Page 125 of Mr. Picture Perfect
“You didn’t usually play on that rusty old thing,” she went on. “And if you did, you certainly never climbed up on it. Somethin’ must’ve been guidin’ you that day to be adventurous. Maybe it was even sweet Cole, tryin’ to pull you outta your shell.” She shook her head and brought a mitted hand to her cheek. “You probably just thought it was somethin’ that happened to you on the playground at school, but no … it was the backyard of a house just down the street. I doubt that jungle gym is even up anymore. New owners probably tore it down.” She peered at me, then pulled off a mitt and placed her hand on my arm. “I don’t wanna tell you what to do, Noah, I really don’t. So I’ll just leave it at this: Cole’s been your guardian angel since I can remember.”
I stared at her, feeling like a balloon floating in a storm.
I felt like I was still trying to bring pieces together to form a puzzle I had not even realized existed.
The boy … in the playground that wasn’t a playground … was Cole …?
“For all we know, he’s been lookin’ out for ya ever since,” she said with half a laugh. “I find it very hard to believe you two didn’t run into each other all the time during your school years. The town’s only so big, Noah. If I knew better, I’d put money down that he was keepin’ an eye on you in school, too.”
I tried to give that notion an honest consideration, thinking of any stray memory that might arise from my school days.
Times when I noticed Cole.
Or he noticed me.
“She still has them tiny pink tongs?” she asked as an aside. “Really? Them little … Them cute lil’ pink things …?” She smiled to herself, then rose from my bed and went to the door, where she stopped and turned back. “I’ll let you be for now. But please give it thought. Relationships like yours and Cole’s … they are the envy of everyone in every town and city ever, across the globe. They only come once in a blue moon.”
“That … saying is … misleading,” I said distractedly, my mind lost in the past. “Blue moons occur as frequently as every two to three years and have nothing to do with it literally being blue.”
“Then relationships like yours and Cole’s come once in aliteralblue moon,” she amended, “when the moon isliterallyblue.”
“So they come around … never?”
She gave me an important look. “Exactly.”
I stared back, unable to form a counter, struck by the sincerity in her eyes.
Then she left me to sit there on my bed with my thoughts. It was unusual of me to let my mother’s words affect me so deeply, but I couldn’t help thinking about cookies burning in a classroom, about the sweetness of my dad as a teenager, to eat and enjoy the entirety of one of her charred disasters.
The character one must have, to stand up against mockery and laughter for the sake of someone else’s dignity, to show such valor for another person, to display such compassion …
Traits I recently found myself admiring in Cole.
I suddenly imagined Cole doing the exact same thing for me, tasting a cookie I had burned beyond recognition.
What if Colewaskeeping an eye on me all of those years?
Secretly watching my back?
There was one time I lost my math book. I was devastated. But then in my next math class a day later, I found a math book sitting there on my desk waiting for me—except it wasn’t the one I had lost. It was a totally new copy. I always wondered where it came from. I decided it was the teacher who got me a new one.
Even though she denied it.
And didn’t know I was missing my book in the first place.
Could that have been him?
“No,” I decided right then, thinking aloud. “You’re reaching too far for an explanation. That’s why they call it ‘farfetched’.”
With that, I cuddled back up in bed and hugged my pillow to my chest, closing my eyes.
It was barely five minutes later that I found myself thinking about all the times in school I had finally gotten to the front of the snack bar at lunch, after having let so many people go ahead of me (or rather: not stopping them from pushing and cutting in front of me with their friends, as if I wasn’t even there), then hearing they were out of the treat I specifically wanted.
Only to discover that the lunch lady was asked to set one aside specifically for me. And it was paid for already.
And she was told not to mention who did it.
Every time I asked, every time it happened, she kept her lips sealed. I always wondered who was behind the kind gestures.
