Meeting Someone New

“I can’t believe we never knew.”

“We never wanted you to.”

Recorded By: Divinity Sykes

Jen’s Diary: Entry 8

          The grocery cart was already brimming with various flavors of sugar cookie, coconut brownies with the colored sprinkles- but never with caramel drizzle, and ginger snaps by the time we finished up in the food section. We had made it to the end, where I tried to tempt Helix with bananas or even just a taste of something green, but he wasn’t paying me the least bit of attention. His eyes were locked in, worriedly, on the food. “Do you think we have enough?”

          I started to say that it would never be enough, but the words dropped off and I smiled my brightest smile at him. He was so proud to get a new job, and to be able to buy these things for himself instead of bumming food off the rest of us like he had done for years. “I think you could use some of those yummy coconut balls, you know, that are all the different colors?”

          He agreed and we doubled back for more.

          My big brother Ronald joined us at the check out aisle with a new penny board Mom was going to yell at him for, and some girl’s number on a receipt with a lipstick stain on it. Helix bumped elbows with him for the score.

          “You know sugar diabetes kills, right?” Ronny picked through the bags of jelly beans at the front of the cart with disgust. Under his right arm he had a bag of salad mix and some mushrooms to fuel his athletic body.

          Helix was as close to Ronny’s opposite as a person could get. He wore the same black jeans three days out of the week, and a different pair of black jeans for the other four. Whereas Ronny had a different baggy pair of basketball shorts and a sweat-wicking shirt with some sports team’s name on it for every day of the week two times over. Helix wore his Mohawk up on the days he was feeling well, and let his hair flop to one side on the days he was not. Ronny kept his sandy blonde curls in a high and tight for JROTC and never wore black eyeliner or lipstick or fingernail polish.

          “I think I’ll go back for just one more thing,” Helix’s white knuckled grip on the cart released, and he tried to place me in charge of it, but I grabbed him by the shirt and kept him steadily in place. Putting my hand firmly on his shoulder I assured him, “We will ration it out.”

          The words, “ration it out,” didn’t sit well with him, but he obediently steered us forward to the self-checkout machine, if only because he was running out of paycheck. I had to keep my hands up like blinders around his head so he wouldn’t be distracted by the candy bar displays.

          “Look,” Ronny elbowed me in the stomach and all the air left me in a groan, “It’s that kid from soccer.”

          Helix and I both glanced over our shoulders at the same time, and Ronny sighed that we were being too obvious. What I saw was a short- even for our age- bony kid, helping his wheel chair bound mother scan groceries nearer to the entrance. Her hair was sparse, thin, discolored, and yellow brown. She wore a homemade face mask with kittens on it. He wore a sad smile and long-sleeved clothes that were too hot for the weather. Even a high collar couldn’t hide the bruises on his neck.

“That kid,” Helix leaned in and whispered, steadily scanning groceries as though he hadn’t seen anything, “Stops by the alley to buy Oxy on Wednesdays. Word is he’s dropping out of school to get a second job.”

I had been staring too long, he caught me looking, and smiled handsomely. True, he was shorter than I preferred; his face was round and plain. He kept his head down, but his eyes were steady, fierce, and kind.

“ ’Scuse me, boys,” I tore the receipt from Helix’s hands and dug around for the right colored pen in my purse. It couldn’t be red, but a more sophisticated color would do. A sad color. In blue pen I wrote my name and number, and drew a funny little monster hanging upside down from a tree, with crossed eyes and a little joke blurb. It was lame as could be, and yet, I walked right up and slipped it in his hand with some excuse that I was Ronny’s little sister, that I’d heard a lot about him, that it was nice to finally meet him.

He blushed, and swept his brown bangs from his brave but dirty face. “I’m Kit,” was all he said, but I knew he could see the sadness in me, too. He turned, to introduce me to his mother, who was frail but gave a strong hug. A woman no older than my mother, with a permanent, toothless grin, but dying eyes. She waved the other two over, and laughed playfully at Helix’s buggy. She said she was a bit of a candy-holic herself, during her younger years, and pinched his pale white cheeks, and squeezed Ronny’s biceps shamelessly. Telling us it was always nice to meet her son’s friends.  

We weren’t friends, of course, but then we were all of a sudden, and it was like we had been all our lives. We stood there for half an hour like we were meeting up with relatives. Ronny and Kit swapped soccer stories that we laughed obnoxiously loud at, and I fixed his collar so you couldn’t see the bruises, and Helix offered Kit’s Mom one of his jealously guarded, albeit probably stolen, candy bars that he must’ve nicked while my back was turned. 

In a strange way, it was nice to feel normal.

© 2020 A.K