Between You and Me

Chapter 3

"Oh no, this is not going to work!"

There were about a dozen boxes all over the living room and hallway. Tristan was moving in today.

Maybe they made a mistake jumping into this. Having this strange guy move in with them. Johanna was still trying to find out as much as she could about this boy. He was twenty-one, almost exactly two years older than her. He turned twenty-one last October, she would be twenty in September.

Zee's birthday was a month away, and turning twenty-one she knew her sister would go wild. Now she had someone to party with. Zee already liked to drink and smoke weed on occasion. She wondered if Tristan was into all of that. Zee also pretty much partied every weekend with friends, sometimes not making it home till the wee hours of the morning.

Tristan attended Vashon High School, while she grew up on the southside and attended Roosevelt High. The high school one attended mattered in St. Louis. When meeting new people and you found out they were from St. Louis, the next question was "What high school did you attend?"

That was because you could assume their socio-economic level by the answer to that question. It was sometimes not a valid assumption of the haves and have-nots. It meant Tristan grew up in a mostly Black neighborhood while hers was a bit diverse.

She did not know much else about him, though she scoured the internet for him with little trace. He played football at Vashon and was pretty good until a knee injury.

"What are you griping about?" Zee held a box in her hands, helping Tristan with his things.

"He has a lot of stuff!"

Zee looked around at the boxes on the floor. Plus there were lots of equipment things that looked like a YMCA was being built in their living room.

"Oh yeah, Trist likes to work out. I told him we had a basement he could put all of this in."

"Huh? Dad's stuff is all down there." Cluttered things of old projects of his. Besides their grandmother, he was the only one who lived there most of his life. Her auntie married Uncle Billy right out of high school and moved off with him. Her Uncle Richard went off to college and never moved back home.

Her father, the black sheep, never could get his life right so lived there between shacking up with various girlfriends. The basement was cluttered with his things.

"Bump that. It's our house now, he needs to come get his shit or it gets trashed," Zee stated with authority in her voice. "Besides, you hated going down there building all that wack ass shit. He wanted a boy so bad."

She smiled at her sister. "Then you should tell him you're gay and you like building things."

"No, I like cars. Fixing cars...and that old man doesn't need to know a thing about me." Zee headed upstairs with the box while Johanna looked around at the things.

At least he seemed neat. Everything was in boxes, taped up, and labeled. Some guys would just throw things in a bag, or worse just grab it and go. It was good that he was neat, she could not stand someone messy.

She was looking at the box that was left open with several picture frames in it. She pulled out one of the framed pictures and studied it. A young boy, likely a young Tristan, standing bare-chested with a football in hand and an older man who looked like the spitting image of Tristan now. She second-guessed that he was the kid and maybe he was the older guy. But the older guy seemed older than Tristan now.

She studied it a bit closer. Tristan was definitely the little kid. Probably his father even though he said he was not around. He for sure inherited his looks from his father. She wondered what his mother looked like now.