Chapter 3- Turned Completely (Revised)

Author's Note: (Sha!- it's revised!)

This story lives on because of all of the support I've been getting- thanks, you guys! Anyway, this is a chapter before the excrement hits the fan. As usual, this story's dedicated to the Main Attraction- Horace Mahoney. Now, enjoy. Or maybe not- it's your choice in the end.

The day he dropped me off was a normal day at school for me. I had come home that morning to find my mom and dad passed out in the living room. Things hadn't looked up for me much of the day as normal, but it felt as though it was the most beautiful day that I had ever been alive simply because I had met and talked to Horace not too long ago. I left school that afternoon with the full expectation of going home- but I suppose that I somehow zoned out and came out of it across the street from Mahoney's Junkyard. I figured that since I had mistakenly traveled there, that I might as well visit Horace again. I began to walk over to the closed-up gate that I had entered last night before I realized that the three ugly dogs inside of it were napping next to the gate.

I ran to the other side of the junkyard, and hid when I saw movement near the front gate. I looked closer then realized that it was someone leaning against the small building that served as the front office I had seen. I recognized the shock of blond hair and the tall stature immediately as belonging to Horace.

After the moment of initial recognition, I saw that what he was doing was smoking a cigarette. I was turned off, but at the same time mesmerized as I watched him exhale a long thread of smoke. Staring at him didn't last for very long when Horace's head turned in my direction. He looked puzzled at first, but he dropped what was left of his cigarette and gave it a slight stomp before turning towards me. I walked to the entrance and lent forward, thrusting my fingers through the chain links in the fence that separated us.

"I didn't expect to see you again." He said, opening the gate.

To me, the excuse I gave sounded completely innocent. "Oh… I was bored, and I didn't want to head home yet."

He shrugged. "Well, if you're going to stay, I hope you don't mind following me to somewhere in here. If it's all the same to you, I wouldn't like to have one of my dad's friends to tell my dad that he saw me talkin' to a six year old."

"I'm eight." I said, crossing my arms.

"Uhh.. right, eight. Well, you game or not?"

I nodded, and he began to walk off into the junkyard. We walked past row after row of tall stacks of rusted cars before I began to wonder where we were going. We hadn't said a word to each other, but it didn't really seem necessary until I began to feel a bit sick of walking.

"Where are we going..?" I asked.

He laughed. "There!" I looked at what he was pointing at- and I saw it for the first time.

It was a red convertible that looked as though it had come straight from an old-fashioned drive-thru- the ones where the waitresses came out to deliver the food and got orders on roller skates. It sat in the clearance that was covered in weed-choked grass. By the look of it, I guessed that the clearance itself had just recently been un-covered from under something heavy that had once been sitting on top of it. Unlike most of the junkyard, it had no car stacks in it- the red convertible sat alone in the grass.

As we walked closer to the clearance, I realized that the wheels of the car were gone, and that it was set on top of huge cinderblocks. The car was in excellent condition- in fact, it looked as though someone had taken to giving it a hand wash and a wax at least once a month. The only sign of age the car had was in its yellowed cloth hood.

I watches as Horace walked over to it and threw the car door open. He crouched down into it and sat down, shutting the driver's side door with a gentleness close to near reverence or love. He sat there in his seat for a second before he saw me. He rolled the car's window open and poked his head out. "Well? Are you comin' or not?"

I ran over to the passenger's side and threw the door open. When I sat down, I tried to buckle my seat belt up out of habit before realizing, ohh yeah, the car's not going anywhere.

I put the seat belt back and hoped that he hadn't seen.

I turned to him, realizing, embarrassed, that he had seen. He was looking at me then with the same look of barely concealed amusement as he usually did.

"What?" I asked, feeling my face reddening.

He shook his head. "Nothing, nothing."

For the longest moment, he sat there, staring out the windshield. His blue eyes were hazy, as if he were somewhere else a million miles from here. The way he was staring at nothing silently made me feel very alone all of a sudden. As if he had left me here with his shell of a body, and had gone off.

"So- what are we going to do here?"

He was quiet before a slow smile spread across his lips. I watched as he pulled the lever for the seat back, throwing his seat completely backwards. He shut his eyes. He stayed like that for a short while until I became worried that he had fallen asleep and I reached over to shake him.

"What?" he asked, sounding exhausted.

"Are you falling asleep?"

He groaned- a sound that made me feel all warm inside. Ugh, damn my huge crush on him, but it made me so drooly around him.

"No- I'm… thinking."

I gave him a skeptical look that I forgot was wasted on his shut eyes. "Well, it looks to me like you're sleeping, not thinking."

He expelled a long breath of air. "Sleeping, thinking, there's no difference."

Looking at him like that suddenly made me want to smile like he always seemed to. "There's a lot of differences- when you're asleep, you can't think."

He shrugged. "Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm meditating. How's that?"

Back then, I didn't know what meditation was, but I didn't want to be embarrassed in front of Horace. I stayed silent, and he smirked at me.

We stayed quiet for a long, long time until I began to wonder if he had fallen asleep.

"Horace? Horace?" I whispered.

"What?" he said, sleepiness definitely in his voice.

I felt like a nuisance all of a sudden- he sounded so tired, and I was probably bugging him. "Do you want me to leave so you can sleep?" I asked in a timid little voice.

He shot up in his seat so fast I almost yelped and flew backwards. "What?! No, you stay- errr… ummm…. I mean, you can go if you want, not that I'm saying you don't have to stay, it's just that I…" he coughed, his face growing red. I always thought it was particularly sweet the way his face reddened when he was embarrassed, and the way it seemed to glow in comparison to his pale blond hair. It still makes me fantasize about kissing him.

"No, I didn't want to go… I just thought that you might want to get some sleep- you looked tired."

"Oh." He leaned back in his seat, raising his arms up to make his palms into a pillow for his head. He was quiet as he stared back out the windshield.

After a long while, I began to wonder if he wanted me here because he wanted someone to talk to. My heart stuck in my chest. I could not keep the memory of what I had confided in him yesterday from my mind. "Horace?"

"Hmm?"

Now or never. "I love you."

A small snort from him. "You really mean that, do ya?"

God, how my heart skipped. "Yes."

He said nothing at first, then he grunted and turned a bit in his seat. "That's nice." He simply said.

After a while, I felt the awkwardness of what I said feeling like it was close to consuming me. I decided to speak, lack of anything to say or otherwise. "Why did you bring me here?"

One side of his lips turned up. "I just wanted to show you what I do- I thought you could use somewhere quiet and safe to sit and think about things like I do every day."

I leaned back. "Oh? Are you sure you don't want to talk?"

He shook his head, and stretched his arms above his head. Because of the length of his arms, it was not very far. They made an audible crack as he stretched them. "No, not unless you want to. I was just planning to sit here with you and get some quiet time in."

I was silent, and he seemed grateful for it. I didn't understand it then- or the 15th time we did that after school when I decided to walk to the junkyard to visit him, but I eventually understood why he liked to do that with me. Vaguely. I think that he knew how hectic both of our lives were- and he found it soothing to be enclosed in his favorite car with a kindred soul. We could sit there for perhaps a full hour- and after the first few times doing it, I began to enjoy it instead of feeling bored. I would allow my mind to drift off- and maybe it was similar to the place Horace's mind went, but I always doubted it.

His was a more calming, happier place than mine, and where he had that as a crutch to lean on in the two years we knew each other, I had to use him.

To my surprise after a long while of being used to going in there with him, the radio worked. He just tuned it in one day for no apparent reason, and I can remember being upset that he didn't tell me the car had a working radio. He just gave me another one of his amused looks (like he always did when I continued in my crusade of telling him that I truly loved him), and said that music, as nice as it was, was only a distraction from the silence in the car that he liked so much. We listened to different rock stations with bands I didn't know the names of playing music from generations long gone. I was in luck, however, because he knew every song that came on.

An obvious favorite of his was "Life Is A Highway" by Tom Cochran. That usual veil of stillness around him always dissipated when that song came out. He held nothing out when that song came on; sometimes he would halfway bawl with happiness when it came on. He knew every word to it, and a smile that stretched across his face never failed to form when he heard the beginnings of that song.

His deep voice singing along to it never failed to make me smile, either, although I could never quite get the lyrics straightened out as well as he did.

Ah, but I can still remember the first few lines to the song- how could I not, since he would never pass up an opportunity to sing to it?

Life's like a road that you travel on,
When there's one day here

and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend,

sometimes you stand,
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind,

There's a world outside every darkened door,

Where blues won't haunt you anymore

Where the brave are free

and lovers soar,
Come ride with me to the distant shore,
We won't hesitate

break down the garden gate
There's not much left today…

After that sober verse, he would start to grin from ear-to-ear as he sung the rest of the song, his upper body bobbing slightly from side to side. The sight of him so happy and singing was one memory that I'll never forget.

The two years I spent with him from time-to-time were all full of memorable times like that- they were years of hiding from his dad, following him through different parts of the junkyard, quietly sharing the comfort of his car, and listening to "Life Is A Highway". Of those years, I was never again afraid of my parents, or of anyone at school- I could always imagine what would happen if Horace was there to defend me in those bad times- a big, temperamental friend that would pound any bullies of mine into the pavement. Despite my learned lack of tenderness when dealing with my parents and their fighting (I rarely cried over their fighting after I met and fell in love with my giant) I found reasons to spend the night at the junked car lot every once in a while. I even made enough excuses for him to sleep in the one roomer with me- with one of us lying on the bed and the other on the floor. Those sleep overs have since become precious in my memory- especially when he pulled out the bunny ears and the black and white small television for us to watch together on the bed before bed.

As fate would have it, he did pull up one day to pick me up from school as he sometimes did- and he looked out of his tow truck for me to only find a big pack of boys dropping my books on the ground out of my backpack and me being shoved down next to them.

I was usually pretty scrappy for a little kid- but this kid, Dereck Sander, was bigger than me, and had a pack of drooling idiots for followers. The last time I had gotten in a fight with him I had managed to hit two of them, but they eventually shoved me to the ground and pounded me until I started crying. For someone like me, it was an embarrassing moment that I didn't want to repeat under any circumstances.

None of us saw him come out of the tow truck- next thing any of us knew, Dereck was being held up in the air by the back of his shirt. When he looked around to see who was holding him up- he was horrified to realize that it was the giant who lived in the junkyard who was holding him by his shirt. He screamed, but Horace clapped a hand over his mouth.

"What are you doing?" Horace practically growled.

The boy grew as pale as the cement he was hovering over, but he stayed silent.

"Speak up, boy. I expect you to have a good reason to be doing that to my friend."

The boy stuttered wordlessly as Horace's eyes stared unblinkingly at him. All of Dereck's goons were staring at Horace- sizing him up with looks of horror in their eyes.

"I-I-I was just playing." he finally stuttered. Horace dropped the boy to the ground abruptly. He cried out as his ass hit the pavement.

"If you're going to pretend that waving her books in front of her, and shoving her is a fun way to play, then I will play along for today- but if you think for one second that I won't throttle you until you're unable to walk right for the rest of your life if and when I see you doing that again or hear of you doing that again, then you're going to be walkin' with a permanent shake for the rest of your life, okay?"

The boy nodded as hard as he could and scuttled backwards on his hands a knees. In a way to reinforce just how big he was, all Horace had to do to get close to Dereck was to bend over slightly. He brought his lips close to Dereck's ear, and whispered something to him.

If it was possible for Dereck to be paler, he paled even more.

Dereck stood up and walked away as fast as he could. His goons ran off after him, leaving only me and Horace. I was left wondering what Horace could have said to him to make him even more frightened.

As soon as the boys ran off beyond sight, Horace looked down at me and winked. My heart melted into my chest, and when he helped me into his tow truck a little while later, I could not stop smiling as I played the scene over and over again in my head. He didn't say anything to me as we drove back to the junkyard.

Those years were wonderful- I was never again the same lonely, scared girl that I had become because of how my parents had raised me. I had him, and he had someone to talk to or perhaps relate to in some small way.

I just wish that I had more than the two years that I spent with him.

It was after those two years were over that trouble occurred with almost heartbreaking suddenness that took more than our happiness away.

(Lyrics to "Life Is A Highway" By Tom Cochran used above)