Chapter 51
“Hey, you alright?”
I shut my locker and see Nolan from winter formal standing there, hands stuffed in his pockets, a look of concern on his cream of wheat face.
“Mm-hmm,” I say. I leave but he follows. He asks if I’m sure, then if there’s anything I want to talk about, then says that he’s here to listen if I want to talk, then tells me he’s a pretty good listener, and proceeds to go on a long-winded speech about just how good of a listener he is.
“I was six years old the first time I heard I was one,” he says as we walk through the hallway.
“On the porch of my childhood home in Louisville, licking a lollipop. Grape. I still remember the flavor. The mailman came up to drop some mail, but he seemed down—heavy—so I asked if he was sad. And then all of the sudden he just started cryin’ and tellin’ me about how his wife had just left him, then he started goin’ into his whole life story.
He must’ve gone on for twenty minutes. Then he wraps up and slings his mailbag over his shoulder and turns to me and says, ‘Kid, you’re the best listener I’ve ever seen’ and walks away.
So, yeah, anyway, I’m a good listener…if you wanna talk. ”
I look around the corridor at the pockets of students.
Girls twirling their hair and gossiping, boys in baggy clothes laughing, a pair flirting, a guy kicking a hacky sack.
I want to be like them. Like people my age.
People who have things in common with other people my age.
I’m tired of being on the outside looking in.
Studying, observing, but never just being.
Maybe it could be good to try to fit in.
To try to be like them. To try to be my age.
I turn to face Nolan. “Do you want to go out sometime?”