Bobby Likes A Lot of Things

How Not To Shower

Bobby is standing next to a bunkbed. Bottom bunk, obviously. Total man-smell, (bread, sweat, cum), obviously. You're attracted and repulsed simultaneously.

He is wearing a ratty salmon-pink thermal long-sleeved shirt. He is rubbing a dryer shirt across the worn fabric, under his arms, in his hair, on his chubby neck. 

"This is my trick. I think I invented it. How good do I smell right now? Like super fresh laundry, right?"

He is on his way to visit his straight Harvard girlfriend who has very erect posture and loves the Grateful Dead, despite being vehemently opposed to marijuana. The attraction is intellectual; her skull is Slavic, all angles and points, the hair stick-straight and the color of high-quality sandpaper.

She is the last minor-chested, humorless woman Bobby will fall for. They are sweet with each other. And she put up with the dryer sheets, despite knowing better. 

Before he leaves he puts on Elgar's cello concerto in E minor. Bobby who is always moving, talking, drawing, just stops when this song comes on. He becomes quiet, still. 

His voice breaks when he talks about, water almost pooling in the corners of his eyes.

It's a song he discovered in high school, a song he loves despite his father, a music teacher, also loving it.

Contemplative and elegiac, Wikipedia will call it 15 years later, when I check the page. Elgar wrote the melody after getting his tonsils out, asking dryly for a pencil and paper. 

When the cello pizzacato comes, Bobby sighed, like the weight of the beauty of the sound was too much. 

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A/N: Please vote and comment! It's weird in the beginning, I know. But also, I love nostalgia, and remembering friends and becoming an adult and that time when we didn't have a filter on our brains (am I beyond that now?) and we said what we felt when we felt it, and I'm trying to capture that. So vote and comment - god knows I need to feel like I'm not alone in my insanity.... xoxox