The Boy Who Melted

by Travis McBee

placed an order for two large pizzas. I put the charges on my parent’s credit card and left an exorbitant tip for the driver. My parents wouldn’t mind.

  I retreated into my office to while away the time with a book. Forty minutes later, I heard the sharp snap of a door closing in the driveway. I peeked out of my office window and saw a beat up Chrysler wearing a pizza sign.

  The doorbell rang. I gave it a few seconds before heading down to answer; I didn’t want the delivery boy to think I had been waiting at the window for him to arrive.

  The front door opened onto a wide covered porch, which protected both the side of the house and me from rain. I ran back the deadbolt and pulled open one side of the fancy double door, preparing for the hastily hidden shock the delivery boy would betray when he caught sight of my face.

  But there wasn’t a delivery boy at the door. If there had been, my life might have stayed on that same, insidious path. Sometimes I wonder if that would have been best. It doesn’t make much difference though, because it hadn’t been a delivery boy, instead, it had been the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

  She was short—five feet if even that—with sleek black hair and brown eyes that dimmed the world around them. Her teeth—shown off by the wide smile she greeted me with—were white and perfectly straight. I glanced instinctively at her nametag but regretted it immediately; she might have thought I was looking at something else. Laura. Well that wasn’t anything special, except it was her name, and, thus, the name of the prettiest girl on the planet.

  “John Woodward?” she asked. Her eyes looked at me amiably, without a trace of the revulsion that went through most strangers’ eyes upon our first meeting.

  I nodded.

  “Two large meat-lovers?” she asked again. Her voice was like that of a Disney princess.

  “Yup,” I said, trying to sound cavalier. How I sounded, instead, was lame.

  She reached into the massive pizza bag she had somehow carried with one hand and pulled out two boxes, handing them to me.

  I took the boxes by scooping my left hand under them and balancing them against my body. I usually like to scare people with the hook on my right wrist—on Halloween I’d do a pirate noise and snag little kid’s bags of candy with it—but I didn’t want to scare Laura.

  The boxes were bulky, hot, and didn’t balance well. She smiled at me knowingly. “You don’t have to hide your hook; it won’t scare me.”

  Shocked, I gaped at her. “Uh…I…how?”

  She giggled. “I recognized you off of TV,” she said with a smile then added in a more serious voice: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sound like a freak…I mean a…” Her face turned red and she glanced down at her feet, swinging the empty pizza bag in one hand.

  I was amazed. This girl had gotten embarrassed over me. This perfect girl. Was that good or bad? My heart hammered out an answer, but it beat too fast for me to tell what it was. “That’s okay. I’m used to it. Don’t worry about it.”

  She flashed me an imitation of her actual smile. “Have a good evening,” she muttered and turned to leave.

  Disappointed, I snagged the corner of the door with my foot to swing it closed. Before I could, however, she whirled around.

  “Oh wait! I forgot to get you to sign your receipt,” she laughed as she dug into her pocket and extracted a pair of crumple pieces of paper and a pen.

  The world ended then and there for me. That pen and paper dashed what had been a moment of fleeting, insane hope. I had dared—dared!—to believe that she had turned back around to ask something of me that every boy dreamed.

  “Of course,” I said, and, to my credit, I believe that I managed to hide the disappointment from my voice.

  She held the receipts out to me, but I didn’t have a free hand to grab them. I glanced around behind me, deciding that the bottom step would serve well. I walked over to the stairs and put the pizzas down.

  I turned around, expecting to have to walk back to the door, but Laura had followed me into the house. If a delivery boy had done that, I would have been concerned and frightened, but with Laura I was excited.

  She looked around the atrium with nervous interest. I would guess that if I had looked put off or angry she would have quickly retreated and that would have been the end to the whole ordeal, but I smiled and took the receipts when she offered them to me.

  “Are your parents here?” she asked, taking in the quietness of the house.

  I shook my head. “No, they went off on a vacation to Rome.”

  “Georgia?”

  “Italy.”

  “Wow. That would be amazing. I wish my family could afford to do that,” she said, impressed. “What do your parents do for a living?

  “They had me,” I mumbled, scrawling my signature on the bottom line of both copies.

  Laura didn’t seem all that shocked by the sourness of my response. In fact, she smiled with clear understanding. “I hate those shows you’re always going on.”

  I handed the receipts back to her, not wanting this exceptionally long encounter with a pizza delivery person to end. “I do too, but they say it’s for my own good.”

  “Who says that? The producers?”

  “Everyone.”

  She frowned, dropped her pizza bags to the floor, and hugged me. She actually hugged me. I could feel her small body pressed against mine, the doughy smells of pizza mingled with some perfume overwhelmed me. My heart slammed in my chest, and I suddenly didn’t know how to hug her back; one arm or two? Heck, I suddenly didn’t even know what my name was.

  Now I know what you’re thinking: aw look at him getting his first hug. Well it wasn’t my first hug, and it wasn’t even my first hug by an attractive female. Almost every one of the little talk show bitches I met hugged me—and most of those women could have been models. But it was the first time a girl had hugged me just to be hugging me, without an audience or cameras around to show how “caring” they were. It was my first genuine hug, and it was incredible.

  I couldn’t figure out what to do with my arms; they hung by my sides like limp noodles. By the time it came to my mind that I should probably hug her back, she had released me and backed away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, taking my stiffness as a negative, and hurrying toward the door. “I didn’t…”

  I walked after her, unsteady on my feet. My tongue fumbled around a few words before managing a sentient reply. “It’s alright. I enjoyed it.” Damn, what a stupid thing to say; she might think I had meant something inappropriate.

  But she turned and smiled at me. “I’m a bit of a sensitive baby,” she confided. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

  She scooped up her pizza bags and walked through the door. I watched her leave, not knowing what to say, but knowing that I needed to say something.

  Laura stopped outside the open door and glanced back at me. She opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, and turned back around. But before she took another step, she looked back at me again. “Do you think…” she hesitated and chewed at her lip while she mulled over what she wanted to say. “What I mean is…gosh this is going to sound preposterously forward…Well, I get off work in an hour. Would you mind if I come back by so we can chat some more? I’d really like to get to know you.”

  Windswept? Shocked? Amazed? None of those really work. Let’s just go with flabbergasted. I was flabbergasted. “Of course!” I nearly shouted. “Come on by anytime. I can’t get out much…”

  She giggled and smiled. It was all girlish—really girlish—but I didn’t mind. “Thanks. I’ll…uh…see you.”

  With that, she hurried down the path to her idling car. I watched her go, not quite believing what had just happened. Had she really just promised to come see me? Me, the boy who melted? I would’ve thought that I had been dreaming, but I wouldn’t have dared to dream anything so absurd.

  I didn’t have much of an appetite anymore. I nibbled at a piece of pizza before shunting both of the pies in
to the fridge. My stomach jumped around in crazy leaps, and I feared that trying to weigh it down with food would instead create ammunition for projectile vomiting.

  Sunlight flickered through the clouds as I quickly slipped into a fresh pair of jeans and a polo shirt—I hadn’t bothered to change clothes in three or four days by that point. The patter of the rain slowed and eventually stopped. It looked like I was going to end up having one sunshiny day.

  I wandered into the family room to wait for the best day of my life to continue. The seventy-inch television mounted over the fireplace was still playing a documentary from The History Channel—some really educational crap about people in swamps chasing alligators. Not wanting to look like a complete shut in nerd, I picked up the remote and turned it to MTV. A wave of harsh New Jersey accents assaulted me, and I thumbed the volume to a low mutter. I would enjoy my own thoughts while I waited.

  But as I sat there, on the overstuffed sofa staring at college-aged kids getting hammered at the club, I realized that my thoughts weren’t the happiest places to be. I guess you could say that after years of being exploited, I didn’t trust people. Laura’s sudden act of kindness lost a little of its shock factor, and I was left wondering just what the cause of it had truly been. Had she really felt sorry for me—not because I was a freak who melted in the rain, but because those who were supposed to love me had sold me out for vacations to Rome—or had she simply pitied me. Understanding and