Page 64 of Error Handling
“Hmmm.” Sarah rests her elbow on the door’s armrest and rubs her chin. “When I was a kid, my parents built me a sandbox. I would build roads in it, make little towns. And when I finished a town, I’d immediately wipe it out and start all over. Because the fun was in the design and the build.”
“So, you’d flip it and then buy a new rundown Victorian.”
“Probably.”
I think about telling Sarah my own dreams of flipping houses, but it feels too binding. I file her dream away next to my own. Maybe someday we can compare notes. But not today.
Chapter 12
Sarah
I’ve kissed two guys in my lifetime, not including my dad, and that was just a peck or two when I was a toddler. My first “real” kiss was in eighth grade at Shelby Conner’s fourteenth birthday party. Shelby and I were in the same friend group. We weren’t best friends, but close to it.
The party was co-ed and poorly supervised. As in unsupervised. Not an adult to be seen. Just twelve teenagers in a pole barn down the hill from Shelby’s house.
The barn serviced horses and was filled with hay, the clomping of horse’s hooves, and the unmistakable smell of manure while half the group, all girls, danced awkwardly to Rihanna’sUmbrella.
I spent most of my time petting the horses, who were hanging out at the front of their stables curiously watching a bunch of eighth graders try to act older than they were. The horse with the white blaze on its forehead was named Corporal and the spotted one was named Chickpea.
Chickpea showed me the most attention. He loved the raw carrots I brought over from the snack table, watched my every move, and gave me nose bumps.
When everyone sat in a circle on the dance floor, I knew trouble was brewing. Shelby had already talked about subjecting us all to a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven. My girlfriends were on board. I was so nervous about it that I felt like puking, running screaming from the barn to Shelby’s house, and ratting them all out to her parents, but I just patted Chickpea on the nose. Chickpea answered with a sneeze that blew horse mucous and saliva on my camo sweatshirt. Kissing one of those boys in the circle would be just as bad. Worse.
I didn’t have to play the game, but then everyone would know I was weird. Teenagers do that. They worry about being the weird one, the one everyone else thinks is made from alien DNA. The rejected.
I cursed under my breath, deciding to head to the circle just as Shelby called me over.
“Chickpea just sneezed on me,” I said. For some reason I wanted the boys in the circle to know I had actual cooties. Horse cooties. It was a push and pull, my desire to be accepted. I wanted to be included on my own terms.
Shelby scooted over to give me room in the circle, and I sat on the hard concrete, crisscross applesauce, and waited for my life to be permanently altered. I’d fantasized about kissing celebrities, but never one of the boys I saw every day.
It didn’t help that I’d known most of the boys in the circle since kindergarten. I remembered when Travis licked his glasses in third grade to clean them. I remembered when Jeremy cried on the first day of fifth grade because he missed his mommy. I remembered when Patrick spit a blueberry onto his lunch tray in fourth grade, didn’t even realize he’d done it, and then found itfive minutes later, and popped it back into his mouth. And I was supposed to have crushes on these boys?
My girlfriends were made of different stuff. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was made of, maybe cotton and wooden dowels and leather. Nothing resembling a heart or veins or blood.
Shelby had prepared for Seven Minutes in Heaven before everyone arrived. She held a glass bowl containing slips of paper with all our names on it. The pink slips were girl names, the blue slips were boys. There was no room for gender neutrality because as far as Shelby knew, all her peers were only interested in the opposite sex. I was too if the male was in a photo or on a movie screen. That way, I didn’t have to smell them.
Maybe I was also made of some liquid ingredients because as I sat there waiting for the first two names to be pulled, my stomach churned with thirty-foot waves of bile, crashing and receding, traveling up my esophagus until I swallowed it back down again. If I was lucky, everyone would become bored of the game before my name was called.
“Patrick,” Shelby said after unfolding the blue slip. “And Sarah.”
I swore like a sailor in my mind. No, no, a thousand times no. Yet my body moved of its own accord, deploying my legs beneath me, and setting them in motion with a clomp of each foot, like a heartless Cyberman from Doctor Who.
Don’t think I didn’t notice Patrick’s expression when my name was called. I did. He sneered. Whose idea of fun was this?
He followed me into the office across from the horse stalls and closed the door behind us. It was dark. I immediately turned on the lights.
A messy desk sat off to one side covered in miscellaneous papers. Horse equipment made of leather and metal hung on the opposite wall—I was sure each item had a real name, but I knew nothing about horses. A couch sat along the adjacent wallcovered in thick fur, most likely from countless encounters with Shelby’s Golden Retrievers.
The place stank. At least in the open barn, the smell of manure had a place to go, but here it stagnated and mingled with the smell of wet dog. Caring for horses must be a messy job, I concluded, because the whole room seemed covered in a layer of dirt. And this was where I was supposed to experience my first kiss?
“What do we do now?” I said as I stood in the middle of the room, arms crossed. No way was I sitting on the couch.
“We have seven minutes to make out,” Patrick said.
“I’m not making out for seven minutes.”
“Oh.” Patrick looked relieved. “We have to kiss once though.”