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He just looked like that kind of a man. Outdoorsy.
Oh well.
I’m being silly. And slightly obsessive.
As usual, it’s about the wrong thing: a man I’ve seen from afar for maybe a total of fifteen minutes. A man I’m going to forget about by tomorrow.
Shaking my head and sucking on my tasteless lollipop, I walk back to my bed.
But for some reason, I don’t wanna forget him. So I bend down and fish out my journal from under my bed. I call it The Diary of a Shrinking Violet.
I open to an empty page and write about a tall man in a soft plaid shirt with big hiking boots and rough muscles.
A man I’m never going to see again.
I call him the Strawberry Man.
In my head, I mean.
Because he makes me feel exactly how I feel when I’m craving the fruit I’m allergic to: restless and out of control, breaker of rules and avoider of common sense. I know I’m not supposed to want it but I do anyway.
But that’s not his name, of course.
His name is Graham Edwards and he’s not a moving guy. Which should’ve been kind of obvious in hindsight since he was the only one, other than Brian, who wasn’t wearing a mover’s uniform.
Anyway, two years ago on my birthday, he moved in next door with his son.
So really, he’s Mr. Edwards – that’s his correct nomenclature.
Or Coach.
Because he’s the coach of the football team at our school. That explains his good reflexes and athleticism from that day long ago.
People say that he’s abrasive. Tough and without mercy. He rides the players harder than any other coach before. They’re all afraid of him.
Behind his back, everyone calls him The Beast.
People tend to scatter away and change direction when he walks down the hallway at school. Players tend to keep their heads down and come up for air only when he’s passed.
Even a few teachers are afraid of him, but he’s the best the school has ever seen.
Another fun fact: he’s eighteen years older than me, not seventeen as me and my sister thought when we saw him for the first time.
Over the past two years, I’ve collected a lot of fun facts about him.
Like he drinks his coffee black.
He only has plaid shirts in his wardrobe, with a few threadbare t-shirts that he wears over the weekends and which, indeed, seem very, very soft. I wouldn’t know; never touched them myself.
Well, okay. I’m lying. They are soft and I did touch them once. After they came out of the dryer, freshly laundered. Long story.
Anyway, he goes running every morning at four. No exceptions. Even though he has trouble sleeping at night.
I found that out probably the first week of him being here. I can’t sleep at night, either.
I’m the child of night and the moon. A moonchild.
I like the dark. I like being awake and alone when everyone else in the neighborhood is sleeping. I like climbing up to the roof with vintage music in my ears, a lollipop in my mouth and my journal. Under the flashlight, I write about my day. Sometimes I read Bukowski because he’s the kind of a writer you read at night.
For the past two years though, I mostly watch him. I sit on the roof for hours, dangling my legs and sucking on a lollipop, wondering.
What keeps you up, Mr. Edwards?
Why can’t you sleep?
Unlike me though, he’s never watching back. He doesn’t even know that I’m there. Instead, he does interesting things. He swims laps around his pool. He exercises. Or he works in the backyard on his passion project.
Oh man, his passion project.
I’m so in love with it. I love watching him work on it.
I’m not a stalker. Not at all. I know that all this knowledge that I have of him might seem stalker-ish. But it’s not.
It’s not as if I went looking for these facts about him. They just fell into my lap because his son, Brian? He’s my best friend.
Incredible, right?
It’s still as unbelievable to me as it was two years ago. In fact, I had no intention of being his friend and ‘ruining’ things for Fiona. But he was persistent. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d say hi to me whenever he saw me; sit beside me during lunch; talk to me in the hallways when no one ever did. Frankly, he kinda freaked me out a little bit in the beginning with his cheerfulness and interest. And then, we got paired up for a lab class and well, the rest is history. We became the best of friends.
And everything would be awesome, if not for this one little thing.
A thing called a crush.
I have it and because of that, when I close my eyes, I see him.
His dad.
Yeah, I have a crush – a massive, massive crush – on Mr. Edwards, my best friend’s dad.
