I apologize to the non-existant readers, but I again find myself short on time, yet eger to post something. Therefore, I’ll invite you to read yet another dreadful creative attempt. Oh the fun it’ll be. Warning, this is…terrible. Enjoy.
Intents and Purposes
She’d been on the back stoop all afternoon, starring at the red fence between the neighbor’s yard. At first she’d been reading, but now the book lay beside her. She’d barely moved for five hours, listening to the house and the family inside: Mom setting the table, dad coming home, Dave bursting the door open, a half muted fight then the door slamming, and a car screeching away.
No one had been out to look for her yet. They probably thought she’d gone to Mary-Beth’s, not an unreasonable inference, she thought ruefully, given recent behavior. She’d spent all last weekend there, although she wouldn’t tell anyone but Mary-Beth the why.
Before she had come outside, she met her mom on the stairs. She’d hidden the book behind her back and hugged the railing. Mom pushed by with a mountain of freshly laundered clothes. Mom asked in passing, “How’s Jacob?”
In her ignorance, she said, “Fine.”
They’d met in cross-country, both of them middle of the pack runners too lazy to meet mediocrity. He’d complimented on her latest dye-job. She’d liked the way his smile only ever touched the right side of his mouth.
As time went on, they began to become more verbose in these rear guard conversations, discussing just about every detail of their lives at one point or another. Each day presented an hour or so of mostly uninterrupted conversation.
Sometimes, Ms. Corelli would hang back to yell at them and the others, most of whom were actually doing their best. One day, she’d directed her malice at the pair of them, saying, “Jacob and Miranda, quit the flirting.”
Miranda would return the scowl, but with her head lowered. She perceived herself as somehow better than flirter. But Jacob would smile. It’s how she learned his name actually. It was a topic that they’d skipped too often and had become embarrassed about.
Later, after the groups of girls and boys had showered and changed into seasonable clothes, they talked again. They were all filing out and drifting apart, into groups expecting rides, or desiring a chat, the seniors going off as loners or joiners, laughing it up to freedom.
Miranda leaned on the bike stands. She was scouting for her mom, when he came up behind her. She jumped, then laughed. He smiled. He took up a position next to her.
“Waiting for a ride?”
“Yeah.” He wore flannel. She could have guessed that. He probably had Nirvana in his tape deck, that or Soundgarden. She bet he would sing along. She cocked her head and decided she was okay with that.
“I can give you one.”
“Oh, thanks, but my mom-“
He cut her off, “Say no more. I know how…particular parents can be.” His smile didn’t dim. “But, how about telling her you got a ride for tomorrow?”
“Sure.” She tried not
He waved to her as he left, “Catch you later.”
The next day she rode shotgun in his Dodge Dart. It was black turning to rust. Halfway through the ride, he awkwardly wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She didn’t stop him. She smiled to him when he dropped her off and he saluted. Her mom was waiting inside.
“Who was that young man?”
“Jacob.”
“Is he nice.”
Miranda opened the fridge, grabbing the cider. “Yeah.”
Mom had been smiling. She would always like Jacob.
They’d gone on their first date as a double, with her friend Thomas and his friend Mary-Beth. Miranda had never met the girl before, and watched as Jacob and her interacted. She would have laid money on them being exes.
Jacob for his part was cordial to Thomas, who didn’t look happy to be there. He kept fidgeting; his eyes kept looking at the door. He didn’t talk much to Mary-Beth. She talked at him. She was peculiar that way. She liked the inanimate. She discussed with herself fashion and fiction, whole Thomas nodded and feigned some understanding.
He kept looking from her to his hands to the door.
Miranda worried about this. The miscalculation both had probably made. The effect it would have on the evening.
On their way to the theatre, they rode in near silence. The boys were in the front, switching stations as announcers roared in and droned out. They had similar enough taste in music for a denetente to be reached, but the girls in the back had no such bridge.
They sat still and would sometimes look at each other than glance away. Miranda compared herself to Mary-Beth. She was prettier. More alternative. Much more like Jacob, and in odd ways. Where he had his half smile, she had the Gallic shrug. They talked in the same open manner. They laughed almost in unison at the same jokes.
She looked down then back, and saw Mary-Beth examining her, then looking away. They scooted one another all the way to the theatre and built their first impressions almost gradually.
Miranda decided that she didn’t have to worry.
Mary-Beth, or so she later told Miranda, had decided they’d be friends. She also liked the dye-job. It was the first and last thing they said to one another the way their.
At the theatre the girls sat in the middle, with the boys flanking them. Jacob had his arm around her shoulder. Thomas was scooted to one side, his eyes still glancing at the door. Mary-Beth would look from the screen to Miranda, a smile playing on her face throughout the movie.
As they left, she whispered to Miranda, “Wasn’t that awful?”
“Yeah.”
“Next time let’s go to Plaza.”
Miranda just nodded. She was unsure of this arrangement. She didn’t think she liked Mary-Beth.
The ride home was silent, save for the radio.
Later, Thomas told her never to set him up again. They stopped talking after that.
Jacob did sing to the music when he drove. She’d learnt that on their fifth car journey. He turned up the volume and started his singing. She put her hands over her ears, but smiled at him. He grinned back and turned it down, apologizing. He wasn’t brutish about the dial. If she asked he’d gladly change the station. But she never asked.
“Come on, pick something. Something you like.”
“I like this fine.”
“Don’t bullshit. It’s bad for you.”
“I’m not bullshitting you. It’s fine.”
“Please, I know you don’t like it, so change it. What do you listen to?”
“I don’t mind. Just drop it, god.”
He’d give her a grimace, and his grimaces, unlike his smiles, touched his whole face. “If you’re sure.”
“I am.”
She sat in the front, of course. Jacob always had his arm around her. She liked that. It was always warm and reassuring. Her other boyfriends had never managed to acquire the knack for this particular skill. Their arms were always crushing her. Smothering her. She’d wriggle out from under them and there would always be that hurt look in their eyes, as if she was rejecting them.
Sometimes, mostly on Wednesdays, Jacob would give Mary-Beth a ride as well. She sat in the back, the middle seat. Her arms were spread like a Kraken’s over the front two seats. She’d stick her head out, bobbing between them, and Jacob never put his arm around her when Mary-Beth rode along.
Miranda tried to be cordial. She rarely managed it. Mostly, she was quiet. Mary-Beth would choose the station, turning it at will, and laughing at Jacob’s protests.
When they rod alone, Jacob would always stop a few blocks from her house. They’d make out before driving the rest of the way. He told her he’d feel weird doing so outside her house. When Mary-Beth came along, he’d drop her off with only a brief kiss. She’d watch from the curb as they circled the cal-du-sac. She’d bite her lip and wave as they passed, receiving two smiles and a wave in return. She’d always wonder if they stopped a few blocks before Mary-Beth’s.
In the evening, when he called her, she always almost said this. She’d catch herself, though, and replace it with something colorless glossed over in a minute.
Miranda began hanging out with Mary-Beth almost by accident. They shared a study hall, one with Miranda friendless and Mary-Beth bored. Eventually, they gravitated to each other. Familiar was better than nothing.
Besides Jacob, they shared only one thing at first: The margins of their papers.
Mary-Beth called herself a doodler. Miranda called her an artist. The drawings would sometimes overflow the margins of her paper and become embroiled in territorial wars with her notes.
Miranda for her part had inherited her brother’s main vice, writing song lyrics there. On the page her writing was calligraphic, but in the margins it was cramped.
They admired one another’s amusements; they talked like water, slow in parts furious in others, tearing apart interests and activities only to discover that, really, they liked each other.
Outside of school, they bummed around, Mary-Beth introducing Miranda to the car her parent’s had gotten her. It was clunker, a Lincoln Towncar from the early eighties. They goofed around. They went to the 7-Eleven, were thrown out of the Home Depot for playing on the dollies, viewed movies at the Plaza. She started splitting her rides home between the two of them.
Miranda didn’t have many friends, and there were few as similar to her as Mary-Beth. Slowly, they became nearly inseparable, to the point where only Jacob could wrangle one from the other.
He began then to adopt what they mockingly termed the “puppy-dog voice”.
“Come out with me tonight! I haven’t seen you in three days.”
“That’s ridiculous.” They still ran at the back of the pack. They still talked to one another. But something was flacking off.
Last Friday, Jacob had taken her to a show, a remake of something smart and terrible, turned dumb and glitzy. The finish was Hollywood, but the workmanship European. It was a disappointment to Miranda, who’d seen the original a few years ago when it had come to the Plaza, with Dave, back before Dave started to become crazy. She’d been scared, then, and her brother had guided her through it. Now she was angry. And Jacob couldn’t figure out why.
He kept asking, and she stalled him.
She never wanted to tell.
He put his arm on her and she didn’t shake it off. But when he let her out, she bolted.
“Goodbye?” He was indignant.
Inside, she called Mary-Beth.
“Can I come over?”
She spent the rest of the weekend there.
On Monday she broke up with Jacob.
She got up from the stoop, the book loosely clutched in her hands. She opened the back door and nearly silently walked up the stairs.
There was music coming from the dinning room, a laugh, then someone falling over. More laughter.
Once upstairs, she went to her parents’ room and grabbed the cordless. She punched in a number and waited. She tried to find the reason for the abrupt shift. It was so hard to articulate, but she’d known it from the second that his arm on her shoulder had become so heavy.
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