Almost every day, about halfway through lunch, Julian gets up from the table and leaves without saying anything.
"Where does he go?" said Dave yesterday after he did this.
"The hill behind the band room, I'm pretty sure." (One day in physics, he had pieces of grass on his back. I asked where he had been.)
Later, because it was nice out and we because were bored, we decided to find him to see if I was right. Sure enough, as we approached from a distance, we saw his knees sticking up on the side farthest away from the school. He was lying flat on his back doing nothing but staring at the sky. We both looked at him for a second, smiling a little.
"Should we go over and talk to him?"
"No, I don't think so."
I told Molly. She said, "...That's really adorable."
There was a pause.
"I know."
"Does it make you sad?"
I thought. "Not... Really."
"Oh... It makes me sad. I mean, I wanted to see you guys together."
Another pause.
"Can you really see that happening though? Can you imagine him being..." I trailed off.
"I don't know. I guess not. It's just..."
We made abstract expressionist paintings in Odyssey. We had to pick an abstract concept and paint it. I painted thick, bold, curving lines in varying shades of red, extending past the top and bottom of the page. I outlined them in black, and the black faded into a dark gray background. I called it love.
"What are you painting, Aidan?" said a very friendly hippie girl in the class, looking at my painting.
"I think it's love," I said. "It was meant to be love. I think it might turn out to be infatuation, but I'm not sure."
"I'm surprised that you're doing love for some reason," said the very friendly trendy girl sitting next to me.
"Yeah, you seem like a loveless person to me," said the very friendly hippie girl, pretty loudly.
The noise level in the room went down slightly. Some people who had heard this comment kind of looked over. A few of them made sucking-air-through-their-teeth noises that implied "ouch," and some of them looked vaguely shocked. I can't tell whether or not these people agreed with her. They may have.
I said, "Ooh. That was harsh."
She said, "Oh, and by the way, you were awesome in the Java Jam! I wanted to come find you and tell you how awesome you were, but I couldn't find you!"
I said, "Thank you." She walked away. I felt slightly slapped across the face, but I wasn't angry, or even upset. I looked at my painting. It looked exactly like what I feel. Intense, dark, contradictory, complex, beautiful. I ended up calling it infatuation because I thought that's what it would look like to other people. But I should have called it love. That's what I meant. Julian is taking Odyssey next year. I hope Mr. Sampson hangs it up on the wall, and that he sees it.
I chose love because I figured my version of it would be different from other people's, and that it might be interesting. Maybe I am a little introverted and cold, and maybe I get more excited about ideas than I do about people, and maybe I don't show my emotions most of the time. But I am very deeply in love, and that feeling is beautiful. Perhaps more beautiful than it is in people for whom emotions are not a big deal. Fuck you, very friendly hippie girl.
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