Pull Me to the Sunny Side

t h r e e | sky high

loving him is like trying to
change your mind once you're already
flying through the free f a l l . . .

⛅️🌤☀️

By some miracle, we beat Kentucky 27-21 in overtime. It broke our five-game losing streak and since we all seemed to forget what it felt like to be winners, the only acceptable way to celebrate was with a good old-fashioned kegger.

The dead-end of Dwyer Ave was inhabited by football players and football players only. It was the most unholy trinity of houses that sat side by side by side in all of Preston. The neighbors were numb to the influx of parties, people, and an extreme lack of principles that the boys brought onto the block. It was debauchery at its finest.

It didn't matter what they did. Precautions or not, any time they hosted it always ended in a bust. If you thought that maybe one day they would give up, you were wrong. It gave those boys all the more reason to test their boundaries. They knew they weren't ever going to be state champions or professionals at any rate. They lived up to our mascot name, I had to admit – they were bulldogs to the core.

Wesley lived in the middle house, which was at the top of the football hierarchy of houses and made perfect sense because he was the quarterback that carried our half-decent team. I had become friends with him when we got paired together as semester-long partners in the same statistics elective our freshman year. He may have looked like a pale, bleach-blonde grizzly bear, but aside from his fearsome demeanor and powerful reputation, he was as mild as a summer breeze. A gentle giant, I liked to call him, who also looked more like my own siblings than I did.

His name was actually Theodore, and wouldn't you know – he hated it. He thought it was the least intimidating name of all time and only used it for formal reasons or in the presence of his mother. His last name, Wesley, became his sole identity sometime when he was a teenager and it stuck ever since.

It was another reason why he and Riley were perfect for each other, but that was just my unprofessional observation.

I stood with him in the cradle of the chaos that swept its way through every square inch of his house after the game. The place was overrun with teammates, close friends, and those we didn't know, all equally as hammered as the next. A motley of kids in PVU gear with plastic cups and beer cans for accessories, donned head-to-toe in navy blue and white.

We'd been inside for a while, where the music and a majority of the crowd was, but we ended up filtering out to the backyard when it got to be too cramped, too loud, and too hot. The sliding screen door had been ripped from its track a long time ago, and to this day it still dangled off to the side, serving no real purpose. The main door was left wide open too, but that was more for allowing air flow into the house and letting the music leak out for the people that lingered outside.

The two of us were camped out on the slab of uneven concrete that was the patio. Everyone else stood in groups, dispersed in the remainder of the yard, a sad mix of dead grass and dirt. Wesley next to me was slugging back his own beer, uninterested in anything that wasn't the crimson tornado I called my best friend.

Riley was the furthest away from us in the yard near the janky wooden fence, but she wasn't alone. Shane Cohen, the lifeguard with a crotch she had a weakness for, was within a hair's breadth of space from her. You couldn't even fit a sheet of paper between their bodies. His one hand was propped up against the fence behind her head, the other clinging to her hip, and every time he leaned down to say something in her ear, she was either beaming or blushing.

We may have won today, but Wesley was as bummed as if we lost to a 50-0 shutout.

Who could blame him? Riley was captivating, but she was a hard one to hold onto. Trying to grab her interest and keep it was like picking up a bar of soap in the shower. One second, you thought you had it and the next, it was gone. Wesley knew that better than anyone.