A speeding train going in the opposite direction shook me out of my train of thought. I kinda jumped out of my seat as the thing went whizzing past, and I could tell Gavin was slightly amused by my reaction. I just gave a little shrug and attempted to re-establish my (
. . .) train of thought . . . . .
Well, I got back into it, and started thinking again. I thought back to my old talks with Riley about the subject. He always had that way of saying "
Whasamattahwit'you?" without ever really having to say it. He always kept it very . . . "themish". He had this one broken-record of his he liked to use a lot (especially to me). It was like . . . . . "I JUST can't understand what it is about guys and their
absolutely ridiculous infatuations with her!" Not that I'm judging him, but I was always curious as to wonder just what his stand on the fairer sex was. I mean, really I don't think I had ever seen him speak or act upon such things before - I mean ever! It's like such things just aren't important to him . . . how he does it, I'll never know.
And then there are my own apprehensions about the whole thing. Like I said earlier, I've gone through this before, and it just
kinda failed miserably. If I were to follow through, would it really be worth it? Do I even really care that much? Ya know, it probably
would be in my best interests if I didn't, and I do seem to believe that . . . man, life is screwed up . . . . .
I took a gander out the window and saw the mall - you know, THE mall.
"Hey Gav," I ask him, himself lost in his own thoughts, "wanna check out the mall for Natalie stuff?"
"It's still open?" he asked me.
"I'm sure something's still open.
"Alright, let's go for it." We stood up, I grabbed Natalie's poster from the seat next to mine, the train stopped, the doors opened, and we stepped out. It was really funny, because this was probably one of the only times I had ever seen the mall's train station this empty . . . neat site to look at . . . . . aaaaaaaaanyways, Gavin and I walked through the overpass to the building and entered - basically total silence. You know that eerie feeling you get when you walk somewhere by yourself and all you hear are your own footfalls? Take that and echo it in an empty mall, and you get our situation. Heck, I even tensed up a little after I sniffed back more nasal-excrement! But really, it wasn't that creepy; it was just . . . different.
I don't know if it was instinct or whatever on our parts, but we leaned our movement towards the newer section of the mall, as we were pretty sure it would still be open since it had a theatre attached to it. We were partially right - the Sweets Factory™ was still open (go fig). Instantly, Gavin perked up.
"Hey, everybody loves candy!" He exclaimed (quietly - we can't forget the empty mall). We went into the little shop and looked around at all the fancy gift-things, like glasses and mugs and steins filled with candies and plush dogs and bears and stuff. It was the kind of stuff that was so cute you almost wanted to hate it for being so cute (e.g. Elmo™), and yet you couldn't help but marvel at how cute it was. Gavin decided on a small, flower-shaped cone with kisses and stuff inside. He quietly paid the cashier (who looked
reeeally, really tired) and we kept heading around the corridor of the mall.
A few minutes and several metal screens in front of entrances later, we came upon another open shop. Don't think we were just THAT lucky, though. The place was a gift shop connected to a restaurant. Get it? The restaurant part itself was pretty quiet but was still obligated to its vigil until its hours were done for the day. I took my strapless (it snapped off long ago) watch from my pocket, and I found out just how late it was.
"We better hurry up, man," I told Gavin, "it's already like, 10:45." We stepped into the litt . . . actually . . . it was a rather large gift shop
The restaurant was a very . . . trendy, place - very gimmicky. There was a lot of wildlife paraphernalia everywhere; plush monkeys, mugs with tropical birds on them, crocodile-pens, and so on and so forth. Next to the shop's young cashier (who also looked tired, but a little more awake than the candy-store person) was one of those metal-wire-rotating-things that held what I thoughts were cards. On closer inspection they did indeed turn out to be cards. Animal-themes were tattooed on all of them, naturally.
"Whadayathink?" I asked my friend. He was intrigued by the cards, but was equally overwhelmed as to which one to pick.
"Which one do we get?"
"Well, I recall Nat' had a thing for horses . . . . . bingo!" I removed the equine-covered card and took a look - Gavin kinda shrugged in a "surewhynot?" fashion. I took a look inside; it was a blank card (which could work to our advantage). Out of bad habit, I then flipped the card over -
heh, it wasn't Hallmark™ . . .
"We still need a pen to sign it with, don't we?" Gavin brought up a good point.
"Yeah . . . I guess we do . . ." I took a look at the little plastic container on the cashier's desk - the fancy animal-pens were about 3 or 4 bucks . . . . . "Hey Gav', you need a pen?"
"I'm not buying a 3 dollar pen."
"Yeah, okay . . . . ." we stood there, thinking, and the cashier started to look at us with somewhat of a smirk. "Hey, would she lend us a pen?" I brainstormed.
"I don't know."
"Yeah . . . well, we might as well take care of this first." The two of us shelled out what change we had and found an equal parting of cost.
After we paid for the card, the moment of truth came:
"Excuse me?" I asked the clerk. "Can we borrow a pen?"
"Oh, sure," she replied. She then took a black pen out of the mug behind the counter and wiped off the end before handing it to us (now how nice is that?). We gave our thanks, and I started writing like hell. I decided I'd take the left side of the card, and started the whole "So you're older today, huh?" speech. As I started drawing a little cartoon in the corner, I could hear Gavin explaining our case to the cashier - she thought the whole
absolutely-to-the-last-minuteness of the situation was all pretty funny. I gave Gavin the pen and card, and he went on to write his own little inscription on the right side.
As Gavin wrote, the girl asked me if the poster (in my hand) and the candies (on the counter) were all. When I replied yes (somewhat sheepishly, I mean that is kind of a REALLY crappy present in all!), she then pulled out a little counter from the desk, took a sheet of that really thin gift-wrapping paper, and wrapped the poster and the cone of candy together! All I could do was give a very enthusiastic thank-you; she seemed to accept that with a bit of a smile, and left the desk to take care of some shelves.
I looked back to Gavin (who was now sketching out a really nice-looking person [
upstart me, eh?]), and he agreed how cool it was for the girl to wrap the stuff so selflessly. The gift itself looked much nicer with the yellow paper around it (and by now it kinda looked like a tube with one rounded end). I quickly took the envelope, wrote out Natalie's name in really swooshy script, and drew a birthday cake on it. Yeah, the cake-picture probably really sucked too (and now that I think about it I probably should've let Gavin do that), but at least you'd know it was a cake - it was at least good enough for that. We gave the two items a quick look-over, I replaced the pen in the mug, we gave another round of thanks to the cashier, and we got back on the train.
Before we reached the infamous 22nd Street train station, Gavin had to ask me,
"So, that girl at the gift shop was kinda cute, huh?" I just rolled my eyes and smiled.
That kid is too innocent for his own good . . . . .
Once we got off the train, we headed for Natalie's house (it was well past 11 by now). The two of us were discussing how to get this gift to her. We both deemed the "Well we were just in the neighbourhood . . ." approach would just not work here. Gavin then proposed the "ring the bell and run" - I felt that was just too corny to work at our age and turned it down. I then suggested we just leave it on the stoop and leave. Now, I don't know if it was out of pure agreement or just sake of non-confrontation, but Gavin agreed. I'd hate to think that I vetoed him for my idea, but that is kinda how it went . . . oh well . . . . .
As we neared the little yellow house, the living room was blocked off by the drapes behind the window. A light glow was coming through the cracks of the drapes, so I surmised they were watching a movie or something.
"Let's do this." The two of us slipped into our "Rainbow 6" modes, and crept to the front door. Gavin passed me the package and I placed it in a nice manner on the welcome mat. I then motioned for an "evac", and we silently ran down the driveway and onto the sidewalk (I, incidentally, also had my hands clenched together as if I were holding a pistol of sorts - that boyish ingenuity again). Once we were in the clear, we then just started laughing. I'll never know why, but any time you have to be really quiet for a long time, it tends to seem really, really funny for one reason or another. We kept laughing about God knows what for another 2 or 3 minutes or so. It was weird.
Aaaaaaaaaaaanyways, yeah, we got back to the station, got on the bus, Gavin got off before I did, then I got off, yada yada yada . . . it was really late by then. I could see in the window that my mom's room was still lit up, meaning she was waiting for me to get home.
"Mom, I'm home."
"Did you have a good time?" she asks me.
" . . . More or less."
"Alright. Well, I'm going to sleep now. Don't stay up too late."
"Alright."
"Okay, good night."
"Good night." I went downstairs to the computer after that. I got online, and checked my e-mail. Incidentally, a few people were on ICQ (Gavin being one of them), so I decided to hang around for a while before I decide to hit the sack.
