Joe by H.D. Gordon

childhood, remembering a time when he had been taking this
very same walk to the bus stop for middle school. Even though it had happened
over six years ago, John still spared thoughts for the incident every time he
had to take this walk.
    He had only been thirteen years old at the
time, but just as socially awkward as he was still was today. The details of it
all had begun to fade, and yet the effects had placed a large stepping stone in
the path that made John the way he was. It had left him bitter, and he was too
bitter to even know it.
    The girl’s name was Jodie. The incident
that ended it all was finally beginning to unglue itself from his mind, but the
first time he set eyes on her would never leave him. The way her curly blond
hair stuck out from her head, as though gravity from the sky were pulling it
upward, still made him smile. The memory of her sea-green eyes reflecting the
light from the sun still made his heart flip. Her pink-and-blue flowered dress,
the small scar just above her right knee, the single dimple of her left cheek.
He remembered her so very clearly.
    Jodie was the reason that he had not
taken scissors to his hair for six years. He was growing it in memory of their
love, but it had never been theirs , not really. It had only been his.
    The girl had been sitting on her porch
as he passed by on his way to the bus stop that morning. When he saw her he
knew immediately that she was new to the neighborhood. To this day he didn’t
know where his courage to wave to her came from, but when she smiled and waved
back the hair on John’s head tingled. That’s why he had stopped cutting his
hair. At one time, a girl named Jodie had made it tingle.
    Jodie was John’s first real friend, and
the two walked to and from the bus stop every day together. Jodie understood
John’s humor. She didn’t seem to mind as much as everyone else that he was
strange. She was one in million, and beautiful too.
    Then the incident happened, and John
never saw Jodie again. He hadn’t heard from her in over six years, not since
that day–not until she had called him yesterday.
    The two had been on their way home from
school when Jodie reached out and took John’s hand in hers. “There’s something
I want to try,” Jodie said, looking at John from underneath her golden lashes.
    “Okay,” John said, his hand warm with
hers inside it, “I’m in.”
    Jodie giggled. “You haven’t heard what
it is yet.”
    John shrugged. “What is it?” he asked.
    The two had reached the front of Jodie’s
house, on the sidewalk where they split ways every day. She glanced back at her
house and studied it for a moment, then, she turned back to John. “Close your
eyes,” she said, turning him by the shoulders so that he was facing her.
    For a brief moment, a small-enough
second that he hoped she didn’t notice, all he could do was stare at her. Jodie
had become his best friend, and the reason he never missed a day of school. She
didn’t mind walking to the same off-beat rhythm that made John seem weird in
everyone else’s eyes. Jodie was innocent. They both were. They were only
thirteen.
    The thing that Jodie did next remained
the single best memory in John’s mind to this day. Jodie leaned in and kissed
him.
    The day wasn’t particularly beautiful.
In fact, it was a little windy outside, rays of sunshine only breaking through
the clouds at infrequent shifts. Fallen leaves floated their way down the
sidewalk, their soft scraping sound the simple soundtrack of the moment. But,
the world may as well have been coated with thick cotton, blotting out all that
there was except John and Jodie.
    It wasn’t a long kiss, really just their
lips pressed together gently for a tiny moment that would last a lifetime. John
would give anything to go back to that moment, to seize it and take up quarters
in its grasp. That was the moment when everything changed for him. It was one
of his defining moments, a pillar holding up the man that John was