so annoying," she grumbled under her breath.

"They seem nice," I said, not quite sure what I was supposed to say in response to that.

"Whatever, you don't live with them." she replied grumpily.

I followed her over to a large tree in her backyard and joined her on the ground when she sat with her back leaning against the trunk. It was then that I got my first look at her backyard. It was a decently sized piece of land that had been fenced in. It had two big trees (I'm not quite sure what kind and I don't think that the type of tree really matters anyway as long as you know there were two) one of which being the one that we were sitting against, and the other maybe ten feet away with a hammock stretched between the two. There was an in-ground pool and also a patio with an expensive looking grill and a glass table with a large umbrella over it. All in all I liked it.

We sat in silence for quite a while, and I don't know what Shane was doing or thinking but I was thinking about anything and everything. I watched as a butterfly fluttered lazily by us and I began to wonder about life, and the curiousness of it all. And that thought led me to thinking about death, and the mysteriousness of it all. And that thought led me to asking aloud:

"Are you afraid of death?"

Shane looked at me for a moment, and I could see in her eyes that she was trying to see where that particular question came from. However after a moment she seemed to mentally shrug, she had become accustomed to my rambling thoughts by now.

"Not really."

"I am." I said.

"I don't see the point of being afraid of it." she said slowly. "I mean, it's going to happen, there's no way around it. And if it's going to happen and there's nothing we can do to stop it then why should I bother sitting around being scared of it?"

"Because there's no way around it. That's the scariest thing about it though." I argued. "You can't avoid it."

"I don't see the point of wasting time being afraid of it when I can be just living."

That was the moment.

That was the moment that I realized Shane didn't see the point in a lot of things. That was the moment where I realized why Shane was Shane. Shane was just living. She wasn't living to live, she wasn't living to die, she wasn't living to be somebody else. She was just living, and that made her special.