The Get-Go [Ashton Irwin]

10: Get Something to Eat

If you haven't watched the track-by-track for Kiss Me Kiss Me, you might want to, cos... well, the song and the track-by-track is kind of the inspiration for the whole chapter.

    Ashton waited in my bedroom while I switched out my shorts for a pair of sweats that would keep my legs from freezing off in the pre-dawn cold. When I came out, he was looking at some of the photos on my cork board, giggling quietly to himself at something.

    I padded across the faux hardwood to stand behind him, trying to figure out what he was laughing at. Not that there's any lack of things to laugh at; even now, the board has more than its share of embarrassing photos, stretching all the way from some of the earliest days of my existence onward.

 

    "What's going on in this one?" He asks quietly.

    His finger is hovering over a glossy 4x6 print of a photo that was taken on one of my first days of first grade. In it, Brent and I are hugging each other and smiling at the camera in our little Winchester uniforms. There's an 'X' of masking tape across my mouth, though, which made me laugh along with Ash.

    "I forgot about this one," I confessed. In retrospect, it's surprising that he even noticed it, hidden as it was behind more recent photos. Still, that's just like him, to notice something so perfectly unassuming, and recognize the significance in it.

    "Who's that?"

    "Brent."

    "You've talked about him before, right? He's your best friend."

    For some reason, I felt my cheeks heat up pleasantly at the thought that actually cared enough to remember my friends he'd never met. "Yeah," I giggled. "But don't tell him that. It'll just inflate his ego even more."

    "I won't," he promised. His breath was warm on the top of my head as he chuckled. "You still haven't told me what's going on here."

 

    "When we were in the first grade, Brent was a new kid at Winchester," I started. "You wouldn't know it now, but he had just about the worst stutter I've ever heard. Especially when he was nervous, which was pretty much all the time, because stuttering made him nervous, and being nervous made him stutter."

    The feeling of Ashton's gaze on the side of my head as I spoke was making me nervous, even as he nodded agreeably. "It was a cycle. That must've been hard for him."

    "It was. He got teased a bit, and like, even when kids weren't teasing him on purpose, they still pointed it out. I mean, we were all little kids, we didn't really know better than to point out people for being different yet."

    I noticed Ashton's jaw clench at the last part, and wondered if I'd touched on a nerve. Still, he didn't stop me, so I kept going. "But that was why I wanted to be friends with him. I liked that he was different. When I told him that, he told me he hated being different, and that he was going to stop talking until he could stop stuttering. I told him I would, too. So I started taping my mouth shut until this day."

    "Did he stop that quickly?" Ash's voice cracked.

    "No. But that was the day he started speech therapy. And it was the last day he refused to speak because he was afraid of stuttering."

 

    What happened next, I hadn't anticipated at all. Before I could even blink twice, Ashton was holding me to his chest, clinging to me in a full-body hug. Completely dwarfed by his size and strength, I really couldn't do anything but stand there and let him squish me, wondering if this was normal behaviour for him. When I started to feel the need to breathe again, I started rubbing circles in his back with my flat hand, hoping he'd get the idea to let go.