He was making it really hard for me to not like him in a way that was more than friendship, too.
***
The following day during lunch period, Ash randomly said, “Tell me something about her.”
“About who?”
“Your mom.”
My shoulders relaxed from his words. Wow. When was the last time I talked about Mom to someone? I thought about her all the time, but speaking about her didn’t happen often.
I felt lightheaded as all the memories of Mom came rushing back to me. It was like an avalanche of love hitting every corner of my being. And there Ash was, sitting across from me, asking me to tell him about not only the hard parts of me and my life but the best parts, too. He was asking me to share all of myself with him, including the stories of Mom.
I cleared my throat. “She loved record players. She had a massive amount of records that my dad dedicated a whole room for in our basement. Each night, we’d pick out one record and play it in the living room. All of us would dance to one songbefore saying good night to one another and going to bed.” I smiled. It was a string of good memories.
“Records and nightly dancing traditions, huh?”
“My favorite tradition.”
Ash smiled.
I loved when he did that.
“Did she have a favorite record?” he asked.
“Diana Ross and The Supremes,” I said. “It was their greatest hits album. Unfortunately, I scratched the record a few months ago when I was upset. Stupid mistake.”
“Mistakes happen. OK...” he said as he rubbed the nape of his neck. “Tell me some more.”
The next thing I knew, I was telling him so many things. I was sharing happy stories about my mom along with funny ones. I laughed as I retold them, too. I never thought I’d laugh again from any memories I had about Mom. I thought they’d always make me strikingly sad.
But that afternoon, I chuckled and beamed.
“She ate sixty-five hot wings in one sitting?” Ash asked in amazement.
“Yup. We both love hot wings. She said she could’ve easily eaten seventy, but her favorite number was sixty-five, so it seemed like a good stopping point.”
Ash laughed.
I loved when he did that, too.
“That’s a wild favorite number,” he said.
“Yeah. My mom is wild.” I caught my words swiftly and shook my head. “Shewaswild.”
“‘Is’ is fine, too,” he said. “Sometimes I talk about Rian as if he’s still here. It’s comforting whenever I get really sad.”
“You still get really sad?”
“Sometimes. Mainly when I have a great moment happen, and I wish I could tell Rian about the moment, too.”
“I get that.” I bit my bottom lip as we sat in the quiet. “Can you tell me about Rian?”
He paused his fiddling hands for a second. Then a tiny grin fell on his face. “For my eleventh birthday, I got in trouble. My parents told me that they weren’t going to give me a birthday cake. To be fair, I did drive their car into our neighbor’s garage.”
“Ash!”
He laughed, tossing his hands up in the air in surrender. “I know, I know. I was a little shit. Anyway, my parents held up to their threat of no birthday cake. Then after I was told to go to bed for the night, Rian came into my room with three packs of powdered donuts. Each pack had five donuts, except the last one; that had only one left. Rian’s face was covered in powdered sugar, a clear sign that he ate the other four. He made a donut tower, then pulled out a candle and put it in. He said he didn’t have a lighter—or firestick, as he liked to call it—so I had to pretend to blow out the candle as I made my wish.”
