and
Syd’s eyes met mine
and we knew we were feeling the same way
and she
dropped the umbrella on the ground
and we walked off in the rain without looking back, and then
we were running,
and then
we were laughing
and I don’t know
that
I have ever loved anyone more.
88.
now
I’ve been trying. I’ve been chasing them all over town, whoever it is, however many of them there are. Trying to catch them.
But. I think I know how to do it. I have a new idea.
The student government room is another place I avoided last year, so as Yolo and I walk across the room, I notice banners and signs I haven’t seen before, handwriting I don’t recognize on the whiteboard.
At the end of my junior year, I ran for class secretary again, and I won. But after everything that happened, I just sort of never showed up. I never went to anything or did anything or responded to any texts about it. They’d put someone else in my place.
The markers are lined up neatly in the tray of the whiteboard. The minifridge, when I open it, is still full of off-brand diet soda, and the cupboard next to it has Nature Valley crunchy granola bars, the nourishment the school provided us. Nobody ever ate them unless we were desperate.
We’d spent so many hours in here junior year, Alex and me.
“I bet other schools have, like, fancy printers and graphic design stuff they can use instead,” I’d say, as we wore out another marker coloring in lettering for a poster announcing a band concert or a debate trip.
“I bet other schools have a lot of things,” Alex muttered.
But at Lithia High we always liked that we were scrappy.
I open the cupboard where we used to keep the marquee letters.
In addition to not having enoughEs, we also didn’t have a question mark, so we used the money sign instead. The best was one time when a guy on the football team used the marquee to ask a girl to a dance. In order to fit all the words on the marquee he spaced them out like this:
SOPHIA WILL YOU GO TO
HOM3COMING WITH M3 $KEVIN
So from then on Syd started calling him MoneyKevin, and it stuck.
But Kevin had a ton of confidence. He could handle the nickname. He embraced it, in fact.
I haven’t thought about MoneyKevin in ages. I wonder where he is now.
