Chapter Five: Confessions
That weekend, Sylvie took it upon herself to contact Elijah, though the world seemingly was against this decision, she wasn't about to be stopped.
"No, Liz, I'm not STALKING him! He deserves to know ... it's his right ... as Kaylie's boyfriend.""Once again: this is sabotage, and you know it!"
So after an agonizing bus ride from Long Beach to Santa Monica, with a creepy looking lady who kept staring at her the entire time, Sylvie finally arrived in her destined city. After an even MORE excruciating search for Elijah's house within the vast city; Sylvie found herself growing weary, and bought a map from a local tourist shop -- or "curious" as they're known in Mexico. To her luck and surprise, Sylvie wasn't TOO far away ... about a mile and a half or so. This time, walking wasn't quite so bad, seeing as she knew where she was headed -- not just in circles, "Past the same friggin' house for the seventeenth time! I've probably been transported into a new dimension -- or maybe every block in Santa Monica is identical." This proved false, as she would later see.Exhausted, exasperated, exerted, Sylvie wanted to collapse and never get up... but she was only a block away, according to the map, "This better fuckin' not be an old address!" She muttered to herself, shuddering at the thought. She could almost see Liz's forced sympathetic smile -- like deviled eggs, only re-stuffed with giggles.
Walking down the street, she looked at the medium sized houses ... in a way, she was disappointed; her vision of Elijah's house would have been an enormous three-quarters-empty manor. Instead, she stared from the sidewalk at a slightly over-grown yard with a weather-beaten 'Vote For Gore' sign, though 'Gore' had been X'ed out and scrawled beneath in black marker and messy handwriting was 'Nader'. The house itself was two-story, big, but not something a hot-shit movie star should be living in. Dirty windows, blue paint -- peeling in some places; and in dear need of a new roof, "I'm not in the wrong place, am I?"
Hesitantly, Sylvie walked up to the door and knocked, 'Hey, if it's a beer-bellied fifty year old man, I can pretend I'm a solicitor.' Immediately, dogs barked and Sylvie jumped back a foot. The door opened and Elijah's head poked out -- along with a mangy looking "wolf-bear" and... there was a howl... Sylvie saw the other dog. "OH MY GOD!" She shrieked, Elijah stared at her, his glasses glinting in the fading sunlight.
"Sylvie?!"
The dog had short stubby legs, a sleek brown coat, low-slung belly, ears that were perfect for playing peak-a-boo (or for self-ear mite-examination), and a pointed nose. In short: a wiener dog. Sylvie stared into Elijah's eyes as if to say, 'Your nerdiness has just escalated a tenfold!'
"Erm, hello. I was just ... needing to talk to you ... in person." The wiener dog waddled over to Sylvie's feet, she had to fight the urge to kick it away and was quite bemused by the thought of such a sad organism rolling like a log into Elijah's yard. It growled at her Mary-Janes.
"Levonne, come here!" Elijah beckoned ... it ... back into the house.
"Weird name," Sylvie commented.
"Hey!" He said defensively, "I think it's a pretty name!"
"Weird. No less. Especially on that pathetic excuse for a dog ... it looks like an over-grown sewer rat!" There was a cough from behind Elijah, he turned and greeted a girl with blonde hair, she scooped up the dog and brought it into the house.
"Um. That's my sister Hannah, by the way..."
'Dammit! Too bad she isn't some secret lover that Elijah takes with him to get off with in airline bathrooms ...' She shuddered, "Oh ... hi, Hannah ... um." Hannah threw a 'whatever' look and walked back to their living room. Sylvie looked up at Elijah, his face was expectant, confused, and curious. "Ya wanna take a walk?"
Funny how dogs' ears perk up at the sound of a one-syllable word such as 'walk' or 'leash'. Since Sylvie was nearly drug down by Rascal, Elijah's other dog, she was left with a thin black-blue-and-purple leash attached to Levonne's collar -- who was quite eager to run, and therefore pulled relentlessly."Um. So. What'd you need to talk to me about?" He asked, after about a block of silence and deep thinking on Sylvie's part.
"Well ... I'm still deciding how to tell you that ..." she watched as Rascal stopped to smell some flowers, "How cute! Your dog's sniffing the flowers!" At her words, Rascal lifted his leg and -- "Oh. Never mind." Elijah stifled a laugh, and they continued walking.
The houses changed from middle-class, to lower-class, to upper-class; a few kids tumbled on their front lawns through sprinklers, and mothers' urgent screams echoed through the air of "I JUST MOPPED! WIPE YOUR FEET OFF OR GET OUT!" Dads sat in lawn chairs digesting the papers and sipping lemonade, the glasses dripping with perspiration, causing their hands to become cold and clammy. 'How summer-ish,' she mused, not paying attention to the silence that had caused Elijah to begin fidgeting with the hem of his shirt.
Within the upper-upper-class, the houses towered above them in green-paper-aplenty glory. The beach was within a few blocks and as the dusk began to descend upon them, they could feel the soft ocean breeze twist and pull at their hair and clothes, pricking their skin with unexpected coolness, causing the hair to stand up on their arms like cactus pins.
Rascal just happened to take a shitt in front of an enormous home rivaling in greatness with the Mayor of Los Angeles' mansion! Elijah sighed and pulled out a plastic baggie.
"Eeww!" Sylvie exclaimed, and turned around in disgust.
"You can turn around now," Elijah told her, he stood holding the plastic bag with its... contents. Without warning, Elijah took off running up the drive-way, and discarding it in a bin. Though he wore a triumphant expression, as he headed back down the drive-way, it changed to fearful as an old woman spoke to him.
"Young man, that was the yard debris can!" She barked ruthlessly.
Sylvie noticed him chew the side of his bottom lip before turning to her, "Oops. Sorry..." The woman wore a yellow outfit, her gold crucifix necklace hung on a loose chain between her, thankfully covered, withered chest. Her hair was the classic 50's pin curls look, though hers was probably permed, and badly done at that. Thin and bony; her veins poked out slightly from her thin skin; age spots covered her arms and hands; forgetting about the large house behind her, Sylvie felt a little sorry for the woman.
"Well! Don't just stand there! Go remove it! You put it there! I could sue you for trespassing!" She growled, and Sylvie began to dislike her more than Elijah's dog. It seemed that Elijah reciprocated the angry feelings, for he muttered some obscenities below his breath before slumping back up to the yard debris can. Once he extracted the bag, he carelessly tossed it into the garbage can, which caused the woman to shriek and threaten. Elijah gave her the finger before walking away fairly disgruntled.
Sylvie wanted to console him, she truly did, but seeing him upset was kind of funny -- Batman, Episode 346597: "Get Off My Lawn, Mutt" -- in it's own corny way. On the side of that, she didn't want to get too friendly and then have to break her "news" to him.
But it had to happen eventually.
"Have you figured out how to say, what you wanted to say, yet?" Elijah shook his head, "Ugh! That's confusing!"Sylvie was enjoying his company much more than she had intended to, and was starting to regret having to tell him about her and Kaylie. "Well ... I could tell you ... but I don't really want to. You wouldn't want me to either, if you knew ..." her eyes dropped to the sand that was so abundant on the pavement, she wished for a moment that she could shrink and turn into a grain of sand -- clinging to Elijah's shoe between tufts of cotton and suede.
"You can't be sure until you tell me," he prodded, taking in her hunched form.
"Oh you'd be surprised ..."
"I like surprises," he said with a childish charisma that made Sylvie smile and feel guilty.
"You won't like this one ..." she assured him, then sighed, stopped walking and Elijah copied this action. They stared at each other, seriously. "Well! I guess, to start off, I warned you ... so don't blame me too much, though you'd have good reason to blame me. But I'm against you doing so for obvious reasons, and-"
"Sylvie ..." he gave her a crooked smile, and it reminded her of Kaylie, which tossed her heart from one side of her rib cage to the other, and back again. "What are you trying to tell me?"
"That ... I'm bi, and I like your girlfriend ..." Her forehead, mouth, and eyebrows scrunched together as she waited for a reaction.
Elijah sighed, "Aye carrumba ... That's ... surprising. I was thinking you were going to say that I actually did break a pencil, because you were some weirdo like that or ... but, wow. Jesus. Um. What can I say?"
"Not much I guess ..."
"But, why are you telling ME this? Did you tell Kaylie?"
"Yeah. She's ..." Sylvie bit her lip in frustration and pulled at her hair a little, "let's just say ... loneliness adds up in the end, and the only way to relieve ones' loneliness is to ..." She snapped her fingers for inspiration, "go ... be with someone. So, that's what she did."
Elijah stared at her like she was some sort of half-eaten Big Mac in a vegetarian's refrigerator. "So ... that means ... what, exactly?"
Sylvie took a deep breath, "It means she went to a bar, got drunk, and made out with me while you were out of town because she was depressed and missed you, and now she's feeling VERY GUILTY, I cannot stress that enough! And I'm not the kind to walk around with loose threads, I like to nip them in the butt instead of live with this past regret and etcetera, so, I felt the need to tell you. Tada, that's it." Her smiled was rather lopsided, baring half her front teeth and raising one eyebrow in examination of his face, which was in turn shocked.
After a moment of staring at her with his jaw dropped open, Elijah muttered softly, "Mother fucker ... what a cunt!" With that he slipped a hand into his pocket and fumbled with a pack of clove-cigarettes; this surprised Sylvie out of her stupor of the word 'cunt' and she watched intently as his fingers struggled with the green lighter. The end burned red as embers, and he sucked therapeutically as his other hand hugged the pack and lighter around his stomach.
"Wait ... who's a cunt?"
His blue eyes flashed jumped up from his hand, and Sylvie was sure he would drop his cigarette. "Oh, not you, or Kaylie, just the situation." He tucked the smoking-paraphernalia back into his pocket and rubbed his temples as he dragged smoke into his lungs, occasionally mumbling, "What a cunt ..." and shaking his head disbelieving her words. Once he'd sucked up two cigarettes whilst Sylvie waited impatiently he finally crumpled his shoulders forward and flung his hands in the smoke-filled air, "Well! What am I supposed to do?!"
"Well, you've had enough to smoke, so don't even think about--"
"Don't tell me what I can and can't do, you little--"
"DON'T INTERRUPT ME! DIDN'T YOUR MOTHER TEACH YOU MANNERS?!"
Elijah covered his ears unhappily, "NOOOO! Stop yelling!" He collapsed onto the sidewalk, and began picking at an aloe plant; Sylvie eased herself to the ground and grimaced at the sand grasping to the seat of her pants.
"Alright, I know this is hard for you ..." Sylvie mused that Elijah may be suffering from male-PMS, 'he's so moody ... up-down, up-down!' "And I'm sorry, since it is kind of my fault. Though ... she wouldn't have been interested in me were it not for your being gone for months at a time." Elijah looked up at her, eyes a little red, all full and wide.
"You're cruel," he said quietly, he then turned his gaze over beyond the small warped-wood-fence, down to the beach that sat below them. The waves unfurling onto the sand causing a crisp sound to emit with every rise and fall of the water. The sand was burnt-yellow, not at all pearly white and clean -- it was infected with discarded pop cans and lost toy dinosaurs, forever buried within the sand castles of war, the sticks poking from the turrets with leaves shishka-bobbed atop as kingdoms' flags; cracked sand crabs lay sprawled in the courtyard-turned-graveyard and the only grave-keepers were the wind and the water -- whirling the wind over the bodies or carrying them to sea ... The perch was perfect for mermaid spotting, just as they would surface at dusk, bobbing and ducking through the twilight waters; stars reflecting upon the dark abyss, catching on the scales and locking there 'til morning. When they would disapear before sunrise.
They sat there for a while longer, until Sylvie grew tired of staring at the pouting puppy, drooling dogs (landing neatly in her lap, grossing her out immensely), and listening to the lull of the sea and the occasional cry of the gulls. "Well, Elijah, I should probably be heading back ..." she dreaded the thought of riding the bus at night, it seemed like a safer idea to walk home, crazy as it sounded, but she couldn't bare to have yet another person stare at her for half an hour without blinking.
"I can drive you," Elijah offered, turning towards her, Sylvie tried to object but he wouldn't have any of it. "It's simply ridiculous. No matter if I gave you a tennis racket with thorns in the netting, and you had a killer back-hand. There are too many weirdos."
With that, they walked back to his house in near silence, the drag of Elijah's sneakers on pavement and the click of Sylvie's Mary-Janes and the dogs' toenails being the only sounds. Elijah leapt inside with a sudden burst of energy that had been taken for granted, unhooking leashes and grabbing car keys; he soon led Sylvie around back to the garage where she nearly fell over at the sheer magnificence radiating from his red Ferrari. Though this sense of envy soon rose (as she got inside the car and felt the pure nirvana of sitting in beyond comfortable upholstered beige leather seats) and fell (as Elijah turned on the stereo as loud as possible and the car seemed to gyrate out of the garage to the steady beat of Smashing Pumpkins, which Sylvie later would reminisce to Liz, "His music taste is impeccable ... smashes your eardrums and feels like you've woken up in a dream world where people are constantly confused about their reality and whether or not they're a rat in a cage living in a vampire-world. As I said, impeccable. Yet addicting ...").
The streets whizzed by as they sped down the freeway, glancing at the roller coaster down at the pier and corndog venders illuminated by the soft lamp posts; the windows were rolled down and Sylvie was constantly engulfed with the scent of gasoline and salt water, now and again they would catch a whiff of Italian food or Greek, a McDonalds soaking their fries in pig grease and a Mexican restaurant cascading the aroma of burritos and tamales, refried beans and chile` wafting across the wind tainted with cigarette smoke, laughs and endless chatter.
Elijah leaned over the gear-shift and pointed through the windshield at a movie theatre, 'The Lord of the Rings', 'Mulholland Dr.', and 'Gosford Park,' were the only things playing; a red slanted brick roof covered the Spanish-stucco building, red trim surrounded the white and a smile crept upon his face. "That's where I went to see 'The Blaire Witch Project'," a grin, "opening day. I loved it, I saw it six times."
Sylvie shook her head, "You're a fool."
"Ya mean you never saw it?" he asked in disbelief.
Shrinking down into her seat a bit and staring out the window she replied, "I saw it ... it was disappointing."
"I thought it was fabulous! The acting! My gosh! Everyone believed it was real! It should have won an Oscar ... and I mean that." He bent back to his seat and continued down the road, "So, where do you live again?"
"Long Beach."
"Alright."
This small piece of nostalgia proved successful in diminishing the tension and quiet, they began jabbering about life and family, sexuality (which Elijah was extremely interested about), work within the recession and how long it was going to last, in the end Sylvie was rather surprised to have Elijah first, park on the sidewalk ("It was an accident, and anyway ... live on the wild side!") and then ask for her number."What the hell do you need my number for? You already know where I live now." She glanced up at the yellow curtains of her neighbors, a lamp was on and Mrs. Cackwats peeked outside, her nose shadowed like a dark fiend snooping for any chivalry out of order. This made Sylvie a bit squirmy, but it was also rather exhilarating.
He smiled behind his glasses, they seemed to keep him from being intimidating, unlike other boys with mysteriously ethereal eyes. Like a shield. "Because ... you intrigue me. Especially the whole bisexualness, that still stumps me."
She couldn't help but laugh, hoping it didn't sound too pitiful. "Well, it wouldn't stump you if you WERE bi."
"Yes, but I can't imagine tonguing Macaulay Culkin while Cate Blanchet sucked my ear ..."
Sylvie scowled and twisted her face up, "Cate Blanchet is an old cow. Wrinkly, sallow, and very unbisexual ..."
"Very cunty," Elijah mused with a seriousness that grabbed Sylvie's attention. "Anyway," he coughed.
"And I intrigue YOU! Ha!" Elijah shot her a stupid look, making her burst with giggles, like a bouqet does flowers or a box does chocolates. He smiled sincerely, leaning his arms onto the steering wheel as a pillow for his head, his eyebrows raised above the rim of his glasses. He looked sleepy, she thought.
"So can I get your number?"
A roll of eyes, a smile plastered, a new one emerging, sigh. Defeat. Elijah muttered as he sifted through the car for paper and something to write with -- five minutes later a lightbulb clicked on in Sylvie's brain, she rushed inside her apartment and returned with a blue pen. "Ok, a sort of ... not very well planned out Serendipity thing." She reached for his hand through the driver-side window, and while writing her number explained, "If it washes off, then you can't call me. Or if you cut your hand off on accident." His eyebrows quirked and an amused spread of giggles came over his face, "Or on purpose ... assuming you're a masochist. Eh, screw it. You can just write it on something else when you get home." She smiled sarcastically and ungrasped his wrist, "Give Lemone my love and affection."
"It's Levonne," he corrected.
"Whatever, it's a wiener dog, howabout I call her--"
"NO." He stated firmly, "I'll call you," he smiled, "assuming you didn't give me the dean's cell number."
"Yeah, yeah ... later Batman."
"Bye, Catwoman." (Catwoman? How the hell did he know about that?!) He pulled off the sidewalk and bumped loudly into the side of Mrs. Cackwats' red Toyota Camry. "Um," he shouted rather distressed, "oops!" Backing away from the Camry, he managed to rear-end into a Ford truck, which, unfortunately, caused it's alarm to go off. Scared and sweating, Elijah waved quickly to Sylvie's laughing form before speeding off, twenty miles past the speed limit, towards the freeway.
She shook her head, sighing, "What a weird kid ..."
Inside, Sylvie found Liz asleep on the couch, curled into a knot with Basil; the end credits of Baz Lurhman's 'Romeo + Juliet' starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, rolled across the screen. She smiled to herself, it felt alien to think their relationship was sweet for once, but it was. Like melted chocolate on Easter morning, she felt a sudden need for yellow marshmallow chicks, but thought better of it as she grabbed a peach from the refridgerator. She thought about Kaylie as the juice tricked down her wrist and the peach-fuz tickled her lips, she felt like calling her ... just to talk. When she finished her peach, throwing the pit away, she washed hands and face in the bathroom, slipped into a nightgown and crawled into bed. She picked up the phone that sat on her bedside table -- yellow with pink flowers, which just happened to match the apartment perfectly -- dialing Kaylie's number, which she had memorized rather quickly.
"Hello?" A female voice asked.
"Kaylie?" Sylvie asked confused.
"Uh, just a minute," there was a rustling and Kaylie heard, "Hey babe, phone."
Kaylie's voice asked, "Who is it?"
"Umm, hold on -- who are you?"
"I'm Sylvie, who the hell are you?"
"Whoa. Chill girly, I'm Rosa. Anyway, here's Kayl'."
(Kayl'? Rosa?)
Sylvie tapped her finger nails on the night stand irritably, "She better have some kind of explaination ..." she growled to herself.
"Hello?" Kaylie's innocently sugar-coated voice asked.
"Hello Kaylie ... this is Sylvie, who's Rosa?"
"Erm ... Sylvie I really can't talk right now."
Grudgingly, Sylvie bobbed her foot up and down off the side of the bed. "I told Elijah about us."
There was a brief silence, she could hear Rosa ask, "What's wrong honey dew?"
Muffled: "Nothing." She coughed, "Sylvie, just leave me alone, I don't know what you're trying to do but just stop it--"
"IS SHE HARASSING YOU?!" Rang Rosa's voice. "Gimme the phone," (more rustling) "Hello?"
"Hi--"
"What in the flying blue blazes did you just say to her?!" Sylvie opened her mouth to retort, "If she doesn't wanna talk, she don't wanna talk, ya got that?! Now leave us the fuck alone!" With that, there was a loud clang, a grumbled 'fuck' and a click as the phone was set correctly into the cradle. Sylvie sat bewildered, holding the phone to her ear, as if someone could pick up at any second. Three dings sounded and a familiar recording played, "We're sorry--" she hung the phone up before it could continue. Leaning against the head board, she banged her head and cried in pain, rubbing the soft spot with the palm of her hand.
"This friggin' sucks ..." she moaned unhappily.
