12-02-06

My sister is in love with the video store clerk. He has small green eyes and wears the same thing everyday. I don’t tell her, but I was in love with him first. He doesn’t actually work there anymore, but sometimes we see him around town with paint splattered over his clothes. He paints houses now, and we scheme to get him to paint our house by trying to chip off the paint with sticks and our brother’s baseball bat. If mom and dad catch us we’re dead meat.
The first time we went into the video store was when we had just moved into this town. It was a long time ago and we were all jazzed to see so many trees, parking lots that didn’t charge by the hour, and such clean street corners. I checked out Home Alone 2, and my sister checked out some movie about two girls too wild to stay home, so they hopped into a car together and ran off to the desert to smoke pot, pick wild flowers to put in their hair, and sleep with boys who never wore shirts. It was a stupid movie, and the parts when the boys unzipped their pants where the parts where my mom told me to cover my eyes and I did but still saw everything through the slats of my parted fingers. That night, my sister had a shouting match with my mom and my dad looked like he wasn’t going to get involved but at the very end he looked like he was going to slap her but instead of slapping her he shouted louder than anyone else in my family has ever shouted, and we all felt the ringing in his voice, that frightening linger of anger in out bones for days afterwards.
The reason I loved the video store clerk with the green eyes is because I started sneezing like crazy when I first entered the store because earlier I had been playing with my friend Chrissie’s cat and it turned out I was really allergic to cats so the whole rest of the day I couldn’t sneezing and Gary, the boy I loved gave me a box of Kleenex and while I was blowing snot into the Kleenex, he showed me how to make a tissue flower, and he said, “A white rose for the girl with the allergies!”