Safe

When I moved to California, I had low expectations. I wasn’t going to be around for long anyway.

That is, before I met Corrine Blake.

This is just another typical story of boy meets girl, but it’s my story of boy meets girl. It’s been told a thousand times in a thousand different places, which may mean nothing to you at all. But in the end it saved my life, so I guess it means something to me.

I can’t say I was ever specifically happy anywhere I’d ever gone, but I don’t think it was for lack of trying. I smiled at the sun when it rose in Atlanta and when it set in New Jersey, when kids scoffed at my skateboard in my suburban Minnesota neighborhood and when the principal broke it in half in the halls in Las Vegas. But I don’t think I ever knew what it ever really meant to smile, to really feel happy, when I moved to California. But Corrine changed that, I guess. That’s probably the best way to put it.

A week after I moved in to California, the collection of pills I’d been accumulating started calling my name from underneath the bathroom sink. I decided to hide them in plain sight, the last place my parents would ever decide to look – not that they would ever decide to look anyway, as they had no idea. Now that I have some clarity, I think I can say that it was probably a cry for help, but I don’t think I would have ever admitted to that then.

At any rate, I left the house that morning with the pills heavy in my jacket pocket like a grenade, beating against my hip every time I rode over a crack in the sidewalk. It was like one of those guessing games at elementary school carnivals – how many little blue pills are in the Rite-Aid bottle? I assumed by the end of the day, I would find out one by one.

The boardwalk was dead at ten o’clock on a Tuesday, most everyone at work or in school at that hour in Santa Barbara. For being one of the most beautiful places I’d lived in my eighteen years of life, it was probably the most absolutely dull. Spending my morning skateboarding was a hell of a lot less dull than spending it behind a tiny little desk at school.

With the wind in my hair I felt like maybe I could just skate for so long and so far I would fly away from Santa Barbara, from my family, from my problems. But I knew that was criminally wishful thinking, so I enjoyed the smell of the sea on the air for one last time as I skated the snaking sidewalk parallel to it.

When I finally grew tired from the heavy burden of freedom, I sat down on the curb. The waves were beating against the shore in a calming, rhythmic pattern, sparkling underneath the warm midmorning sun. The vast blueness went on for as long as the eye could see in all directions, fading out into a gradient as it reached the pale horizon, dotted with swollen cirrus clouds.

This would be a nice place to die, I contemplated, reaching into my pocket and rolling the bottle around against my palm. Calm, quiet, beautiful. The immensity of the world all out in front of me. Maybe I could drown instead and let the ocean take me in its never-ending arms.

“Hey!” a voice suddenly called, snapping me from my thoughts and drawing my attention. A beautiful girl stood in front of me, her skateboard propped up by the weight of her foot on the tail, her long brown hair blowing around her shoulders in the gentle breeze. Her full lips were curled into a coquettish smile beneath a neatly sloped nose, bright and deep eyes focused on me. I felt the breath get knocked from my lungs at the sight of her, surprised that she would have stopped to talk. For a minute, I thought she was calling to someone behind me just out of sheer disbelief.

“Are you alright?” she spoke again, directly to me. I raised my eyebrows, not sure if I was amused or actually excited. I don’t think anyone ever asked me if I was alright before Corrine Blake. I don’t think anyone ever saw me at all.

“Y-yeah,” I stammered, removing my hand from my pocket and letting the pills settle in the bottom like a stone. “I’m fine, no worries. Thanks though.”

She grabbed the nose of her board, now holding it against the side of her mile long legs, cut off only by a pair of the smallest, most faded denim shorts I’d ever seen. No doubt she was beautiful, sending my nerves into a frenzy, but maybe she was a little dumb. Only a girl with nothing between her ears would find an interest in a guy like me.

“Do you go to school around in here?” she asked. “I’ve never seen you before.”

I paused for a moment, afraid to open my mouth to speak again. “I go to Costa. I’ve only been in town for a week.”

“No way!” the girl exclaimed, her lips separating to reveal a shining, white smile. “I go there too! I’m a senior.”

“Small world,” I mumbled. “Me too.”

I felt so tiny, crumpled on the curb beneath her tall, lanky figure. Her body cast a shadow across me, serendipitously blocking me from the sun I needed so desperately. In flash of a moment, the sun was back on me and the girl was sitting at my side, extending her hand for me to take.

“Corrine Blake,” she chirped, waiting for me to shake in return. I worried that my hand would be sweaty from holding the weight of my death in my hand just moments earlier, but her welcome was magnetic and I couldn’t help but take her hand in return.

“Bennett Archer.”

“Bennett Archer,” she mused, that same smile breaking out onto her face. “What a solid name. You could write novels with a name like that.”

I furrowed my brows in her direction, confused at what she meant. “You know, seeing your name on the front of some great novel,” she continued, her gaze floating upward towards the ever-rising sun. “Doesn’t that sound like a dream?”

She gazed at me expectantly, her cobalt eyes shimmering like the ocean in front of us. I shrugged apathetically, not sure exactly what to say. Corrine laughed – a melodic laugh of sorts, something like I’d never heard before.

“Alright soldier, fair enough,” she replied to my silence, shaking her head in a sort of disbelief. “Why aren’t you in school?”

I narrowed my eyes at her, surprised that she would even ask. I thought that everyone in this town was aware of the fact that it was an absolute bore with next to nothing to offer aside from the ocean, much less the sub-par school system. I’d gone to private schools all over the nation, my mental stimulus being pushed to the limit. A public school in the valley wasn’t doing me any favors.

“I could ask you the same question,” I countered.

Her face exuded an expression of surprise and amusement, her eyebrows flicking up for just a split particle of a moment. “Touché. I guess I’ve got a little bit of senioritis. It just seems so much nice to be outside than stuck behind a desk, you know? It’s beautiful out today.”

“Sure is,” I replied with a sigh, shifting my feet around on my skateboard beneath them. As much as I wanted to talk to her, I don’t think I’d really ever learned to talk to girls. They never took much of an interest in me, so I never really needed to try.

“Do you actually skate or is that just for show?”

“I’m sorry?”

That bubblegum laugh tumbled from her lips again, shaking her head so that her long brown waves falling across her face. Something about her made me want to laugh too, the choppy hum from my vocal cords foreign even to me.

“Do you wanna skate with me?” she offered. “There’s not much else to do around here anyway. And not much of anyone else around, either.”

Riding down the boardwalk next to Corrine Blake made me feel the least alone I’d ever felt before in my life, like despite the fact I had no knowledge of anything past her exterior I for once had a friend. Her attention was terrifying and yet so unbelievably warming. Despite the fact that the bottle of pills thudded against my hip bone as we went over every crack.

She outstretched her arms as she rode, motioning to take my hand as we talked about everything under the sun. With her hand grasped in mine, that solitary feeling of flying was suddenly transformed into something entirely different. I don’t think I could ever explain it to another human being for as long as I lived, even if I wanted to or tried.

When I took her home, she asked to hang out again the next day after school. I decided the pills could wait another day. And when she invited me to dinner at her house, I decided another day couldn’t hurt. Corrine handed me excuses as I needed them, pushing D-Day back with effortless abandon until I stopped carrying the bottle around with me, and then I threw them away.

Again, this is just another story of boy meets girl – on the surface, it’s no different than any of the others you’ve heard before. But when her lips touched mine for the first time on the boardwalk one morning, I knew that this was different from the things I’d seen on television. I didn’t have to feel alone anymore. Not for a while at least. And maybe, I would have a chance to breathe for the first time, to get learn how to walk on my own to feet with someone to finally help me. And for the first time, the smile I greeted the sun with had a meaning behind it. And that meaning started with the help of Corrine Blake.