Continued from Part 1. Catch up
HERE (about half way down page).
FLASH
Her Mom expected her home by possibly noon. My Dad ordered me home by 1:30 a.m. … “And not one second later.” Both parents were serious. Her mother — either generous and very cool or weird and very dumb — lent us the keys to her shiny, new Ford Explorer so I could drive a group of our (her) friends to the nearest big town for a fancy (over-priced) pre-prom dinner. Meanwhile my parents allotted me an extra 30 minutes of curfew and the promise that my father would be sitting at the corner of our street in a lawn chair waiting for me if I missed the allotted time. He was serious. He’d done it before.
I parked my car in front of her large, beautiful home, paused for a moment, started to hyperventilate, caught my breath and then quickly made for her front door. Once there I paused for a moment, started to hyperventilate, caught my breath, looked at the slight reflection of myself in the door’s glass and then knocked gently on the pane. My heart was beating so fast I felt as though I would hurl on my black tuxedo. However, stomach acid would have clashed horribly with the cummerbund that matched the royal pinkness of her dress. Earlier my brother had joked that pink was for sissies. I agreed whole-heartedly, but didn’t remark back. I’d seen worse. My best friend was wearing some teal-purple vest under his jacket that with the addition of just the slightest bit of electric current, would have lit him up like the Las Vegas Strip.
Her mother came to the door with a smile on her face and a kind word or two about my monkey suit. I felt like a fraud, a child in my father’s clothes as she led me from a foyer filled with nice family portraits to a living room filled with very original art. The mother calmed my nerves slightly by saying her daughter was “still getting ready, but should be right down. Why don’t you sit?” So I planted carefully on the couch, trying desperately not to wrinkle my pants. Soon we were chatting about how wonderful fleeting moments like these were in life and how happy she was that her daughter had picked me to escort her to one of the most memorable nights of her life. I think she was quoting a poem of some kind, when the daughter appeared at the top of the stairs.
She was incredible. At that point in my young life I’d seen no one more beautiful. Still to this day, only two other moments have taken my breath completely away. But this was my first. She smiled, her long, dark hair pulled behind her head in a way that accentuated her always striking smile. Her makeup was that of a seventeen-year-old girl trying to look 25, but slightly beneath the foundation, the energy that always consumed her face shone through like a bright light. I struggled to cough, as my throat grew dry. I could not take my eyes away as she nearly floated down the stairs.
I was still staring, in a trance, when her mother spoke. She spoke again. The third time my trance was broken, because she raised her voice in an impatient way and asked the question: “Well … don’t you think she’s beautiful?”
I did. And to this day I still occasionally play this moment over in my head. I could have gone in so many different directions. However, my brain was truly paralyzed by the beauty before me. I reached and reached, searched and searched and tried desperately to clear the dryness from my throat. Then, after rubbing my neck with my hand, and then running it up my cheek and through my hair Christian-Slater style, I said the most offensive comment I could have conjured.
“She looks … very … nice.”
The breath the Mother took in sucked the life out of the daughter. Beautiful's eyes dropped for a second and the smile that beamed so bright turned down ever so slightly for just a touch of a moment. Then being the sweet, enduring person she always had been, her face lit back up and she said, “You look great.”
But I felt like ass.
FLASH [ stay tuned ]
