Who Is Paul Botterman?

III

Strange Behavior. To Be Grateful. Omens

We spent an October afternoon on Saffron's porch swing. She insisted on curling up on my lap like a baby, with each sway creaking pitiably as I questioned its constitution she claimed would hold sturdy as the foundation of the house. The quartet of hurricanes was behind us as the state recovered in a sigh of exhaustion. Tired from the school day and over how pretentious of a cunt Paris Hilton was. This was followed by our Christmas wishlists, which included a decent list of video games I could now afford with my job, yet still too stubborn to spend the money for purposes I hadn't quite discussed with her.

The girl was simple and only wanted a few DVDs and hinted strongly at some symbol of commitment from me that I knew would end up costing me something more than anything I had wanted. Not that I hadn't already made a mental note of it, having fallen hard for her, and despite my prospects of leaving Ocala for Michigan no sooner than I turned the big 1-8. I found myself imagining taking her back with me. Fear striking in those thoughts undefeated as I hypothesized her own in mention of scenery change. Much as she delighted in the conversation of my former home, Saffron became uneasy when I brought up uprooting when we were of age and going with the wind.

She pulled back from my shoulder. For the first time, I noticed she had freckles across her pale cheeks. I made fun of how she was a secret ginger, but I loved her no differently, even if I thought she had no soul. Her laugh gave me the shivers and made my stomach queasy. The deep kiss that followed tasted sweet as I fell into a numb stupor that felt like stone.

"You think we'll be like this in a year?" she asked, running her hands through my hair. "Never been like this with another boy. Feels too good to be true sometimes."

I grazed her freckled cheeks with my fingertips as she kissed them with her rosy lips, smiling and kissing her back as we felt that the present tense defined what we believed was the idea of forever. The neuropathy of the teenage mind you remember precisely to the moment of how it all feels well into your later years.

There was no way to time these things. To be fair, it kind of just slipped out.

"You should think about going back to Michigan with me." Her eyes met mine. I could see the stunned contemplation; having put her on the spot with such a request, the mind of a young girl may have daydreamed in the warmth of silent afternoons with nothing more than her thoughts to occupy over the subject. "Alexander isn't Ocala. But it's home. And I think you would like it there."

As the sun shone upon us that afternoon while we stared out into the peaceful stretch of her front yard in the calm of this solitude, we wondered if those little slippings were the necessary seeds to the ideas that force the hands of so-called fate. Saffron wouldn't give me an answer that day. It would be up for discussion later as we would have to see how everything played out as we moved forward. So far, so good. She laced her fingers in mine, and we laid on that creaky old swing. As close as we could possibly get without the warring urge for further and forbidden intimacy. Asleep until the damn chains finally gave, and we awoke in the aftermath of the crash, laughing ourselves silly.

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Strange is defined as: unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand.

That was precisely how I felt the afternoon Saffron and I had crashed onto her porch from the collapsing swing. Only a few minutes later, her mother was pulling into the driveway from work. I needed to get home to work on a small piece I was writing to submit to the Creative Writing Contest for the Halloween Heebie Jeebies after Saffron coerced me into sharing some of my prior writings like any supportive girlfriend does. Inside my head was an imaginary typewriter floating on a transparent cloud too flat and dense to be possible. Words forming across the spectral sheets at a million a minute. The story was a play on demonic possession. A story where several members of a religious community are brutally slain, and the suspect is a well-respected man of the cloth. The idea of a saintly killer too insane, but in a good way. If only they hadn't caught the killer red-handed, literally, and found him to be in a state of possession. The idea you could contribute inspiration to a recent viewing of The Exorcist.