Drummer Boy
Sitting on a bench outside, we kicked our feet and watched the sun set, her hand still clasped in mine. The slowly drawn shades of night darkened the sky, and a brief chill whipped through the air causing her to shiver suddenly. Her momentary shaking gave me pause, and I took my sweatshirt off, offering it to her to shield her from the cold.
“Aren’t you going to get cold?” she asked.
“Nah, I’ll be ok. The cold doesn’t really bother me.”
“You know, those stories were so funny!” she squealed. “I didn’t know that you were such a cute kid,” she cooed teasingly, accepting my sweatshirt and tugging it over her head.
“No, no, no…blah…,” I shook my head and sighed, trying to elaborate further. “My aunt and uncle exaggerate, really,” I said. “You can’t believe everything that you hear…”
“They’re just stories…they didn’t all happen exactly like that.”
If my face could be represented by a modern day emoticon, it would have looked something like this >_<. Those stories were not only embarassing, but they also showcased some of my less than perfect moments.
Over the course of dinner, not only did my childhood antics come up, but so did some of my less popular traits. My own famly outing me to a bunch of complete strangers, and they all laughed heartily while exchanging their experiences and observations about their own children. Unfortuantely for me, my stories seemed to come up the most often. There's not much to say. I always knew that I wasn't the most trouble-free child out there.
"It's ok though," she said, trying to reassure me. "Those things you did, and the things you said as a kid. What a laugh!"
Seeing the look on my face, she changed her tone a bit. "Ok, so if you weren't exactly like that, then how were you really like as a toddler?"
"Okay, I was a bit of a trouble-maker, but who isn't?" I asked, wide-eyed full of feigned innocence.
"So you're telling me that you never tied Lynn's door handle closed with a bungee cord, to another door handle right across the hall?" she asked. "Or how about the one where you convinced other kids to eat hot chili peppers, convincing them that they weren't 'that' hot?" she asked, raising both eyebrows.
Hearing the slight disbelief in her tone, I figured that I should just tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.
"Well, I guess there's always some truth in the stories my family shares. I guess I always did things my way cause I felt like it. It didn't really matter what kind of trouble I'd get into, or how much I might get hurt. I'd just do it, even though I knew what kind of consequences I might face later."
"Ah ha," she snickered.
"I'm kinda hard-headed that way." I said sheepishly, a slight grin perched along the edge of my mouth.
"So when your aunt said that you were always a bit stubborn, that wasn't one of these so-called 'exaggerations' right?" she asked, giggling to herself.
I suppose she was imagining me defying all the rules, just to do what I felt like doing, and she wouldn't have been that far off. "I'm not stubborn! I just march to the beat of my own drummer," I protested, a bit too loudly; my grin spreading like wildfire through a forest of ashe.
"Oh? So what does that drummer say to you? Does he always tell you what to do?" she asked slowly. Her nose twitched and the twinkle in her eye jumped from one brightly lit pool to the other.
Sidling up closer to me, I could see her warm translucent breath floating up into the night sky. My face got hot, my breath caught in my throat, when I realized how close she was at that moment. Catching a whiff of vanilla, I breathed a bit easier, and could also detect jasmine, a soothing scent that was distinctively her smell, but barely noticeable unless you were quite close. Pulling myself together, I tried to swallow slowly, but my throat and lips had gone dry.
"Uh..."
"Oh drummer boy..." she whispered.
"Yah?" I breathed, as we both leaned in.
