The Pieces We Trade

9. Gray

"Pass me the aux," I tell Jamie a week later. We're in my car heading south, homeward bound.

"No way," he says, swatting my hand away from the console.

"Ow!"

"I swear if I have to listen to your 2010's emo playlist one more time I'll throw myself out of this car," Jamie threatens.

"My car," I remind him. "Therefore, my aux. Therefore, if I want to play "Dear Maria, Count Me In" on a loop for the next 4 hours, you have no say in the matter."

"If we're listening to throwback pop-punk music, then at least tell me you've added 5SOS self-titled to the list," Jamie argues.

It comes as a surprise that James Flynn is a full-fledged, proud 5 Seconds Of Summer fan. It's all he ever allows to be played in his car, but as I said, since this isn't his microwave with wheels he calls a car, I should get full aux cord privileges during this trip. Still, when I manage to connect my phone to the car's sound system I scroll through my music library and click shuffle on the playlist I made of 5SOS 'entire discography. Jamie beams and nods his head in time with the beat, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

"You're so predictable," I tell him, rolling my eyes.

"What? Can't hear you," he yells over the loud music. "The best music ever created is playing."

His nodding and drumming eventually turns into singing. Loud, unconscious, streaming from the heart, singing. He does this every time but I never call him out on it, no matter how tone-deaf he is. I'm not sure he notices he does it and I'm afraid if I point it out he'll stop.

"But not in the same way!" Jamie sings along with the chorus in a horribly high-pitched, out of tune voice. I smile fondly at him, grateful for being able to have this private concert. He doesn't take his eyes off the road, though.

I remain silent for a while, tucking my knees up to my chest and alternating between looking out the window at the rolling scenery, and looking at Jamie, animatedly rocking out from his place in the driver's seat. I've never been one to talk much during car rides, but Jamie has always been more than content to fill in my silences.

We're an unlikely pair, Jamie and I. He's Mister Sunshine and most of the time I'm Miss Thunderclouds. Should-be opposites but instead two halves of one whole.

Realistically, had we not met during childhood, way before judgments came into play and when the only thing that mattered was whether or not the other person was willing to share their toys with you, I don't think we ever would have become friends.

Puberty hit Jamie in all the right ways, giving him inches in height, defined cheekbones and hollowed cheeks, a honeyed deep voice, and filling him out in a way that his limbs stopped looking too big for the rest of his body.

Puberty hit me like a right hook to the jaw. I was a late bloomer, one of the last of my classmates to get their period. By then all my friends had assured me often enough for me to start believing that my boobs would fill out eventually when aunt Flo paid her first visit. They didn't. They said that the roundness of my belly would eventually smooth out. It didn't. What I got dealt instead was an infuriating amount of acne that I didn't get rid of until my twenties, and a surprisingly dark peach fuzz.

No, we would not have been friends. I would have thought him to be a jock by proxy, and he would never have noticed me because I would have been too busy trying to make myself invisible.

The thing about Jamie is he's a very specific type of unapproachable. Not because he's intimidating, but because he has this air about him that even before you approach him already warns you he's too good for you. You can tell by his looks alone, and the way he carries himself.

Jamie Flynn is the type of guy you see at the airport waiting for his connecting flight, the setting sun lighting up his face, wire-framed glasses low on the bridge of his nose, your favourite book resting on his lap. You think about approaching him, already having a topic of conversation you might open up with (he seems to be about halfway through his read, you know that's when things start getting good), but before you can work up the nerve to go over to him, his plane is boarding and then he's gone.

And for the next few months you'll think about him once in a while, the white-haired airport guy, wondering what he's like. Thinking about how you would have approached him had you had more confidence, what you would have said. Wondering if he'd liked the book. Jamie is that guy. Airport guy, coffee shop guy, bookstore guy. You see him once, never again, and for a while you regret not having approached him, until eventually you forget him, or run into the next airport guy.

That's what Jamie could've been for me. A handsome stranger, a chance encounter, thought over and later forgotten.

I imagine there's a parallel universe in which things have happened the way that it made sense for them to. In it, Jamie and I never saw each other until our teenage years. Our houses shared a wall but we still remained oblivious to each other's existence nonetheless. Then one day, while I sat on the couch in my living room, I had felt compelled to glance out the window, and there he had been, white hair catching the sunlight, cheeks pink from exertion, not riding his bike but walking alongside it on his way home. I'd done a double take because there had been no way I could have helped myself. And he'd seen me, looking through the glass past his own reflection. He had smiled knowingly, if a bit abashedly, lifting two fingers in salute and then I'd looked away. In that alternate reality, from that moment on, I pretended it never happened, and we never crossed paths again.

But in this one, by some stroke of luck, our paths crossed once, and they never stopped crossing after that.

In this reality, Jamie saw me through a crack in the fence separating our backyards. It was during one hellishly hot summer, and we couldn't have been older than six at the time. He'd heard splashing water, a result of me throwing my dolls into the pool, and he'd asked if he could come swim with me. My mom heard me talking to the fence and came over to investigate. I guess Jamie's mom heard him too, because a minute later the adults were standing over us on their respective sides of the fence, introducing themselves to each other in their kindest voices, the ones reserved for strangers you wanted to make a good impression on. Ten minutes after that Jamie and his mom were at my door and my mom was inviting them in. Jamie's mother made him shake my hand, his fingers were sticky from a melted popsicle. There was an orange ring of food coloring around his mouth. We went out to the backyard and swam the entire afternoon away. And then the next day, and every day after that for the rest of the summer, we did it again.

Somehow, sunshine boy liked me, and I was surprised to find that he didn't stop liking me even when he turned into sunshine man. He liked me, pimples, and round belly, and overly sweaty hands, and prickly personality, and short temper, and all.

He told me about his love of graphic novels, and I let him read the nonsensical stories I came up with, sitting next to him to help him when he couldn't decipher my unintelligible handwriting. I even let him keep some of them. They're currently sitting in a box in his childhood bedroom, under his childhood bed.

Later on, he had his mom hook me up with her dermatologist friend, and he told me he'd done it not because he thought I needed it, but because he knew I wanted it. Clear skin wouldn't make me pretty, he'd said. That, I already was.

And I believed him, when he called me pretty. Because Jamie never lied. And he believed me, when I said he was pretty too. Because I never lied to Jamie.

Jamie is the only person I've ever verbally expressed love for. He was the first person that ever heard the words "I love you" coming out of my mouth. He said it back, and it wasn't the first time I'd heard that from someone. My parents occasionally told me they loved me, but they had to. This was different. It was the first time the words held any real weight to me. Jamie didn't have to love me. He just did.

There may be other realities in which Jamie and I have never even met. Ones in which we're acquaintances but not close, some in which we were once friends but now we're strangers. There may even be some in which we hate each other. I don't care about those, because in this reality, the best reality, Jamie is sitting behind the wheel of my 2017 Ford, singing along to the 5 Seconds Of Summer playlist I made for him blasting through the radio, driving us to the joined houses with the joined fence where a boy with hair like the sun first spoke to me through a crack in the wood. In this reality James Flynn and mine's paths crossed, and I hope they'll never stop crossing.