Her Spot

The perfect day had just been had. It didn’t matter if it had been a school day. In all honesty, I found school to be decent; enjoyable even. Learning new things was always something I had taken to with great earnest and thirst. But no one would ever expect that to be the case with just a glance at me. My jeans were always skinny, my belt not ever tight enough to keep my waist band above my ass, and I was always wearing a hoodie. I looked like a prick that didn’t care one bit about school, but I always achieved the highest grade on average in the classes I was apart of. Overachiever in school, underachiever in dress.

I wasn’t up to my standards, but I was up to all the standards of the ladies. I was “hot” to them. I was less than attractive. Less than handsome. I was just hot and they all wanted me to “date” them. As in, say we were in a relationship and screw me. Just to say they did. But my heart was held in the tight grasp of a girl I had long since left behind in a move when I was just ten years old. It’s hard to leave friends behind when you’re a kid because the chances of ever seeing them again is so small. But by some strange twist of fate, we found each other again.

It was only a couple of years after I moved. I was thirteen, she would have still be twelve; just younger than me by a couple of months. My friends and I were at the movies a several towns over, where I had lived before, for the sake of getting out of the same background for a few short hours. My friend Brian’s dad had offered to drive us out because he had some friends he had wanted to visit for a little while anyhow.

“Yeah, I lived here until I was ten,” I told Brian and Jalen and their girlfriends, Mimi and Lauren.

They looked shocked that I hadn’t told them this before. Jalen asked me inquisitively, “So, is there anyone here that you still talk to or whatever?”

“Nah. I don’t know where any of my friends are anymore. But there was this one girl. For some reason, we were really close. She was my best friend and I miss her a lot.”

Brian poked me in the shoulder, “Someone has a crush.”

The girls giggled and I blushed more than any guy should underneath the front of my hair, “No, I don’t. I haven’t seen her in three years, guys. I can’t have a crush on her anymore.”

“Yeah, you can,” Jalen said dryly as we walked into the movie theater, with me between the two couples. I was the loner and always had been since I moved. My friends were great, but they weren’t … her.

Her. She was here. Standing in line with a couple of her own friends. My heart started pounding as I stood, transfixed and how pretty she had already gotten in just the few years of our separation. Jalen, Lauren, Brian, and Mimi looked from me to her, me to her, me to her and just grinned at each other.

“Is that her?” Mimi asked in a shy voice with a soft smile on her lips. “She’s pretty, Robbie. Go say hi.”

“She probably doesn’t remember me.”

“What’s her name?” Brian asked with a large grin that quite scared me.

“Beth. I called her Bethy. The only one to ever call her that…” I smiled at the back of her head and she bent forward slightly, her shoulders shaking under her long, curly, frosted brown hair with a giggle.

“He’s got it bad,” Jalen shook his head.

Brian winked at me, “Hey, Bethy!”

She whipped around and looked all over before her eyes settled on my group. Piercing green eyes stared at me curiously as I looked at Brian with fear all over my face. She took a few precarious steps toward me before running full force at me and wrapping her arms around my neck and burying her face in the neck of my hoodie.

I let my shaky arms wrap around her waist as I put my face in her hair and inhaled how she smelled. Like a warm summer breeze. I felt like I should be drinking a lemonade by a pool with her or something. I let tears fall from my eyes and into her hair. My best friend. I found her again.

“Robbie,” she sobbed happily into my shoulder.

“Bethy…”

“I’ve missed you so much! What are you doing here?”

“Getting out of the other town for a few hours. Too much of the same stuff.”

“You look fantastic.”

“So do you. You look so pretty.”

She blushed heavily, “Thank you, Robbie. What movie are you seeing?”

“Star Wars 3,” I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t huge on the previews for this movie, but Brian was all about it and who was I to say no to a night out with friends.

Her smiled dropped, “Oh… I’m seeing something different.”

“You have a phone, right?” I said with the hopes that maybe I wouldn’t lose touch with her again.

She smiled, “I do. Here,” she pulled out a pen and wrote it on my hand, with a little heart underneath, signed with ‘your bethy’s number’. It was in all lower case letters. She folded my fingers gently over the numbers on my palm and said, “Save this and text me later tonight?”

“Of course,” I smiled dreamily at her and my friends dragged me into the ticket line as she strolled into the theater. I added her number into my phone immediately.

I called her that night instead of texting her. It was an excuse to hear her again.

“Hey, Bethy.”

“Robbie! How was your movie?”

“It was alright. When are you free next?”

“Well, tomorrow is Saturday and I don’t think I have anything going on.”

“Is there a way for you to come see me and my family?”

“Let me ask my mom,” I heard her set the phone down and leave the room. When she returned, she sounded happy, “Mom said it would be great to see your parents again. So as long as they are alright with us coming over it’s okay by her.”

“Hold on a sec,” I put my phone on my bed and raced down the stairs to where mom and dad were cuddled on the couch, watching some bad movie that just happened to be on the television, “Would you have any interest in seeing Bethy and her mom again?”

Mom raised her head in surprise, “Where did you run into her?”

“She was at the movies. She gave me her number and her mom and her want to come over tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

“Yes, that’s perfectly alright. Your dad has to work, but I’d love to see Bonnie again,” mom smiled at me.

I grinned back and thanked her, bounding back up the stairs and picking my phone back up. “My mom says she’d love to have you both over,” I smiled into the phone as I sat on the floor and leaned back so I was laying down. At first, I just left my legs bent up with my feet on the floor. I soon became uncomfortable with that and raised them to rest on my bed frame. My bedroom had still been filled with childish toys at that point.

“Okay then. I see you tomorrow? We can catch up?” She sounded very tired on the other end.

“Yeah,” I told her, feeling tired myself.

“Goodnight, Robbie.”

I smiled again, “Goodnight my Bethy.”

-

Every night after that, we spent an hour at the very least on the phone before we went to bed. And every night, I laid upon my floor and stared at my ceiling, just content on listening to her voice. Over the next couple of years, I listened to her laugh about something silly in school that day, or cry about something a boyfriend had done to make upset her. I always wanted to tear that boys heart out. How could anyone make an angel cry?

As the years changed, so did we. My room turned into a blue color. I started playing sports, I grew to enjoy the stuff from Hot Topic quite a bit. She grew into a popular girl who usually wore pink and had a boyfriend every month or so. I never had a girlfriend ever and we were both now sixteen at this point. Everything I did was done for her. Every conversation we had on the phone was because I wanted to hear her. I loved her. Whether she loved me back or not was something that was never brought up and I still hadn’t told her how I felt. I still found myself on the floor, with my feet on my bed frame through everything.

We hung out once a month, because that was all we could afford gas wise and each time we hung out, we ended up wrestling around on my floor and embracing in a way that told each other we needed each other. We were there for each other. We didn’t want to lose each other again.

There was an instance when I saw her, just before my seventeenth birthday where none of that happened. She asked for me to visit her since I had my license already by this point. She sounded very upset, so I dashed to my car and drove over there. When I got there, she was home alone and sitting on her bed, just staring into her lap.

“Bethy, what’s wrong?”

She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. I walked over and kneeled in front of her, “Beth?”

Beth burst into tears, “It’s dad.”

I froze. Her mom and her dad had separated when we were kids. He was a bad man, but it was still her dad and she loved him, “Sweetie, what happened?” I took her hands in mine and squeezed them.

“He was in a car accident. Mom is at the hospital right now. She called me. He was drinking again, Robbie. He was drinking and he ran a stop light at a two way stop. I don’t know what to do. What if I lose him?” She removed her hands from mine and wrapped herself around me, sobbing into my shoulder.

I hugged her tight and stood us up, “We will cross that bridge when it happens, if it even happens.”

She sniffed and pulled away, tears still running silently down her cheeks, “Robbie, I’m so happy I have you.”

“You’ll have me no matter what happens,” I whispered softly and I kissed her.

-

“I don’t know, babe. Prom seems a little overrated, don’t you think?” I said into my phone from my place on the floor of my bedroom. It was senior year and I was nineteen now. She was just a few months from it. We had started dating that very day in her room, nearly two years ago. Nothing had made me happier and still nothing does than to see her and hear her.

“Overrated, Robbie? Non-sense. It’s a great time. If you don’t want to go to yours, that’s fine, but come with me to mine. Please, sweetie?” I could hear her pout.

Sighing, I gave in and sat up, “Okay, Bethy. I will go with you to your senior prom.”

“I love you, Robbie.”

“I love you, too, my Bethy.”

She giggled, “I’m so happy I have you.”

“You’ll always have me. I’m yours, baby. But you need to sleep.”

“Alright. Goodnight, Robbie.”

“Goodnight, my love.”

I snapped my phone shut and laid it on my stomach. My hands came to rest behind my head as I smiled at the picture of her that I had taped up on my ceiling. She asked me once why I had put it all the way over where I did. I told her that for the last six years, I had been talking to her from right there on that very floor. It was the one thing that never changed in all that time. But when we started dating, I wanted to see her whenever I talked to her. If she couldn’t be there, I wanted a picture to put up to the exact spot I look every time.

I rose from my spot on the floor and changed into my pajamas. On my dresser was a promise ring, safe in a box that I would be giving her on prom night. A promise that she would always be my Bethy.