Page 34 of Neat
Mallory shook her head, still not convinced, before pulling the highest box she could reach from the corner stack. “This sucks.”
I chuckled. “It does, but hey,” I offered, pulling my Bluetooth speaker from my backpack and propping it on one of the middle rows of boxes. “At least we have music.”
I hit play on one of my go-to playlists on my phone, the familiar sound of “Fever” by The Black Keys filling the closet. Mallory paused where she was opening the first box, brows popping up into her hairline as she assessed me.
“Youlisten to The Black Keys?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Why is that hard to believe?”
“I don’t know, I just took you for more of a country boy… you know, George Strait and the like.”
“George Strait is the fucking man,” I said, grabbing a box of my own off the stack she’d started on. “But so is Dan Auerbach.”
She smirked, amusement dancing in her eyes as she assessed me. She took a step toward me, then another, and I hadn’t noticed how small that closet felt until her chest was nearly touching mine.
“I couldn’t agree more,” she said, reaching behind me and turning up the volume on the speaker.
She backed away then, mouthing the words and moving her hips to the beat. My gaze fell to those hips, watching them sway like a hypnotizing pendulum. With her arms up over her head, a sliver of her toned stomach peeked out from under the Scooter Whiskey polo she wore, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that stripe of bronze skin.
Not until her arms dropped, the sliver disappearing, and when I looked up, she was watching me with an even more amused smile.
“Let’s get started, shall we?”
I swallowed, murmuring something close to ayeahbefore I turned and opened the box I’d pulled down from the stack. Mallory chuckled from behind me, but I didn’t dare look back — not with my cheeks as hot as they were. I just bobbed my head along to the music, pulling the first file from the box.
And then we got to work.
As the morning stretched between us, it became overtly clear to me just how different Mallory and I were. Where she was huffing with each new box she opened, and sighing with each file she slapped down on the archive pile, and groaning when she came across something she couldn’t decipher easily whether to keep or toss — I was in my own version of organizational heaven. The music helped me zone out, and I hummed or sang along to each new song as I filtered through the boxes, making neat piles, labeling anything that didn’t already have an identifier, organizing by color and size so I could figure out the exact best way to re-pack it all in the end.
It was definitely a punishment for her, but as much as I wanted to be outside giving a tour, our task was something close to therapy for me.
I was still in the zone, flipping through some photographs from the Scooter Whiskey Single Barrel Soirée of 2004 when Mallory let out a larger sigh than usual, turning the music down a little and flopping down on the floor. She leaned her back against a stack of boxes, looking up at me with a pout.
“Can we take a break?”
I chuckled. “You can. I’m in a rhythm.”
I wrote on a lime green label with Sharpie, sticking it to the folder of photos and placing it on top of the other files of photos I’d found that morning. I glanced at Mallory before I grabbed the next file in the box, and she smiled.
“God, youlovethis, don’t you?” She shook her head. “I’m over here watching the minutes tick by like years and you’re geeking out over putting everything in its place.”
I smiled, peeking down at her before I flipped the new file open in my hands. “I can’t help it. I’ve always been this way,” I said. “There’s just something so satisfying about putting things in order, giving them a place.”
“You’d freak out if you saw the shop right now,” she said, crossing one leg over the other. “There’s not a corner of that previously empty space that’s not covered with shit right now. I’m trying to set everything up, separate the room like I told you I envisioned. And Chris tried to help, but…”
“Chris has a different vision, I’d wager?”
She made a noise. “That’s one way to put it. I mean, you know Chris — he’d have that place covered in glitter if I let him have his way.”
I chuckled, because Ididknow Chris — at least, I knew him back when we were younger. He was the first person I’d ever known to come out, and the only one in our high school at the time. I didn’t hang out with him, and didn’t know him personally, but I remembered talking to Dad about it the day Chris told everyone he was gay.
I was confused, mostly because all the other guys in our school were being dicks to him suddenly — although he was the same guy he’d been the day before, when everyone adored him. Chris was the captain of the JV soccer team. He was on student council. He was hilarious, and was always surrounded by a huge group of friends who loved to watch him, to let him entertain them.
And it all changed overnight.
I could still remember Dad’s furrowed brows as he listened to me, the calmness in his voice as he explained to me that people didn’t understand people who weren’t like them, and so they lashed out, afraid of the unknown. He told me not to be like them, not to run from what I don’t understand, but to embrace it, instead.
And the last, most important thing, he told me was that I needed to be ready to stand up to those guys at school should they pull any shit with Chris.
