Puddle Jumping

by Amber L. Johnson

  With a locker just a foot away from mine.

  And he was even more beautiful in real life than he’d been in the faded picture I’d kept of him in the back of my mind.

  He was standing a foot away and I swear I almost passed out. It was like he was some sort of hallucination, but I had done one of those weird age-progression things they do on the news and my creative lobe took over making him much taller and so much more attractive because that would be exactly how my teenage fantasy would have played out.

  Except he was so real.

  I just stared at him for a second; breathing out of my mouth noisily and waiting for my alarm clock to sound, but it never came.

  “Colton?” It had to have sounded like a question because I could hear the end of his name kind of lilting upward as it left my mouth and I sure as hell wasn’t trying out a British accent, so . . . yeah, it must have been a question.

  His eyes flicked to me and he nodded once, turning back to a paper in his hand.

  “Hello.” His shoulders were stiff and his chin was almost tucked into his chest as he took a moment to think. And just as abruptly as he appeared, he turned and walked away, holding his backpack strap tightly with one hand as he squeezed his other fist around the piece of paper.

  Now, I had that little almost-stalking incident the last time I saw him, so I couldn’t exactly fight my genetic makeup. So I tailed his ass, walking a couple people behind him until he veered off into a room I’d never really paid attention to before. There were already quite a few students inside, sitting at desks and chatting among themselves.

  Well, except for Colton, who seemed to stall for a moment before finding an empty desk in the back corner.

  Before I could gather my nerve to wave at him from the door to see if he would meet me in the hallway, I heard heavy footsteps behind me and turned just in time to see one of the senior football players rounding the corner, stopping before he almost slammed straight into me. He had hair that was almost white blond and big eyes that were crinkled with laughter at my slack jaw.

  “Excuse me.” He smiled and blushed a little, slipping by to walk into the room and be greeted by a couple friends.

  I was so confused. Why would Sawyer Grant, football god, be in the same class as Colton? It didn’t click with me that Sawyer could be like him, too.

  Of course, now I know that’s not the case.

  Now I know he’s dyslexic and has a hard time learning in regular classes.

  I know the skinny brown haired girl who zipped by me to take her seat next to him is Marissa, and she has ADHD.

  But that day I didn’t know any of it until the bell rang and their teacher walked over to the door and shut it, proudly displaying the room name: Resources.

  To say I was shocked would have been like saying boys like to touch boobs.

  An understatement.

  All of them looked fine.

  I just remember wondering why Colton’s mother had sent him to school just so he could be in a special class. She homeschooled him, didn’t she? Which shows exactly how little I knew about anything, given the fact I was very self-absorbed and was always concentrating on doing good things to look like a nice person. But I was still judgmental and critical on the inside if I was having those thoughts.

  Because not every kid who’s in those classes is a stereotype.

  Some kids just go once or twice a day.

  Some kids go all day.

  Some, I would learn, go by choice.

  It really is amazing how much my thought process has changed since the beginning of my senior year of high school.

  I remember just being in a weird daze as I made my way to my first class where Harper was already ignoring our teacher and reading a Cosmo because she claimed it pertained to her more than a Seventeen Magazine did.

  What can I say? My bestie is a little . . . advanced.

  “You’re late,” she’d whispered and I shrugged, settling into my seat and hoping not to be noticed.

  “Colton Neely is here.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I heard he enrolled. He being tutored so e could do his art and stuff. I have no idea why he's here if that's true.”

  Word spread fast.

  “God. How do you hear this stuff?”

  She shrugged. "I have connections in the front office."

  It suddenly made all the sense in the world. And it was all I could think about through the rest of my morning classes, barely acknowledging Joseph when he grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the cafeteria. I hadn’t needed to go back to my locker yet, and I was nervous as hell.

  Colton had scarcely looked like he knew me.

  While we were sitting at lunch and I was fighting this horrible nervous stomach cramp, I heard some whispers from across the table and looked up just in time to see Joseph’s friends staring at a few people making their way toward a table along the far wall, away from the crowded middle section of the lunch room.

  It was everyone I had seen in Colton’s class, though I only recognized the few I saw walking by me that morning. There were so many of them occupying the lunch table, everyone taking seats like they were assigned.

  Now, I’m pretty sure I was the only one at my table who knew Sawyer was in Resources with the other kids, which is why I was surprised to see him walking toward the table with his girlfriend, Quinn, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Marissa, I would later find out, was a grade below us, so I’d never had a reason to really pay attention to her before, and she sat down, too. Lastly there was Colton.

  Joseph, with his dark hair and even darker eyes, tanned skin and recently braces free teeth, leaned into me. “Uh-oh. Look who just showed up.”

  You should have seen how red my face turned. I shrugged his arm off and turned to glare. “Don’t be an asshole. You don’t even know him.”

  He’d cocked this eyebrow at me. “And you do?”

  It was like my lips were sealed with cement. “Just shut up, okay?” I’d said it as quietly as possible and instantly felt terrible. Nauseated at myself, I pushed away from the table and grabbed my bag. “I have to go to my locker before class.”

  Joseph offered to walk me but I said no because I needed a minute to just freaking breathe. He was pissing me off. And I was mad at myself for not saying yes to his question about Colton. So, I made my way down the corridors to my locker and pressed my head against the cool metal, wondering exactly what I was supposed to do.

  “Lilly?”

  It was that voice.

  Oh, God. I love that voice.

  “Colton.”

  I listened to him shift his feet from side to side for a second before I got the courage to look up. He stared at the floor for a beat and then he seemed to struggle with himself before pulling his hand out of his jeans pocket and offering it to me tentatively.

  “Hello. I’m Colton Neely.” His eyes flicked to mine and then to his extended hand.

  I laughed a little. “I know.” But he stood still I began to feel silly so I held out my hand and he flinched at the first contact, pulling back and scratching at his palm before thrusting it back into mine and squeezing. Hard.

  “Why are you acting like you don’t know me?” I asked, my heart now laying in a wet mess on the floor.

  He released my hand and shoved his back in his pocket, his shoulders raising a little. “My dad said to be polite and introduce myself. He said I had to be polite.”

  It was then I realized just how hard this was going to be for him. He was so formal. So timid.

  “You’ve always been polite,” I whispered waiting for him to look up again. “Even when you were saving me from lightning.”

  His face shot up immediately at the memory and he blinked furiously. “You remember.”

  “Of course I remember. How could I forget? You saved my life.” His eyes had widened further. “Twice,” I reminded him.

  He smiled then. Just a small smile, but it was all I needed before he let out a long breath and looke
d at the floor again. “You remembered.”

  The silence took over then, and I won’t lie, it made me fidgety. So, I got my things from my locker and packed my backpack while he stood to the side, not saying a word. Finally, I had to break the tension.

  “I haven’t seen you in while.”

  His entire body language seemed to imply exactly how nervous he was. “Paint . . .” his mouth snapped closed and he looked down.

  “Paint? Your paintings?” It was like pulling teeth.

  His face grew solemn. “I’m only allowed to talk about painting three times today and I used my chances during first period.”

  Something in my heart, now that it was back in my chest, stung as I looked at him because he seemed to be so embarrassed. He wanted so badly to do what he was used to.

  I lifted my hand to touch him and then closed my fist by my side and looked up with my head tilted slightly. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

  My mind was chanting, ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me.’ Selfishly, I wanted to hear him speak. I wanted to hear his passion over something he loved.

  It was, without a doubt, the best sentence to ever come out of my mouth in seventeen years.

  He talked. Oh my God, did he talk. And I just stood there like a fool, smiling at him as he rattled off all this information so fast and excitedly, using words I’d never heard someone my age use before.

  The bell rang and he was still going. I tried to cut him off, but there really was no stopping him once he’d started. I interjected long enough to get him to hand me his schedule in order to see about walking him to class. People may have walked by, staring at us, but I didn’t pay any attention. I was in his world now, wrapped up in his passion, making my chest feel so damn full I thought I would stop breathing.

  When he handed me his schedule, I felt tears rush to my eyes. You know that stinging in your nose right before the tears come? That’s what happened as I realized we were headed to the same class.

  AP English. Where our teacher had us all in alphabetical seating when we arrived. I watched Colton from my side of the room as he sat down and went stiff in the chest again, eyes forward and his mouth zipped shut.

  About halfway through the period, Mr. Mercer began listing the names of the books we would be reading. I’d barely been paying attention at all because I couldn’t stop staring at the back of Colton’s head and the way his hair curled up at the nape of his neck . . . freckles trailing into his shirt.

  I’d been so lost in my fantasy of actually touching them and wondering how it would feel to get my fingers wrapped around one wayward curl that I wasn’t at full attention to hear Colton suddenly speak out to tell our teacher he had already read a few of them.

  It was like an out of body experience watching his head raise a little higher as the words, low and steady just rushed from his lips.

  Mr. Mercer had given him one of those looks and whispered that Colton needed to please raise his hand in the future before interrupting class with an outburst.

  Poor Colton’s fists curled in his lap and he kept his head down for the rest of the class, but as soon as the bell rang, I pushed my way to the front and tapped Mr. Mercer on the shoulder, giving him my very best authoritative voice as I told him flat out that Colton’s mom had asked me sit with him during our class and he would move to the back row with me tomorrow. Mercer had given me a look like he didn’t believe me, but I didn’t back down.

  An agreement was reached and I made sure to wait for Colton as we left class, knowing after seeing his schedule he was going back to the Resources room for another period.

  He smiled a tiny bit when we reached the room, but turned abruptly and found his seat at the back of the class again. Like the creepy stalker-girl I am, I watched him settle in and then moved out of sight so he didn’t know I was still there.

  It was when I moved out of his view that I caught sight of the poster behind his head. It was of two pair of sneaker clad feet, one male and one female, frozen mid-air before landing in a deep puddle of water. Looking from their feet upward to their legs and higher, the shot revealed fingers knotted together as the boy and girl held hands. It was raining. It was black and white. And the only words on the poster were, FRIENDSHIP: A true friend is one soul in two bodies – Aristotle.

  So cheesy, but all of that stuff in school is. Yet, this particular poster didn’t seem that bad to me.

  It made me wonder if it were true.

  After school, I completely ditched Harper and waited for Colton outside his last class. If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t let on. Instead, he fell in by my side as if we’d been walking through the halls of our school together for years.

  “Want a ride home?” I asked, my palms all sweaty again.

  His head shook slowly from side to side. “At three-thirty-five I’m supposed to be standing outside for my mother.”

  I smiled as big as I could. “Then I’ll wait with you.”

  A nod. That was all I got, but it didn’t matter. It was something.

  I’ll be honest, I was more nervous about facing Sheila Neely again than I was to first approach her son. While we waited for her to drive the long loop set aside for car riders, mostly freshman, I thought of things I could talk to him about. Like, why the hell he was suddenly at school?

  Instead, I chickened out. “Are you busy after school tomorrow?”

  His answer was abrupt. “Yes.”

  Look, being a girl in high school is hard enough. But add having to do the ‘dude’ duty of asking someone to hang out was making my head want to implode. And we didn’t want that.

  About that time, his mom pulled slowly up before crawling to a stop. She rolled the passenger’s side window down and then kind of pulled her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose as she squinted to see if I was really standing next to her son.

  “Lilly Evans.” The way she said my name made my nose scrunch. I said hello and she laughed, her head thrown back and reddish hair bouncing. “I didn’t think you’d make it to sixteen . . . much less your senior year.”

  Touché, Mrs. Neely. One point for you.

  Colton was getting into the passenger seat, blocking my view of her, so I moved around to her window. She’d smiled wide and pushed her glasses into her hair to address me. I was leaning in and trying to speak loud enough for both of them to hear.

  “Would you mind if I picked Colton up for school in the morning? I can bring him home, too, if that’s okay with you.”

  I swear on a stack of Bibles, her eyes got so wide I thought she was going to have a stroke.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. He has a class with me and stuff, so I figured we could ride together and his locker is next to mine and then he wouldn’t have to be dropped off and picked up . . .”

  She held a hand up to stop me and for a moment I thought she had tears in her eyes. “Absolutely.”

  “Awesome.” It was like I could finally, finally breathe again. I was going to take care of Colton this time, not the other way around.

  “He has a class tomorrow at the community college. Can you take him?” She looked so hopeful.

  “Sure. Should I . . . sit in?” I couldn’t remember if it was called shadowing or auditing or whatever, but neither of them sounded cool so I didn’t push it.

  Her voice . . . it got so low. “It’s a socialization class to help him acclimate. You know, he wanted to do this on his own. He asked to come to school, but he doesn’t have to be here.” Her eyes actually did get shiny then. “He just wants friends.”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Neely. He’s already got one in me,” I assured her and then leaned in a little to say goodbye to Colton. He nodded a couple times and they drove away, leaving me with a thousand questions.

  It felt like everything that transpired on the day he started school was what I needed to prove to myself I should find out what I’d been putting off for years.

  It finally felt like the right time to give in and find out
everything I could about it.

  I drove home immediately and Googled the shit out of Asperger’s.

  Holy hell. The amount of information available is so extensive. I couldn’t tell which end was up. While he had some of the qualities and characteristics listed on the spectrum, he didn’t seem to have all of them, and honestly, it just got to be pretty exhausting and confusing after a while. It made me want to lay my head down and cry because he was a complete mystery to me.

  My research showed socialization was the hardest thing for someone like him to ‘get’. Which made his after school class seem all the more necessary, obviously. But how could I help? At the time, I didn’t think pushing him into school activities would be the right key.

  What if he became over stimulated?

  Would he freak out and have to leave?

  Would he be absolutely fine and I was a total douche for thinking so many stupid questions?

  Sometimes Googling things make it worse.

  One thing was certain: I would do whatever it took to be what he needed me to be. He was worth it even after only one day.

  * * *

  About an hour before bed, I realized I had left my phone on silent and checked it to see about a million missed phone calls from Harper and Joseph. I was irritated to say the least. Harper would take a text, I knew. But Joseph was another matter altogether.

  Calling him proved to be the second best thing I’d done that day. The conversation went a little like this:

  “Hey. I missed your calls?”

  “Yeah. The hell were you doing with that Neely kid? Everyone saw it. They’re all talking about you . . .”

  I won’t go into the specifics of what exactly was said, because it’s . . . just . . . not important what people said about Colton or what they called him or categorized him as. But let’s just say it was ignorant enough to warrant a kiss off of epic proportions.

  In essence, I told Joseph he could kiss my ass.

  We broke up. Over the phone. And it didn’t bother me for a minute. Then my cell blew up with more texts from Harper.