Renaissance (boyxboy)

Chapter 8

By the time Ricky came home I still hadn’t eaten anything and was just laying on my bed in the dark.  I wanted to sleep, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my shoulder or the Cullens.  Yeah, they were easy on the eyes, but there was still something offsetting about them.  Part of me wanted to ask more about them, but at the same time I didn’t want to come off as obvious.  At least not to the other kids at school.  Maybe Ricky would know about them, it was a small town after all.

Despite that, I tried to feign being asleep when he came up the stairs and knocked on my doorframe, “You awake kiddo?”

I sighed and let my arm hang off the side of the bed, “Wish I wasn’t.”

“Bad first day?”

To be honest I had no idea how to answer that, but I sat up anyways on the edge of the bed, “No, I mean, not really.  Met some kids, they were all right I guess.  A blond boy named Mike and an extremely enthusiastic girl called Jessica to start.”

He slowly nodded, “Sounds like Mike Newton, he’s a good kid, you guys could hang out.”

Hang out?  Something about my father saying that was almost laugh worthy, but I held back the urge.  “Yeah I guess.”

Silence hung between us and he tried to break it, awkwardly though, maybe one day we’d actually be able to talk to start a conversation comfortably, “Why’re you sittin’ here in the dark?  Have you eaten yet?”

I shook my head, not really up to cooking that night.  He continued, “Well I was gonna head down to the diner, get something there.  You wanna come with me?”

Ricky inviting me somewhere?  Well I guess it wasn’t too strange, just, I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years so it was almost foreign feeling.  Mom and I cooked a lot together, usually making enough to last for days so that we could laze around when we got home and not have to worry about dinner.  Taking a break and just letting someone else do the cooking sounded like a good idea to me,

“Sure, yeah, I’m ready now I guess.” I pushed up from the bed and followed him down the narrow stairwell.  When we got in his car –which, to be clear, I still wasn’t used to riding around in a cop car- I decided it was safe enough to ask, “So, there were these other kids at the school…”

“Other kids, what about them?”  He started up the car and pulled out.  I tried to focus on the misty drizzle that clung and dripped down the windshield,

“Well, I don’t know.  They just seemed to be off on their own, the Cullens?”

No response.  What?  What was wrong?  I looked over at him and realized that now he was gripping the steering wheel so hard you’d think he was keeping us from getting into a car crash.  What had I said?  Before I could follow up he started to speak, a new passion to his voice that almost disturbingly resembled protectiveness, “That’s a good family.  Dr. Carlisle is a brilliant surgeon and him and his family have done nothing but be good to this community.  Did anyone at school say something about them?  Because those are a good group of kids that haven’t had the easiest lives themselves.”

Whoah.  What in the world?  Did he know them personally?  The hell was going on?  I tried to dial it down a notch, “What?  No, no one said anything about them.  They were just…I don’t know, a little odd.  I sit next to one of them in Bio.”

Seriously, what was with that reaction?  I guess what I said was the right thing because his grip on the wheel loosened and he even managed to smile, but only a little, “Sorry kiddo.”

“Yeah what the hell was that?”

His eyebrows shot up and he looked over at me before back at the windshield.  Maybe swearing was something I wouldn’t be able to do here, but still, my question was valid.

“What that was, was me trying to put a stop to anything that might have been said about them.  To be honest I’m guilty.”

My eyebrows furrowed, “Guilty?  Why?”

He sighed, fingers drumming on the wheel now, “All those teenagers living together, for a while I thought they were gonna be a lot of trouble.  Even kept an exceedingly sharp eye on them for a while when they first moved in.  Made me feel like that much more of an ass when I realized how well behaved all of them were.”

So that’s why.   Huh.  I had to admit that I was pretty impressed he could admit it so easily.  Ricky and I had barely spoken too much since I got here, and my childhood memories of him were different now that the shine of being younger was gone.  Plus, he swore, so I was gonna take that as an ‘ok’ to do the same.

“Yeah well, I sit next to one of the brothers, Edward.  Dad, did anything weird ever happen with them?”

“What kind of weird?”

“I don’t know, just, anything weird.”

We slowly pulled into the parking lot, but neither one of us left the car, almost like there was some unspoken rule about speaking of the Cullens within earshot of anyone.  The mist picked up to rain and it was amplified against the metal roof after the car was turned off.  When I was just about ready to get out of the car, thinking that he wouldn’t come up with anything to say and a little unnerved at how long he had to think about it, he spoke,

“No, not that I can recall.  Edward you said?  Yeah he’s well behaved like the rest of ‘em.  Never been a problem, at least not as far as I know.  A little more distant than the rest maybe, but nothin’ bad that I can think of.  Why?  Did something happen?”

He looked over at me and I shrugged almost too quickly.  Luckily he didn’t notice it, “No, he just didn’t talk or anything.  Gonna be weird being his lab partner.”

But if Ricky wasn’t scared of them then I was even more confused as to why they creeped me out so much.  Edward was more distant apparently, but that hardly explained his behavior towards me.  Maybe it really was me; maybe it was all in my head.  Besides, I thought he might have been socially awkward when I first sat down next to him, all this did was confirm it.

“Come on, let’s get inside before it really starts to come down.”

My eyes widened and I nodded quickly, bolting out of the car and to the door of the diner.  To me, this was already really coming down, how much harder could the rain get?  It was still strange not to see the sun every day, to not feel that dry heat.

Our talk about the Cullens was pretty much the only big conversation we had, and dinner was mainly a mixture of silence and silverware against ceramic and glass.  I didn’t mind though.  Sure we didn’t talk a lot, but when we managed to actually fully converse it wasn’t hard.  Almost like we could flow back into that natural state we’d been in when I was younger and came here to see him.  His silence wasn’t because he didn’t want to talk, there was just nothing to talk about at the moment.  The same could be said for me.  I guess living with Mom for so long just got me used to someone breaking the silence.

Now I was reminded of how much I actually liked it.