Next chapter! This one's pretty short, and I'm really scared I might've dragged on with it, but I promise the next one will be better!
Arthur's home was like a perfectly knitted sweater from your grandmother. The furniture looked regularly cleaned, and the dining table was in the kitchen. I didn't expect Arthur to have some underground base with cigarettes everywhere as a home, but his house seemed perfectly normal to me.
When walking through the hallways or staring at the walls in the kitchen, there would be paintings of vintage looking things or photographs of London. My dad never liked hanging artsy things around the apartment, so most of what was framed on our walls was old photographs of the family. The oldest one was probably one that we found in the attic of my great uncle's house, the photo in black in white of a man with a clean shave and a women with her wavy hair in a barrette smiling at each other. Dad blew the dust off the photo and said those were my great-grandparents during the 1930's. That was also the day I found a worn out, brown bomber jacket. I'm still hoping that maybe by freshman year of college it'll fit perfectly.
"Don't you need to call your dad or something?" Arthur asked me as he heated up something on the stove. "The phone's over there." He motioned with his index finger.
After calling my dad to tell him everything was fine and that I would definitely get a ride home, (Arthur would made sure of it) I slid into one of the dining table chairs.
"My mom will be home soon," He said as he sat across from me after handing me a cup of tea. "She'll bring you home. She might get lost though, make sure she knows where she's going."
I ignored everything he had said to stare down the tea he placed in front of me. I did not like tea. It tasted like a soulless creature dying.
"You don't have to drink that if you don't want to," Arthur said, noticing my disgust. "I just offered it to be polite."
I pushed the tea cup away from me. Arthur was really nice when he wanted to be, I noticed. Most of the time in class it just seemed like he tried to hold back every critical sentence held inside him, like maybe one day he'd just blow up in English class like "You fucking idiots are so incredibly stupid and I hope college rejects you because you are immature and unfashionable." Something like that.
Arthur started putting the dishes away in the sink, washing them, drying them and putting them back in the cabinets.
"So you guys are from Britain?" I asked still looking at the photographs by the dinner table.
"Gee, how did you guess?" Arthur replied monotonously.
"What? What do you mean how did… Oh" I mentally slapped myself. I really tend to point out the obvious.
Arthur laughed lightly. "Yeah, we're English. I moved here in like… 5th grade."
"That's pretty cool, I lived in New York my whole life." I told him. Arthur finished the dishes and sat in the chair next to me instead of across from me. "Well, except for now I guess."
"Yeah, moving sucks doesn't it?" He said looking down to his finger nails and bringing them up to his mouth to bite them.
"I guess."
We looked over to the front of the house after hearing keys jingle and a door open. It was all really messy sounding, I could hear heels clacking, a purse being thrown on the hardwood flooring, and a generic Nokia ringtone going off.
Arthur's mom entered the kitchen smiling, with her brown hair up and messy, a giant tote bag on her left shoulder and a phone in her right hand.
"Hi Arthur and friend!" She said cheerfully. I can tell Arthur didn't get his personality genes from her.
"It's Alfred." I told her with a smile. His mom seemed like a really nice person, but one of those nice people that if they hated you they would punch you in the throat. It would be smart not to cross her.
"Alfred." She repeated, putting all her other purse things on the kitchen counter.
"Mom, I just cleaned that." Arthur stared at the counter like his dreams died. She apologized and ran upstairs with her things after closing her introduction. She had told me to call her Rachel instead of Mrs. Kirkland because she hated formalities. She also said she really liked how the blue hoodie I was wearing brought out my eyes.
She drove me home and almost got lost on the way, but it was nice because she kept talking and trying to learn things about me like where I had moved from and generic questions like that to ease that weird awkward car ride tension. She told me really was really glad that Arthur had had a friend over, if even just for an hour. I could tell she really liked him having friends because apparently Arthur doesn't socialize all that much, but that wasn't a surprise.
In school, Arthur and I started actually talking to each other in class, or waving at each other in the hallway. People didn't really give me weird looks anymore, unless I did something that seemed really gay like going to the bathroom because apparently that's strange, but with Arthur it was just easier to handle.
I thought about what his mother said, and I was really glad I had become friends with him too
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