Volume Two

The Second Volume

JUSTIN

I  remember only three things about the last day of my junior year in high school: signing yearbooks, eating massive amounts of junk food, and a 12:30 dismissal. Most of my classes, while usually separated from one another by the raucous sound of a bell, blended together into a mesh of high fives and lewd jokes.


“Hey Justin, looks like you’re enjoying that lollipop. You practicing for tonight on that sucker?”
“Come on, Alex.” I replied. “You’ve been killing me all year, do you really have to rub it in on the last day?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Like I didn’t see that one coming. You’ve murdered the joke, Alex. It’s dead. Decapitated. The crows are feasting on its entrails. You’ve dismembered it so gruesomely I’m surprised the government hasn’t placed you in an asylum.”

Alex and I were leaning against the side of our Spanish classroom, finishing leftover piñata candies that were scattered across the ground like auto glass; the only remaining evidence of the car wreck that had been Spanish III, our last period of the day. I inspected my candy critically.


“It’s not technically a lollipop; it’s called a Dum-Dum.”
“You’d know, practicing on them every day.”
“Alex… shut up.”
A gust of summer wind stirred the pile of wrappers at our feet. I plucked mine off the ground and stuffed it into my back pocket, intending to dispose of it later. My gaze swept the milling crowds. She’d be around the science building any moment now…


“You going to ask her out?” Sometimes I swore that Alex could read my mind. I decided to play dumb.
“Who?”
“You know who I’m talking about, Justin. Alaya.”
“Do all of your sentences have to start with the word ‘you’?”


While Alex was fumbling for a reply, I saw a familiar mane of raven-black hair entering the quad area from between the science and math buildings. If I left now, I could catch her before she was lost in the crowd… Alex replied, but he may as well have been shouting up at me from the bottom of the Marianas Trench for the amount of attention I paid to him. My only response was  a quick clap on his shoulder.


“Catch you later.”
“Hey, I thought… you can’t ditch me like this, Justin! I know what you’re up to!”
“Gotta go man. Later.”
“Chasing girls… ladies man. I’m taking your candy, you know!”
“Take it!” I was halfway across the courtyard and closing the distance. Two thirds… then Alex called out.
“Justin!” I glanced up and waved, then looked back.

Alaya was gone.

Crap! I thought. This could be the last chance I'd have to see her before she left for Europe.

Crapcrapcrapcrap---

“Hey.”

Suddenly, she was right next to me. How did she do that? It didn’t matter, though; I decided it wasn’t wise to question fate. We walked without speaking, each step taking us another degree further from the massive throng that was high school, the fading voices that extolled the glory of summer vacation; three straight months of unmolested freedom. A few minutes later we walked alone, and I found my gaze examining Alaya's captivating figure much more often than the evergreens that surrounded us. Still, neither of us broached the silence; it was one of those fragile moments where two young people know they both have a subject of great importance to discuss, and yet neither can muster the courage to acknowledge it.


Alaya proved herself to be the more courageous of us. “You’re turning seventeen soon.” Even in such a simple statement, I heard the low and melodious tones that had first captured my imagination two years ago, during the second week of my sophomore year. Why else would I have noticed the friend of a friend? It was either her voice or her eyes. Meeting her gaze, I caught several shades of deep jade-green, framed by hair that was dark; so dark that it went beyond mere blackness. It captured the indigoes, the velvety purples, the depths of any combination of blue and violet. The dark of the sky on a moonless night, I thought, when nothing is there to impede the shimmering of the stars.


“Justin?”


She was talking to me! She was talking, and I hadn’t even noticed. Well, between her hair and her eyes, it was no wonder that I’d lost my composure. Late adolescence, I thought, is more of a burden than most people realize. “Yeah,” I answered. “I’m seventeen now. Well, in a week.”


Jays fluttered in the pine branches above our heads, knocking pieces of bark and cone to the ground. I noticed Alaya’s hand touch the pocket of her jeans for a moment. Was something in there?
“You know,” she began, “I’m leaving on vacation in three days. My dad won his company lottery; we’re spending a month in Europe. It’s something about touring old Gothic churches.”
“You’re going to miss the party,” I said, and rather dumbly at that. I’d known I wouldn’t be seeing much of Alaya that summer, but still felt a twinge of pain at the thought of it.

Alaya gave me a conspiratorial grin. “I was thinking we could have one of our own. If you’ve got time, that is.”

The prospect of spending the afternoon with Alaya was infinitely more desirable than whittling away the afternoon with Marcus and his Xbox. Sometimes, I decided, the spontaneous decisions were the best ones. I met her gaze and answered, “You know I do.”

We whiled away the hours on Alaya’s living room sofa, alternately watching 70s-era episodes of Battlestar Galactica and simply enjoying each other’s company. From where I sat with Alaya leaning against me, I could see the wooded landscape through the window dropping sharply away; as I stroked the long strands of hair, I thought the mountains in the distance rather resembled an enormous, sleeping canine.


“Hey,” I said. In the background, I could hear the muted voices of soldiers scream profanities at their cylon nemeses.
“Hmm?”
“The hills over there. See them? They sort of make a wolf.” The shadows of our alpine valley grew longer as the light waned, and the lupine visage was thrown into stark detail.
Alaya’s eyebrows drew together as they always did when she was thinking. “You’re right. It’s sad, but in all the years I’ve lived here I’ve never noticed that before.”
A series of chimes from the cuckoo clock in her kitchen drew us out of our contented daydreams. "Darn," Alaya muttered. "It’s six.”

“Six?” I asked, craning my neck to see around her head. I caught a single glimpse of the clock, the hands dividing its pale face vertically into two half-moons  . “And six is bad… why?”

“My parents told me they’d get home at about six-fifteen, but Dad likes to arrive places early. I doubt he’d consider this a constructive use of my time.”
I laughed at the sarcasm in her voice. “I get the picture.” I stretched my back and began the laborious process of extricating myself from the sofa, then felt a hand grab me firmly by the wrist.
“Wait.” Alaya revealed a small box, drawing it from somewhere on her person, dropped it into my hand. “An early birthday gift.”
“Do you mind…?”
“Go ahead.”


I opened the box and drew out a long silver chain. The links tinkled musically as they impacted one another, free at last from the confines of their velvet prison. I found it hard to split my attention between Alaya and the necklace; both of them were shining with expectation. “Shiny,” I said, and laughed at the bluntness of my own comment.


“Do you like it? I wasn’t sure what to get you, and this seemed right somehow, but I’m afraid it might be too—” she never got to finish the sentence. On a heretofore unknown impulse, I’d taken her in my arms and kissed her. “Too straightforward?”


She nodded.

The moment could have lasted much longer, possibly late into the night, if not for the ominous crunch of a gravel driveway and two and slams of a car door. Alaya found the clasp first and fastened the chain around my neck, saving me precious seconds. “Back door. Turn left and stay behind the house so they don’t see you from the front window. And you’d better still be wearing that when I get back from vacation.”


“No problem.” I was out of the house and gone before her parents even had time to enter; leaves slid and disintegrated under my racing feet as I took a straight shot home through the woods. I laughed as I ran; lucky! I’d cheated the powers that be, found myself a girlfriend and had a smoldering date inside her parents’ own house. I felt like the luckiest human on earth. But then, I was seventeen, and nothing could touch me.

Author's Note

I am simply re-submitting the same things in teh form of a book, because I did not know that writerscafe was gay and differentiated a "Story" from a "book."