Interesting Eyes

“You have interesting eyes.”

I glanced over my shoulder, straight into a gaze some four inches lower than my own, topped by skinny black eyebrows. A golden cloud of hair framed a round pale face that was staring at me curiously.

“Oh…” The vending machine chose that moment to spit out my wrinkled dollar bill. It bounced off my chest and lie on the ground like a dead moth.

“Wait,” lips shiny with gloss said as I automatically squatted down and shuffled to the side. Remarkably long, thin fingers, ones made to dance across a Steinway’s keyboard, pushed three quarters into the slot and jiggled the button. Two cans appeared; one hovered in front of my nose, the red aluminum winking in the sun.

I took it and unbent my knees. “Thanks.”

She smiled, a small, peaceful, mysterious thing. “No worries.” Holding her Coke out in a sort of salute, she vanished around the corner, leaving me slightly puzzled.

“Do I have interesting eyes?”

Joel looked up from his salad, trapped and a little scared. “Is this your version of ‘Do these jeans make my ass look fat?’ Because if it is, I plead the second.”

“It’s the fifth, numbnuts.” Beside him, Steve gnawed on a honey bun the size of his head, treating me to a lovely view.

“Huh?”

“The fifth amendment. Second’s the one that says we have the right to bear arms.”

“What, like short sleeves? They had to amend the Constitution so people could wear short sleeves?”

Steve slapped Joel on the forehead, right where the rogue curl fell in a comma. “Stop being stupid!”

“I was just kidding!” But he wasn’t. He hardly ever did.

“Marge!” They both appealed to me with indignant expressions, remarkably similar for stepbrothers.

This was not the first time I had felt an urge to sit the two of them in separate corners. “Just answer the question honestly, would you?”

Shooting a sticky hand across the table, Steve grabbed my chin and turned my head towards him. I could smell icing, all 614 calories of it, on his breath. After a moment’s close scrutiny, he concluded, “Yeah, they are kind of interesting. I never noticed those little flecks of gold before.”

“Where?” Joel stared at me so hard I thought he might spontaneously combust. “All I can see is blue. His mouth angled upward and a finger reached out to trace the line of my jaw. It made me shiver deliciously. “The prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Steve rolled his own muddy eyes. “Blue and true as the sky in June, so I’ve noticed. But I swear there’s gold in there.”

“Stop looking at my girl, dude. It’s getting creepy.” Joel shoved Steve lightly enough so they could both pretend he was joking.

My girl. The class ring--the one Joel had given me a month ago, pulling me aside after lunch and tripping a bit on the words--hung from my neck by a delicate silver chain. I touched the cool metal and laughed.

“She asked,” Steve pointed out. “Why am I always getting beat up for what she says?” Wounded, he turned to me. “What made you ask that, anyway?”

Suddenly, I didn’t want to tell them. “Nothing. Just idle curiosity, I guess.”

Observing my flaming cheeks, Steve exclaimed, “Ah ha! You have a secret admirer, don’t you? One who sends you chocolate and roses and poetry more beautiful than this dunderhead could ever come up with! Ow, damn!”

No poetry, I thought, only a free can of Coke.

Despite the distinct probability of his arm becoming one big bruise the next day, Steve continued. “So pray tell who the young man is, Mistress Margaret.”

“There isn’t a young man.” I did not tell a lie.

“A girl?” How did Steve make his eyebrows dance completely independent of each other like that? Did he use it as some kind of mind-reading trick? “Margaret Cather, did a girl hit on you?”

“Perv,” I tried to joke, but it collapsed under the combined weight of their stares--Steve’s full of impure interest and Joel’s shot through with almost visible veins of jealousy. “How did you guess?”

Steve pulled a skinny shoulder up to his ear, anticlimactic in revealing his sources. “I saw you and Lesbie Lizzie talking at the vending machines.”

Dirt formed a thin film on the window, a cataract through which afternoon sunlight filtered and puddled onto my desk. It caressed my cheeks, coaxing me away from biology. Not that it took much effort.

“The paramecia have eye-like sensor spots on the anterior…”

My mind wandered leisurely through the courtyard, pausing at the drink machines, and suddenly--amazingly--she was there, a rainbow smear amidst the dull gray concrete. I blinked, hard, and she smiled, holding a hand palm up in recognition. As I nodded back slightly, my heart gave a queer little sideways lurch.

“No, that is most incorrect.” Old Lady Roger’s voice brought me back to reality with an unpleasant thump. “I have repeated this until blue in the face: protists are classified as eukaryotic! Eukaryotic, are you writing this down?”

“Yes ma’am.” I dropped my gaze and didn’t dare raise it any higher than my notebook for the rest of class.

When the bell rang, I bolted, eager to breathe the freedom of a Friday afternoon and not watching anything except the cloudless sky. I never saw her coming until book bag made contact with notebook and papers explode everywhere , covering a good stretch of the front sidewalk.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” Dodging feet and legs, I grabbed as much as I could, stacked it untidily, held it out as a peace offering.

“No worries.” I glanced up at that, and she seemed agreeably surprised. “Hello.”

“Hi.” Feeling myself blush, I offered my hand. “I’m Margaret.”

She took it and pulled herself up, notebook restored as best as possible under the circumstances. “Elizabeth.” Her grip felt warm and tender.

“I know--”

“Most people do, don’t they?” she replied lightly. We stood there blocking traffic until a horn blatted from a few feet away. “That’s my ride.”

I offered her a “Nice to officially meet you…” and was rewarded by upturned lips and a “Yeah--yeah, you too” as she got into a rusty compact car that sped away.

“I got something for you.” Joel twisted so he could root around in the back seat of his car, parked at the end of my driveway. “Here, put it in.”

The cassette tape’s label was crammed with titles written in his narrow letters, popular and obscure twining together in no discernable order. My heart melted a little as I pushed it into the player. “You’re awesome, you know that?”

“Duh.” He grinned and slid an arm around my waist, drawing me close. “But it feels great to hear you say so.”

“Always modest. That’s what I like in my man.” Resting my head on his shoulder, I breathed deeply. He smelled clean and strong.

When the first guitar chords, electric and liquid, washed over us, my eyelids drooped to half mast and the rest of the world fell away. Joel traced gentle patterns on my stomach, and I snuggled deeper into his jacket, desperately trying to find my old comfort in his safety.

The phone looked at me, slightly impatient. Well, are you going to call or do I have to dial myself?

“No,” I told it. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

My line came out flat and stale; I could tell the phone didn’t believe a word of it. Neither did the index card I had taken out of my pocket. A name and seven curvy digits smoldered in red ink inches from where Joel’s senior picture sat in a blue frame. The plastic was cheap, it’d flare up at the slightest provocation--

Giving into a sudden violent impulse, I tore the index card, severing Elizabeth’s name and phone number, and threw the pieces towards the trash. “Forget it!”

Smirking, the phone pretended it didn’t care. It’s your life.

I seized the handset around its neck. “Shut up!” It flew quite easily and landed heavily against the wall. “Ha!”

But it still had a pulse.

“Okay!” I shouted and started pressing buttons. Anything to disrupt that horrible smooth hum that somehow sounded more quiet than absolute silence. “See? You win!”

“Hello?”

Oh God. “Um, hi. Can--may I speak to Elizabeth?”

“This is she.”

“Oh. Right.”

“…Might I ask who’s calling?”

“Sorry--” I had never felt so flustered in my entire life. “It’s Marge. Margaret--I sort of ran into you today--”

A bubble of laughter evanesced through the receiver. “Right. The girl with the giant book bag.”

“Yeah--” Relief flooded through me when she didn’t hang up immediately. “--yeah, it is kind of big, isn’t it?”

“Very much so.”

“So,” I started. “so…”

“So…” she echoed. “What’s up?”

“So…so I found the index card. With your phone number written on it. In my front pocket, and I was just wondering--” here goes-- “I was just wondering if you meant it for me.”

A pause in which my vital organs stopped moving altogether, then, “Yeah. It was for you. I mean--if you want it or whatever.”

“Well, I just wanted to, ah, thank you again for the Coke at lunch.” Had I accidentally set my ears on fire? “That was really very kind of you.”

“Oh. The Coke, sure.” Faint disappointment or my active imagination? “I know how to get a free one out of it. The janitor showed me.”

“I’ll pay you back tomorrow--”

“No worries.” I could almost hear her shrug.

“See you at school, then?”

“Yeah, see you.” Click.

I waited for her outside at lunch the next day. “Elizabeth-” reached out to tap her shoulders, rounded hills covered in cotton.

“Margaret?” Irritation and happiness fought an indecisive battle on her face. “I told you not to worry about paying me back for the drink.”

“Yeah, I know.” Handing her a Coke, I gestured to the nearest bench. “Can I--can I talk to you for a second?”

She didn’t say anything, just sank down and held onto the can. I focused on her white knuckles.

“The whole phone call thing last night--I--I didn’t mean for it to be like that, exactly. I--I think I gave you the wrong impression, that I--”

“No.” Her hand cut short my speech. “No, I know what you’re going to say, and I should apologize--this happens a lot, I can’t tell if everyone is homophobic or if I’m just egotistical--”

I wanted to tell her how it was all her fault, everything. How, when I looked at her, my own life suddenly seemed boring and stifled, how she sparked something in me that made me feel incredibly unstable, how damn nervous I was with her four feet away--and how I wanted more. Oh, how I wanted more.

“--but I really did think--”

Words and thoughts and emotions crowded my brain, twisting and melting together into a tangled mess that could never possibly come out of my mouth but clamored for release.

So I leaned over and kissed her. It tasted soft and sweet, like the first bite of an ice cream cone.

For a moment we gawked at each other, until I willed my tongue to form something coherent. “I like you.”

“Wow,” she breathed. “I--but what about--?”

Joel’s ring. I unfastened it and slid it onto my finger, where it dangled loose and cold. “Let’s go return this.”

Twin gray laser beams dared me to fib. “Both of us?”

I thought of the catcalls, the jeers, the insults; the disapproving stares; the soda cans, empty and not so much; certain to come our way. But I was invincible--Elizabeth Fain thought I had interesting eyes. “Yes. Both of us.”

Crooking my elbow, she took hold and we plunged into the cafeteria together.