#ch: nick crosby

[motownfiction]

cleats

Will can’t stop staring at Crosby’s cleats.

He knows how that sounds, and he wishes he could stop doing it. But the harder he tries to look away, the easier it is to keep staring. Except it’s not just staring. It’s outright gawking.

It’s embarrassing, especially considering he’s quite sure Crosby’s taken some notice. He’s the kind of guy who can always feel eyes on him. Most of the time, girls stare at him. It’s not usually other guys, and it’s definitely not usually Will O’Connor. But today, he just can’t stop staring at his cleats.

There’s nothing weird or wrong about the cleats. At least, that’s what Will has to assume. He’s never played sports beyond gym class or a few passes with his dad in the backyard, but he’s pretty sure he’d notice if someone’s cleats were fucked up. Crosby’s look normal. Used to hell and back, of course, but normal. And that’s what pisses Will off the most.

How easy is it for a guy like Crosby to just be normal?

How easy is it for him to wake up and choose the normal thing everyday? The average thing? He wears plain, solid-colored ties to school, does his homework but never takes any creative risks with it (lest he get below a perfect score), dates popular girls, and plays sports that require cleats. He’s so cool, he needs a special shoe to show it to the world.

Because that’s what cleats do for a guy, especially a guy at St. Catherine’s. When you wear cleats, you’re not just a student. You’re a prize athlete – the kind of guy who’s going to bring in a trophy (and, with it, new students, because parents want to pay tuition dollars for a school full of winners). People respect you when you’re normal enough to like sports, to play them, to excel at them.

Crosby’s the right kind of sixteen. He goes to parties in his friends’ basements, but he makes out there, gets drunk there, plays a sloppy game of pool there. He’s not like Will, who stays up late to watch Saturday Night Live with Sam and Daniel (more Sam now that Daniel’s almost as cool and normal as Crosby). The right kind of sixteen doesn’t stay home on a Saturday night to watch a show that may or may not be funny. The right kind of sixteen already has a favorite beer and impresses girls with his beat-up cleats.

Will is the wrong kind of sixteen. His shoes are wrong, his music is wrong, his arrant lack of romantic or sexual life is wrong. He’s an abject failure in Chuck Taylors. Forget the cleats.

Crosby looks up at him as if to ask what his problem is. But the look on Will’s face must be too pitiful for a fight. Crosby just shakes his head like he understands. He’d stare at himself, too, if he were a loser like that.

Maybe Will’s projecting. And in a way, he knows he is.

It does not stop feeling like the real thing.

(part of @nosebleedclub july challenge -- day ii!)

[bethestaryouareradio]

Mentoring with Henna Hundal, Nicholas Donzelli, and Cynthia Brian

https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/118595/mentoring-with-henna-hundal-nick-donzelli-and-cynthia-brian

"Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction."  John Crosby

Henna Hundal returns to Express Yourself!® to host this important episode focused on mentoring. She reads The Gift of Mentoring by BTSYA volunteer Karen Kitchel from the book, Be the Star You Are! Millennials to Boomers Celebrating Gifts of Positive Voices in a Changing Digital World. Henna interviews her personal mentor, Founder of Be the Star You Are!® and producer of Express Yourself!®, Cynthia Brian, to find out why mentors are necessary to success and how to establish a beneficial mutual relationship. Cynthia finds out more about Henna’s radio show where Henna is currently interviewing 2020 Presidential candidates. (www.thehennahundalshow.com) De La Salle high school junior varsity water polo coach and Founder of Green Air, an energy solutions company, Nicholas Donzelli, converses with Henna about his philosophy about the importance of mentoring. Both guests agree that to achieve your dreams and goals, it is essential to have a mentor to guide and ground you, holding you accountable, focused, and on the right path.  Mentorship empowers us to accept the struggles that are inherent to achieving greatness.  There’s no progress without struggle.   

Guests: Nicholas Donzelli

Nick Donzelli graduated from the United States Naval Academy as a systems engineer with a minor in nuclear engineering. He is an entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of an energy solutions company in Northern California called Green Air. It is time to Go Green! As head coach of the De La Salle junior varsity water polo team, Nick strives to mentor and empower his players with integrity, truth, confidence, and a can-do attitude. Nick is happily married and the father of four children who inspire him daily to make a difference on the planet. In fact, Nick’s son Isaiah who is now 19, was the youngest reporter ever on Express Yourself at age 12 with a segment called Nature Calls. Be the Star You Are! 501 c3 charity is grateful to Nick for being a supporter of outreach programs. Nicks definition of Proverbs 12:15 is:  “A man who counsels with himself, counsels with a fool.” Don’t be a fool and think you can achieve your goals and dreams on your own; seek guidance, be willing to sacrifice, and never quit working towards your dreams! Find a mentor! www.gogreenair.com

Guest: Cynthia Brian

Cynthia Brian is a New York Times best selling author of several books, TV/Radio personality/producer, lecturer, and enrichment coach specializing in acting, media, writing, speaking, and life success. Cynthia is the Founder and Executive Director of Be the Star You Are!® 501 c3 empowering women, families, and youth through increased literacy and improved positive media messages. (www.BTSYA.org) Since 1998, she has produced and hosted the radio broadcast, StarStyle®-Be the Star You Are!® heard LIVE Wednesdays from 4-5pm PT on the Voice America Network. (www.voiceamerica.com/show/2206/be-the-star-you-are) She is the creator and producer of Express Yourself!™ Teen Radio broadcasting Sundays at 3pm PT. (www.voiceamerica.com/show/2014/express-yourself) She is honored to have mentored thousands of teens and adults, including her own two children. In her spare time, Cynthia can be found working in her garden or playing with her barnyard of adopted animals. www.CynthiaBrian.com

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[motownfiction]

oddity

From the moment she learned to speak, Lucy’s mother has held her close and called her my little oddity.

It seems nice for a little while. Mom never says anything mean to Lucy. She loves everything about her. When Lucy picked up a guitar and started strumming non-existent, non-rhyming songs about women in cafés in Europe, Mom kissed her cheeks and called her perfect little Joni Mitchell baby, my little oddity. When Lucy got really into wearing mismatched socks because she thought it added subtle character, Mom said she was proud of her, so proud of her, my little oddity. It was a term of endearment, like when Sadie’s mom called her sweetheart, or when Will’s mom called him baby. Mom’s just smarter than all the other parents, including Dad, most of the time. Oddity is a stronger word. A smarter word. A better one.

Until Lucy is too proud of it on the way to art class in fourth grade.

And Nick Crosby tells her it’s an insult. An accurate one, to be sure, because Lucy is the only kid in the whole fourth grade who knows the difference between all the different painters that Miss Kovacks asks them about every Tuesday morning, in art class.

She carries his words in her chest like a bomb for almost two more hours. Thankfully, recess rolls around, and she can detonate. Right in front of Sadie, the only person who knows how to listen. They’re sitting motionless on the swingset when Lucy finally gets the courage.

“Am I weird?” Lucy asks.

Sadie shrugs.

“I guess so,” she says. “Why? Is that bad?”

“I think. But you have to be honest with me. Am I weird?”

“Yeah.”

Sadie doesn’t even hesitate. Lucy wonders what it would be like to punch a hole right through the air.

“Great,” she mutters. “How do you know I’m weird?”

Sadie shrugs.

“You know how everybody else likes Greg?” she says, beginning to pump her legs and swing back and forth, back and forth. “Including me?”

“Yeah.”

“You like Peter.”

Lucy screws up her face.

“That’s not weird,” she says. “He’s kind of like Will.”

Sadie turns her head and gives her a look that only a ten-year-old girl with gossip behind her eyes can give.

“Sure,” she says. “You’re weird.”

Lucy sighs.

“I knew it.”

“But that’s not bad. If you weren’t weird, I don’t think I’d like you very much.”

Lucy smiles, even though she doesn’t mean to.

“OK,” she says. “I guess I’ll live with it, then.”

They swing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

(part of @nosebleedclub november challenge -- day 18!)

[motownfiction]

windy days

Sadie loves windy days. At least, in the early spring of her sophomore year, that’s what she tells herself she loves, anyway.

It’s not that she loves that the breeze makes her a little colder than she’d like to be, especially after a long Michigan winter. It’s not that she loves the way the wind blows her hair in front of her eyes (and sometimes gets in her eyeballs, which is more painful than it looks). No, it’s that she’s convinced herself that if she’s wearing a dress or her school skirt, and a powerful gust of wind rolls right on by, she’ll have her Marilyn Monroe moment.

Preferably in front of Daniel.

It’s no secret that Daniel’s made his way through a good chunk of girls in the sophomore class this year. Sadie hasn’t been one of them, and she’s not even sure she wants to be – at least, not in that way, and not yet. She does know, of course, that she’s in love with him. She knows she wants him to think about her as more than just Sadie, his friend since before either of them could speak. And after watching The Seven Year Itch on TV with Lucy last summer, she’s convinced herself that a good breezy skirt moment is exactly what will hook him.

It happens on the way back from All Schools’ Mass, of all places and all things. It’s a Thursday morning, and Sadie’s walking side by side with Lucy, gabbing about what tape Lucy should play in the car on her date with Will tomorrow night. She’s leaning toward 1999, but Sadie thinks she could go a little more vintage with Abbey Road.

“Are you kidding me?” Lucy asks. “Who makes out to ‘Mean Mr. Mustard?’”

“It wouldn’t have to be ‘Mean Mr. Mustard,’” Sadie says. “There are other songs on Abbey Road.”

“Yeah. ‘Polythene Pam.’”

Sadie rolls her eyes. That’s when she feels it. The wind picks up faster than it’s been all morning, and so does Sadie’s pulse. She knows Daniel is standing right behind her. If she lets go just a little bit … if she just lets go … she’ll have her Marilyn Monroe moment at the perfect time.

And she does. She feels it, and dammit, she grins. She feels just like a movie star.

Until she hears people laughing.

Laughing at her.

She’s not sure who says it. It sounds like Nick Crosby, her regrettable first kiss from about two years earlier. It’s always Nick Crosby. Meaner than a mean girl. But it doesn’t matter who says it. It matters that everybody hears it, and they do.

Hey, everybody, look! Sadie Doyle wears Wonder Woman Underoos!

They laugh and laugh and laugh like they’ve never seen underwear before. At first, Sadie wants to get mad. And then she can’t. She can feel her face turning red, but it doesn’t feel angry.

The hot tears running down her nose surprise the hell out of her.

She doesn’t even care that Daniel’s behind her.

She takes off running. The closer she can get to the door, the better. Maybe everyone will forget about the Wonder Woman Underoos when the bell rings. Sadie runs, and she can feel Lucy running to catch up with her. Behind her, she hears Lucy hiss, “Fuck you, Crosby!” before she finally catches up again. She wraps her arms around Sadie.

“Fuck them,” Lucy says. “They don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?” Sadie asks, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.

“You. Me. Any of it. They don’t get it.”

Sadie nods. She’s not sure exactly what Lucy means, but she is sure she’s a good friend. The best she’ll ever have.

“Maybe that was just the dress rehearsal,” Sadie says. “You know, for my real Marilyn Monroe moment.”

Lucy laughs.

“Yeah,” she says. “Count on it.”

Sadie smiles and turns her head to look at Daniel. For half a second, they make eye contact. For half a second, Sadie knows he understands, too. He understands all of it.

[motownfiction]

drawbridge

Sometimes, Lucy wishes she knew how to shut the hell up.

It’s not all the time. She wouldn’t even wager it’s a quarter of the time. For the overwhelming majority of the time, Lucy is proud of her voice. But when the feeling comes on, she can’t make it stop. She just wishes her mouth was a drawbridge, one that she never has to let down. If she never lets it down, she never has to wage war. And if she never wages war, she’ll never embarrass herself.

For as much as Lucy loves to speak, she hates to be embarrassed.

It’s been hours since her English class this afternoon, but Lucy is lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling, wishing it had gone differently. Wishing she had shut the hell up when she had the chance. She’s pretty sure she’ll be able to visualize this moment vividly for the rest of her life … pretty sure it will always be in her limbs, a muscle memory as easy as breathing or walking, but one that she would prefer to forget. She can’t believe it really happened. She can’t believe she really said all that. Did all that.

In her pride, she wants to blame Nick Crosby for the whole thing. But in her rationality, she knows he didn’t deserve it – not all of it. They were talking about Of Mice and Men in class, and Nick Crosby, in all his smarminess, decided to blame Curly’s wife for her own death. He said she coaxed Lenny into it, so she was asking to die (“or worse,” he added, as though that would make it better). And Lucy couldn’t take it. She couldn’t take that Crosby had said it, and she couldn’t take that half the class was agreeing with him. So, she did what only Lucy would do. She walked to the back of the classroom, picked up a hardcover dictionary, and flipped to the word misogyny. She slammed the book’s spine on top of Crosby’s desk, pointed to the word, and yelled, “Read it! That’s you!”

The fact that she only received a half-hour detention after school was a fucking miracle.

Her parents aren’t really mad at her. They’re not even really disappointed. Mom says it’s good to stand up for your beliefs, especially when you’re right. But Dad has a point when he says that you don’t always have to go around proving yourself to everyone. Sometimes, the toughest thing to do is to let it go, let it roll off your back like the rain.

Empirically, Lucy knows that. She really does. But everyday, it’s like she resets. She learns the same lesson all the time, and it never sticks. It’s like Leave It to Beaver without all the misogyny (or with it, depending on your interpretation of what happened in English today). She looks up at the ceiling and sighs. If only she’d learned to stop talking. If only she’d learned to stop proving herself.

She doesn’t think she was wrong to call Crosby a misogynist. She also doesn’t think it will stop him, as she can most certainly picture what he’ll be like in twenty years: an almost middle-aged guy in finance who cringes when his wife spends a night out with her friends and doesn’t think his daughter should play basketball, even if she’s good at it. But she doesn’t think she was wrong for pointing it out. Maybe for slamming a dictionary on his desk, but not for pointing it out.

It’s that she didn’t know she’d have to deal with this much aftermath.

After English class, there was only one more period left in the school day. But already, word had gotten around about Lucy Callaghan’s latest feminist meltdown. When she walked into her last-period French class, Robby Blair (Crosby’s best friend) slammed his notebook down in front of her. 

“That’s you!” he said. “Read it!”

Lucy didn’t even have to look down to know that Robby had scribbled the word bitch on the piece of paper.

And even though Will saw the paper, tore it out of Robby’s notebook, and chucked it at his head, and even though Lucy knew it wasn’t much in the grand scheme of her life … it still felt like it, anyway. She’s fifteen years old, and worse, she’s aware of it. She knows fifteen is temporary (and sixteen and seventeen and everything that feels so distant, even now, even to her). But just because it’s temporary doesn’t mean it’s not present. And when something is present, it bites and stings until you don’t know who you are anymore. Right now, Lucy’s not sure of who she is … who she’s supposed to be to get by, without ever feeling like this again. Without ever feeling embarrassed.

She wishes her mouth was a drawbridge.

Maybe then, she wouldn’t have to feel anything bad anymore.

(part of @nosebleedclub january challenge -- day xxi!)

[motownfiction]

apple

In first grade, Lucy’s Halloween costume is a no-brainer. She can’t believe she’s never had the idea before. This year, she’s going to come to school dressed as Snow White.

It’s the perfect idea for her. She already has everything. The dark, dark hair. The blue, blue eyes. She can even wear her mother’s red, red lipstick for special occasions, and what occasion is more special than dressing up for Halloween? All she needs is the dress and the apple, and she’s ready to go.

When she gets ready for school that day, she poses for about a million pictures on the front porch. Mom and Dad tell her how beautiful she looks. A real little princess. A real little fairytale, right before their eyes. Years from now, Lucy will deny ever having wanted to be a princess (among other things), but for now, it’s the most important thing her parents could say. She’s almost seven years old, and she already knows how smart she is, how brave. Sometimes, it’s nice to hear she can be a fairytale, too.

Eventually, Will and his sisters make their way out of their house next door. He’s dressed like Batman, and Lucy calls him over for pictures. He’s ecstatic, very unlike Batman, but the pictures are sweet. A princess and a superhero. Exactly what they should have been. Years from now, Will, too, will deny that he ever wanted to be a superhero. But when he was almost seven years old, it was what he deserved.

Before school, everything was grand.

But everyone knows that it’s during school where everything goes wrong.

Lucy keeps her apple on the edge of her desk. She has it there for all of five minutes before Nick Crosby, inaccurately dressed as Superman, notices it. He walks up to Lucy’s desk, grabs the apple, and takes a big bite out of it, just like the richest kid in class would do.

“HEY!” Lucy shouts.

“Sorry,” Crosby says, mouth still full, “I was checking to see if it was a poison apple.”

Lucy folds her arms across her chest and narrows her gaze at him.

“It is,” she says. “So you’re gonna die.”

Crosby’s eyes go wide. Lucy thinks she even sees him start to cry as he runs to the coatroom to catch his breath. She smirks.

Good.

Even if Miss Cunningham gives her a lecture, it will be worth it.

Next Halloween, she knows she’ll go as a witch.

[motownfiction]

two miserable people meeting at a wedding

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Kim Campbell has been meticulously fantasizing about her wedding since she was four, and she went to her cousin’s wedding in Hilton Head. Her best friend, Vicky St. John, always made fun of her for that. She used to say things like, “Kim, you can’t ‘meticulously fantasize.’ Dreams are loose on purpose. That’s why they’re fun!”

But Kim would meticulously fantasize, anyway. Until about third grade, she fantasized about a rainbow wedding, like her cousin had. All the bridesmaids would wear different colors, like a rainbow. As the bride, she’d assign the colors, of course. Her little sister would wear blue, since it was her favorite color. Gina Lumetta, her second best friend, would wear green, since it would look so pretty with her coppery hair. Steph Armstrong, her third best friend, would wear orange, since she always drank so much orange juice. And Vicky, her best of all best friends, would wear yellow. It would be her punishment for making fun of rainbow weddings.

Over time, Kim fell out of love with rainbow weddings. She fell out of love with chocolate raspberry and forced herself to adore tasteless white foam. Her mother said that was classy, and Kim always did as her mother said. But the one thing that was the same was the song. She needed to dance with her new husband to one song.

If a picture paints a thousand words / Then why can’t I paint you?

It’s the song she heard when she and her parents were driving back from Hilton Head. She thought it was the most romantic song in the world. She never gave up on it, either. When she and Robby Blair started dating in the eighth grade, she told him it was their song. She was preparing for their wedding, and in a way, he must have known. Robby became really reckless shortly after that, almost like he had a death wish. Kim has no way of asking him, of course, since he did die in the middle of tenth grade. She’s not sure it has anything to do with her, anything to do with the song, so she keeps listening to it. It wasn’t meant for Robby. It was meant for someone else.

But this isn’t how it was supposed to go. Kim was supposed to get married after maybe a year of college. She and Robby were supposed to move into a pretty little house, right in between his parents’ house and hers. They were supposed to be climbing toward their own affluence. They were supposed to be happy. Instead, Kim went away to college with no boyfriend. No prospects. She didn’t even meet a boyfriend in college, either, so she doesn’t know what this degree is for. What kind of a woman gets a degree in French Language and Literature if she’s not going to get married before graduation? Now she’s working in the HR department at some company she sometimes forgets the name of. She can recite a lot of Jacques Prévert, but no one cares. It doesn’t even matter that Kim cares.

She’s not supposed to be sitting at the head table at Vicky’s wedding reception, wearing an itchy dress that’s neither blue nor purple, with no ring on her finger. She’s not supposed to be twenty-five, unmarried, and too tired, too embarrassed to make it through applications for a master’s degree. This is not how it’s supposed to go.

Kim gets up in the middle of “My Eyes Don’t Cry.” She doesn’t feel like dancing, and it’s a Detroit law that when “My Eyes Don’t Cry” comes on, you dance. So, she skulks off to the bathroom. She almost makes it there, too, when she sees somebody familiar coming in from a smoke break.

“Nick?” she asks.

The guy looks up from fiddling with his jacket. Sure enough, there’s Nick Crosby, Robby’s best friend, Kim’s high school buddy, unexpected valedictorian from the Class of ‘85. Kim hasn’t seen Nick in probably six years. He looks different but the same. And she can’t explain it, but she’s almost running toward him.

“Hey, Kim,” Nick says. “Long time.”

“Yeah. I didn’t … I didn’t know you were here.”

Nick shrugs.

“I’ve been making myself scarce,” he says. “I don’t know why I was invited to this. I really don’t know why I came. Guess I just needed something to do.”

“Yeah,” Kim says. “I was kind of surprised when Vicky said she was inviting you.”

“You mean ‘cause she dumped me for this guy after a whole year of making long distance work?”

“I mean …”

“It’s OK, Kim. I went to Stanford. I was fine.”

Kim smiles a little. She forgot about Nick Crosby going to Stanford. For a little while, it seemed like he was going to have to settle for Michigan. Lucy Callaghan just kept beating him. But then, Lucy got pregnant, dropped down from first place to fifth, and Nick just … rose up. Kim can’t believe she forgot how exciting it was when he got his acceptance. They must have drunk a whole shelf of everything and nothing. Kim still remembers waking up feeling like she had no head. Gina said it was preparation for all the partying they were going to do in college. Kim only went to a handful of parties in college, and she never got drunk at any of them. If she’d known that then – that she was going to be such a square when she got old – maybe she would have done things differently.

But that’s the thing about Kim. She doesn’t know how to do things differently. Even when she does something for love, it’s always a little bit for money. It’s always a little bit for attention.

“I can’t believe I almost forgot about Stanford,” she says. “Remind me what you studied.”

“American Studies,” Nick says. “Got a master’s, too, but nobody’s taking me for a Ph.D. So I’m pretty much just a professional douche.”

Kim laughs, but she doesn’t even really know why. Maybe it’s because Nick is taller than she remembers. Yeah. That’s probably it. Kim always did like the tall ones.

“Well, there are worse things to be than a douche,” she says. “A condom, to name one.”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure the condom wins that race.”

“How could we find out?”

And though no one will believe her even a few hours later, at the time, Kim hadn’t meant those words as a pick-up line. But less than ten minutes after they come out of her mouth, she finds herself in a supply closet with a condom and Nick Crosby.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Kim Campbell wasn’t supposed to be one of two miserable people meeting at a wedding. She wasn’t supposed to screw Vicky’s first boyfriend in a supply closet at her own wedding.

But that’s exactly what she’s doing.

And in about a year, when she and Nick Crosby are sitting at their own wedding, they wonder which two people will find themselves in the supply closet.

[motownfiction]

high school accident

Will can’t believe he almost forgot about that time Daniel rear-ended Nick Crosby’s Mustang.

It was about twenty years ago now. Daniel had just gotten his driver’s license, and he took Will and Sam in his Bronco to grab a pizza on the way home from school one afternoon. Of course, Daniel was probably too short to drive a truck. When he backed out of his assigned parking spot, he backed right into Nick Crosby’s brand new cherry red Mustang. Will can still see the look on Crosby’s face when he got out of the car. He was even cherry redder than the car itself. He was screaming all sorts of obscenities that probably should have landed him in detention or even worse, but because he played on at least one sports team at St. Catherine’s, he got a pass for life. As he stood there in the parking lot, he shouted at Daniel about how it was cruel to damage a new Mustang, my new Mustang. After about five minutes of that, Sam got fed up. He rolled down the window and shouted, “Yeah, your new Mustang. Too bad it wasn’t an old one. Then maybe I’d almost feel sorry for you.”

Crosby lunged for the window at that, but Sam rolled it up too fast. All the while, Will was laughing like he’d never found anything else that funny before. And at sixteen, maybe he hadn’t. When Will was sixteen, he felt like every moment rolled into the next. There was no point in thinking about the ones before because they got you to the present. He used to be so good at moving forward; at staying in the present.

Now, though, he lives in choppy memories.

It has only been a few months since they buried Sam, and Will still thinks about him everyday. Every minute, really, is more like it. The thoughts always come out half formed (if that), but they’re always on his mind. Sometimes they’re fun, and sometimes, they’re like this: deceptively fun until they break his heart into a million stupid pieces.

He can’t believe the three of them were so dumb as to laugh at what happened that afternoon. They were really so ignorant as to think it was funny. Any one of them could have been much more hurt than they were, but they didn’t think of it that way. They were sixteen, and they didn’t know how. They were sixteen, and it was just a silly high school accident. They were sixteen, and they had no way of knowing that within the next two decades, one of them would die in a car wreck.

They didn’t know.

Would life have been better if they did? If Will could go back and warn himself that in less than twenty years, his best friend would be dead, would he do it? Would they still have been best friends? Or would Will have walked away out of fear – the fear that it was his fault, the fear that if he’d just stayed home instead of moving all the way to New York, the fear that if he’d just been a better friend, a more present friend, someone who showed up for all the holidays every year? He doesn’t want to know the answer to any of that. He just wants to know why they sat there in the parking lot and laughed.

He just wants to know how he can move on, knowing how terrible he was before. How awful.

Some days, he can forgive himself. He can forgive himself for having been a teenager, for having stayed in his apartment with Lucy and the girls on Christmas, for moving on.

Today is not one of those days.

Will turns on the TV and pretends not to hear the memories whispering to him.

(part of @nosebleedclub poetry month challenge -- day xxx!)

[motownfiction]

rival team

In the eighth grade, Will’s least favorite class of the day is gym.

He loves the idea of spending an hour running around, jumping, and throwing things. That sounds like a lot of fun – like stuff he’s always been good at. What he’s not good at are organized team sports. And that’s all that a Catholic school gym class is really about.

It’s the middle of April. Today is Friday, and they’re at the end of their two-week soccer unit. Everyday is a new game, but everyday, the same guys win: the popular guys, the ones who dabble in every sport, even the ones they don’t actually play for St. Catherine’s, like Robby Blair and Nick Crosby. Will (and Daniel, his only true ally in the class) is on their team, but it still feels like he’s losing the game. Blair and Crosby do it all by themselves, a Starsky and Hutch for the junior high crowd.

They’re in the last few minutes before the teacher blows the whistle and sends them back into the locker room. Will’s done a pretty good job of avoiding the ball … until now, when Kevin Sheehan accidentally kicks it to him. Will looks up at Kevin with panic in his eyes.

“Will, man, I’m sorry!” Kevin says. “I didn’t know what to do! The ball never comes to me!”

But Will doesn’t say anything. He has the same instinct as Kevin, and he kicks the ball to the person closest to him … the person he feels the most comfortable with: Daniel.

There’s a gleam in Daniel’s eye that isn’t usually there. He never has to deal with the ball, either, but he doesn’t receive it with the same horror as Will and Kevin did. Instead, Daniel has this look like he wants to be a hero. It’s a look Will knows all too well because it’s a look he gets in his own eye. He holds his breath and watches Daniel kick the ball all the way down the field to score his first goal in eight years of gym class history … for the rival team.

The teacher blows the whistle.

The rival team wins.

Will knows it shouldn’t matter. It definitely doesn’t matter to him. He just wants to change clothes so he can go to lunch and have a few words with Lucy, who just finished up her French class. She’s always in a happy mood after French class. Unfortunately, the boys in fourth-period gym aren’t in the happiest moods, especially not Crosby and Blair.

Blair sneers at Daniel on their way inside. Crosby whispers something to Blair that Will wishes he never would have heard.

“He doesn’t know how to play because his dad left him,” he says, and he and Blair both laugh.

Will’s breath hitches. He looks around to see if Daniel heard. Luckily, he didn’t. He’s chatting with Kevin Sheehan about how pretty Steph Armstrong looked when she did the first reading at All Schools’ Mass yesterday morning.

Good.

Now Will can take care of this on his own.

He speeds up to Crosby and Blair – mostly Crosby – and kicks him in the back of the leg. Crosby falls to his knees and yelps, and Will can’t help but laugh. He’s pretty sure Crosby is exaggerating. But he’d love to think he could just lay him out like that … that he could humiliate him.

And maybe he still can.

He thinks about what he could say to stand up for Daniel. He wants to tell Crosby that it’s not funny to bully a kid whose father left; that it’s not funny when your parent doesn’t love you because all you ever deserve is their love. But just because Will feels it and believes it doesn’t mean he can get away with saying it. He’s a fourteen-year-old boy, and fourteen-year-old boys don’t talk about their feelings. It’s 1981, and they’re not supposed to do that if they want to make it out of school in one piece. Will looks down at Crosby on the grass. He knows exactly what he has to say.

“Fuck you, Crosby.”

Will walks away, and he knows Crosby knew what he meant.

(part of @nosebleedclub poetry month challenge -- day xvi!)

[motownfiction]

fire and rain

After her first kiss, Sadie goes home and cries.

She’s newly fourteen and in the middle of eighth grade. She was just at Kim Campbell’s birthday party, and she knows she was invited out of guilt or pity or both. Kim Campbell is the most popular girl in the whole junior high, and she’s never particularly liked Sadie. She does, however, have a real thing about Sam. After all, he’s the handsome twin – the handsome twin who never goes anywhere without his twin sister, the chipped tooth wonder.

She was planning to sit the whole party out until her dad convinced her to go. Mike always said that if you were invited to something, the best thing to do was to go. That way, you’d be invited to things again, and you’d never be lonely. Sadie agreed, but this didn’t feel like a place where she was wanted. She’d rather go to the movies with Lucy, who wasn’t invited to the party at all – not even out of pity. But Mike convinces her by saying it’s the nice thing to do. Sadie can’t resist doing the nice thing.

So, she went to the party. For the most part, she sat in the corner of the Campbell’s basement and feasted from the plastic bowl of Ruffles. She was seated right beside the Campbells’ bookshelf, so she read the titles and tried to think of which ones she still wanted to read. Persuasion. Wuthering Heights. Hard Times. She knew Lucy would have something to say about the Campbells’ taste in literature (“Too pedestrian” or something like that), but she didn’t care. Sometimes it’s nice not to have a Lucy in your head, judging your every motion like you’re constantly running for political office.

Looking back on the past few hours, she doesn’t really know exactly when Nick Crosby approached her. She just knows that he did. He was wearing a dark green sweater that made him look almost cute. Sadie knows that had to mean he looked incredible because she’s only had eyes for Daniel since the fourth grade, and if she noticed somebody else outside of a movie screen or a magazine, then there was certainly something there. Certainly something.

Crosby asked her if she’d be willing to trade the last of the Ruffles for one Twix bar. She thought about it and decided they’d better split their earnings instead. It made her feel strangely validated when Crosby laughed at her half-joke. After all, he’s the most popular boy in school, and making him laugh feels like an accomplishment, like getting straight A’s or securing the lead in a school play. She’s not sure why she feels this way. She just knows that when Crosby was sitting right across from her, it was like she couldn’t help herself.

They talked for a little while longer about school and teachers and Crosby’s small legacy on the eighth-grade basketball team. He’s desperate to grow so tall that the high school’s varsity team will take one look at him and let them into their ranks immediately. When Sadie laughed and asked him why that was his dream, he just shrugged and said, “At least I have one.”

At the time, Sadie was too stymied to take it personally.

It was strange, but the more time passed, the more Nick Crosby seemed … human. Likable, even. Sadie knows that Lucy hates him because he sometimes scores higher on math tests than she does, and he’s her only real competition for valedictorian in ‘85. But at the party, Sadie didn’t hate him. She found him just as charming as everybody else did. And it didn’t even bother her for a second. Not then.

“Fire and Rain” began to play in the distance. Sadie didn’t have to look around to know that Sam was probably behind it. He’s the only person in this whole house who’d try to play a song from 1970 and get away with it. Those are the perks of having a bunch of girls want to kiss you, he always says. You get to pick the music, and nobody complains. Tonight, Nick Crosby certainly wasn’t complaining.

“This is a great song,” he said.

Sadie nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “Great song.”

Crosby looked at her with one of those dastardly smiles. She wasn’t hooked, but she knew she wanted to see where it would go.

“You’re a great girl,” Crosby said, and Sadie felt herself blush like none other. Even Daniel hasn’t gotten her this flustered before.

“I don’t know,” she struggled.

“Well, I do. I wanna show you.”

“Show me? What …?”

But she didn’t get to finish asking the question. Nick Crosby kissed her, and for a moment, she forgot all of the English language.

She wondered what that must mean for the two of them now. In junior high, if you kissed somebody, they were going to be your steady. All it really meant was that you sat together at lunch and tried really hard to be seated next to each other in school Mass so that you could hold hands during the Our Father. Was that about to happen for her and Crosby? Was he about to abandon people like Kim Campbell and Vicky St. John just so that he could hold hands with Sadie Doyle? Would Lucy stop speaking to her? And what would Daniel think?

In the end, none of it ever mattered. Crosby didn’t really speak to Sadie for the rest of the night. Just a few nods. It was like he’d gone and kissed her for no reason. Just to see what might happen. Just to see if the world would explode.

She stands in front of her bedroom mirror and cries. It’s not that she wanted to be Nick Crobsy’s girlfriend. When she thinks about going to school basketball games and making spirit cookies to cheer him (or anybody) on, she feels sick to her stomach. But she does want to feel like someone sees her. Like for a second, someone looks at her, and she’s the beautiful twin.

Instead, she’s a party trick.

And she cries harder and harder.