NOW WE ARE two years beyond that point when Mr. Bolling’s voice shook me to my naive and inexperienced core. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still the latter of the two things but I’m less naive.
See, I’ve watched Kyra ride some scary rollercoasters in the last two years, soaring up to the sky with the perfect relationship, only to crash hard, flames taking her in for weeks, unable to do anything at all. And every time a guy said hi to me at a party, or invited me to study, I’d envision Kyra sobbing into her pillow over a boy. Painful and miserable is how she looked and I never wanted to feel that way. No way. But Kyra always got back on the horse.
In the time we’d been living together at the dorms, she’d spent every single holiday with her newest, most current boyfriend and his family. And each holiday that would come, there would be a newer, more current boyfriend. In a way, I envied her, deep down somewhere hidden away that I wasn’t ready to admit existed. She got hurt but she got to feel, she got to be touched and held, her bare skin exposed to another person.
It was almost too much for me and my inexperience to think about at once-I quivered at the idea of having that with someone.
Now we are moving into an apartment together, as we’ve outgrown campus life. We plan to spend our remaining year and a half of school in our fancy new apartment, Kyra vowing to find herself a fancy new boy. But the apartment isn’t up to her standards. And we’ve got only one place to go for the summer, while it’s worked on.
“You know what?” Kyra says quizzically, a look of moderate bewilderment across her face. “In the two plus years that we have been best friends, I think this is the first time you’re going to meet my Dad!”
My eyes widen and I raise my brows, my lips pursed tightly together. I nod, acknowledging in faux surprise that, yes, oh my, this certainly is the first time we are meeting. As if I didn’t know that.
The first night I heard him on the phone was tattooed in my mind, making lightning fast flashes in my brain each time Kyra’s cell phone rang his tone. Sometimes my breath stilled while she spoke with him on the phone, trying desperately to quiet myself so that I may hear his voice reverberate from the receiver. I bit my lip, air filling my chest as I ache to feel the vibrations of his baritone float across the room and give me oxygen.
But I have done my best to avoid him, truthfully, which has been pretty easy considering Kyra is always going everywhere.
Sometimes I fantasized about him secretly thinking about me, or what he would feel like, his skin against mine, the most perfect man I’ve never seen. And it made me feel warm… down there, everywhere. But I kept my crush buried deep because it’s crazy, for so many reasons.
Still, now, I tuck away my dark need for Mr. Bolling, this virtual stranger, and agree to stay at his home for the summer while the apartment owners are fixing up our new place.
Kyra makes it sound like her father is hardly around, anyway, but I am nervous nonetheless. I have one huge fear, which is buried in my nervous gut, and I can’t even bring myself to think about it without my heart racing. Fear or not, I don’t have much of a choice on staying here because my job as an ice cream scooper hasn’t made me wealthy and Kyra is still, really, my only friend. I haven’t heard from my mom in over a year so I really had nowhere else to go. And anyway, I wanted to spend the summer with Kyra.
I MUST’VE DOZED off on the drive because I wake up to the sound of Kyra riffling through her purse, cursing under her breath.
“And of course, it wouldn’t be there, huh, because that would be too easy…” she grumbles, and I can hear a box of tic-tacs pour out into her tote.
“Damn it, oh forget it…” she trails off, frustrated.
I sit up and rub my eyes.
“Sorry I dozed. What’re you looking for?”
I’m always telling her she keeps way too much crap in her purse. Do you really think you’ll need to apply lotion and comb your hair while you are anywhere but home? She puzzles me sometimes with her complexity. Maybe that’s something growing up poor has afforded me-a simplistic view on things. When you’re poor, you have to be simple, you can’t afford to be complex.
“My house key,” she said.
It occurred to me just then that we had arrived. I turned my head and looked out the window to see the home Kyra grew up in-the one she told me she’d lived in since she was four.
I could feel that it was magnificent but it was hard to tell because it was shrouded by a large, ornate black iron gate and tons of trees. A wall of viridian sits behind the gate, poking through wildly all over, making it impossible to see the probably monstrous home residing back there.
“Quite the entrance,” I say under my breath, not really to Kyra but she responds.
“I know. My Dad likes his privacy,” I glance to her and she rolls her eyes and smiles.
“I’ll text him and he can open the door from his phone. But I’m sure he will be annoyed I don’t have my key.”
The smooth voice tears through me from memory and I wonder what he must sound like when he’s annoyed. And he’s not home! All this time I’ve shoved away the eroticism of not knowing who belongs to the voice that awoken me and now I’m here, confronting it, and he’s not home! Kind of poetic, I smile privately before I remind myself that it all is pretty silly. This is Kyra’s dad after all.
She pulls her car up to the gate and types in a code which she repeats to me out loud-am I supposed to be remembering this? Because I definitely won’t. The gate pulls in and opens, and we creep forward down a very long gravel driveway.
“He loves his cars but then makes the driveway gravel,” she scoffs as the little pebbles try to attack the sides of her beautiful electric car. I laugh gently, nervously, and clasp my hands in my lap.
The house comes into view as the wall of greenery subsides-it is a large house, light grey stone with black trim, walls climbing so high that my mouth drops open. No expense has been spared building this home and it is evident.
The windows are adorned with white shutters and long curtains, a warm glow coming from behind them. It’s daytime but because the trees have worked so well for privacy, the home feels as if it’s caught in a state of unending sunset. The glowing windows, the tall, black double doors decorated with two magnolia leaf wreaths, the smooth concrete steps leading up off the drive to the porch; it’s all so beautiful. This is the type of home I fantasized about as a kid, clutching my blanket, sleeping on the couch in our trailer. I am overwhelmed by it and suddenly I feel warmth building behind my eyes, a tight knot stodgy in my throat.
“Hey,” Kyra is too perceptive for me to shrug away any reaction. She grabs my knee. “What’s the matter?” she leans slightly towards me, a look of worry on her face.
“It’s so beautiful, Kyra,” I am in awe of this massive, beautiful home.
She looks at me for a moment before tightening her grip on my knee.
“I’m glad to share it with you.”
I wonder, in this exact moment, why Kyra is my friend? Surely, she could be best friends with anyone, ask the school to have placed her with anyone, and yet here we are junior year-actual friends. The thought eats at me and I can’t help but ask.
“Kyra, I know it doesn’t matter to you that I came from… where I came from. But why am I your best friend?” Feelings of inadequacy wash over me as I sit in the expensive car, talking to this gorgeous friend of mine, outside of an insanely gorgeous mansion. At first, she furrows her brow with frustration but after she can see that I’m serious, that I don’t understand- her face softens.
“You don’t expect anything from me but friendship and your friendship is the only one where I’ve felt… loved, just being me, not for anything in return,” she gives me a small smile, as if her response has caused some level of self-reflection that leaves unhappier memories in her mind. It’s only now that I see that Kyra has had troubles maintaining friendships, too.
I nod and smile and she releases her hold on my knee.
“Come on, let’s go inside and get some food. I’m starving!”