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Five
Skye
People loved to ask where I met Leo.We were an odd bunch, the three of us. Leo in his classy clothes, dripping money, privileged, while Hunter and I stuck out like sore thumbs. Even Hunter and I were oddballs. He was rough around the edges, and while we lived in the same trailer park, he was much more impoverished than I was.
And broken.
Hunter was broken, and some pieces were missing. Without them, he appeared unhinged at times.
I stopped explaining our dynamic after a while because it made me uncomfortable. Sometimes it felt like I was defending my friendship with Leo. It never changed the way anyone viewed us. From the very start, they thought Hunter and I were a passing fancy in Leo’s life. A temporary friendship, a way for Leo to rebel against his expectations.
When an invisible line was drawn between the wealthy and the poor, you viewed the opposing side like trespassers. Both sides just did not mix, no matter the Disney movies spewing otherwise.
Truth of the matter was, eyes followed us everywhere and mouths flapped. It was the same vitriol exchanged regardless of where we were.
On our side of the tracks, we were using Leo to get something out of his rich ass.
On his side of the tracks, we were using Leo to get something out of his rich ass.
After a certain point, it just didn’t matter anymore because the three of us knew the truth and that was all that mattered.
How did we meet Leo?
I was ten and hanging with Hunter—Hunter who I had known since forever growing up together as neighbours. We were at the beach of the Brown Bay marina. The very same multimillion dollar marina Leo’s dad, George Itani, happened to own outright. Mr Itani loved to take his boat out on the water. It was a 130-foot superyacht, the biggest one docked there, and he felt tremendous pride at that. It stroked his ego to know his marina was the best voted one in the Pacific Northwest, that it was featured in magazines and that his superyacht was the well-known splendour that put Brown Bay on the map.
I didn’t say these things, by the way.
Leo did.
And so we sat on the rocks, feet in the water, staring out across the bay as boats came in, their sails up, the panting wives at the front. Hunter was eating my candy popcorn, and I was shoving bites of his liquorice sticks down, shuddering at the taste.
“Then stop eating them,” he hissed.
“I’ll stop when you stop eating my popcorn,” I retorted.
Hunter threw a popcorn at my face, and I smacked at his shoulder, making him laugh.
Throughout the exchange, I didn’t realize Leo was there, lingering in the background, watching us.
I didn’t know until…
Leo
He had seen them hanging around the beach almost every day.
Leo wasn’t intrigued at first. He had his own friends—friends his mother had approved of. Family friends and school friends and friends from the boxing club he had freshly enrolled in because his father was adamant he grow into areal man.
Any other day he would have walked down the marina boardwalk, glancing briefly at them hanging out below the walkway, kicking at the rocks as they threw their food at one another before continuing by.
But this time, for no apparent reason other than boredom, he happened to look a little longer. He caught the carefree look on their faces, the freedom as the girl smacked the boy and he bumped his shoulder against hers, laughing.
It was theirlaughter.
Their laughter made him stop and turn.
It was real laughter, not the fake prissy shit he heard in the circles he was forced into. These two were familiar with each other, comfortable in their own skin. They were dressed in what his mother would scoff and call trash bags. The crappy no-name brand clothes you found at a used store or in the chain stores of every mall or shopping centre. There were hundreds of thousands of those shirts floating around—unlike the customized ensemble he currently donned, freshly washed and ironed by the latest maid his mother was sure to fire any day now.
Leo stared a little harder at them, trying to find fault. He could have listed a dozen right there on the spot. He could have regurgitated his father’s proud sneer and noted that they were filthy, unsupervised, and eating junk food—that refined sugar sure to rot their teeth. Don’t even get him started on how improper they were being. Too close together. Didn’t matter they were young. Didn’t matter there were no lingering touches. It was downrightimproper. They lacked mannerism and etiquette—they should have been far apart,at least three feet; the boy should have been more of a gentleman, and that girl was sitting cross-legged—a position his mother would have criticized under her breath, or maybe to the girl’s face. His mother didn’t care, had no shame in pointing it out if only to embarrass them and make the lines drawn that much more visible between her class and theirs.
