Trapped in Forever

20 ~ Sit their Fat Butts on your Name

Henry Wallis’ card, folded and creased in the center right over the Y, W, and A of his name, slipped out of my jeans pocket and onto the glazed, Heart Pine floorboards of the hallway floor, his name, occupation, and number all staring at me, as if daring me to grab the nearest phone, dial his number, and count the number of dial tones until he answers, maybe with a catchy, but albeit cheesy, greeting issued by the modeling agency.

It must have fallen out of the left pocket of my jeans as I grabbed the discarded garbs of clothing off of my floor, reeking of beer, cigarettes, and pizza—generally things I didn’t want to give my mother the impression I was doing, i.e. underage drinking, smoking, and eating junk food—and gathered them all in my arms, the large, knitted face of a black and orange striped tiger staring up at me, and headed for the laundry room. After I lifted the washing machine lid open, cranked a couple of dials, hearing the screech of the old knob turning, and dumped my clothes inside, slamming the lid shut with a bam! I stepped out the open doorframe to see his folded card on the floor, gaping at me, the colorful words beckoning me to call and fulfill Roxanne’s dream.

I reached down, grasping it by the pointed, white edge of the card and lifted it up to my eyes, rereading the name over and over again, and then the number. It seemed so surreal that the moment could actually be here, knocking at the door, waiting for me to let it in. I ran my thumb, still poorly manicured and chipping, Wet ‘N’ Wild nail polish proving not to be the best choice I’ve made, over the ten numbers aligned together to form his phone number, and I felt a smile tug at my lips as I stood up, catching an unfamiliar glint in my eye in the mirror on the wall across from me.

. . .

I fell back onto my bed, feeling the navy comforter rise under the gust of air beneath my sides before settling, leisurely and inaudibly, and the springs embedded within the mattress squeal as they coiled under my weight, as my eyes landed on the white, rutted ceiling of my room, adorned with light green stars stuck to it with Sticky Tack, forming constellations I had to find print-outs for off of Google. With the card in one hand, my poorly manicured fingers covering the last letters of his name, and my cell phone in my other hand, flipped open, and my thumb poised over the first digit of his number: 5. I paused, hearing the beep as I pressed down the glowing digit, marked with a white 5, and my eyes flickered over to the card again, swallowing, and I felt my heartbeat begin to race again. All I had to do was enter nine more digits and maybe I could finally achieve her dream for her, like dedicating a glossy, black bench to someone, but this would be so much more to her.

There was a bench in the local park, beside the broken fountain with murky rain water amalgamating in the knee deep bottom with crumpled, brown leaves and crushed beer cans missing the tabs, all floating around to create something sordid no one wanted to clean, and the bench sat beneath a large, Elm tree. It was made of granite, casted glints in your eyes during the afternoon and sunset, and notched into the back of the bench was the name Penelope Kenton, gold paint aligning inside the crevices. Most of the time, her name was obstructed by a heavy set woman in an old beige coat with a bag of bird seed propped against her thigh, a newspaper tucked beneath the bag, but it wasn’t like anyone really remembered who Penelope was, anyway. One day, after Roxanne dragged me to the park so she could watch some guys from school skate around the fountain, trying to pull off some kind of stunt on the rim, I wondered just who Penelope was and what made her so important that her posthumous accolade was a bench.  

“Who cares?” Roxanne replied, breezily, never once taking her eyes off Tucker Manny, clad in a pair of ratty, dark jeans and an oversized T-shirt with a logo stamped over his chest that I could never make out, and a gray beanie concealing his black hair, as he fell off of his skateboard and onto the grass, the skateboard rolling away on the cobblestone—clack, clack, clack. “She’s dead. Besides, it’s just a bench. What does that say about someone? ‘We loved you so much that we decided to put your name on a place people are going to sit their fat butts on. R.I.P.’” She shook her head, blond curls falling out from behind the back of her ear, and as she brushed it back, turned back to watching Tucker jump to his feet, cheeks flushed pink under the strands of black hair poking out from under the knit rim of his beanie.