Our Destination

I slowed down in front of the Taylors' house. In part because Poppy was an elderly dog and he was always tired towards the end of his walk. In part because that was where my crush lived.

It was a house similar to mine, a two-storey building made out by red bricks, in a remote part of the little town we lived in. Us, the Taylors and the Wrights, were the last two pillars of civilisation against the woods that surrounded Northpass. The people that lived there liked to say that it was a place forgotten by God and men, and hopefully by bears and wolves too.

The house in front of mine had been empty for ages, but one day the Taylors bought it. I remember it was a very big thing, in such a small town. A new family wasn't something as common as a young adult moving to a big city to start college. During the first few months in Northpass High, everybody looked at Cate as if she was some kind of alien, a stranger everybody had to treat with care, or a second, dinosaur-looking head would have appeared to eat the insolent who disrespected her.

And that's how she drew my attention. Even after people had stopped pointing at 'the new girl', I'd find myself staring at her long eyelashes, listening to the meaningless conversations she had with the few friends she made, trying to catch the smell of her perfume as she walked past me in the corridors. The fact that my crush lived in the house right in front of mine sometimes felt like a bless, and sometimes like a curse.

The Taylors' house door was thrown open, and a girl - the girl - stormed out of it. The broken voice of a woman followed her outside. "That's not healthy, Cate!"

Cate didn't turn around. She stood right out of the door, clenching her fists. "I don't care, mum. I need to go" she said, refusing to watch her mother into her eyes.

"We must forget" the woman answered from the house. Her voice was feeble and distant, like the sigh of a vanishing ghost. "What you're doing is not healthy at all. It's wrong."

"Then I will be wrong!" Cate screamed.

She ran down the stairs, headed at the car parked in the driveway. She had a little struggle with the door, which opened as if it was afraid to cross a girl as upset as her. Cate tried multiple times to start the engine, her hands shaking, the car not willing to cooperate. She punched the steering wheel, probably letting out a little scream that I couldn't hear, and took her own face in her hands, to calm down.

I walked towards her car, Poppy by my side, sniffing the grass he was not usually allowed to roam. Cate didn't notice me immediately. I took advantage of that short moment to look at her messy braided hair, at her little golden earrings. I studied her as a painter does with his models. I wondered why I had to face such a sad image, and decided to try my best at changing it.

I knocked on the glass. Cate jumped on her seat, startled by the sudden noise. She rolled down the car window. "Richard, what..."

"Need a ride?" I asked, pointing at my driveway, where my old car was parked.

Cate wiped away a couple of tears I pretended not to notice. "It's not going to be a short ride" she said. Her voice was still slightly shaken, but she wasn't shivering anymore. Maybe it was because my presence distracted her from the thought of the fight with her mother. I liked to imagine that, somehow, if she wasn't crying anymore it was thanks to me.

"Oh, well, then..." I pretended to think about it a little. "Wait. You're not a serial killer, right?"

She seemed shocked to be asked that. "What? No!"

"Then I'm fine." I shrugged my shoulders.

Cate was still misty-eyed, but she finally smiled. I smiled too.