Trapped in Forever

32 ~ The Stupidity of Apologies

I wasn’t entirely sure why I was there, with my fingers still gripping onto the key ring dangling from the ignition, the key twisted so the engine had stopped it’s muffled humming and occasion cough, and my seatbelt was still wrapped around my chest, the thick material grazing against my neck, and Roxanne’s hula girl on the dashboard was still bobbing, swaying her hips side to side, her grass skirt rustling together, and fingers poised over her ukulele.  The aromas of fried Chinese food, cigarette smoke—almost undoubtedly Sarah-Anne’s—and garbage, with sporadic whiffs of icing sugar, laundry detergent, and gasoline. The sky was dimming over the rooftops of the buildings in front of the curb where I had parked my Smart Car, the streetlights already flickering on and a few cars sped past the bumper of my car with their headlights glaring. On the passenger seat beside me was the CD, the masking tape labeled with my name still there, but now it carried Mikayla’s echoing words that guys didn’t make mix CDs for girls they didn’t like.

A guy liking you seemed to be something every girl wanted, something she would dream about since she started applying her LipSmackers lip-gloss and started tacking up large, thick posters of boy bands members and guys dressed in neon, shooting a sultry look to the camera, and then she would scan her eyes across the hallways at school, searching for that perfect boy to return her gaze. For years, Roxanne tried to convince me that this was I needed, to finally pluck up the courage to slowly step towards that boy she thought I was perfect for, we’d totally make a cute couple, she said. We both liked superheroes—he was one of the few boys sporting a Flash T-shirt—and she had a hunch that his favorite subject was history too, because he wasn’t falling slack in his chair behind his desk during a lesson.

I rambled on excuses that stumbled into my brain when she would bring him up when she glance over my shoulder, across the glossy hallways crowded with teenagers, clutching their graphic binders, heads either down or held high, and see him there, juggling his wearing Superman Returns binder, the edges almost white, and his undersized Batman Begins backpack, and it didn’t help my case that there was a history textbook sticking out of it. She would nudge my arm, and nod over to him, her gaze lingering on his fumbling body as if she wasn’t afraid at all of him discovering this, and she wasn’t. She thought he was dorky, with so many superhero graphic logos attached to his clothes and school supplies, and she said that his horn rimmed glasses didn’t make him look as much like Peter Parker as he wanted, and then rolled her eyes when I corrected her that Clark Kent wore horn rimmed glasses. To her, he was the nerd you set up your prude of a best friend to so she’d finally get a date for Junior Prom.

The real reason, though, that I didn’t want to grasp onto my own The Dark Knight binder and tilt my chin higher in the air, like the cheerleaders who strutted past me, shooting Roxanne a glossy, pearled grin while ignoring me entirely, was because I was terrified of him rejecting me, that he would glance over my plainness—take in my dull brown eyes that weren’t sparkling blue, like Roxanne’s, or mysterious hazel like Orion’s, and then the freckles that darted across my cheeks that felt more noticeable than scars under the eyes of others—and mumble something about him already having a date, but thanks anyway. And then I would end up becoming the third wheel to whoever brought Roxanne this year, staring down in my punch glass when they would kiss or dance, and bite my lip every time I thought a guy would ask me to dance, but all of their gazes slid past mine, so easily it left an echoing pang, and their outstretched hand would reach for Roxanne, their tuxedo clad arm positioned in front of my face, giving me faint whiffs of his heavily applied cologne.

But now, as I sat in the driver seat of my Smart Car, the reflective side of the CD glinting off of the roof of my car as I sat there, feeling the color flood down my veins, draining from my face and dripping down in my toes, where my feet felt especially heavy overtop of the mat, littered with gravel and the rectangular, white strips of paper from a straw, I was terrified, but not of being rejected. I wasn’t scared of him saying he already had a date, or that he didn’t think of me like that, or even really as a friend, but instead, I was afraid of him not saying that. I was afraid of his easygoing grin that so effortlessly aimed itself for my face, and that he would pull out another one of those mix CDs from one of his sticker adorned, rusty locker, and allow Mikayla to whisper that sentence back into my ears, and then Roxanne to whisper another.