I asked the moon, p.1
I ASKED THE MOON, page 1
I ASKED THE MOON
PAUL A. RAYES
ANORI PRESS LC
CONTENTS
I Asked The Moon
Author Website
1. The Dreaded Reunion
Wednesday 04 June 2008
2. Last Day of Junior Year
3. Dana
Thursday 05 June 2008
4. Really, Riley?
5. Butterflies
Saturday 07 June 2008
6. Roller Coaster
7. House Party?
Sunday 08 June 2008
8. Morning After
Monday 09 June 2008
9. Ice Cream
Tuesday 10 June 2008
10. Clumsy
11. The Pool
12. Who’s P. Antoine?
Wednesday 11 June 2008
13. Ma, Come On
Thursday 12 June 2008
14. Birthday
15. Your Clothes Aren’t That Tight!
16. Dana
Saturday 14 June 2008
17. Tricked
18. Thad’s Birthday Continued
Sunday 15 June 2008
19. What Did I Say?
Monday 16 June 2008
20. Like Old Times
Wednesday 18 June 2008
21. Dana
22. Thad
Thursday 19 June 2008
23. Rejected
Friday 20 June 2008
24. Brothers
Saturday 21 June 2008
25. I Asked the Moon
Sunday 22 June 2008
26. Thank You, Riley
27. The Reunion
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Supporting Indie Authors
I ASKED THE MOON
PAUL A. RAYES
I ASKED THE MOON
Copyright © 2022 by Paul A. Rayes
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Publisher’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 979-8-9863494-0-4 (Paperback) / 979-8-9863494-1-1 (Hardback) / 979-8-9863494-2-8 (Ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022910992
Edited by Kristen Corrects, Inc.
Cover art design by Robin Locke Monda
First edition published 2022
I dedicate this book to my teenage self, and to those who feel like they don’t belong. We do belong, and I hope you can find a home in my stories.
AUTHOR WEBSITE
Scan code below to access the book playlist, and to connect with the author.
www.itspaularayes.com
1
THE DREADED REUNION
Do you remember your first crush? Or the first time you really wanted someone to be your friend?
I sit in my car facing the lakeside restaurant, listening to Indochine’s “2033,” staring through the windshield at the faint glow of the moon on this hot summer evening. “What am I doing here?”
I hated high school. Yet here I am, at our ten-year reunion. Thinking about times past and all the people I used to know makes my hands sweat and my eyes itch. It makes me think back on a period in my life when I wanted time to stop. When I wanted the world to pause so I could breathe. Have you ever felt like that?
His name runs through my mind again. A name that has lingered in the back of my head for all eternity. My eternity, at least.
I text my childhood best friend before pulling the keys out of the ignition. Going in. See you inside.
She immediately replies. K.
K? I look down at the screen, brows furrowed. I think too much about context and clarity. When replying to text messages, I use alrighty instead of K. That one-letter response just gives me mixed signals. I might think you’re angry with me or something. Am I crazy?
As I walk through the parking lot of the restaurant, I’m reminded of the days where I walked through the lot to the side of the school entrance. I used to be able to pick out the cars that belonged to my friends and acquaintances: Dana and her nearly new Escape, Kayla and her dad’s always new BMW, Samantha with her old Ford Focus—a car many people in my school drove. It’s a different story here today in front of this restaurant. I can’t tell who owns what. Most of these people have been blank from my mind for the last decade.
I enter the private room to the right of the restaurant entrance and am signaled by a small group of girls huddled over a table close to the bar. Should I have said women? We’re in our late twenties now. Funny, isn’t it? I still don’t see myself as an adult. Whenever I think of people my age, I think of them as girls and boys. Anyway, I instantly recognize them, a few former school friends who sat with me during lunch almost every day.
A sinking feeling seizes my stomach as regret falls over me. I ditched everyone after graduation. High school made me feel trapped, and in order for me to free myself, I had to create a new life without all of them. I could have tried to keep in touch. Instead, I did nothing. These girls treated me kindly at school, something I needed then. I know everything about them and their adult lives now thanks to social media. And yet here I am, a stranger reemerging from the shadows after a decade of silence.
“Hey! It’s been too long. How’ve you been?” asks Kayla, looking for something in the purse hanging from Samantha’s seat, her hair still strawberry blonde and wavy like I remembered.
“Yeah. We haven’t seen you since the bonfire at Michelle’s house the weekend after graduation,” Samantha says, pointing to Michelle, who’s pulling back her dark curls.
“It’s been a long time. Hey, have any of you been in touch with Dana?” I nervously ask, gesturing to the empty chair across the table.
“No,” replies Nicole, sipping on something like a vodka cranberry.
Who still drinks those?
“She told me she wasn’t coming.” Kayla pulls an e-reader from the hanging purse.
The table looks at me in confusion. Am I ruining a surprise for them? A feeling of uncertainty falls over me as I realize that Dana could be ditching me. Dana wouldn’t do that again though, I think. At least I don’t think she would.
The senior class vice president approaches the podium at the end of the room; the class president no longer lives in the country from what I gathered after stalking her on Facebook. The VP begins recounting times past, and a knot in the pit of my stomach starts to form. So instead of taking a seat, I walk over to the bar. I need a drink if we’re going to talk about those days. I don’t understand how people speak of the past in fondness. The past is the past, leave it there. Then again, I did show up. There must be a reason, though truth be told, I couldn’t have named it.
Have a good time honey. Send me pictures of your friends, my mom texts as I’m about to order a drink. I roll my eyes.
I stand, annoyed, at the bar with a Canadian rye whisky in hand since the wine selection is overpriced. I would have paid more for the ticket if it were open bar.
Looking across at the top of the room where the podium stands, our class vice president still speaking, I notice the entrance door slowly closing. Dana? I straighten my back, eyes wide open dissecting the room trying to find the new face. I make awkward eye contact with several of my ex-classmates, but there’s no one new in sight.
I tip the bartender after shooting the drink in my hand, then order another. Trust me, you’d also want another.
“Hey. Give me that,” the vice president says, grabbing my attention.
Before I can turn around to see what’s going on, someone else begins to speak. A voice I haven’t heard in eleven years. The voice I hoped I wouldn’t hear today. It’s him.
It’s Thad.
Where’d he come from? I gulp, stomach churning. I haven’t seen him yet tonight. Trust me, my eyes ran a marathon examining this entire place before I even sat down. I’m always on the lookout for someone who might know me. If I ever tell you that I didn’t see you, but you saw me, I’m lying. I see everything.
“I wanted to say something,” he states as the vice president attempts to reclaim the mic from his grip, but Thad manages to yank the mic back. “Please, just give me a couple minutes.”
He has the attention of the entire room. And while everyone looks back and forth in confusion between Thad and the vice president, he starts speaking. Where is this going? I look around the room again. He had his own group of friends in high school, so why does he need everyone’s attention when he can just talk to them?
I decide not to return to my seat yet. I don’t want to catch his attention. Or anyone else’s. Being invisible at the bar is safer.
“There’s something I need to say.” He looks around, face turning red. “There’s something I didn’t do a long time ago. And someone I need to say a few things to.”
The cramping in the pit of my stomach becomes worse, and for a terrifying moment I think I’m going to have a severe ass explosion: a term only my mom and her best friends use. You know the feeling when your stomach is about to flush through you? Yeah, that feeling.
“Junior year, on the last day of school, I approached one of our classmates in the parking lot. And I tried to become friends with…”
As he speaks, I am immediately taken back to e
WEDNESDAY 04 JUNE 2008
2
LAST DAY OF JUNIOR YEAR
“Hey. Étienne,” he said from the top of the school parking lot, behind me.
Guess I did hear steps.
I turned and looked up to see who it was. Well, I knew who it was. I’d known that voice for years. A masculine yet soft voice. I’d never heard it directed toward me, though. Well, at least not in that tone.
“Yeah?” I replied then looked around, thinking there had to be another Étienne standing not far from me. I did—and still do—that sometimes when people call my name and I’m not sure if it’s me they’re actually addressing. Like when someone waves in your direction, and the pitiful person inside you waves back without verifying who it is first. Then you’re the idiot waving at no one. Yeah, I’m the awkward clown you get secondhand embarrassment for when you see this happen.
“Hey. I’m Thad.” He smiled. He’d gotten his braces off the previous year, making his smile look like something you’d see on an Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bag.
“As if I didn’t already know your name,” I whispered to myself as he approached. We’d gone to the same schools and had been in the same classes since the fourth grade. I know who you are. But I have to say, I’m surprised you know my name.
“Yeah. Hey,” I replied, scratching my left ear.
“You’re here late.” He looked around the nearly empty school parking lot, biting his lip as the light breeze lifted his ultra-blond hair.
“Oh. I had a cross country meeting,” I replied. “We were going over our training schedule for mid-summer before classes start again in the fall.”
Like I would have time to train over the summer, though. Some of us had to work. Luckily, summer conditioning wasn’t actually mandatory, although it did help with my early season meets the last year. I wanted to train. Spending four days a week running up and down the lakeside, getting lost to the music on my iPod, would have been a better distraction than having to work.
“Need a ride home?” he asked, both hands now in his front pockets.
I looked frantically to see if anyone was around to observe this interaction. Was this a joke? Or a prank? Had he followed me? Was he waiting for me? I hesitated to reply. I needed time to think. Was this guy really trying to be nice or was this a setup by him and his group of friends?
“Umm sure,” I stuttered. I only lived a block away, after all. What harm could it do?
“Cool! I’m parked right there,” he replied, his voice strangely enthusiastic.
I looked toward his car, side-eyeing him in confusion as my heart fluttered. Hold on. What was that?
His car was in the last row of the parking lot, facing the tall fencing separating the school grounds and the back yards of the people living on the next street over. My street. When no one was around I would usually climb the fence to my backyard. That day, like so many others, I’d decided to exit through the parking lot to take the long way home to get lost in my music, and to avoid the chaos at my house.
“Long Way Home” by ATB was one of my favorite songs, so I decided I would listen to that album on my walk. I liked taking the long way, anyway. I felt alone, and this song made me feel good, like being alone wasn’t such a bad thing.
After a moment of me twiddling my thumbs in his parked Focus, an electric feeling overcame me. Like butterflies in my stomach, but not in that way. I thought. More like nervousness had enveloped my being. I had ventured into the unknown and now had to see what would come next.
“How was the last day of school for you?” he asked before adding, “Funny how our last day is always on a Wednesday.”
I sat there concentrating on my peripheral to catch any movement. People need to see this. Where are they? Why is this guy, of all people, talking to me?
“Fine. Yours?” I replied, trying to give away as little as I could. I mean, I’ve wanted to know you for years and here we are. In your car. On this hot day.
Speaking of hot, I wanted to open the window, but he still hadn’t started the car. What was I supposed to do? Open the door for some air and feel more ridiculously awkward?
“It was.” His voice cracked. “Fine. You know?”
I nodded, looking at his fidgeting hands in his lap.
“I made some plans for next week and hung out with my friends during the fifth period assembly,” he continued, talking to me as if we were friends.
He’d never seemed like the friendly type before. Was this nervousness pushing him to talk? Or was he genuinely a kind person? All these years of receiving the silent treatment from him had me confused.
Like the last time I made eye contact with him in the hallway at my locker, only the week before. At my locker, I turned my head and immediately noticed him from my peripheral, turning the corner and heading my way. I looked up too quickly, flinging my contact lenses out of focus, which forced an awkward scowl on my face as I blinked to refocus. I usually tried to grin after making eye contact with someone. But my contact lenses had other plans. My vision cleared, and our eyes met for a moment as he bit both of his lips. He quickly redirected his gaze past me to the end of the hall and kept on his merry way.
I assumed he was one of those popular types who spoke only to those who mattered, like once in American Government when we were assigned to the same group, discussing the pros and cons of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He sat there tapping his pencil, staring at the blackboard. Had I been wrong all this time?
“Hey,” I blurted into the weird silence after he finished telling me about his last period. I felt dizzy from the heat building up in the car. We were shaded by a tree branch peeking out over the fence, but June heat in Michigan could be a killer even in the shade. Well, at least in those years before the climate was drastically changing. “Could you maybe start the car or open a window?”
I was still wondering what the hell I was doing in Thad’s car. Thad, of all people.
“Ooh.” He twitched, hands reaching for the keys that fell from his lap onto the floor. “They’re right, you’re easy to talk to.”
Who’s they? A cloud of anxiety fell over me. People talk about me? Why? I had tried so hard in life to blend in, why were people talking about me?
He grinned after finally turning on his car and blasting the air conditioning. “So. What are you up to today?”
I grabbed my chest, looking around even though I was obviously the only one in the car. “Uh. Me?”
His eyes met mine as he clenched his jaw. “Yeah. I was thinking…”
“Hold on.” I raised my hands. Thad straightened himself as if trying to take a step backward, but obviously we were both confined in the car. “What’s going on here?” What I really wanted to say was, Why are you talking to me? You’ve barely spoken to me before.
“What do you mean? Nothing’s going on.” He looked down. “Look, I don’t know why I asked to drive you home. I just…” He didn’t continue.
“I have a hard time believing that,” I said. Shit! I said that. It forced itself out of me like word vomit. I mean, I did have a hard time believing that someone like him, someone who had never really spoken to me, would pick up a conversation and offer me a ride home. But I was usually better at controlling my urges and keeping thoughts to myself. “Sorry. What I meant to say—”
