Every Rose Has its Thorn

4- mighty oaks from little acorns grow

        I didn't realize when or where I'd seen Charlie Parkington before until I arrived at work that evening, when the memory hit me with the full force of a battering ram.

        It was three years and a couple months before; I was barely fourteen, as of that May, in fact, and it was my first summer working at the bookstore for real pay. Someone had left all sorts of novels in all the wrong places, and, disgruntled, I'd been assigned the task of placing them back in their respective spots.

        Standing in the same place now as I was then, with the last novel to return in hand, I was suddenly awash in the memory of a meeting I hadn't thought about nearly since it happened, but one my hippocampus had managed to preserve most perfectly. Whether that’d prove to be more of a curse or a blessing; I’ve yet to find out.

        Muttering to myself, I quite literally —and not being one to misuse the concept of literality, I can assure you it truly happened– stumbled upon a strange boy. Strange, because he was a stranger, and no one was a stranger in such a small town. Though not a boy so much as a young man, one maybe a year or so older than myself, but somehow without that slightly awkward frame of youth.

        He was sitting down with his legs sprawled out in front of him, obscuring the path and causing me to nearly fall down on top of his sleeping form. His head was perilously close to falling off, leaning down towards his shoulder, and his mouth was half-open and drooling most unattractively, which was fortunate for me because it distracted me from the fact that everything else about him was most attractive indeed, and, being fourteen, I was rather inclined to notice the appearance of any boy relatively close to my own age.

        Even while sleeping, he had one of those presences that just sort of oozed charm, polluting the ozone layer with its many addictive toxins, I'm sure, and also possessed thick dark brown hair mussed to perfection, with cowlicks lifting it in curly whorls away from his forehead and off of his neck, which was probably the only thing keeping him from a haircut. It was fortunate that his eyes were closed, so 1. he couldn't see that I was staring and 2. I couldn't see what color they were, because my one weakness if I had any when it came to attractive guys was pretty eyes, but equally lucky was the fact that his dark hair and unusually caramelized complexion gave the impression that his eyes would be a dark brown as well, something I could handle much more easily than if they were blue or green.

        I continued to study him. He was sloppily dressed in a most appealing way, with untied sneakers, ripped jeans, from wear rather than intent, a wrinkled white tee, square black glasses nestled in his hair, and a beat-up sort of black army jacket folded up in his lap, its pockets bulging with unseen contents that shielded his hands, something I regretted because it prevented me from noticing discreet facts about his existence.

        I became immediately aware of my various inadequacies in that regard, such as the utter fashionlessness I was currently suffering from, and I cursed the laziness that had caused it. While I tended not to try, per se, the vintage combinations I created to suit my whims and fancies were generally rather satisfying. I also remembered with a cringe the volcanic zit holding court upon the end of my nose that I hadn't even bothered trying to cover up with the minimal amount of makeup I owned but didn't really know how to apply, along with the perpetually tangled and unbrushed hair tumbling down my back. Only I was to blame for all of these faults, and I was inwardly slapping myself in the face when the boy stirred for the first time.

        He stretched and squirmed, yawning most ferociously before rubbing his eyes like a small child. I'd already backed up at a safe, socially respectable distance, and so coughed, not unobtrusively. He blinked up at me sleepily, seeming puzzled as to my existence.