"Pet Shop" Chapter x

I waited up by my window most of the night. He never came.

I kept vigil long after my eyes were weary and the school day lay only hours away before me, still thinking, hoping he might show. So many times I saw the phantom, bleary headlights outside of my peripheral vision from the position I held against my bedroom window: chin resting on knuckles, back of head leaning against the cold weather-proofed window, trying to prop inside a pose that wouldn’t pull my hair by the pressure of the weight of my head. The inevitable hair pulling saved me from a crooked, feverish fragment of sleep which would have awakened me in a state of discomfort that I would carry the next day to school. Trying to concentrate on algebra with a crick in my neck on a Wednesday morning: trying harder to figure out why he didn’t think it worthwhile to come to my house, as he had said he would, than the effort I would give to trying to figure out the quadratic equation which meant nothing when compared to him, meaningless and flat on the white page. Algebra meant nothing when compared to the way he looked at me.

“You gonna be at home tonight?” he had asked in the midst of my scrubbing down of the feeder mices’ overcrowded aquarium home.

“Should be,” I answered, trying to sound casual, as if I was not shaken by his unexpected overture.

“Billy and I might come by”…he paused…”tonight.”

“Sure. Ok.” I took one of my yellow bleach-scented rubber gloved hands and wiped away the dangling stray bang that threatened to block my view of him as carefully as I could without making contact with the parts of my fingers which had touched the rodents’ urine-saturated home. It was a funny thing. I was cleaning up after mice, mice who would be eaten by unforgiving reptiles, and in the midst putrid odors and small-animal squeals that would make most people cringe, I felt pretty. Maybe even a little desirable. The feeling was not an intentional one – perhaps more accidental, like any other moment in which one is not prepared for something nice to sneak up and find us in the middle of an unflattering daily task.

“Ok, so maybe we’ll see you.” He looked down, my view of him now of only his white cap, like there was more he wanted to say, and as if he wanted to explain to me exactly why he had decided to invite himself over to my house on a school night and out of the clear blue sky almost as much as I wanted him to explain it to me.

A pause.

“Hello,” someone called from the front of the store. “Is anyone able to answer a question? I’ve got a sick fan-tail goldfish who needs some help.”

His eyes met mine again, and we half-smiled at the interruption, like some sort of pseudo-defining moment had been interrupted. I held up my gloved hands like a doctor does after surgery. “Guess this one is yours,” I shrugged with a smile.

“Yeah.” A tipping of the white Pet Pros cap and one last short gaze of intensity into my eyes, and then he was gone.