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I’d had a crush on Lila Kellerman since fourth grade—except I never realized it at the time. I was just a kid. She was in second grade, and her class came out to the playground when mine did.
I’ll never forget the day I noticed her. My friends and I were tossing a football to each other in a big circle, and she was jumping rope with some other little girls. She was wearing a frilly pink dress, which was weird because the rest of the girls were wearing jeans and T-shirts. Her sunshine-yellow hair was in pigtails, and they bounced as she jumped over the rope with each swing.
“Who’s that?” I asked Teddy, my best friend, as I spun the ball in my hand.
He glanced over his shoulder to the group of girls. Then he shrugged. “New girl that moved here from Charleston. Lily, or Libby. Something like that.”
“Huh,” I said as I watched them jump and laugh. “Why she wearing that frou-frou dress?”
“I don’t know,” he said in exasperation. “Throw the dang ball!”
Teddy thought he was so tough by saying “dang.”
Irritated at him for no specific reason I could name, I threw the ball at him. It hit him in the chest so hard, he fell to his ass in the dirt.
“Geez, Lucian! Easy!”
His complaint fell on deaf ears, because I was walking over to the girl in the pink dress like something had control of my feet. When I got closer, it was like I was being pulled into her orbit like a tractor beam onStar Trekor something. She was magnetic.
“Who are you?” she asked as she stopped jumping and cocked her head at me.
I’d never seen eyes so crystal blue in all my life. All ten years of it. For a moment I was tongue-tied, and all I could do was stare at her.
“Are you deaf?” she asked me with a worried frown as she stepped closer. I continued to blink at her like an idiot. Until she took my hand and little sparks went up my arm like when you hold a sparkler too close to the lit end. “It’s okay if you are. We can still be friends.”
The giggles of the other girls shook me out of my daze, and my brows dropped into a frown. “I ain’t deaf. I just never seen you here before. What’s your name?”
She gave me a haughty little huff. “I asked you first.”
I grinned at her spunk. “My name’s Lucian. I’m in fourth grade.”
“Well, Lucian-in-fourth-grade, I’m Lila.” She paused before she leaned closer like she was gonna tell me a secret. Then she whispered, “In second grade.”
A stupid smile spread so far, my cheeks hurt. “Like the Eric Clapton song?”
“The who?” she asked, and her face wrinkled up in confusion.
“Layla,” I clarified but shook my head. I had no idea why I expected her to know who Eric Clapton was when none of my friends did. He was my dad’s favorite singer.
“Ohhh. No, Lila,” she said with a smile.
“Okay, um, never mind,” I mumbled.
Before I could ask her anything else, the recess teacher blew the whistle, and we all needed to line up to go back inside.
“You wasted the last five minutes of recess talking to that weird girl,” Teddy complained. “We could’ve been throwing the football all that time.”
I glared at him, and he immediately shut his mouth.
As we filed inside, I glanced over to see Lila lined up with her class, waiting to go in. She gave me a bright dimpled smile and waved. My heart went all funny, and I ducked my head to hide the smile that wouldn’t go away.
Lila and I became best friends, but I’d never tell Teddy, Mike, Jerry, or Todd that. They wouldn’t understand. Turned out, she lived in the neighborhood two blocks behind my house. Her neighborhood was new, and my mom said that’s where all the “hoity-toity” people lived.
She had a swing set that, no shit, looked like a freaking castle—complete with a drawbridge. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
On the nights that my mom left for the bar well before dinner, I would traipse down to her neighborhood and sit on her swing set. She would bring out a plate of food to me, and we would sit in the castle part while I ate.
I knew her mom made the plates up, because I caught her looking out through the curtains sometimes.
