Crashing Into Blue

Chapter 4

Each summer I take it upon myself to find a part-time job. My first summer after high school, I got a job working at Chippy's Homemade Ice Cream Shop. There was as much free ice cream as I could physically eat, air conditioning on the many sweltering days, and a constant supply of music pouring through the overhead speakers. It was the ideal job... until it wasn't. I got sick at the thought of eating ice cream after about three weeks of working there, and my hands were constantly getting frost bitten going in and out of the freezers all the time. The boppy summer songs about salty kisses and bonfires, which I learned constantly played from the overhead speakers on a loop, became enough to make me want to hit myself over the head with my metal ice cream scooper in the hopes that I would momentarily pass out and get some relief from the auto-tuned crap buzzing in my ears. It was an especially awful day, with lots of hot, angry tourists and numb fumbling fingers when he came in.

He had a blonde crew cut, blue eyes so deep and dark they almost seemed navy, and an easygoing smile. I remember that he flashed one at me as he came in, and in that moment I thought that he made smiling look so easy and natural, something that I hadn't mastered yet with a mouth full of braces. I can still remember his order: a double scoop of pistachio and chocolate chip in a waffle cone. When he took it from my hands, our fingers brushed, and my fourteen-year-old heart took flight. A similarly blonde woman with matching eyes called at him from the door, giving me the one piece of information that I was secretly hoping to gather; his name, which turned out to be Patrick. Safe to say he was my first real crush, and my infatuation had only grown over the past four years.

Every summer he and his family have come to the place that Samson, Indigo, and I call home all year round, and they make use of their family's summerhouse, along with a plethora of other resi's (which is what us townie kids call the summer residents). Something in the air changes when those summer months roll around: the wind loses its gentle whisper and instead it carries a raucous chatter. People flood in from all corners, filling up the empty houses that are skeletal during the year, but in the summer, laughter and life wraps around their brittle bones.

Early on in my infatuation, I got the opportunity that I had been hoping for: an opportunity to catch a glimpse of him again. Biking home from the ice cream shop one sunny summer afternoon, disappointed that I hadn't run into him again on one of my shifts in the past week, motion in my peripheral vision caught my attention. I turned my head briefly, and saw two boys reenacting a battle scene on the front lawn of a house. I think I almost got whiplash from the speed of my second head turn, because it was him playing on that front lawn. I also almost crashed my bike into the curb, because I started to swerve from staring off to the side for too

long and not straight ahead. What were the odds that his family had a summerhouse on Flamingo Lane, the same street that our house resided on? To my fourteen-year- old self, it was simply destiny, and this was how the universe decided to insert us into each other's lives.

Over the years, it's gone from imitating battle sequences to tinkering around underneath the hood of his car, shirtless may I add. And I'm still here riding my bike around, still almost crashing into curbs. But one thing that has changed is how I feel about destiny; now I think it's all a bit more of a cruel joke, putting us in such close proximity. I wish that it set us a bit farther apart.