I didn't do a blog last week. For the sake of my fallen blog, I must avenge him with a blog twice as long this week!! I do, fortunately, have plenty of things to talk about. I sang a song, and then sang it again. I’m not normally the person to sing a song but I had an interesting revelation in these last 2 weeks. I’m going to call it pre-hind sight. Does that make sense? It’s the sudden realization that if you don’t do something now, you might regret it later. I’ll call it PHS for short.
So, like I said, I had some PHS about 2 weeks ago about what is going to happen after ninth grade. I have made a bunch of new friends with all my extra-curricular activities and junk, and now the impact of not having a place I always see them has landed on me like a bag of small but heavy rocks. I remember threatening to hit a girl with a brick, watching a girl grapevine off a riser next to me, discussing cool one liners in crime dramas (looks like she’s in….a sticky situation), cleaning random bloody noses, and getting a phone number…a girl’s phone number! All of these things are somehow dampening my immediate desire to sprint as fast as I can away from junior high forever. They aren’t dampening it very much, but just enough for me to notice what I’ll be missing.
I would like to address the phone number comment more officially right now. It happened just recently during geography. I sit on the far right side of the room right up front. I like this position because I can use the wall as a back rest if I so desire. She’s the teachers assistant in my period of geography and decided, on this particular day, to choose to sit directly behind me for the ten minute period at the end of class where Carper has nothing else for us to do. Now, there is something you should know about her before I go on. She is a horse jumper. Never before have I had a friend who knew how to jump a horse. About 2 weeks previous to this incident that happened 2 weeks ago (so four weeks before right now), I went with my dad to watch her jump horses. Originally I went because my dad mentioned a meal at Zupas afterward. We went down to a place I believe to be called the recreational fairgrounds. It’s like a place for sports involving more than just a ball and some hoops. It was a large warehouse style building with a set of nice bleachers and a large caged zone with a dirt floor and hurdles….big hurdles. Humans could jump them, but it’d be more of a Fosberry flop. My father and I sat in 2 of the fold down seats and watched silently. The warehouse wasn’t very full, besides a few people scattered about the other parts of the bleachers. We watched a large number of identically dressed women, all women, jump horses of various colors over multiple hurdles. These horse shows are extremely confusing to a noob like me, so I’ll just skip the explanation. She rode 3 times and won some pretty high up ribbons. I couldn’t help but notice that she smacked her horse, Cabela, on the neck after some of her runs. I thought about this and realized that to a horse, this action would be pretty insignificant. This enormous, muscled beast is being petted. I asked my dad about this and he speculated that, although the horse probably wasn’t affected by it at all, Cabela likely received a sense of love and affection from that pat. I’ve heard that horses can have pretty complex emotions, so I didn’t argue. She thanked us for coming as we left.
So, as I said, she sat behind me. Now, she didn’t seem that interested in me initially. She said hey but then turned to the group of more popular kids next to me. I sat in that place where I wasn’t really in the conversation but I could enter if allowed. Class ended and I was halfway out of the door before I heard a gentle “hey,” from behind me. I turned to see she was looking at me with a small slip of paper between her fingers. She smiled and said “this is for you,” before she disappeared into the sea of moving children. I might have seen her go was I not intrigued by the folded piece of paper in my hand. I flipped it to find my name written in big, curvy handwriting on the opposite side followed by a smiley face. Now, I’ve seen smiley faces before, but this one seemed especially…I don’t know….genuine? I looked up but she was gone. I slipped the small note into my pocket and headed to my locker. I considered the situation for a moment. A note? I thought, why would she write a note? Maybe it was to that other kid with my name from somebody else. Why’d she write a note? It’s a trap! I’m uneducated in the writing of notes and smiley faces so I was completely clueless as to what may be inside it. I didn’t want to read it immediately because I might have to explain why I was late to science to Mr. E again. We had to take the EOL in science that day, but I was unable to focus thanks to the little secret stuffed in my pocket. I wouldn’t have felt good about the test anyway because almost every question was something weird that asked which answer was the “best answer,” or “most likely.” It was like a little heart in my pocket; constantly beating in my brain. I managed to get through the test and, while I was sitting silently, immediately succumbed to the power of the note. I strategically hunched over my lap to keep it from curious eyes. I unfolded it about 4 times before I gazed upon the full product. I’d never honestly talked to her long enough to know her individual voice but I could hear it in the note. She added the awkward “Soooo…,” at the beginning and various smiley faces throughout the note. I found it a little strange that her smiley’s were sideways as if she had to make it a colon and a parenthesis even though she wrote the note by hand. It was heartfelt, and I still have it. Nobody writes letters anymore, so I keep all the ones I get. At the bottom was her number and a smiley face that was not on it’s side. I suppose, in the most masculine way possible, my heart fluttered a bit at that. A girl, who I didn’t really talk to at all, had given me her number in a sweet little letter that I never even asked for. Could anybody in the world possibly still be that nice to a kid who normally sits in his own little universe? She reminded me of Stargirl in this situation. Horsegirl! That sounds awful. Lightmare! Get it? Mare is a term for horse and it sounds like nightmare. That’s what I’ll call her. I managed to get through the rest of school feeling a little floaty.
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