My Share of Sand (A Calabasas Fable)...Slightly Revised Edition

Part II: Done My Sentence But Committed No Crime...8-Breakthru...revised

Wednesday, August 31 (later in the morning than before, but still early)

Darius learned something this morning: there's no good place to lean your back against in a high school hallway.

You could lean against your locker, teen comedy style, but other people might need to get into the lockers adjacent to yours.

You could lean against a classroom door, but obviously people need access to those as well. Same goes for closet doors. And any bare wall spaces are so narrow and skinny, they're worthless for leaning.

Instead he just sort of hovered back and forth, waiting for Colinda. Finally spotting her coming into the hallway, he hurried and opened his locker.

"Hey," she smiled as she opened her locker and took off the air filter.

Darius wasted no time. "We have something big in common, you know."

"What?"

He motioned her to come over with his finger. Then he leaned in and whispered in her ear. "We both love Templynn Treat." With that, he pulled the white binder from his locker shelf and handed it to her.

Her emotions changed quickly: confused, annoyed, pleasantly surprised, grateful. Then it was her turn to motion him over and whisper: "And we both hate ourselves for not being worthy of her."

He nodded in agreement, then added another whisper "But we can still dream."

Then she did the finger wag and whisper: "Let's talk about it more over lunch."

###

"So you couldn't help yourself, could you?", Colinda chided Darius in a not-entirely-serious way as she settled in at the cafeteria table, shaking her head theatrically.

"I couldn't sleep. And I didn't think I'd find anything worth remembering," he explained.

"I'm not in a position to criticize. I would've done the same thing. So I'm guessing you looked at it all?"

"A lot of it I didn't have a clue what it was supposed to be," he said as he scratched his head.

"Well, I'm here to answer your questions."

"The notebook with the names in it" he asked.

"Everyday I pick a new name that's better than Colinda, which is like every other name in existence. It's like trying on clothes you can't afford to buy."

"And those... street names?"

"I realized a couple years ago that people in Calabasas are paying a million dollars to live behind ugly-ass gates for the privilege of living on streets with the dumbest possible names. I mean, each neighborhood has a theme, and they're either all this fake Spanish junk—Calle Blank, Avenida Placeholder, Camino De La Stupido—or, Park Blank, even though it's a street and not a park, and, like, girl's names, or flowers, or spices, or clouds like where I live. So I figure I can come up with stuff a million times more creative than that. Why not have some fun with it?"

"Streets named after underwear?" he asked after a sip of orange juice.

"Exactly."

"And the one notebook was writing prompts, right?" he asked her.

"Yeah, from a book I got for my birthday. Who else but my folks would buy me homework for my birthday?"