I'll Be Here

was being saved for Alex.  The rest was practice.
    Because, Alex Faber wasn’t just a boy that I thought about from time to time.  He wasn’t just a boy that I spent time with when our parents threw us together.
    Alex was a world.  He was an entire galaxy.  A universe of possibilities.
    I could write a ten page essay about his hands alone.  There was the way that he talked with them—rolling them in the air to describe something.  Or how he brought them to rest in his pockets when he was being particularly thoughtful.  Or the way that he held a pencil so tight that he had a permanent callus on the middle finger of his right hand. 
    I could describe in detail how his face lit up when he had a good idea and how his brow furrowed into three lines when he was confused.  Or the way he stood with his shoulders rounded slightly forward and his head cocked to one side when he was listening.
    These were the things I noticed about Alex.  In fact, I noticed everything about Alex.  Like that his left nostril was slightly larger than his right nostril.  And the way he ate a Kit Kat bar: chocolate first and then the layers of wafer separately. 
    I could pick his one sneeze out of a room full of sneezers.   
    His voice talked to me in my dreams.  Low and soft with a touch of huskiness that made him sound a bit older than he was.
    “Try this,” he said, handing me a roll of masking tape. 
    “Thanks.”  There I was struggling with a strand of white paper garland for my mother’s winter solstice party.  She was trying for something “out-of-the-box” so the standard red and green holly berry theme had been passed over in favor of frothy white paper decorations and twinkling metallic stars and moons. 
    By the front door there was a table set up with little slivers of colored paper and those tiny pencils that you get when you play mini golf.  Her idea was that each party guest should write down a wish and at midnight we would all throw our wishes into the backyard fire pit.  Mom theorized that the winter solstice was the perfect time to make wishes come true even if Wikipedia didn’t mention it as a traditional part of any of the worldwide rituals.
    My job was twofold:  to set up the coolers and cheese trays and to hang the garland over the French doors that led out to the patio.  Alex’s sudden appearance almost an hour before the party sent a shiver through my entire body.  I was probably lucky not to fall off the ladder considering that his presence generally resulted in a severe uptick in my rampant klutziness.
    Without meeting his infinite eyes I tore off a piece from the roll of tape that he held out to me and attached the end of the white strand to a shelf that housed stereo equipment.  Alex’s left hand rested casually on the ladder near my leg.
    “My mom’s trying to stay green this year so she wanted me to use tacks instead of tape but there’s environmentally responsible and then there’s ridiculous .  I mean—I’m hanging paper decorations.  I don’t think that using a few measly strips of tape is going to increase the size of this party’s carbon footprint all that much.”
    He laughed and the sound killed me.  “I think you’re right and if you want, the use of tape can be just between us.” 
    I looked down at him from where I stood braced on the second rung of the ladder.  I noted the changes in him since the last time we’d seen each other.  It had only been about two months, but something had changed.  I felt the shift in the air that surrounded him. 
    Alex’s squared jaw seemed somehow squarer; his cheekbones, always high and angular like his mother’s, were even more defined under his skin.  He was wearing slim pants and a soft corduroy jacket and a pair of beat-up black chucks on his feet.  He looked like he’d just rolled out of bed and I mean that in the best possible way.  His rumpled inky hair stood out in all directions like he’d just pushed his hands through it to keep it from his forehead. 
    My fingers itched and it took all my willpower not to reach out right then and touch the dark strands the way that I’d dreamed about.  The half-smile he wore was all crinkles and secrets as usual, but it was those insistently bright blue eyes that did things to me.  And with the way that they were looking up at me, I thought “this is it.” 
    I was fifteen.  Alex was seventeen.  We were at a party.  I had a winter solstice wish to make and I knew