What Happened That Night

12 ~ a r o u n d

Taped to the surface of my locker door was a lime green sign-up sheet for Shrek, the Musical, the spaces underneath the musical's title blank and waiting for signatures and auditions, and in the bottom left corner of the sheet was scribbled writing in glittery, purple ink: if you were Fiona, we wouldn't have to buy a wig! Hugs and kisses, Mrs. Foley. There was a hollow, empty, glittery heart at the bottom of the exclamation point in lieu of a dot and a sideways smiley face with a semicolon for eyes to mimic an emoji, and, for a moment, I just stared at it. According to the sign-up sheet, auditions were on Thursday after school, and I thought about how, before, I would've had that date double circled in red ink on my calendar at home, humming the tones to "I Think I Got You Beat", "I Know It's Today", and "Who'd I Be" while I did my homework, drove home from school, and glanced out the window to see my mother obsessively brushing back the snow from her frozen flower gardens in the front yard. But that was before, way before, and now saving the drama department the cost of a ginger wig seemed like the least of my problems.

I had just reached out to grasp onto the bottom corner of the sign-up sheet, my fingers curling around the brief message Mrs. Foley has jotted down in glitter pen, and tore it from my locker door with a satisfying ripping sound coming from the tape as it was yanked off of the metal of my locker. My hand was clenching around the paper, feeling the edge poke and crumple underneath my grasp, when I heard the sounds of leisurely footsteps coming toward me, quiet but softly confident, and stopping in front of me as I squeezed an audition sign-up sheet into a lime green ball.

"Not trying out this year," Kolby said, more as a statement than a question, and I wasn't sure if I found this annoying or not as I tucked the lime green ball of paper-and, maybe, memories-under my arm as I reached out to spin the dial lock against my locker and Kolby seemed to understand that my silence was a firm no, and he leaned his back against the lockers beside me, dropping his backpack to right of one of his legs, and I heard the signature swishing noise coming from his vest. "You should," he said after a moment. "You're really good."

There was something about the way he said this, so quietly and sincerely, giving those contrite words meaning that seemed too big for the letters to hold, and I exhaled as I shoved my textbooks into the locker, knocking over a tube of strawberry lip gloss with my wrist and it rolled out of my locker and plinked onto the glossy, tiled floor. Kolby, vest swishing, reached down to grab it after stopping it with the edge of his Timberland clad foot and handed it back to me, silently, and then leaned back against the lockers. "They'll find someone else," I said, drily, as I closed my locker door and, my fingers still lingering on the cold metal of the surface of the locker, I added, "Did you need something?"

He pushed himself off of the lockers as I swung my backpack over my shoulder, grasping onto the slippery material of the strap, and followed me toward the double door exit, as if this was a habit of ours, him waiting by my locker and then trailing behind me as we left. He stood close enough to me that I could detect the scent of musk and deodorant emitting from his body. "Yeah," he said, almost somewhat reluctantly. "I wanted to know if you could give me another ride." He nodded toward the double doors, the windows revealing the grayish sky and fattened snowflakes dropping from the sky, clinging to the hoods of cars and the barren branches of trees. "It's just there's a winter storm warning and visibility isn't that great and the sidewalk is pretty slippery-"

"Okay."

He blinked. "Okay?"

I nodded, my glasses gliding a little further down the bridge of my nose as I did, and I turned around so that I was facing him, walking backwards, and I could hear the creaking sound of the chilled wind bracing against the windows and the hinges of the double doors, and the metal chain of my zipper of my PocketBac hand sanitizer clinked against the metal door as I pushed my tailbone against the elongated and narrow button in the center of the left door that went ka-jung as the door swung open.