(Short Story for Young Adults)

When Arienette walked into her high school poetry class for the first time, only one head turned. Checking her map of the big, newly renovated school and her schedule, she stopped just inside the door and tucked a single ringlet behind her ear. In the third row, in the fourth seat from the end, Patrick turned his head and noticed her. That’s all it takes, you know: the first noticing.

Patrick suddenly wanted with all his heart for Arienette to sit next to him. It’s difficult to say exactly why. Something in the way she held the stack of books cradled in her elbow, and something in the way she had obliviously stopped in the doorway,
temporarily barricading several impatient students into the hall, enchanted him. His eyes never left her as she chose a seat in the front row, but slightly towards his side of the classroom.

From Patrick’s seat, he could see her face occasionally in profile as she looked around nervously. He felt as if he’d seen her before in a dream. As casually as he could, he picked up his bag and moved one row down, and just imperceptibly more toward the center, placing himself in her peripheral vision.
She opened a composition book and wrote feverishly, her hand to her forehead. Tendrils of loose curls spilled from between her fingers. He couldn’t read what she was writing. Patrick thought that she had the saddest face he had ever seen. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, he fell in love with her immediately, and resolved to ask her on a date after class.

The forty-five minute lecture wore on, their tweed-jacketed and full-bearded teacher passing out the class syllabus and making his rules. Patrick studied, intently: the back of her neck, the curve of her ears, the exact shade of her hair, the way she held her pen, the pressing of her palm to her forehead when she concentrated, and above all, her frequent, quiet sighs between bursts of writing. Patrick thought about, extensively: fastening a necklace around her neck, tucking her chestnut hair behind her ears, holding her hand, reading what she was writing, and above all, kissing the sigh off her lips.

Suddenly, a chorus of scraping chairs and clearing throats signaled the end of class. Patrick had been thinking of everything but how to get her attention. The moment found him unprepared. The girl was stuffing notebooks and papers into her bag, and getting out her campus map.

“Wh- what are you writing?” he asked her quickly. He immediately regretted it. The intensity with which she had been writing suggested that it wasn’t class notes or a to-do list. She had probably been writing something deeply personal. But the girl didn’t look up. It seemed she hadn’t heard him. Sometimes Patrick spoke so quietly that people around him simply didn’t react. If you had been there, you might have heard an exhalation, an under-the-breath sort of mumbling, but you probably would not have noticed, either.

He inhaled sharply, intending to try again and ask her name, as she stood and walked out of the class. Patrick sighed. It reminded him of her.

He went about the rest of his day, being assigned textbooks and expectations and seats and projects. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. At lunch, his friends all made fun of him for being so spaced out. “You have to be more light-hearted about girls,” advised his friend Roy, stuffing four crinkle-cut fries into his mouth. Almost instantly, he swallowed and continued. “Just have fun, don’t be so emotional about it.” Patrick studied Roy’s pale, full-moon face.

Roy didn’t have a girlfriend. Patrick wasn’t sure that he ever had. Roy did, however: listen to relationship psychology on the radio, have a drawer full of dirty pictures, and chat constantly with girls online. “I hate to break it to you, Roy,” Patrick said, “but I won’t be taking your advice on this subject.” Bluntly, he stood up with his lunch tray and threw his trash away. With a furrowed brow, he scanned the cafeteria for her one last time before leaving.

The day wore on as it does when you are lovesick and miserable. Each passing moment was both hopeful and heart wrenching- not to mention long. Time never moves as slowly as it does when you are in love with someone who is somewhere else.

Shuffling his high-top sneakers as the dismissal bell rang, Patrick walked into the newspaper office for their first official meeting. He pulled out a seat at the particleboard table and rested his forehead on his backpack. His hair was such a deep, shiny shade of jet that it was at once darker and brighter than his black backpack, which was brand new. All he wanted was to go home and sleep so that he could see her again the next morning.

As Ms. Fjord began welcoming them, Patrick raised his head. He turned to look at the clock, and who do you think was seated behind him? Arienette was scribbling busily in the same composition book, and reluctantly met his gaze with her clear green eyes for a moment before returning to her work. Patrick turned around, locked his eyes straight ahead, and thought as quickly as he could. This meeting would only last a few minutes.

Ask her name then ask her to do something. Her eyelashes are so long. What do girls like to do? Girls like movies . . . No, too dark, I‘ll seem creepy. Of course she has green eyes. The mall? Too loud. She likes to write. The library? She’ll think I’m insane . . .

“So I’ll see you all here tomorrow before school,” Ms. Fjord concluded, clasping her hands. Determined not to miss his chance, Patrick swiveled, in one motion, completely about-face in his desk, finding himself with his nose almost touching the top of Arienette’s head.

“Hey,” he said in his best-practiced nonchalant voice. She looked up, biting the lower left corner of her lip.

“Hey?” she asked, shyly backing away to increase the distance between them. Was he talking to her?

“Do you want to-” Patrick’s words stuck in his throat and he coughed a few times. “I mean, maybe sometime we could go ice skating. Tonight.”

“Oh,” she said. Arienette thought of how much she would like to go ice skating with the boy. But she had to, as her mother said, ‘remember her condition’. And remember she did. A skating rink was an awful place, especially keeping her condition in mind. Flailing around on razors over a hard sheet of ice? Ice skating was impossible.

Patrick could see that her heart was pounding like mad. “What’s your name?” He interrupted her thoughts. She looked at him again. She liked the way that his hair fell over his face, half-obscuring one beautiful, bright eye the color of polished mahogany.

“Arienette,” she whispered. She saw the confusion pass his eyes. “A-R-I-E-N-ette. It’s unusual,” she said, a bit louder.

“It’s pretty. I‘m Patrick,” he said, smiling. Every time she lowered her eyes from his, he dipped his head a bit to catch them again.

“I- I can’t. I just - I’m really sorry,” Arienette managed to say before breaking into sobs. Clutching her composition book, she turned and ran as fast as her legs would carry her.



* * *

The next morning, Patrick woke up with a strange expectancy in his chest. It felt like Christmas morning, or when you got the part in the play you wanted the day before. It’s the feeling you have in the morning when something life-changing has happened that you have to think a moment to remember. He remembered Arienette. The expectancy rose into his throat. He remembered she had cried. The expectancy sank to horror and settled at the bottom of his stomach. Patrick flopped face-down into his pillow and made a small, whimpering noise.

While making his breakfast, he did not think of Arienette. He read the latest issue of the 1950s Husband Guy comic, spilling cereal on the ingénue’s face. He dressed, purposefully not choosing anything that would provoke accusations of “trying to look sharp” from Roy. However, when brushing his hair, he did think of her. Although he would never admit it to you, he spent much longer brushing his hair than usual, and it looked quite nice.

Arienette woke up from a dream of ice skating. It felt so real. She laid motionless in bed, trying to remember the dream, trying not to break the spell. She saw Patrick, lowering his head slightly to catch her eyes. Oh, how awful. Oh, how mortifying. The beautiful boy from her poetry class had asked her on a date and she had cried and run away. Ice skating. Why couldn’t he have asked her to go somewhere else?

While her mother made breakfast, Arienette thought of Patrick. She picked out a green sweater with a bit of angora in it, a grey pleated knee-length skirt, and the grey ankle boots she imagined looked elfin. She put her hair up, purposefully messily, wild curls all over. She wondered, for a moment, if her idea of pretty was the same as his.

As if to answer her, her mother entered the room, holding a plate with scrambled eggs, a whole wheat muffin, and sliced honeydew melon. She tilted her head a bit and looked at Arienette suspiciously. “You look pretty,” she said, handing her daughter her breakfast. “I believe you’ve done your hair.”

Sighing, Arienette took the plate from her mother’s hands, thanked her, and sat down at the breakfast table. Her mother took a chair across from her, and looked at her askance. All at once, she took note of: the flushing excitement in her daughter’s cheeks (highly suspicious), the clarity of her daughter’s eyes (no drugs), the width of her waist (not pregnant), and most of all, the way she was so distracted by her thoughts that she didn’t notice her own mother studying her (love).

“You‘ve met a boy?” her mother said. It wasn’t really a question so much as a declaration. Arienette looked up at her mother, surprised, a forkful of honeydew stopped halfway to her mouth.

“Well, yes,” she said.

“Remember-”

“My condition,” Arienette mocked. “How could I forget it. He asked me ice skating, mother. I cried and ran.”

Arienette looked as if she might cry again, as she finished her breakfast. Her mother sat silently for at least three minutes, then asked, “Is he nice?”

“Oh God, mother! I mean, really. Is he nice? I don’t know! I didn’t go ice skating with him, so I don’t know!” Arienette’s face flushed a trifle past radiant into a sort of splotchy discontentment. Her mother knew she would cry any minute.

Conspiratorially, she asked, “Is he cute?” Her daughter smiled in spite of herself.

“He’s beautiful,” she said, sighing. She took her plate to the sink and, agitatedly, herded bits of uneaten egg down the garbage disposal. Cautiously, she slammed her plate into the dishwasher, sparing no force with the fork, which made a wonderful clatter but did not break. “Are you driving me to school or shall I walk?” Arienette said in a huff, brushing her updone hair, which now felt ridiculous, out of her eyes.

Her mother picked up the car keys and stood at the door. She surveyed her daughter one last time. “Tell him the truth,” she said. “If you like him.” Arienette sighed.

In the car, she leaned her forehead against the window and watched lines of trees blur by. How could she tell him the truth? She only knew the boy’s name, and he would never believe her. What sort of a person is overcome by a compulsion to kiss everyone who says ouch? He would think her at least odd, and more than likely insane. Her ‘condition’ had no name, no word you could point to in an encyclopedia and say, “Here.” No diagnosis. No proof.

* * *

Arienette sat down in the newspaper office. She considered, but elected against, sitting in the same desk as the day before. Patrick would probably feel compelled to sit where he had yesterday. This way if he moved closer to her, she knew it might mean that he wanted to sit near her. She took her composition book out and began to write.

Walking in the door, Patrick was momentarily frozen at the sight of her. He held still, then weakly swayed just slightly backward in the knees, knocking into the front of Reid Lynford’s head with the back of his. Reid Lynford, who had been gesturing in an overly finger-pointing way to his football buddy, and making a ‘heh-heh’ sort of a laughing face, bit down on his own tongue rather sharply. “Ouch,” he said.

Embarrassed, Patrick looked at Arienette to see how she felt about this development. She stopped writing, shot to her feet and walked, quickly, towards him. She had dressed up. There was an untamed, foresty sort of beauty to her, especially about the hair and the eyes.

She continued past him and kissed Reid Lynford in a strange, halting manner, said, “Excuse me,” and stepped past them, running towards the girls’ bathroom. She didn’t come back to the meeting.

Arienette knelt with her back to the bathroom stall, her palms planted firmly on the cool tiles. She felt rather dizzy, and sounds had a strange, false quality. A group of girls leaving the restroom sounded like a laugh track on television. She was very aware of the unattractiveness of her cold sweat. She was not aware that she was several shades paler, making her berry-bitten lips even prettier. I have to tell him, she thought.

* * *

Patrick mostly hung his head in horror during the newspaper meeting. Of all the boys in the school for Arienette to choose to kiss, Reid Lynford? Really? All because he had hurt Reid by falling over himself like a fool at the sight of her. The bell rang for classes to begin. Patrick despondently threw his messenger bag over his shoulder, checked for the weight of Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems, and funneled out the newspaper door with the rest of the students.

With his map and schedule, Patrick leaned into an alcove between lockers to figure out which hall he was headed to next in the new building. Standing at the foot of the stairs, with a small group of backpacked minions, each with a bubble-blowing counterpart, Reid Lynford was telling of his latest, easiest conquest.

“I swear guys- wait wait,” he exploded into laughter for a moment. “Okay, okay. I swear I walked into the meeting, and this kid tripped or something and I ran into him.” The group started a wave of snickering and nudging. Reid waited, patiently, for them to stop. “The best part guys, this girl, new and kind of pretty, gets up and kisses me!”

Reid’s bubble-blowing counterpart, Vicki Reddington, smacked him and started frantically twirling her white-blonde hair, rolling her china blue eyes around in contempt. “That total slut!” she said. The other bubble-blowers voiced their agreement. “No sweat, babe,” said Reid Lynford. “I mean, I wouldn‘t touch that with a ten-foot-”

“You wouldn’t what?” Patrick barked, emerging from the alcove like a wolf from its den. “You wouldn’t touch her? You wouldn’t KISS her? You did!” Vicki Reddington started flicking with her fake nails, and a harem of ponytailed nail-flickers gathered around her for moral support.

“Hey, man-” started Reid, lifting his hands in truce.

“NO, man,” shouted Patrick, taking another step toward him. “You LET her kiss you. You kissed HER. And she ran out upset and you laughed and sat down.” Patrick stepped backward with his right leg, dropping his bag and Walt Whitman to the ground. In the same motion, he found himself pulling back his right arm and making a fist. He had never hit anyone before. He wondered if it would hurt.

Patrick threw his weight forward, his fist coming around his right side in a fantastic arc, hurtling toward Reid Lynford’s stupid face, and it felt so good already that Patrick didn’t care if it would hurt.

An enormous fist, the likes of which superheroes clutch their women with on comic book covers, wrapped around Patrick’s wrist. The bubble-blowing harem wailed, as if Patrick were going to burn their cabins and injure their men, leaving them staring wide-eyed at the smoldering rubble, with hungry children clinging to their helpless hands. There were twelve boys running toward one Patrick.

* * *

Coming to consciousness. Ouch, ouch. Oh, ouch. Was that blood on the tile? If it was blood, it was definitely his. On sitcoms, the principal always comes around the corner and stops such massacres. Lifting himself up on one elbow, he looked behind him for his bag. Arienette knelt, clutching it to her chest, knees folded up to her shoulders, holding Walt Whitman safe in her arms. He winced at her.

“Ouch,” he said. She laughed like bells strung on a kite’s tail.

“Ouch?” she replied. She kissed him on the lips. Fireworks and lightning, hot chocolate in December, milk and honey, windows down on a breezy night, she kissed him. “I have to tell you something.” And so Arienette told Patrick of her condition. And he believed her.

“What class do you have next?” he said.

“Chemistry,” she said, squinching up her nose. Her nose had freckles and squinched adorably. Patrick nodded.

“Health,” he answered, squinching his nose in kind. He discovered that his nose hurt. “Ouch.” She kissed him. Fireflies and fog, peach lemonade, swinging on the playground, windows up in the car with your best friend and singing, she kissed him. “Wanna skip?” he asked.

Arienette had never skipped class before, and she never would again. Patrick had skipped twice before this, and would skip once to go to a concert senior year. That time, Arienette would refuse to go. This time, though, she considered, and decided that it was worth it just this once. And so she said yes, put her hand in his, and said, “I want to get away from here with you.”