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in a silent way
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she looked like camilla belle, before i knew who camilla belle was. i was in grade eleven. she was a year behind me. i thought her best friend liked me. she made me touch her hair after she got it cut short. feel how soft it is, she said, and i felt the back of her head after she guided my hand there. it was like dark cotton wrapped around a smooth stone. somehow i dug up the guts to ask her if she liked me. she said no. she was just friendly. she was like that with everyone, she said. people were always asking her if she liked them.
years later i would run into her sometimes at the bar i'd drink and shoot pool and smoke occasional angry cigarettes at on friday nights, even though i didn't really smoke. one time she walked with me to buy smokes for a friend who didn't fake it like i did, and there was something like fear or sadness in her face when she asked if she could come with me. i never found out what it was, and she never looked at me like that again. one time she read me kinky personal ads from a local magazine and giggled. one time we partnered in a pool game against the smarmiest douchebag in the world and his trophy girlfriend, and we won, and the douchebag threw a silent hissy fit while his girlfriend threw her cue down on the table, and i thought, jesus, that's sad. it's a game. grow up. after she said goodbye to me and left that night, some guy i didn't know but talked to sometimes said you fucked that up, buddy. i asked him what the hell he was talking about. she's into you, he said. don't you see it? and i said no, she's just friendly. she's like that with everyone.
he didn't go to school with her. he didn't know.
but before all that, there was her friend who looked like camilla belle, who had her own dark cotton and didn't cut it short. she would talk to me when i caught her at her locker or she caught me at mine. how was your weekend, how are you, what's new with you. you know, medium-sized talk.
one day i was lugging a friend's acoustic guitar around with me. he gave it a girl's name. i don't know why people do that shit, but they do. they've been doing it forever with guitars and hurricanes. just once i want to hear a dude say he named his guitar brutus. anyway, i was lugging this guitar that wasn't named brutus around because he left it at my place, asked me to bring it to school for him the next day, and then he didn't show up. so i carried it with me to all my classes. even brought it into the bathroom when i had to take a leak, to make sure no one tried to steal it.
i was waiting for a ride home after school and the ride wasn't coming, so i took the guitar out of its case and played with fingerless gloves, sitting on the grass out front. i loved those gloves. they didn't keep my fingers warm, but they made me feel like a junkyard philosopher. i mean, there was a flap of fabric that velcro-glued itself to the knuckles. you could unglue it and slip it over your fingers if you wanted. but that's not how a junkyard philosopher rolls. i played a little sweet_jane, and i played a little satisfaction, and camilla belle's doppelganger sat down beside me, and after a while everyone else was gone and it was just the two of us. we talked for an hour, maybe more. i can't remember a word either one of us said anymore, but i remember it was one of those conversations you get lost in. it was comfortable. it was good. give and take.
that was october. by the following march she'd stopped talking to me. later on when i knew a little more about these things i guessed it was because she was the one who liked me, not her friend, and when i didn't ask her out she thought i didn't like her that way, she decided she didn't want to be my friend, and that was the end of that. the idea of someone as beautiful as her having any non-platonic interest in me never even entered my mind at the time. it was beyond the scope of anything my brain could begin to fathom.
after high school she joined the air force. years ago i found her on myspace, when myspace was still a way to find people. i sent her a message asking how she was doing. she wasn't terse or unfriendly, but she shot down some aside of mine about luck or fate, saying she didn't believe in the stuff. it felt like a slap.
maybe she was right. maybe we make our own luck, or fate, or whatever it is. i don't know.
she's a ghost now. but i think about her from time to time. if i could go back and do it again, i'd probably try kissing her around the fifty two minute mark of that cross-legged hour, just to see what would happen. maybe she'd pull away. or maybe she'd kiss me back, teach me how to do it ten years early, invite my fingers into that dark cotton without saying anything. should have given my guts a hard shove in that direction, but i didn't.
i'd like to think my guts are wiser now. they're probably not. what are you gonna do?
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