Happy (belated) birthday Haritha! I'm in Tejas now, but you'll be here in less than a year, and I absolutely cannot wait. I love you and enjoy not being a minor anymore...and this story. :)
-cl-
I was at Half-Price Books when I met him.
We were both perusing the Classics section. I already had To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, Wuthering Heights, Catcher in the Rye, and The Great Gatsby piled up beside me; in my right hand was Les Miserables, five hundred pages of tough sledding.
"You don't want to read that," he said.
My head snapped up, and I was about to tell this random boy to piss off, but his eyes caught me. They were a deep russet brown, and turned light caramel when the sunlight caught his face. Underneath his left eye was a purple-black bruise—small, but still noticeable.
The boy grinned at my gaping form. "See, Les Mis was originally written in French. The version you've got in your hand is translated and probably unabridged. You don't know how good that translation is. Reading it is just going to make you miserable."
My mouth dropped open further, if possible.
"You're probably only attempting it because you're interested in the musical," he continued. "Maybe see the show first, then try reading it. But if you're still hell-bent on reading a book that's a show, then try this." His warm brown eyes quickly scanned the shelves and focused on a worn paperback on the 'D' shelf. He flipped it out and held it up.
"Oliver Twist," he announced.
I couldn't help it. I smiled. I could already see the Artful Dodger and Nancy dancing around in my head.
"How'd you know?" I murmured, casting Les Miserables aside and taking Oliver.
He shrugged. "Lucky guess." I laughed, and a shy smile formed on his face.
"I'm Claire Lyons," I said, setting Oliver on top of my pile and sticking out my hand. He shook it and hesitated for the slightest of seconds before responding: "I'm Derrick Harrington."
We spent the rest of the afternoon in that Classics section. It seemed as though he had read nearly every book there, and we rifled through all of them, trying to determine what to put in my pile and what to keep out.
"Fahrenheit 451?"
"I like the concept."
"Pride and Prejudice?"
"Pretty girly, but you'll probably like it."
"Of Mice and Men?"
"I hate Steinbeck, so don't bother."
By the end of the afternoon, my stack nearly reached my upper thigh, and we scared the checkout lady when we dumped them all on the counter.
"Do you live around here, Derrick?" I asked as we carried the books back to my car.
He bit his lip. "Not exactly."
"Are you staying with someone else?"
Derrick shoved The Picture of Dorian Gray and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn into the backseat and pressed his lips into a firm line. "No."
"Then…"
"To be honest? I was just going to hang out at Denney's until they kicked me out and then go from there," he confessed, his cheeks turning a deep shade of red.
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
"Do you need someplace to stay?"
-dh-
I wasn't looking for charity when I took the bus from White Plains to Rye. My plan was to stay out of sight, keep a low profile, just like always, but then I saw her with her eyebrows all scrunched up, staring at Les Mis. And now, four hours later, here she was, offering me bed and board.
"You're not serious, are you?" I asked.
"I am!" she said with an earnest look. "I'm renting this apartment for the summer, and I've got a couch…"
"But you just met me," I protested. "I could be a rapist. Or a serial killer."
She looked me up and down and snorted. "Who, you? You're like, what, fifteen? You're hardly a rapist."
"I just turned sixteen," I snapped, indignant.
She shrugged. "Take the offer or leave it. I just figured you'd rather have a couch to crash on than a sticky booth at Denney's." She plucked The Secret Garden out of my hands and made for the driver's side door.
"Wait!" I cried. She turned.
"I'll take your offer," I sighed. She grinned and unlocked the door. We both climbed in.
"You better not turn out to be the rapist," I muttered. She laughed and turned up the radio.
-cl-
In my gut, I knew that Mom and Dad letting me rent this apartment for the summer was not a cue to start bringing home random boys I'd just met. But I couldn't help it. I liked this Derrick kid, I really did, even if he was two years younger than me.
I giggled as I watched him explore my little one-bedroom apartment. He marveled at the cream-coloured couch, the stainless steel fridge, and my (somewhat obnoxious) king-sized bed.
"Did you buy out PB Teen or something?" he asked, incredulous.
"Most of this stuff came from my parent's house," I explained.
"Did the claw-foot bathtub come from your parent's house, too?"
"Ah, no, that came with the place."
I picked out some sheets and old flannel blankets from the linen closet (read: pile of old sheets and blankets on the floor of the hall closet) and spread them out over the couch.
"There you go," I said. "Just, uh, let me know if you need to use the bathroom or anything, and if you feel inclined to steal the TV and leave, just—"
He cut me off by suddenly turning and hugging me, hard.
-dh-
When I woke up, Claire was cooking breakfast.
"Normally I just eat oatmeal, but I wasn't sure what you liked so I made cinnamon rolls, bacon, and oatmeal," she explained.
"No, this is great!" I cried. I immediately piled five cinnamon rolls and three strips of bacon onto my plate.
"Yeah, make sure to eat a lot, because this counts as your lunch, too." She shoveled oatmeal into her mouth and smirked at me.
"Do you not believe in lunch?" I asked.
"Not one bit."
She quickly informed me of her schedule. She woke up at 10 and ate brunch, then showered and got ready to go to work, which was at Barnes & Noble. She got off work at 8, ate a little bit, and then watched a movie from her vast DVD collection (which I thought could rival Blockbuster—it took up three whole bookshelves). She went to bed about midnight, except on Saturday nights—she'd go to bed semi-early in order to wake up in time for church. And if I were going to live with her, I was going to have to follow this schedule.
"You do want to live here, right, Derrick? I mean, I'm not asking you to pay rent or anything, but you're welcome to sleep on my couch for as long as need to."
"Yeah, I do want to live here." She grinned at me, and I smacked her with one of my pillows, and soon we were waging an all-out pillow fight, loud enough that her neighbors started banging on the walls.
Falling for her wasn't part of the plan either, but it happened anyway.
-cl-
I never realized how lonely I was until Derrick came along.
I couldn't imagine my apartment without him. Hell, I couldn't imagine my life without him. Caring for him, making him oatmeal and washing his clothes and pestering him to wake up and come to church with me, felt natural.
He pitched in, of course. He got a job at the café in the Barnes and Noble that I worked at. We took an old jar and wrote 'Grocery Funds' on it and both dumped parts of our paychecks—and any tips he made—into it.
Grocery shopping was the best. We'd go to Whole Foods and buy anything and everything we could think of—Pop-Tarts, Oreos, Flaming Hot Cheetos. We'd come back with a hundred dollars worth of food, laughing as we unpacked it, wondering why we had even bought half of it.
During one trip, I bought ingredients to make a pizza, and that was when it happened.
We had been sprinkling cheese over the pizza, and naturally he felt inclined to throw a bit at me. I threw a bit back at him, and suddenly we were lost in a flurry of cheese. I should have been wondering about how the hell I was going to clean up the kitchen and get the cheese out of my hair, but instead I started wondering about those lips of his, why he was always biting them or smiling with them or laughing with them.
And soon I was kissing those lips.
-dh-
After that kiss, I told her everything. Well, almost everything.
We were watching Signs, her legs draped over my lap, and I pressed pause and spilled.
I told her about Dad, and how he had a temper like no other. How he had always smacked me and Mom around. How he had given me the bruise under my eye, which was now fading into a light yellow.
I left out some parts—like my social worker, and how I spent a couple of years as a kid in a halfway house. But I told her everything else, including the time Dad smashed Mom into the kitchen wall so hard that her head left a dent in it and after that she left and never came back. I told her about how I worried about Mom all the time, especially since I had spotted a little blood dripping from her hairline as she had walked out the door.
I told her that for five years after that, Dad and I fell into a pattern: he'd beat me up, I'd run, and then some two weeks later, desperate for a shower and a bed, I'd come back and try to placate him until the next time he felt obligated to take his anger out on me.
She took her legs off my lap and hugged me, hard. We both fell asleep like that.
-cl-
I got a call mid-July from my mom.
"Claire? I'm having my birthday down at the beach house in Southampton this year! You're welcome to come if you can get off of work."
"That sounds great," I said, perching on top of the kitchen counter and watching Derrick read A Separate Peace for what must have been the fifth time. "Can I, uh, bring a friend?"
"Like a boyfriend?" My mom instantly jumped to conclusions.
"Something like that, yeah."
Derrick looked up from the book and grinned.
We drove down for the day to celebrate and spent the entire time running around on the beach and reading on the sand dunes, gulping down Vitamin Water and eating petit fours.
Mom introduced Derrick to everyone as "Claire's boyfriend".
"Is that what we are?" Derrick asked as I lazily laid in the sun.
"What?"
"Boyfriend and girlfriend."
"Yeah," I said. "Of course."
I had never felt more certain of anything in my entire life.
While he smiled at me, I lifted my camera and snapped a picture—it was the only head-on shot I'd managed to take of him all day.
It was the only photo I'd ever take of him.
-dh-
Not long after we got back from Southampton, Dad called.
He wanted me to come back, just for a little while.
I asked Claire what would happen at the end of the summer, just to see how she'd feel about me leaving. She was confused.
"Well, you'll stay here, and…" Then her voice trailed off and her forehead puckered.
"I can't stay here while you go to Harvard," I murmured. "Your parents aren't going to keep paying for this place when you leave, and besides, what is the next Eduardo Saverin going to think when you tell him you've got a vagabond waiting for you back in New York?"
She burst out laughing, her nose crinkling and her head falling forward. I just smiled and squeezed her hand.
I left for Dad's that night, sneaking out of our bed as she slept, her chest rising and falling slowly underneath her Jack Wills jammies, never suspecting a thing.
-cl-
I never saw him again. He wasn't in the obituaries, he wasn't on milk cartons, he was not associated with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He was just gone, a flame extinguished by a wind that I never wanted to blow by.
In the end, I was glad to leave that apartment. I couldn't stand looking at the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' shirt he left in the hamper, or the half-eaten Oreo cheesecake he'd left in the fridge. The whole place was just a horrible reminder that Derrick had come into my life, touched everything in it, and left just as suddenly.
My parents soon learned to stop bringing him up, and Todd had quietly ripped up the picture he'd drawn of Derrick and I at the beach. I went to Harvard and waited for that Eduardo Saverin-wannabe to drop into my life, just like Derrick had predicted.
Occasionally, though, I'd lie in bed after reading about George III for the hundredth time and recall his presence, his warm russet eyes, and his kisses, which were just as sneaky and fleeting as he was. I'd lie in bed and hope with every cell of my being that wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he remembered me just as much as I remembered him.