The
girl threw Cheerios at him, one at a time, little round Os, tiny thuds on the
back of his neck, in his collar, on his desk, in his left ear once. He never
saw her do it, even when he turned around. She didn’t look at him, no wink or
coy smile, no shy wave.
Flirting
or even acknowledgement wasn’t her style. She wore dresses when every other
girl he knew was in skinny jeans—the thin girls, the medium girls, the fat
girls, all in jeans that were painted on by their mothers every morning. Not
Sydney. She wore dresses with patterns, belts, once a skirt that grazed the bend
of her knee, all with pockets.
Which
is where she kept the Cheerios, he surmised. In those pockets.
On
Friday, he asked her to stop. “Hey, Sydney,” he said.
“Yes,”
she said. Those startled blue eyes, blue the color of her dress, blue the color
of the tiny sweater held across her breasts by a single button, blue as the sky
is blue, like a—what do you call that rock—sapphire—as blue as a sapphire is
blue, so very, very blue and perfectly round, round as a Cheerio, but bigger
and oh so blue that he was blushing, this boy who feared nothing and felt
little or so he proclaimed, now felt the slow, hot rise move up his neck and
flood his face.
“So,
Sydney,” he was saying, “what’s the deal with the Cheerios?”
“What
Cheerios?” she said. Her voice was soft and clear at the same time, smiling
although her face showed nothing . . . but those eyes. “What Cheerios?” she
said again.
“The
ones you throw at me,” he said and opened his hand to show the pile he’d collected
that morning.
“You
looked hungry,” she said.
“This
would hardly feed a hungry man,” he said.
“Oh,”
she said. The sapphire eyes—yes sapphire was definitely the rock he was
thinking of—the sapphire eyes filled with light and reflected the heat of his
blush. “Oh,” she said, “then follow me. I have more.”
So he did.
©
2012 Kathleen Coskran
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