Guardians and Angels | Chapter One (Part 4)

Sunlight has a way of making everything from the night before feel like a dream. I wish it had been… but it was a regular night in America for us. When I woke up he was looking down at me, the biggest smile on his face, the gold highlights of his hair sparkling in the morning rays, laughing for some reason, his smirk sharply carved upon his cheeks.

“You make the craziest noises in your sleep”

“No I don’t”

He cocked his head like a dog trying to figure out a math question.

“Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Get all sensitive when I tell you the things I like about you”

I didn’t answer him. I don’t know if it was his compliment or his truthfulness that muted my response. Inside my adolescent mind he might as well had said he loved me. It felt both embarrassing and boisterous… the parts of me that were tucked away from the world because of shame began opening the curtains upon my life path that morning. He was probably the first person to look through and see the other side of me.

His mother made pancakes that morning and at one point in between syrup and smacking our lips she said, “I’m sorry you had to hear that last night”

I didn’t know what to say so I just looked down and kept eating. When I looked up at my friend he was staring out the window. Lost in more than his thoughts and my heart clenched quickly. A painful pulsating spasm right in the center of me.

He won all kinds of medals that day. Stole the show. They gave out huge trophies almost as tall as him for the competition. I remember us having to fit them in his mom’s Escalade and turning them sideways so we could shut the doors. People would walk by and shake his hand and congratulate him, tell him he was a talented boy, and his father would be proud of him.

“Your father would be proud of you”

“Made your daddy proud today”

“Reminds me of your dad out there”

“Where’s your father at? I knew I didn’t hear him cheering”

“Tell your dad I said 'Hi' when you see him”

Over and over and over again. Now I knew why he was so strong. People never stopped picking at his scabs. Relentless reminders tearing at him every weekend.

We didn’t talk much the next week. Parting ways and going home alone probably caused us to get inside our heads, I guess. We knew each other’s patterns with our eyes closed, so it wasn’t hard to find the spaces where we wouldn’t be. After a week it started getting weird. When I did see him there weren’t any smirks, no little waves. During wrestling practice he wrestled with everyone but me for a few days in a row.

Nobody else noticed but it was the end of my world. It was all I could think about.

He was a magnet and I was trapped in his pull. The funny thing about magnets is they know you can feel their pull but never realize you can feel their push even harder when they decide to repel you.

I found him alone before a Friday match in the locker room by chance. I had gone in to get something I needed and he was sitting alone with his headphones on, no music playing. A dragonfly caught in amber, motionless.

“Can we talk?”

My voice sounded “sensitive,” omg

“Sure”

“Did I do something wrong?”

He smiled. His face lightened.

It was as if the sun came out across the inside parts of him that he had kept cloaked. He turned a shade of beaming bronze and began shining in front of me. Daybreak.

“You?”

He giggled and looked away.

“No, you did everything perfect”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was the last thing I expected and I think it knocked the breath out of me a bit. So I sat there for a while. I wasn’t ever going to bring up that “Maybe” between us.

“I’m sorry about your dad”

Pause.

“He’s not my dad, Christopher”

He said it as he looked at me and made eye contact with the sound of spears piercing. I began to cry and looked downward and was genuinely trying to hide it. When I looked up I remember making true eye contact with him for the second time in our lives. That lock clicked again and never unlocked. He saw into me and I saw into him. I smirked and said,

“I won’t ever mention it again”