Hello Kitty shorts, a massive navy blue hoodie and a notebook filled with our music sheets. Messy messy hair and large nerdy glasses.
Sometimes blasting music into your brain at max volume can be dangerous. For example, a very hot guy could walk up the stairs with his best friend, returning from playing soccer right outside the hotel, and you could be sitting there, frizzy hair and all, lip syncing Gotye at full blast. I look up mid CUTT MEEE OUTT, frozen painfully between me and out with a painful EEE grimace on my face to see Jake and his buff Asian friend halfway up the stairs. They looked.. amused. Oh merde. Parfois, je déteste ma vie.
Jake had a terrible hair cut. He’s one those guys that you look at and wonder if they know how absolutely gorgeous they are. Burgundy long-sleeved shirt, shaggy dark brown hair; short and oh so slightly uneven but in the most endearing way. And.. his eyes. In a word, they were stunning. They had a way of making you forget what you were about to say or do.
The last night of the trip we were sitting together on a couch in the hotel lobby. He was telling me about his college plans and how he was planning to be a business major, and I was pretending that we were going to be sitting there on that faded red couch forever. A group from his school was going to a nearby park and Jake’s friend wanted to know if we were coming. I was pretty much, as my mom puts it, peopled out. I love spending time with people, but there comes a point when you are just drained. So I gave my usual shrug and “Maybe later”, and then realized that Jake too, in perfect sync with me, shrugged and mumbled “maybe later.” His friend laughed and said he see us in a bit and went outside into the night with his friends, leaving Jake and me giggling on the couch. Slowly I turned my face toward his smiling, perfect perfect mouth. Perfect teeth. Great skin. I’ve never been kissed. 16 years old. Never even held hands with a guy before, but as I looked at his smile, I thought, maybe this guy is the one. But then I looked up at his eyes. Those cursed, flawless eyes. If anyone ever had eyes that perfectly matched the color of the sea on a hot, perfect sunny day, Jake did. They dazed a person like a bright flash of lightning, and before I could blink everything became a blur and suddenly I was crying on the plane, watching Madrid disappear under a smothering cloud. We must always admit to ourselves when we have truly, irrevocably lost something priceless. And so I said goodbye to the airplane window, the cloud, to Madrid and to that boy who made the few hours I spent with him worth the thousands of hours I will spend missing him.