Dreams of 18(6)

People say that he’s abrasive. Tough and without mercy. He rides the players harder than any other coach before. They’re all afraid of him.

Behind his back, everyone calls him The Beast.

People tend to scatter away and change direction when he walks down the hallway at school. Players tend to keep their heads down and come up for air only when he’s passed.

Even a few teachers are afraid of him, but he’s the best the school has ever seen.

Another fun fact: he’s eighteen years older than me, not seventeen as me and my sister thought when we saw him for the first time.

Over the past two years, I’ve collected a lot of fun facts about him.

Like he drinks his coffee black.

He only has plaid shirts in his wardrobe, with a few threadbare t-shirts that he wears over the weekends and which, indeed, seem very, very soft. I wouldn’t know; never touched them myself.

Well, okay. I’m lying. They are soft and I did touch them once. After they came out of the dryer, freshly laundered. Long story.

Anyway, he goes running every morning at four. No exceptions. Even though he has trouble sleeping at night.

I found that out probably the first week of him being here. I can’t sleep at night, either.

I’m the child of night and the moon. A moonchild.

I like the dark. I like being awake and alone when everyone else in the neighborhood is sleeping. I like climbing up to the roof with vintage music in my ears, a lollipop in my mouth and my journal. Under the flashlight, I write about my day. Sometimes I read Bukowski because he’s the kind of a writer you read at night.

For the past two years though, I mostly watch him. I sit on the roof for hours, dangling my legs and sucking on a lollipop, wondering.

What keeps you up, Mr. Edwards?

Why can’t you sleep?

Unlike me though, he’s never watching back. He doesn’t even know that I’m there. Instead, he does interesting things. He swims laps around his pool. He exercises. Or he works in the backyard on his passion project.

Oh man, his passion project.

I’m so in love with it. I love watching him work on it.

I’m not a stalker. Not at all. I know that all this knowledge that I have of him might seem stalker-ish. But it’s not.

It’s not as if I went looking for these facts about him. They just fell into my lap because his son, Brian? He’s my best friend.

Incredible, right?

It’s still as unbelievable to me as it was two years ago. In fact, I had no intention of being his friend and ‘ruining’ things for Fiona. But he was persistent. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d say hi to me whenever he saw me; sit beside me during lunch; talk to me in the hallways when no one ever did. Frankly, he kinda freaked me out a little bit in the beginning with his cheerfulness and interest. And then, we got paired up for a lab class and well, the rest is history. We became the best of friends.

And everything would be awesome, if not for this one little thing.

A thing called a crush.

I have it and because of that, when I close my eyes, I see him.

His dad.

Yeah, I have a crush – a massive, massive crush – on Mr. Edwards, my best friend’s dad.

How wrong is that, right?

Right?

So, so wrong.

I’m probably breaking all the cardinal rules of friendship. In fact, I broke them even before Brian and I became friends because I inadvertently watched his dad the day they were moving in.

Ugh, why do I like the wrong things? Why?

But there’s a silver lining.

You see, it’s a crush – just a crush and not love.

Thank God, it’s not love.

Thank. God.

There’s no way it can be love. I don’t know anything about love. It’s not like I’m rolling in it. My dad hardly pays me any attention. I drive my mother to drink. My sister barely tolerates me. Before Brian, I had no friends.

But most of all, how can you fall in love with someone you haven’t even talked to?

Mr. Edwards and I, we haven’t had a single conversation in the two years that he’s lived next door. In fact, he’s never even looked at me once.

Not once.

I’m not kidding. I don’t think that Mr. Edwards knows that I exist, even though I’m his son’s best friend.

Although, some of it is my doing.

After it became apparent that I had this massive crush on my best friend’s dad, I stopped going over to Brian’s house. I’d make excuses and avoid setting foot in a place that smelled so like Mr. Edwards: all spicy and musky. It got so bad that Brian would keep talking and I’d sniff the air just to smell more of his dad, completely tuning him out.

That’s creepy, right?

So, I avoided going there and instead, started to have Brian over to my place. Which we’ve debated about quite a few times.

“Why can’t we hang out at my place?” he asked me one time, while we were in my room, doing homework.

I pursed my lips, still keeping my eyes on the notebook. “We hang out at your place.”

“No, we don’t.” Then he sat up straight, all blond and broad – not as broad as his dad though. “And I think I know why.”

Thank goodness I was sitting at my desk and my head was bent over my homework so I could hide my face from him. My blushing, heated face.