Stoplights

Yellow. Red........Rucker.

My foot feels heavy as I slowly accelerate my vehicle from the stoplight. I close my eyes, and hear him in the passenger seat beside me.

"Watch it speed demon, the cops pull over anyone going above 45 here."

I open my eyes again, and stare at the brake lights of the truck in front of me. Driving is weird now, with his voice echoing in my head; the memory of his voice.

I flip my blinker up, focusing on the steady sound of its ticking for as long as I could, and slowly turn right into the parking lot of the small, local chapel. It was a rundown building, with white and peeling paint. The staple was broken in half by a storm that passed through town years ago, but no one ever bothered to fix it.

I turn off my engine, lean back in my seat, and stare at the staple.

"When I get rich, and move back here from my four houses, I'm going to fix up this town real nice, starting with this church, and that damn staple."

I smile, remembering the unwavering determination in his voice, and my witty reply.

"If you really want to help the town, you and your money should have the place torn down and build something actually worth coming to Lowrence for, like a sushi restaurant or something."

I remember he stared at me like I had just confessed to murder in the first degree.

"You want me to tear down the first building of the town, literally the staple of Lowrence, for sushi? I can't believe you'd even suggest such a thing Cor."

Our laughter dies out to a ghostly whisper, only to be interrupted by soft patter of rain against my car. I stayed there, waiting for the raindrops to fully consume my entire windshield, leaving the world distorted. That's how life felt right now; blurry. I sigh and swing open the door to my car.

It's time.

By the time I reach the steps of the chapel, my hair is damp and my clothes soggy. I straighten out the skirt of my black dress and pull my cardigan tighter around myself. I lift my hair onto the front of my shoulders and tuck it behind my ears, hoping to look presentable enough for the hour.

Just one hour, just one.

I slip into a pew in the very back, sliding all the way down to the right, closest to the window. I stare straight ahead at the altar; at the casket. I can feel eyes on me, giving me sorrowful and pitiful looks. I twist my hands in my lap, and wring my fingers. I want to scream at them, but I don't.

"I'm glad you could make it, Coretta," says a voice from beside me. I turn and face his mother, and give her a blank stare. She is noticeably thinner, her face hollow. Her eyes are red and shiny from unshed tears. She pulls her lips into a tight grin, her lips quivering slightly.

"He would be so happy you're here, sweetie." I turn my face away from her and back to the altar, focusing on the white, marble-like material of the casket.

"He would have liked black better." I don't even recognize my own voice as I say the words. His mother fumbles back a step.

"Oh," I hear her whisper, and she brings her arms across her chest, hugging herself. She wants to say more, I can feel it, but she steps away. I breathe a sigh of relief.

More people file into the chapel, and I finally turn my head to look out the window, my eyes inevitably coming to a focus on the changing stop light of the intersection closest to the church.

I watch the colors turn at their slow pace.

Yellow, for just a few seconds. Now red, for a while longer.

His smiling face illuminates my mind. I hear the organs start to play, and people start to rise from their pews, but I remain seated, my eyes never leaving the now green stop light, and my mind drifts to last summer.

We choke out tired laughs as we run as fast as our legs can carry us. Granted neither of us are track stars, but a faster pace would be possible if we weren't struggling to carry a massive stoplight through the woods.

"Rucker I think we lost him!" I exclaim, watching him duck under a tree branch, and I follow his actions suit. He simply replies with another loud laugh.

We carry the stoplight a half mile through the woods, Rucker leading and me copying his every move right behind him. My fingers are just starting to cramp from carrying the light when the familiar shack comes into view. We just about sprint the remaining few hundred feet and burst into the shack, almost taking the door off its hinges, making us laugh even more.

"I can't believe we actually fricken got it!" Rucker exclaims, letting out an excited holler. He turns to me and picks me up, spinning us in a circle. I laugh and shout with him, my fists going up in the air celebrating our victory. He sets me back down and pulls me into his side, throwing his arm over my shoulder as we both turn to face the stoplight. Rucker lets out a sigh and I turn my face slightly to steal a glance at him. A smile dances on his lips, his eyes not leaving the light.

"This is going to be the best addition to the collection yet," he says, and I pull my eyes from him and look around the shack. The walls are covered in every type of traffic sign you could think of: stop signs, slow children playing, do not trespass, caution danger, population signs, yield signs, and so many more.

We had been collecting them for ages, keeping them in our rooms and hiding them in our closets from our parents, until Rucker had finally built a place to be officially ours with our own roof and rules, and to house our collection: the shack. Some of the signs we were lucky enough to just stumble upon, and some, like our most prized, the city of Lowrence population sign, we were sly enough to take in the dead of night, like the stop light tonight.

Rucker takes my hand and my heart gives a jump of excitement.

"Now the real work begins," he says, turning to me with a smirk and giving my hand a squeeze. I roll my eyes at him to hide the blush rising to my cheeks and give a laugh.

"Right, like hauling that thing through the woods wasn't real work," I mutter sarcastically. Rucker chuckles and reaches for his tool belt. If it was one thing that he loved to do and was good at, it was to fix things, and make them even better than they were before.

He removes his infamous mangled, blue flannel, and buckles his tool belt around his hips. I try not to look too long at his arms, lean and strong from his obsessive mechanical work, or the way his black t-shirt clung tightly to his broad and muscular torso. He pulls up two tall stools, setting the stoplight on one and takes a seat on the other. I sit down on one of the beanbags his mom bought him for his 15th birthday, and my eyes rise to his face.

His square jaw is clenched and his eyebrows are furrowed in concentration as he tugs and pulls at the wires of the stoplight. His hands are already dirty, which is no surprise given we stole the stoplight from the dump. He grabs his screwdriver and clanks around inside the light. He raises the tool from his work and holds it carefully in his mouth, concentrating on the work with his hands again. His jet-black hair falls into his face, covering his piercing green eyes ever so slightly.

"You look older when you work," I say before I can even register that I openly admitted that I was staring at him. I feel heat rise to my cheeks again as he turns and looks at me, but I hold his gaze. He stares at me for a while.

"We've both really grown up this summer," he says finally, his eyes never leaving mine. I look down at my hands in my lap. He was right, we had, but not necessarily together. He ran with his crew, and I ran with mine. We may have been best friends growing up, but we also grew into very different people. High school was a challenge for us, being parts of opposite crowds. It hurt us both, but summers always made up for it; summer was our safe haven.

Yet this summer was different. I had an opportunity to attend a journalism camp in Colorado, and was gone for the first two months of summer, leaving Rucker in Lowrence, alone. It had shifted things between us, we could both feel it. For so long we were always just one call away from one another, and this summer was a reality check for the inevitable distance that was going to seperate us when I leave for college. Things were different now, more serious.

"Did you send out your applications yet?" I ask quietly, shaking my head to a new train of thought. Rucker fumbles with the screwdriver, and remains quiet. He goes to turn his head from me, but it's too late; I see the corner of his mouth twitch, something he does only when he's hiding something.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "You did send them, right?" The edge to my voice is steel-like.

He then turns to me and gives me a hard look.

"No, I didn't."

My ears are ringing, his words echoing in my head.

"What do you mean you didn't, Rucker? That was your only chance to-"

"To what?!" he yells, standing from his stool, "To get out of Lowrence? To be free?"

My eyes drop back to my hands, and I wringe my fingers.

"Well let me tell you Cor, not everyone has the grades or the money like you to leave. Some people don't want to leave at all, okay? Is that so awful of an idea for you to grasp?" His words were sharp, but there was emotion behind them.

We sit in silence, Rucker continuing to work on the stoplight while I tilt my head back, staring up at the ceiling. I feel as if I'm about to go cross-eyed when suddenly the room goes dark, and green light illuminates the shack.

I stand quickly, watching as the green of the stoplight flows over everything in the room. I hear Rucker give a frustrated sigh, and I turn to look at him.

"I don't know why its not changing, it's supposed to be changing." He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair. The green of the stoplight made his eyes shine like emeralds and cast stark shadows all along his face, highlighting and contrasting his features. I wanted to stay there and look at him forever. I wanted to be able to close my eyes and see him like this always; beautiful.

I rest my hand on his shoulder, and his eyes meet mine.

"It doesn't need to change, Rucker. The green is perfect."

He stares at me for a long while before rising from his seat slowly, his eyes never breaking our gaze. He inches closer and closer to me, and I don't back away, until our faces are only a breath apart.

"I don't want to leave Lowrence, Coretta. I want to stay here. I want to stay here so you'll always have something to come back to."

My eyes blur with tears as I quickly turn my head from the window and stand from my pew. I turn and walk out the chapel without a word. The sky is even darker with more rain clouds as I reach my car, and use the back of my hand to choke back a sob as I start the engine.

Tears flow freely down my cheeks as I make the turns that have been permanently mapped into my brain. I reach the park and turn off my car, starting for the woods. Twigs slap my shins and tear at my dress, but I don't care, I don't feel anything. I'm numb.

Rucker had always put me first. Me. And I couldn't do the same for him.

The shack comes into view, and before I even realize it I'm sprinting. I burst through the door. Everything was just as he left it, like nothing had ever happened and that he would walk in any minute and buckle on his tool belt once more.

You'll always have something to come back to.

His words echo in my head. My heart races and my hands are wet with sweat. I run them through my hair, tugging at my roots. I squeeze my eyes shut, and I scream.

It rips through my body and tears through my soul as I release all the pain that I held in from the moment I learned of his accident.

You'll alwyas have something to come back to.

I scream and scream, and then I'm ripping down sign after sign; throwing them across every which way of the shack, out the door, not caring where they end up. I'm no longer numb; I'm vibrating with anger.

You'll always have something to come back to.

I tear everything down, breaking the signs which then cut up my hands and arms, but I don't stop. I throw Rucker's tool belt and the stools I can so clearly remember him sitting on, as if it were yesterday.

But it wasn't yesterday; he will never interact with any of this ever again.

Why did you lie? Why did you leave me?

I don't stop until my hands are bleeding and my legs are shaking from exhaustion. I fall onto the bean bag I had sat in only a few months prior, watching him craft; full of life.

I don't know how long I'm sitting there for, but when my mind comes back into focus, I realize it's dark.

I slowly get to my feet and start for the door to the shack, only to trip on a sign and lose my sneaker. I sigh and reach for the light switch of the shack. I feel the familiar, small, plastic lever, and flip it up with my fingertips.

Bright green light floods throughout the shack like a tropical sea, leaving me stunned. It illuminates the mess I made, comforting the disaster like a soft blanket.

Rucker had made the stoplight the primary light source of the shack.

I slowly make my way to the stoplight, which was placed on a stool in the corner of the room, where it was somehow lucky enough to escape my rage, just like how Rucker and I were somehow lucky enough to escape the dump with it that night last summer. I reach out and place my hand on the orb. I close my eyes.

It was warm, like his touch; when he held me to his side, when he squeezed my hand, and when he breathed on my face. Rucker's face that summer night, in this green light, makes its way to my mind's eye. The shadows contrasting his jaw, the green hue highlighting his lips, and his eyes bright like jewels. I open my eyes and stare at the green stoplight.

I decide to eternally carry his profile, his memory, in emerald, and only that. My memory of him does not need to change like a normal stoplight, it can remain a single color for eternity, for that's how I know he wants to be remembered.

I smile at the green orb of the stoplight.

"It doesn't need to change," I whisper, my eyes glossing, knowing that somewhere, he was listening.

"The green is perfect."