My mouth was completely devoid of moisture as I stood in front of the dilapidated steps of 2D's trailer, the morning sun warm across my shoulders. It had taken me twenty minutes of knocking on the various caravan doors of my neighbours to find out exactly which mobile home belonged to the blue haired boy.
After being pointed in the continually vague direction of the right hand side of the trailer park, it had been a sweetly smiling woman in a battered Winnebago who'd finally been able to point me to the exact location. Her brows creased slightly into a frown once she'd heard whose trailer it was I which I wanted to find, but nevertheless she indicated the crooked camper across from her at the far outer edge of the park.
The squat little thing in front of me was mounted halfway up a hillock and propped up on bricks. One of the front windows was busted and someone had stuck up a poster of the Dalai Lama over the hole left behind. A half finished graffiti tag in lurid green was scrawled across the entire side of the trailer, proclaiming "GORR", whilst a much smaller line of writing beneath it read "how many r's are innit? FUCK" in the same acid green.
Too stressed to laugh at the dopey defacement of the mobile home, I had been about to walk up the half broken steps and knock on the bright orange door when I'd been stopped by the oddest noise coming from inside.
Electronic music was drifting out through the open portal of the broken window, a strange bouncing loop of notes that sounded undeniably familiar. The front of my skull began to ache as I paused, frowning in an effort to remember where I'd heard it before. I wasn't big on listening to the radio, mostly sticking to playing old scratchy records of my mum's on the family turntable, yet I was sure this particular song had been on last time I had been watching early morning television.
Who gives a fuck, you've got bigger things to worry about than whether the boy likes watching MTV with the volume up super loud.
Shaking my head to try and clear it, I stepped delicately up the rickety stairs and raised my fist to the door just as 2D began to sing.
"The world is spinning too fast, I'm buying lead Nike shoes..."
Taken aback, I realised that it wasn't that the music was playing but instead that it was being played. Curiosity piqued, I stepped back from the peeling painted door and listened.
"To keep myself tethered to the days I've tried to lose..."
His singing voice was a nonchalantly monotone drawl, so different from the lilting and nasal timbre of his speech. I found myself grinning despite myself at the idea that the lanky wannabe-ladies-man could even produce such a low and sensual sound.
"My mama said to slow down, you must make your own shoes..."
How can a man sound sexy while singing about shoes? Sexy? Sloane get a grip.
On impulse I slammed my knuckles in a repeated brisk knock against the orange door, the music notes from whatever instrument the boy inside was playing faltering and going silent at my interruption. Anxiety spiked through me, a wave of nails down the chalkboard of my spine and I leapt off the steps to the safety of grassy slope below.
Trying my best to act like I hadn't just been eavesdropping, I was in the middle of lighting a nerve-soothing cigarette when the trailer door swung open on creaky hinges. Standing slightly slouched so as to fit in the doorway, 2D looked every bit the bed-rumpled boy I'd wanted to wake up across from that morning; blue hair tousled and hanging down over eyes which were sleepily heavy lidded. His feet were bare, and I decided to look at the slender daintiness of them instead of gawping at his current shirtless condition. He had long and slightly crooked toes.
YOU ARE READING
The Trapeze Swinger
Fanfiction"Him. 2D. I could see him even now, his goofy grin while holding the water gun like a hunting rifle, lining me down the sight. His hands ruffling my hair, one eye closed in a squint as if sizing me up, as if looking into the sun." The year is 2003...
