You have hung out with him dozens of times Ellie, get it together.
Instead of sitting in the armchair like I normally do, I take a spot on the couch, crossing my legs and keeping my eyes fixed on the spot where I’m picking at my cuticles.
I can feel Griffin hovering behind the couch, so I look over my shoulder to face him. He’s still standing, arms crossed, brow furrowed even deeper now. The intensity of his gaze catches me off guard. “What?” I blurt out, sounding way more defensive than I should be.
“You don’t sit there,” he says, gesturing at the couch. “You sitthere,” he says, nodding to the armchair.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize there was assigned seating.”
I’m not the self-proclaimed comedian here, but I’m trying to break the tension anyway. Griffin doesn’t move.
After a few beats of silence, he says “You don’t have to hang out with me if you don’t want to–,” at the same time as I say, “You didn’t have to invite me over out of obligation or anything–”
“What?” we both say, in the exact same tone, like the other person just said the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard.
I stand up, turning to face him fully, putting my hands on my hips in a way that reminds me distinctly of my mother.
Yikes.
“Of course I want to hang out with you Griffin, you’re my friend,” I say exasperatedly.
He takes a deep breath through his nose, gripping the back of the couch so hard I can see his knuckles whiten. Exhaling, he says “You’re not an obligation Eleanor, I—” He stops, and clears his throat. “I always want you to come over.” His voice is quieter now, and earnest in a way that makes my heart stutter.
“Oh,” is all I can manage. I twiddle my thumbs for a few more seconds, then let out an aggravated scoff. “This is stupid, we’ve spent every weekend hanging out for the last two months, can we stop being weird?”
Griffin gives me a sheepish grin and tosses me a Wii controller. He flops onto the couch beside me without another word.
We spend the next hour trying to decimate each other in Super Smash Bros, quickly escalating from on-screen fighting to throwing real life elbows as we get more and more competitive.
After a poorly placed elbow knocks the wind out of him, we decide to shut the game off and find something lessviolent to do. We don’t argue nearly as much as we used to, but without Jack there as a buffer, there’s no guarantee the house survives any sort of escalation.
The silence we sit in now isn’t heavy, it’s comfortable. We’ve gone from sitting stiffly with a mile of space between us, to stretched out across the full length of the couch, my feet propped up on the coffee table with his long legs casually draped over mine.
“So what would you do after the diner before you started coming over here?” Griffin asks, arms slung over the arm of the couch behind his head, like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“Nothing really,” I respond with a shrug. “I would read, or watch TV, or hang out with my mom. Usually I was asleep by 9:30.”
“9:30!? What do you mean!?”
He yells it like I’ve just confessed to being the zodiac killer.
“What’s wrong with going to bed early?”
“What’s wrong is that you’re fifteen, not fifty. You can sleep when you’re dead,” he says in the same way someone might explain to a five year old that two and two makes four.
“Well I didn’t do thateveryFriday, just sometimes.”
“Okay, well what do you do with the rest of your time?”
I begin to share all my favorite hobbies and memories–planting my favorite flowers with my grandmother every spring, summer road trips to the beach, watching a different sports movie with my dad every single week during third grade.
I even share some of the low points (like the one season my dad coached peewee soccer and made everyone on the team cry) and even worse, the embarrassing ones (like how hard I cried when I desperately wanted to be Dorothy in the first grade play but got cast as the Wicked Witch instead.)
When he begins to share stories of his own, I’m overwhelmed by how fascinating I find him.
He tells me about the half sister I didn’t know he had–she’s from his dad’s first marriage, is ten years older, and lives in California with her mom. He doesn’t say it, but I can tell from the way his eyes get sad that he wishes they were closer.
He shows me the scar on his chin, and I howl with laughter as he tells me how he got it from trying to ride the goat at his uncle’s farm like a bronco when he was five.
