Set sometime in early to mid April.
Word Count: 2708
Moving from one apartment to another had been a simple enough experience, though moving from a larger place to a smaller one had required some choice in what to bring along and what to leave behind, determining what the new space would permit and making the required concessions as a result.
Moving from an apartment into a house, and one as large as what Paris and Chris had been given, was entirely different. There were no space constraints. If anything, they suddenly found themselves with too much space. Large rooms, multiple floors—far too much, in Paris's opinion, for two people. They had no furniture with which to fill it, no decorations with which to make the walls a little less bare. The large, low bed they'd once slept in together had been left behind, replaced now with one Nana and Momma Gallo insisted was much more “adult.”
“You're married,” they said, with varying degrees of insistence at separate opportunities. “Married couples sleep in a proper bed. That bachelor's bed has no place in this house.”
Paris didn't see much of a distinction between a bachelor bed and a marriage bed. A bed was a bed was a bed. But he let them have their way because in a lot of things Nana and Momma knew best. And, anyway, they'd managed to come to a compromise. He and Chris kept the mattress and simply fit it in a new, more “adult” frame, higher off the ground and notably more mature. Paris was told it was called a sleigh bed.
He kept any doubts he had on its importance to himself.
Their bedroom was the first room to be completed, and thus the first room to be decorated. The bed, of course, and end tables—it was he first time in Paris's life that he owned furniture that matched. A couch in the sitting area, a coffee table, a clock on the fireplace mantle. There was a decorative mirror on one of the walls, and paintings, too. The walls themselves had been painted a soft blue, the molding off-white, the bedding and curtains and floor rugs in colors and patterns to tie in with the rest of the décor.
Momma had picked out most of it. Chris didn't usually care one way or the other, and Paris's idea of decorating tended to look like a badly planned out college dorm-room. Instead, he pointed to things he liked and let Momma find a way to put it all together. His main duty during the renovation was to stay out of the way and organize all of the old furniture into separate groups—those he really liked and wanted to keep as they were (very few), those he liked well enough and wanted to see refinished (a handful more), and those he didn't like at all and planned to distribute between the rest of the Gallos, or sell off or give to charity.
His second duty was to go through all of his and Chris's possessions and determine which would stay, and which could be thrown away.
Paris had not done anything like this since before his father died.
He sat on the floor in their newly finished bedroom, surrounded by dozens of boxes that had only recently been removed from storage. Some contained old clothes he hadn't worn in years, others old movies he hadn't watched in just as long, some DVDs, a couple VHS tapes, most with battered covers that had seen better days. In a few boxes he found toys he'd played with when he was little and kept during a moment of lingering sentimentality—a box of Lincoln logs, a box of Duplo blocks, a box of wooden blocks with numbers and letters in brightly colored paint on each side. He found old drawings he'd once scribbled in crayon in his father's store, coloring books he'd completed with varying degrees of success (the oldest nothing more than blobs of color on pre-drawn images, the most recent noticeably neater, but with rather creative color schemes). There were a few old family photos in one box, a couple of school assignments in another, his box of glass and porcelain figurines that used to litter the top of his dresser (a ballerina, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, a glass slipper, Tinkerbell, a dragon, a mermaid, and random other things he'd picked up over the years).
His most recent find lay scattered along the floor, spread out in a sea of green, orange, white, black; a splash of turquoise here, and folds of pale blue there; pants, skirts, dress shirts, gently used penny loafers, an old pair of scuffed Mary Janes.
“What's that?” Chris asked, coming in from the bathroom.
Paris looked up with a small, pained smile and shrugged. “All my school uniforms.”
Chris stopped to look at them, his face creased in confusion. “Why'd you keep those?”
“I don't know,” Paris said, and shrugged again. “It didn't feel right getting rid of them.”
“It's not like you're ever going to wear them again.”
“I'm never going to wear my wedding dress again,” Paris countered.
“Touche,” Chris said, “but I wouldn't really put a school uniform on the same level as a wedding dress.”
Paris's small smile turned into a small frown as he looked back to the piles of fabric on the ground. Chris had a point, of course, but Paris still couldn't immediately make himself shove the uniforms into the trash-bag that sat close at hand. He paid particular attention to one of them, his eyes growing dark and distant.
“I never should have let them send me to Hillworth,” Paris said.
Chris took a few steps closer but stopped before his proximity could seem intrusive. His pace seemed cautious, his voice a little quieter when he spoke again. “Paris,” he said, but he couldn't seem to think of any further response.
“I didn't belong there,” Paris continued.
“You didn't really have much of a choice, did you?”
“I could have let Mom make an issue out of it. She would have, if I'd wanted her to.”
“Why didn't you?” Chris asked.
“I don't know,” Paris said. “Probably because I was mad at her. Didn't want her messing around with my life. I told myself it didn't matter, tried to turn it into this amusing thing, rebelled where I could, snuck out and stuff, but I was miserable there.”
He remembered that feeling of confinement, the pressure, encouraged and nearly forced to become something he didn't want to be. Lectures, constant misunderstandings, a few snide remarks, hopeless conversations, a school full of people who either didn't understand or didn't care to. One or two had looked on him with sympathy, but his purposefully obstructive behavior hadn't left much room for indulgence.
Paris tore his eyes away from Hillworth green and settled on the color that came before it.
“Meadowview was better,” he said. He separated the collared shirt from a pair of regular orange shorts, a second pair he'd had hemmed shorter, and another alternative—an orange skirt.
“But?” Chris prodded.
“But what?” Paris asked.
“But you didn't like it there either.”
No, he hadn't. The atmosphere hadn't been nearly as oppressive as it was at Hillworth, but something about it still had a way of making him feel stifled.
“I looked terrible in orange,” he said, for lack of anything better.
“But you had more freedom.”
“I didn't have very many friends, though.”
At the time it hadn't mattered to him. He'd had no use for friends. He hadn't cared to talk with anyone about his life or spend any more time around other people than it was necessary for him to. He hadn't been a recluse, nor had he been in any way shy, but he hadn't expected anyone to understand him when he barely even understood himself, nor had he liked to make attachments and open himself up to be hurt. The company of strangers had been preferable to the company of people he knew; once they got too close, he knew it was time to leave them behind.
He'd used other people and let other people use him, hadn't let himself feel anything for anyone besides a sense of mild curiosity—sometimes amusement, but never anything substantial. It'd been easier to be on his own. The less he struggled to explain, the easier it was to pretend like there wasn't anything to explain.
Now things were a little different. Now he had friends, but he was still no better at getting them to understand.
“Look, I even have my first Knightside uniform,” Paris said, picking up a small pair of black pants, a gray cardigan, and a little turquoise tie.
Chris drew closer again. This time he sat down in front of Paris on the opposite side of his pile of uniforms. Chris riffled through all the many layers for a second, and finally picked up a a black skirt with two thin stripes along the hem.
“This yours, too?” he asked.
Paris shook his head. “One of my cousin's.”
“Rhiannon?”
“Mmhmm.”
“You don't really talk about her,” Chris said.
“I was jealous of her.”
Paris said it before he even had time to think about what he wanted to say, but once it was out there he was forced to acknowledge the truth in it.
“Probably still a little jealous,” he quietly admitted, setting the pants and tie aside to take the skirt from Chris.
“Why's that?” Chris asked.
Paris shrugged to cover up the sudden difficulty he had in explaining himself. “She had it easy,” he said. “She didn't have everyone telling her she couldn't be this or she couldn't wear that... 'No, Paris, you can't be a ballerina... No, Paris, boys don't wear things like that. Here, why don't you wear this instead.?' I just wanted to be like her.”
“But you have one or her uniforms,” Chris pointed out.
“She let me have it. She used to switch with me when we were at school,” Paris said. “I don't think anyone really knew what to do about it. Mom tried to let me do what I wanted, but Dad was against it. My aunt hated it. She always got so mad and wouldn't let Rhiannon play with me until Mom talked her back around. When Mom left, that was the end of it. After that I was on my own.”
It wasn't the entire truth. It wasn't as if he and Rhiannon had been completely separated by his vindictive aunt. They'd still gone to the same school. While at Knightside they were often in class together, and once they'd both gone to Meadowview that hadn't changed. They were the same age, in the same grade, had known one another all their lives. They knew where the other lived, had lockers close to each other, bore an obvious resemblance to one another, and couldn't quite stifle the familiarity when they passed one another in the halls, however much Paris might have tried to ignore her.
But without his mother there to cave to his troubled pleas and suffer through his inarticulate explanations, Paris had grown angry and bitter, and the jealousy that before had been muted beneath childhood friendship festered and grew until the very sight of Rhiannon in the hallway made him feel defensive.
He'd been the one to pull away. Eventually she'd stopped trying to get him to come around.
Suddenly uncomfortable with the tone of the conversation, Paris forced a mischievous expression as he looked back up at Chris. “Want to know what my favorite uniform was?” he asked.
“Sure, which one?”
Paris pulled it out of the pile in a flourish of pale blue fabric, and hopped up onto his feet to hold the high-waisted skirt against his frame.
Chris's eyebrows rose and another smile twitched onto his face. “You only snuck in once and you still kept it?”
“Well, yeah,” Paris said, and moved around so the skirt swished about his legs. “It's cute. I liked it. I usually hated the kind of girls that go to Crystal, but I think... if I had the choice...”
“You would have gone there?”
“Maybe. I don't know. It's a nice thought, I guess. I could have focused on dance more. I probably would have been happier, too.”
Suddenly Chris frowned and stared at him in concern. Paris stopped his prancing to look down at him.
The expression on Chris's face was odd; Paris was unsure how to describe it. He looked troubled, lost in a way Paris was achingly familiar with. Worried but hesitant, supportive but... unsure. Paris didn't know how to respond to it and so didn't really try, merely kept a little smile on his face and asked, “What?”
Chris seemed to be debating with himself. He stayed quiet for a long time, his face tense like he was thinking of something serious, but he eventually shook his head and climbed up onto his feet.
“It's nothing.”
Paris didn't know if he should insist on hearing whatever it was that suddenly crossed Chris's mind or if it would be better to just let it go. He decided, after some careful thought, that the conversation had already tread into some uncomfortable territory without him needling for more. He let the skirt fall back to the floor with the rest of his collection of uniforms.
“Where are you going?” Paris asked when it seemed as if Chris intended to leave the room.
“To work on the kitchen,” Chris said.
“Oh,” Paris said, “Okay.”
He stared as Chris made his way to the bedroom door, watching him carefully for any sign that there might be something wrong.
“Did I say something weird?” Paris hazarded to ask, revealing his confusion.
Chris looked back at him with an expression of mixed remorse and concern. “No,” he said. “No, I just...”
He didn't seem capable of explaining himself; the silence that followed was awkward and painful, the sort of silence that hadn't existed between them in a long time. Paris thought he could sense the question that surely lingered on the tip of Chris's tongue beneath the strange atmosphere that had fallen over them, but he wasn't sure how willing he was to get into the discussion when he didn't even know what the answer was.
There were a lot of things in his life that were like that, it seemed. For some reason, he always thought it better to avoid it when he knew he should be facing it head on.
Once upon a time he would have. Paris didn't know when that had changed.
“I'll be downstairs,” Chris said.
“Okay,” Paris said. “I'll finish up and then we can eat.”
“Take your time.”
Chris left with a smile that should have been comforting, but ended up making Paris feel guilty.
Paris waited until the door had shut and he heard Chris padding down the hall before settling back onto the floor in front of his pile. He stared at them all in turn—green, orange, gray and turquoise, powder blue—and let his memories of an awkward childhood play out.
He wasn't sure what any of them really meant, or what they said about the different stages of his life, or what Chris must be thinking, or even what he thought about them himself, but it seemed strange to keep them when none of them had ever really made him happy. He no longer had any use for them. Keeping them would only remind him of sadness, difficulty, annoyance, jealousy. He was in a better place now, wasn't he? Everything he'd experienced as a child was over. It no longer mattered.
In the end, he compromised.
The Crystal uniform ended up back in the box, along with both sets of Knightside uniforms, and the Meadowview shirt and skirt.
The rest he dumped in the trash-bag, and in doing so freed himself of a small burden.
Later, he let Chris take them out with the rest of the trash.
