An elevator, or a vertical transport, is meant to carry people from one level of a building to another. At least that is how Wikipedia defines an elevator. Whoever wrote that article should have mentioned that to the elevator at the Four Seasons in Austin, Texas where I am currently trapped.
I am on vacation with my mom and her boyfriend, and I was outside practicing playing the trumpet (my mom said that I need to practice, but she does not want to hear me practice for some reason). I decided to practice out by the pool because it was early in the morning and no one was out yet. Eventually, people started waking up and coming outside to work on getting skin cancer. The people out by the pool kept giving me looks while I was playing, and there are only so many death glares I can handle. I decided to take the elevator back to our room, and that was my first mistake. My second mistake was holding the door open for an older girl who asked me to hold the door for her. I do not like social situations of any kind, and especially not with the female gender. I am a twelve year old boy who would rather poke a dead jellyfish with a stick than talk to a girl, and now I am stuck in an elevator with one. The lift stopped a few seconds after the elevator door closed, and the hotel staff assured us via the speaker that the doors would open up again once the back-up generator kicked in. Great.
“This sucks, right? I hope you don’t have to be somewhere soon”, said the girl.
I know she is waiting for a response from me because a normal person would say something back, but I have nothing. I give her an awkward half-smile while I almost glance in her direction. I can feel her trying to hold back a laugh even though I cannot see her face. I am used to people laughing at me.
“My name is Lea, by the way. What’s yours?”, asked the girl.
I don’t want to answer, but I know that I have to.
“Alistair, but everyone calls me Wasp and I like to go by Brian”, I say all in one breath.
The girl has an amused look on her face and says, “Okay, Brian. Why does everyone call you Wasp?”
“My glasses. They make me look like an insect.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I think they make you look intelligent and cool. Obviously, everyone else is jealous of your style.”
I know she is patronizing me, and I do not want to play along. I stare fixedly at the old carpet on the elevator floor, so that I have something to do. There is an outline of an old stain in the shape of a bird next to my left foot; I fight back the urge to vomit. Birds freak me out. My dad once made me watch The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock when I was five because he thought it would be funny. You cannot un-see a movie like that.
“Why do you like to be called Brian?” asked Lea.
Her voice breaks me out of my horrid reverie, and I reply to keep my mind off of birds. Birds are scarier than girls.
“It’s my middle name. My first name is an old person’s name.”
“I like it, but I like Brian too. That’s actually funny because I go by my middle name too. My first name is Alice.”
I think Alice is a fine name, and I say so.
“I don’t like the way Alice sounds. It’s too plain, and I don’t want to be plain. I want to be someone. I guess that’s a silly reason, but oh well. What’s that in the case next to you?”
“A trumpet”, I say demurely.
“Oh, nice. I wish I could place an instrument, but I am musically challenged.”
“I think I am too, but my mom thinks that I should learn how to play it.”
“I wish my mom would have encouraged me to do something like that when I was your age. I might have my life more figured out if I had other useful skills.”
I am not sure what to take from this admission, so I keep quiet. She stays quiet for a full thirty seconds, but I knew the silence was too good to be true.
“Hey, that looks like a wicked scar on your arm. How did you get that?”
As soon as the words leave her mouth my whole body goes rigid, and I am instantly jealous of every turtle on the planet. I want nothing more than to be able to crawl up into my shell and hide from the world. Lea notices my visible discomfort.
“Brian, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I figured we have some time to kill and that scar looked like it might have a good story. I can tell you the story about this scar instead.” She lifts her bangs away from her face, and I see a burn mark on the side of her forehead. It looks gnarly, and I take the bait.
“How did you do that?”
“With a curling iron.”
“A what?”
“It’s something I use to curl my hair. I wrapped this strand of hair around the curling iron and I accidentally pressed it against my head. It burned my skin off and the scar refuses to go away.”
“Girls are so weird. Why didn’t you just leave your hair straight?”
“My hair looks terrible straight. I had a date that night and I wanted to attempt to look nice.”
I wanted to say that I thought her hair looked fine now even though it is straight, but I do not have the nerve.
“Did your date like it curly?”
“No, he said he forgot he had something to do when he saw the burn on my forehead. I never heard from him again…”
She looked like her mind was a million miles away, and I wanted to say something to reel her back in. Not because I was starting to think girls were okay, but because it felt good to talk to someone. I never have anyone to talk to. I say the first thing that comes to mind.
“Did you know that the Prometheus tree in Nevada was at least four thousand, eight hundred and sixty-two years old when it was cut down in 1964?”
“I did not know that. That is pretty old for a tree. Do you like trees?” she seems genuinely interested, and I am stunned. Everyone tells me to shut up if I rattle off a random fact I read online.
“Kind of. I like biology. I read that on Wikipedia once.” I actually read the article twenty-six times, but she does not need to know that.
“Biology, huh? Cool. You’re going to grow up to be a biologist?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. My mom said it’s not a good career path.”
“I think it sounds like a fine career path. What does your mom want you to do?”
“Probably a professional trumpet player, or anything but a biologist. My dad was a biologist.” I am shocked to hear those words come out of my mouth because I have not said the word “dad” in almost three years.
“He was a biologist? What does he do now?”
“Nothing. He died a couple of years ago.” Again, I am shocked by my words. I never admitted out loud that he died. It feels good to say it; cathartic.
“Oh, Brian I am so sorry. That must have been hard.”
Her words amuse me because she just apologized for something she had no hand in doing, and because I am not sorry at all.
“It wasn’t. It’s better now that he’s gone.” I remember saying this to my mom once, and she slapped me and told me to never say that again.
“Brian, why is it better?”
I know I should stop talking now, but I can’t. I want to talk. I have someone who is willing to listen and she is a complete stranger. For some reason it is easier to talk to someone who knows nothing about my life.
“He is the reason why I have this scar.” I raise my arm, so that she can see the scar more clearly.
“My parents wanted to have another kid after they had me, but they couldn’t. I don’t know why exactly, but my mom was always crying saying that it wasn’t fair that she couldn’t have another. My dad was pissed that I was going to be their only child because I didn’t live up to his expectations of what a son should be. He wanted me to play sports like he did until he injured his knee and had to give it all up. So, one night he came home smelling really bad and walking funny. He grabbed my mom and just tossed her into the wall. I tried to stop him from doing it again, and he broke the glass bottle he was holding and threw it at my face. I raised my arm to block it, and the broken edge cut my arm open. He grabbed his car keys as soon as he saw all of the blood, and he crashed his car into a tree a few blocks down from our house. He died that night in the hospital.”
I don’t know why I just spilled my guts to this girl, but it felt good to get it off of my chest.
“You must be brave if you stood up to him to help your mom.”
“I wasn’t brave. I had nothing to lose. No one cares about me, so if something would have happened to me that night it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Brian, that’s not true.”
“Yeah, it is true.”
“Well, I care about you now.”
Again, words have the ability to shock me.
“Why?”
“You opened up to me, and I feel like I know you now. I want you to stay safe.”
I feel safe right now, but once these elevator doors open again I know I won’t be. The world isn’t a safe place.
“I’ll try.”
Lea smiled, and I believe that she does care about me. I have never had someone care about me before, and it is a surprisingly nice feeling. I start to think that maybe girls aren’t so bad after all.
All of a sudden, a voice comes over the speaker in the elevator. The back-up generator has kicked in. The elevator drops down about a foot, and the doors open up into the lobby.
I feel like the world I thought I could have just minutes ago, a world where someone cares about me, is slipping out of my grasp. We are back in reality.
I am not surprised to see several people waiting for Lea to come out of the elevator. Someone like her would have people who care about her. The clock on the wall says that it is 11:30a.m., so we were only in the elevator for an hour. It’s amazing what an hour can do to change your life.
I want to stop Lea from leaving, but I don’t. I walk out of the elevator after her and head left towards the stairs that go up to my floor.
“Hey, Brian! Wait up for a second.”
Lea runs over to where I have stopped, and she gives me a hug.
“Thanks for keeping me company while we were in there. You’re a good guy, Brian. Remember that. You’ll make a great biologist, too.” She gives me a wink and walks back over to her friends.
I have an overwhelming desire to ask Lea about her life, but I don’t think she needed to talk about anything. She seems like more of someone who gets pleasure from making other people feel better. I hope she’s happy because I feel better. I feel like I’m someone worth caring about. There has got to be someone else out there like Lea who can care about me. Maybe the world-not including birds-isn’t so bad.
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