2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Then
Even today, old memories from a lifetime ago sometimes come out of nowhere. I’ll remember drawing with chalk in the one-car driveway of the aging bungalow where I grew up, or swimming in the local pond with my older brother, or the bumpy ride down gravel roads that I took each day in the back of a school bus.
And in nearly every memory I have, there is Theo: showing me up by drawing a bigger, better castle. Laughing maniacally as he cannonballs into the pond. Sitting next to me on the bus with his homework in his lap, urgently trying to finish it before we get to school.
We were born and raised in Amity, North Carolina, about an hour southeast of Raleigh, just as our parents and grandparents were. Our families were always acquaintances in the way that most families in small towns are, but when Theo’s father and mine began working together at the local manufacturing plant, they became good friends. Their wives didn’t quite share the same camaraderie—Theo’s mother was the warm and gooey to my mother’s cold and stingy—but a few years later, when the men fell victim to a wave of layoffs, the four of them decided to go into business together.
Theo was three and I was two when our families opened Walk a Mile, the only shoe store—the only place that sold shoes at all—in Amity. Up to that point, people in town would have to go over to Goldsboro for anything beyond basic pantry staples that could be found at the Wilsons’ general store. We stocked shoes and socks and random other things that Randi and my mom thought the women of the town would enjoy, like hair clips and scented lotions. Despite Amity being very blue-collar, very working-class, the store performed better in its first years than anybody had ever hoped.
I don’t remember the very beginning of the store, but it is the setting of the earliest memory I do have. It was shortly after Theo’s fifth birthday, which I remember because he was still wearing his cardboard party hat, or trying to. It really should have been trash at that point, but he kept wearing it despite the grease stains and the shapeless elastic that hung loose around his rounded chin. Even then, he was stubborn. Determined. Always so sure of what he wanted, regardless of what anybody else had to say about it.
The hat was perched precariously atop his dark hair as he ran around the stock room, bent at the waist, arms extended like a superhero, making pew-pew noises. His mom was in the office just around the corner, and I heard her sigh shortly after Theo darted inside. “Go sit with Nina.”
I was cross-legged on the foam mat our parents kept at the store, playing with some plastic building blocks. At my name, I glanced up and saw his face bunched up in distaste before he turned away from me. “You always say to sit with Nina,” he whined, stamping his foot. “I’m bored of sitting with Nina.”
“She’s being such a good girl.” I smiled, pleased at the praise. It was much more than I received from my own mother, who tended to refer to me with words like loud and ornery and wild . I hoped she would come back to the office and see how well I was behaving. “She has the blocks out. You like the blocks, buddy.”
“But I built somethin’ already. I want to go outside. Daddy said we could go out later and—”
“Daddy’s busy with customers,” Randi interrupted. “And I’m busy, too. You don’t want Nina to be lonely, do you?”
“No,” he said, defeated, and then he reappeared, shoulders slumped low. Slowly, he trudged back toward me, collapsing dramatically onto the mat when he got close enough. “Okay,” he sighed, rolling onto his stomach and propping himself up on his elbows, “whatcha makin’?”
“A castle.”
And just like that, he seemed to forget how much he didn’t want to be down here playing with me. “With a moat?”
“Maybe,” I said, not really knowing what that was .
“Here.” He grabbed a couple of long rectangular blocks and started arranging them in front of my tall tower. “You do the castle, I’ll do the moat.”
And we did. Randi finished her work and went out to the floor, and we stayed bent over our project, diligently building our castle and our moat and eventually turning the green blocks into a forest surrounding it. Then, wanting to protect our creation, we slid the entire mat up against the wall and lay down on the edge of it, the tops of our heads touching as our feet stretched in opposite directions. We stayed there, creating a human barrier between our castle and whichever of our parents would walk around the corner next.
He was talking, and I was listening—or trying to—but my eyelids became heavy and I drifted off. Sometime later, I opened them again and he was still there beside me and, somehow, still talking.
“Nina,” he said after a while. “Are you lonely still?”
I looked over at the castle we’d made together. My mom hadn't come by, but that was okay. I'd had fun with Theo anyway. “No.”
“Okay. ’Cause Mama said you were, and that's sad. Did you know I love you so much?”
I grinned. “Did you know I love you so much?”
“Yeah,” he said somberly. “You smile at me a lot.”
From then on, “love you so much” became our refrain. It was something that Theo’s parents said to him, and since verbal professions of love weren’t the norm in my house, I latched on to the opportunity to exchange those words with him. As we grew older and started school, we naturally said it less often and with less sentiment.
“Love you so much,” I said with a saccharine smile after beating him in checkers.
“Love you so much,” he hollered as he barreled past me in a game of Red Rover.
“Say ‘love you so much’,” Randi prompted us once when she was refereeing some argument we’d gotten into. We said it, voices hollow as we glared at each other. Five minutes later, we were over it and back to normal.
I might have thought that the words had lost all meaning, but one day when I was in kindergarten and he was in first grade, Theo found me crying on the bus after school.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, seeming a little alarmed at the sight of my tears.
I wiped my eyes with one hand and used the other to gesture vaguely at the oblong birthmark beneath my left eye. Haltingly, since I had been crying for ten minutes and had to catch my breath after every other word, I said, “Misty said—there’s mud—on my—face.”
Theo sat down next to me, looking confused. “There’s no mud on your face.”
“No,” I wailed, pointing directly to the birthmark. “She meant this!”
He squinted as if he’d never noticed it before. “Well, she’s stupid. That doesn’t look like mud at all.”
The bus engine started rumbling as we pulled out of the parking lot, and I used the neckline of my shirt to wipe my face. I felt marginally calmer now that he was here, speaking with sense and logic as always.
“She meant because it’s brown,” I said miserably, “and ugly.”
“It’s brown, but it’s not ugly,” he said. “It’s just your skin.”
I stared into my lap, wishing that everybody would treat me the way Theo did. It was just skin, wasn’t it? But it didn’t feel that way when Misty was making fun of me, and it didn’t feel that way when my mom sighed about how pretty my face could have been.
“Nina?”
I looked up at Theo. Back then, when his hair got a little long, he had a cowlick that his mom couldn’t smooth down for the life of her. It was pointing straight up toward the roof of the bus. “What?”
“I think you look pretty.”
I sniffed. “Really?”
“Yeah.” With one hand, he played with the end of my ponytail. “Your hair looks pretty today, too.”
I could feel the clouds around me lifting, giving way to the sun. The corners of my lips crept up, up, until I was beaming at him. Suddenly, I didn’t care what Misty thought. Theo thought I looked pretty today, and that was enough to make me happy.
We started talking about other things—the broken swing on the playground, what our moms had packed us for lunch, the book Theo checked out from the library—and before I knew it, the bus had reached our stop.
I flounced down the stairs, letting my ponytail bounce behind me so that Theo could appreciate it some more. On the sidewalk, I started walking backward in the direction of my house. “Bye, Theo!”
He raised his hand as if to wave, but abruptly dropped it back to his side. “Wait,” he said, hurrying after me.
“What are you doing? Your house is that wa—oof!”
I got my answer when Theo grabbed me in a tight hug. Despite being nearly a year older than me, he was only a little bit taller, and I found that I could comfortably rest my chin on his shoulder. There were a couple of older kids who had gotten off the bus with us standing nearby. They were laughing—probably at us—but I didn’t care. I just hugged Theo back.
When we pulled apart, Theo looked me in the eye and said, as seriously as a seven-year-old could, “Love you so much.”
And that was the very first time Theo Hoyt gave me butterflies.