Across the Lawn - Section One - Intermission

I don't want to write a big introduction for this piece. I'll write these two things: 1) It's unfinished but intended to be of novel-length--probably young adult. 2) The content includes three of my four favorite things and one guilty familiarity. In no order of importance (nor incrimination), those things are: hockey, video games, role-playing, and sex.

Enjoy (?).

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Across the Lawn
Jared Mason


Intermission

To Simon Jefferies, warming house hockey smelled like ice and sweat. High school hockey smelled the same plus popcorn. He didn’t know what college hockey smelled like since he was just a senior in high school. Sitting in the pep band section in Pioneer Hall, the ice arena of the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center, with his field bass drum sitting in the seat ahead of him, Simon figured college hockey smelled the same as high school hockey plus beer.

The first intermission of Duluth Central’s hockey homecoming game was a third through. Seven minutes and forty-three seconds left. Simon sat next to the aisle on the row reserved for the drummers, about halfway down the section. The band was tucked away on the side where the visiting team played the first and third periods. Most of the band had cleared out for intermission, most likely to sit with their friends in other sections. Simon didn’t have many friends but he didn’t mind sitting there alone, watching the Zamboni’s refreshing ovals.

He was distracted by another smell mixed in with the ice, sweat, and popcorn: perfume from the flute section a few bleachers down. Because of the air conditioning, the underclassmen flute girls wore turtlenecks and fleece mittens. Simon wore deerskin choppers. He hated having to play the school song, “Hurrah for the Red and White!” six or more times a night, but he hated playing with cold hands even more.

Sometimes the girls played cards. He wanted one of them to turn and ask him to play. He knew it would never happen, so he was content to watch the flautists’ ponytails bounce and sway as they gossiped. Simon couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were talking about him. They couldn’t decide whether to be flattered or creeped out. Simon wasn’t ugly, or too much of a dork. He wasn’t that cool either. Somehow, and this really puzzled them, he was friends with Jerome Kilbourne, the star defensemen of the hockey team. That was the only thing about Simon that intrigued the girls. They went on smiling and waging their ponytails for him, deciding any attention was good attention. He wished he was one of their red and white scrunchies.

Simon wasn’t a very good drummer. His chops were good enough to handle most concert snare music and definitely good enough to handle a pep band bass drum. In middle school he wanted to play trombone but there were too many already. Drums was his second choice so he didn’t mind. Soon, though, he found out all drummers were nose-pickers and spazzes. By the time he got to high school, he didn’t care about drums or band at all. By sophomore year, he volunteered to play just the bass drum. This was a job reserved usually for the most rhythm-dead, nose-pickin’ spaz in the section. Simon never understood why since a bad bass drummer could ruin an entire song or concert. Fewer notes to screw up, he guessed. His band teacher was happy to have a competent bass drummer and Simon was happy with fewer notes. He would’ve quit by now except for the free hockey games.

Finally, hockey season had started. He was sick of football. Simon thought high school football was like playing grown-up. Kids in grown-up clothes, saying grown-up things. It looked good on the surface—cute even—but it was just pretend. Hockey was pure, a true team game. An offender only played offense when the team controlled the puck. If not, he’d better forecheck or he’d get benched if the coach found a kid who played offense and defense. For Simon, the purity of hockey came from the warming house. All the other levels, high school, college, pro—just pond hockey with more rules and higher stakes. Football didn’t have that charm for Simon. At the warming house, he had skated with six year olds and sixty year olds in the same pick up game. No matter what point a guy stopped playing organized hockey, there was always the warming house.

Simon smiled, feeling pretty good about his present situation. Hockey was back and he had pretty flautists as a pleasant distraction. Best of all, the game would start in just another three minutes and fifteen seconds. Jerome would be out there soon, crushing guys at his blue line. After all, his nickname was Killer on account of his last name and knack for open-ice hits. He was the only Trojan hockey player worth mentioning. The best thing to happen to Duluth hockey since Central hired Coach, Jerome’s father, twenty years ago. Coach Kilbourne claimed Jerome would go in the first round of the next NHL draft if he’d only get his goddamn game together. Simon knew Jerome couldn’t care less about his goddamn game because he hated his father. What Simon didn’t know, is why.

Jerome’s girlfriend, Sofia, was at the game, sitting in a section near center ice. She sat with her parents, sharing popcorn in a generic barber-striped box. She chatted with Jerome’s mom, who sat directly in front of Sofia’s family. That’s the way it was every game last year and Simon knew this year would be no exception. He liked that Sofia wasn’t sitting in the rowdy section full of popular kids decked out in red and white, taunting the away penalty box. She was a popular girl and would have belonged to that section if she wanted to sit there. But that wasn’t her style.

He watched Sophia from the safe distance of halfway across the arena. Winter-themed tuque over straight, wheat stock hair. Double-dimple smiled. Her eyes killed Simon most. One blue, the other green. He couldn’t actually see the colors of her eyes from where he sat. Since he knew their colors, though, he thought he could see them like fraternal twin stars, blue and green twinkles in the crowd’s muddy haze of motion. Sometimes, like now, Simon would catch himself looking a little too long. She was with Jerome and he shouldn’t look at her like that, right? He always looked at girls too long, though; but since he knew Sofia and admired her as a person as well as a pleasant distraction, pulling his eyes away was never easy. Normally, he’d look away and mentally slap his own wrists. Now, though, he felt safe enough to watch as long as he wanted.

During a lull in Sofia’s conversation with Jerome’s mother, she scanned the pep band section for Simon. She was a bit surprised that in a sea of otherwise engaged faces, he was looking right at her. Simon was confident that she wasn’t really looking at him, just in his direction like all the other girls. Her smile caught him off guard. He looked away for a second. She was still smiling at him when he looked again. She gave him a friendly wave, one that pleaded for him to loosen up, break out of that shy shell of his. His smile and shrug were apologetic, telling her, “You know me.”

He almost crapped his pants when she excused herself from her company and headed for Simon’s section, popcorn in hand. Simon sweated, trying to think of something to talk about. Hockey? No. Dating Jerome, she’d be sick to death of hockey talk. Drumming? Hell no. College next year? No. They’d already talked about that last week. She would attend the University of Minnesota, Duluth for nursing and he would study computer science in Madison, Wisconsin. What then? Too late. She’d was already descending the stairs to his section. God, those eyes. And the way her hair fluttered up with each step. She made gravity sexy.

She sat on the arm of Simon’s seat, nudging his shoulder with her hip. His attempt to make room for her was clumsy. He almost sent the bass drum bounding down the section. He recovered and she giggled. She extended the barber-striped box toward him. Sofia smelled like sweet pines, like lilacs planted at the bases of Norway Reds. Simon could barely pick out her scent within the over-barring odor of salted butter. “Popcorn?” she asked.

Simon pinched a few and ate them even though he didn’t like popcorn. He hated the kernel skin or whatever it was that got stuck in his gums. Sofia tongued one such skin somewhere deep in her molars. Simon wished he was that chunk of kernel.

“Umm…” he said. “Enjoying the game?” He sighed, cursing himself for bringing up hockey after deciding not to.

Sofia thought Simon’s shyness was cute in a helpless, poor-guy way. She wished she could be his social coach. She’d teach him that talking to a girl didn’t require sweat and stammering. “Better than those damned football games,” she said.

He rolled his eyes but not because of football, which is how she read it. He rolled his eyes because he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to say, “Don’t tell me that. I don’t need another reason to lust after you.” Instead, he said, “Yeah. Football sucks.” Nice.

Simon liked everything about her. Now, he liked that she completely ignored his bass drum. He was puzzled by others’ urges to bang on drums. When he’d carry the bass drum though the halls at school, on the way to the pep band bus or to the gym for a rally, everyone reached out to swat, pound, or flick the drum. They’d look at Simon first to test whether they should or not. They’d see his indifferent face and mistake it for permission. They’d hit away, producing an awkward, unsatisfying noise from the drum, somehow wrong in timbre and pitch. They’d smile anyway and expect Simon to smile back. He’d just look at them and think, “What the hell sound did you expect it to make?” He wasn’t annoyed out of fear for the drum’s health. He couldn’t care less. He didn’t even like the thing. He was offended by people having fun intruding in on his life. He was jealous that people were more interested in the drum than him. When he’d walk the halls with it, he was a scouring, erratic pulse.

Sofia wasn’t interested in the drum. Simon was glad because he didn’t want to hear it’s oafy bass tone. He was sick of being the oaf on bass drum. He pounded every ounce of high school aggression into that thing. Just looking at it’s thin, dented skin, the scarred, peeling shell, conjured the angst within. Hearing that drum a thousand times a night made him look forward to leaving it behind. He was pretty sure he was sick of Duluth, too, and that Madison would be good for him. A fresh start. New places new faces, right? But he didn’t look forward to leaving Sofia’s face behind. Or Jerome’s. Definitely not Sofia’s. Sofia was everything right and wrong with Duluth. She made leaving difficult and necessary.

“You should come sit with me during the second intermission,” Sofia said.

“Really?” Simon asked.

“Yeah. I don’t like you sitting here all alone. It doesn’t help your shyness. You need to talk to people more instead of just looking, waiting for them to come to you. How are you going to meet anyone next year?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I plan on meeting tons of people. I’ll be out-going and fun to be around. It’ll be a whole new me. You won’t even recognize me when I come back.” He didn’t believe himself but it sounded good.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Sofia said.

She saw on the scoreboard that only a minute remained of the first intermission. She rose, stirring up her smells of popcorn and sweet pine. “Welp…” Simon liked how she said ‘welp’ instead of ‘well.’ “I’d better get back. You promise to sit with me later?”

“Sure,” Simon said. He smiled, already missing her and he wouldn’t be leaving until summer. She said bye and walked up a couple steps before looking back. "And, Simon," she said and he turned. "You've always been fun to be around." He thought she might be lying. Her eyes weren't lying; they were just mismatched. He looked in her green eye and then her blue, as if either might reveal the truth.

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Next Section: Jerome