CHAPTER FOUR
When the bus dropped Reggie off he was a little surprised to see his mom’s old Subaru Impreza parked on the street. Unlocking the apartment door he found his mom at the kitchen table. “Hi Reggie. You look happy. Have a good day at school?”
Noticing that his mom seemed a bit in the dumps, he replied,
“Kind of, I guess, but how are you? They let you go early at The Coffee Bean?”
“Yeah, it was a slower day today,” she answered, “but it’ll give me a chance to rest up before the evening shift at Wal-Mart, which would be a nice change. But I want to get back to that look on your face. School was just okay today?”
Not wanting to get into a real conversation, he simply said, “Yeah, pretty good.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
Reggie ducked his head in the fridge. “Sure, but no more string cheese?”
“I’ll pick some up at Wal-Mart tonight, there are Doritos in the cupboard.”
Munching away, Reggie told his mom about Joe’s lecture in Biology class.
She wanted to interrupt and ask questions, but it was so rare that her son talked with such enthusiasm about something. As young child, being in nature was all that ever got him excited. She just let him talk and talk.
“This guy Joe is a wildlife biologist,” Reggie explained, “and his job is capturing and studying mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains. I mean, how cool is that?”
Reggie’s mom felt both delight and guilt over Reggie’s burst of excitement. She knew how much he missed the woods.
“And the really cool thing was that he seemed to like me,” Reggie continued, “He listened to me, said I asked some good questions and he even gave me his card.”
“That’s great, anything else going on?” she asked.
“Nope!” Reggie responded with a half-smile on his face, still picturing Jennifer. Reggie didn’t want to tell his mom that a girl actually waited for him after class to talk to him, so he kept reading the back of the Doritos bag while he chewed.
Changing the subject, his mom asked, “How’s Algebra coming?”
Reggie stiffened, threw down the bag of chips and shot back, “I’m so sick of talking about that class. You know what? I’m going to change.”
After tossing on some sweats, he headed into the bathroom, took a leak, and then found himself staring at his reflection in the mirror. At 15, going on 16, he felt most people thought he looked young for his age. As he rubbed his face, his light brown skin showed no sign of acne and he thought it probably never would show the fuzz some of his classmates were developing. His nose was a little big, but straight, and his ears stuck out some, but he concluded he was an average looking dude. Would I grow up and look more like my Dad? he wondered. Would I be able to grow a mustache like Joe? His huge head of coarse black hair was his signature look and he liked how it matched the black of his irises, or were they his pupils? He could never remember. Then Reggie went back into his room and lay down on his bed, closed his eyes and soon started thinking about Jennifer.
He pictured Jennifer’s blonde hair. It was short and spiked up straight like an all-around Mohawk. He wondered how it stayed up that way and wanted to touch it. She also had a row of small colored beads running down the ridge of each ear. He didn’t pick up the color of her eyes because he mostly looked down during their brief chat in the hallway. But he really liked her ankle bracelets that had feathers on them and thought they must have tickled her feet when she walked. Most of all what he remembered, as he took in a deep breath, was her smell. A sweet smell not unlike the wild primrose he found in the woods that always heightened his senses. Just to be close to her for that minute gave him a feeling he never had before.
He opened his eyes, got up and looked into the mirror again. He put his hands on top of his head to push back that funny clump of hair that always stood up as the day wore on. It made him look kind of like…. Yeah, he thought, like a friggin’ half-breed. He flattened it and rewound the band in the back and with a determined look, told his reflection, ‘I don’t give a shit about what that that asshole Kevin calls me—one of these days, someone is going to crack him in the face. And it might be me.’
“Time to eat,” Reggie’s mom yelled, jolting him back to reality.
“Coming!” he yelled. Then, back to himself he thought: ‘You know man, all she did was smile at me and say that she liked what I said in class. Then she took off. That’s all you pathetic dork. It’s never going to happen. Forget about her.’