5. Orion
Orion
My first year in Cape Elizabeth passed in a blur.
In some ways, time flew. In others, it dragged so slowly that I still have near-perfect recall of entire conversations and events from that time.
Some of my memories are significant, others less so.
Some seemed insignificant at the time, but in retrospect, shaped who I am today.
It was one of those arcane times in life, where normal existed somewhere on a spectrum bound by two extremes: a terrifying desire to be seen and a desperate quest to ensure no one noticed I was alive.
Aside from when I was safely cosseted at home and self-pity about being invisible crept in, I spent most of my time firmly embedded in the wanting-to-disappear side of the spectrum. It had always been that way.
There was only one exception to that rule. One person I wanted to see me. To know me. To recognize me for the singular soul I am.
Jordan Slater.
To my endless shock, he did. At first, I felt like I was walking on eggshells, waking every morning unsure whether that would be the day Jordan realized I was nowhere near as cool as he thought I was and ran for the hills.
It had happened with friends at other schools, so I knew it was a possibility.
I’d read situations wrong in the past, and there were instances where I’d thought of people as friends, but they only saw me as an acquaintance.
It was the most painful, humiliating thing I’d ever experienced, so I was determined not to repeat that mistake.
As a result, I kept Jordan at arm’s length while I tried to make sense of the situation.
At least, I tried to. It turns out, keeping Jordan at bay was all but impossible.
For reasons unknown to me, Jordan made up his mind about me the first day we met.
He barreled into my life at unstoppable speed and made himself at home.
My first term in Cape Elizabeth was fraught with the heady bewilderment of having met someone determined to be my friend.
And it wasn’t someone I wanted to get away from as fast as possible either.
Jordan was someone I actually wanted to be friends with, and I couldn’t bring myself to trust that it was real.
I planned on remaining vigilant, taking my time to assess the situation and get to know Jordan well enough to understand his motivations before I made any long-term decisions about him.
That’s not how it played out though. Jordan was a forcefield with a ridiculously big smile.
A wrecking ball that laughed in the face of my defenses.
When I arrived at school on my second day in Cape Elizabeth, he was waiting for me at my locker. He found me after class and saved me a seat at lunch.
He did the same thing the next day. And the next.
Though I was loath to ask her advice at the time, due to a deep conviction that I knew everything, the situation was so baffling that I resorted to asking my mom if she knew why Jordan was being like this.
She listened carefully to what I had to say.
“Oh, honey,” she said with a compassionate little scrunch of her nose when I stopped talking. “Sometimes extroverts just choose people like us and home in like a beacon.”
My mom was an introvert like me, and it seemed as though she had experience dealing with similar matters. I paid close attention to what she was saying, despite not wanting to admit that she might be right about something so important.
“Will it…? Will he stop choosing me after a while?”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head sympathetically. “No. In my experience, once they’ve chosen you, there’s nothing you can do about it. Look at Aunty Susie.”
Susie is my mother’s best friend and has been since they were nine. She’s the only person in the entire world my mom loves almost as much as she loves me.
“She chose me in fourth grade. All I did to provoke her was cry when it was my turn to go on stage before a piano recital. It’s been twenty-five years, and I haven’t been able to shake her.
I tried to for a while in the beginning.
I really did. But she didn’t notice.” She gave me a quick hug and ruffled my hair.
“You may as well go with it, love. Fighting it will only exhaust you.”
The thing was, being around Jordan was so intoxicating that I didn’t want to fight it.
After the first few days—and a very, very serious recalibration of whatever had made me talk to him in that horrifying way in the cafeteria—my self-consciousness around him dissipated.
I never had that awful clogged-up feeling of not knowing what to say.
I felt okay when I was with Jordan. Not too obvious.
Not too insignificant. Almost like I did when I was with a small selection of family members who didn’t rub me the wrong way.
He took life supremely unseriously, and being with him made me take myself a little less seriously too. I found myself coming out of my shell around him, volunteering information I usually wouldn’t, telling him what I really thought about life, people, and situations unfolding around us.
He ate that shit up.
He found me hilarious. Laughed his head off at things I said and rewarded me for it with no-holds-barred access to his inner world.
And holy shit, what a world it was. He said whatever he thought and never felt embarrassed.
He was a vault when it came to other people’s secrets, but when it came to himself, he had no secrets at all, at least not from me.
I’d never met anyone who was so different from me yet felt so weirdly familiar.
I was a stress ball, worried constantly about schoolwork, my future, what people thought about me, and random things like finding myself in situations that required me to eat crusty bread in public—something I feared because of a very low tolerance to pain and a previous unpleasant experience that involved a particularly sharp crust and the soft part of my palate.
Jordan was so laid-back he was practically horizontal.
He assumed homework deadlines were merely suggestions and was convinced that open dialogue with teachers could get him out of most things.
Nine times out of ten, life proved him right.
I was prickly, sensitive, and liable to take things the wrong way. He thought the best about people. He believed the world was basically a good place, while I actively prepared for the worst.
Despite all that, within a very short time of knowing him, I could throw him a look paired with nothing more than a slight flare of my nostrils, and Jordan would know exactly what I was thinking.
Others would sit within striking distance of us and not notice that I’d communicated at all.
Jordan wouldn’t miss it. His eyes would mist up, his cheeks creasing deeply as he laughed at punchlines I hadn’t delivered. At least, not aloud.
He needed to be reined in. I needed to be pushed out of my comfort zone.
We slotted together like two halves of a whole.
I wanted to impress him more than I’d ever wanted anything.
In the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind, I was aware of something hard to explain when it came to him, even back then.
I told myself it was normal to want to impress your friends.
Everyone wanted their friends to like them, and everyone wanted to spend all their time with their friends.
They did. It was the whole point of having friends.
On nights when those explanations didn’t quite cut it, I told myself there was a slight chance I hero-worshiped Jordan, which was why I thought of him all the time.
That was why I looked for him wherever I went.
It was why I could spot him at impossible distances, and why I remembered things like what T-shirt he was wearing the first time we hung out after school—a faded red one that had a small stain a couple of inches below the neckline.
Hero-worshiping a friend was a cringey thing to acknowledge, even to myself, so I balanced it out by being a little more sarcastic and cutting than usual when I was around him.
Jordan ate that up too. He seemed to enjoy smoothing my rough edges.
He had a hard-to-make-sense-of thing for placating me.
Making me happy seemed to make him happy.
He was always asking me how I was and actively going out of his way to remove obstacles from my path—by force, if necessary.
He set the tone early on that I was not to be messed with, and people innately understood that causing shit with me was the same as causing it with him.
He didn’t often get into it with others, but when he did, he shut shit down decisively.
I’d lie in bed at night, trying to work out why my well-being was so important to him. I’d cook up all sorts of reasons for it. Some were plausible, sensible reasons I felt comfortable thinking about during the day. Others weren’t.
My curiosity got the better of me, and one day, a few weeks after our first Christmas in Maine, I cracked and asked Jordan why he’d become friends with me.
We were hanging out at my house, but my mom wasn’t home.
We’d ordered pizza and were kicking back on the couch in the den, watching a highlight reel of a recent Blades game.
Jordan was yelling advice at the team with extreme gusto, despite knowing full well they’d lost the game.
He looked slightly confused by my question, a tiny line forming quickly between his brows. I was embarrassed and immediately regretted asking. It wasn’t the sort of thing boys talked about.
“It’s because I said I was a nervous pooper, isn’t it?” I said to make light of things.
He laughed almost the same way he had the first time I’d said it, except this time, in addition to the warmth that cascaded down my body when he did it, I noticed something new in his eyes.
Genuine fondness. A warmth that made his eyes bluer and the yellow ring around his pupils more vibrant than usual.
A softness to his features that made his smile look almost sleepy.
“Nah, it’s not that.” Jordan had a habit of tilting his head back when he said nah.
It made his voice so throaty and thick that it took a while for the sound to travel from him to me.
“It’s because you were so anxious standing in front of Whitfield’s class.
You were bricking it, but you didn’t try to hide it.
Everyone else is so full of bullshit, O.
Constantly hiding how they feel and trying to act like someone they’re not. But not you.”
It was staggering how wrong he was about me. “I was literally using every ounce of my strength trying to look cool,” I informed him.
“I know,” he replied with a languid, lighter-held-near-parchment grin.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him smiling like that, but it was the first time it made my dick twitch so hard I had to grab a throw pillow and hold it over my lap for a while.
“But you’re so bad at it that it doesn’t count when you do it. ”
When it was time for him to leave later, I walked him to the door. Our hallway wasn’t especially big. It was a small space that felt crowded when Jordan and I were in it together. It took a little more concentration than usual to work out how to unlock the door without touching him, but I managed.
“Hey, Orion,” he said when the front door was open and the cold air from outside was rushing in, “I don’t know exactly what it was that I liked about you. I’m not sure. I don’t know if it was one thing. It might have been lots of little things that gave me a good feeling about you.”
He reached up and took my face in his hand, his thumb and forefinger digging into my cheeks on either side of my mouth.
He squeezed hard enough that my lips puckered.
I looked like an idiot, and I knew it. He knew it too, but like lots of things, he found it amusing.
Before I was able to twist out of his grip, he raised his other hand and tapped me twice on my right cheek.
Lightly. Not a slap exactly, more like a firm pat.
Parchment caught alight, rippling as a slow chuckle rolled through him.
“Then again, maybe I just liked your face.”
Heat swam through my veins as I watched him go. His strides were long and laid-back, one hand buried in his pocket, the other swinging in an arc at his side.
My cheeks glowed brightly as he walked, as though I’d been slapped hard.