Blue - A Short Story

On Thursdays the girl with the blue t-shirt brought newspapers to our neighborhood. She came past George’s house on the left and for each building she’d go in and you wouldn’t see her for a while, then she’d come out and go to the next building the same way. There were four buildings between George’s house and my house. I only knew it was George’s house because he came out of it in the mornings before school and he went back into it in the afternoons after school. I didn’t know him that well but there was some satisfaction in knowing his name and where he lived.
The girl with the blue t-shirt went to my school too, except I didn’t know her name because she wasn’t in any of my classes. She didn’t always wear blue either – sometimes she wore a red coca-cola t-shirt and once I even saw her in one of those big yellow poncho-raincoats one rainy Thursday, but she usually wore blue - the soft blue t-shirt or the summery one with the crisp aqua and white stripes.
     After school I sat on the front steps because it was a clear, warm springy Thursday, the first day in a while where I could wear shorts and a t-shirt and really think about summer coming up and all the things I could do during those three months. I sat there thinking about popsicles and pumping my bike tires and reading books in the morning, about walking the neighbors’ dog when they were out of town and sitting in front of the window air conditioning unit all afternoon on the super hot days. Our neighborhood is really quiet during the summer because the old people stay in front of their AC and everybody else goes to work, so when you walk down the street it’s as if no one is here. It felt a bit like that today, with just a tiny breeze coming through and nodding the leaves, and no one nearby, at least in sight anyway. Not a lot of cars came by either, and sometimes you could hear the nearest one all the way by the shoe repair place three blocks away. Then it reminded me of waiting for the bus in the morning, how I had learned to tell the difference between the school bus and the repair trucks and the cars, so I always knew when the bus was coming long before anyone else noticed.
        I was a little thirsty so I went to the kitchen and got myself a cup of orange juice. It was a new carton so I got the top part, which is a lot better than the bottom because it gets all thick and concentrated by the end. I went back to the front steps. It really was like summer today, there were even flies – the kind that comes in clouds and you can only see them in the light. Flowers had started to open up and curly tulips were sprouting, next to the striped crocuses. The air smelled light and fresh. I felt a bland kind of peace.
“Hello!”I looked up. There was the girl, her blue t-shirt billowing a little around her.
“Hi,” I said, soft.She was standing on one leg, like a flamingo.
“Here’s your newspaper,” and she handed the blue-wrapped package to me. She almost lost her balance and she swung a little on two feet, hopping up to stand straight. She was kind of gangly, and her arms and legs shifted in the breezes.She tilted her head up into the sky suddenly, squinting into the blue.
“It’s a nice day today, ain’t it?”
“Quite nice.”
She turned out as if she was about to go continue on her route, but then she dug into her front pocket, reaching for something. She came up the front steps in one leap and sat next to me. She uncurled her hand carefully and in the center of her palm was a milky blue seashell, the type that’s round and spirals in the middle.“Me and my mom, we went on the beach yesterday and found this one,” she said, “It’s a pretty nice one, isn’t broken. It’s like summer, don’t you think?”
“Sure.”
Then she stood up and jumped off the steps to the driveway, picked up her newspapers. She ran off down the street, and when she got to the next building she shouted “Good afternoon,” before disappearing, a flash of blue. I watched her weave in and out of the buildings, a sky colored spot getting smaller in the distance until she turned the corner and was gone.I kept thinking about that blue seashell. I’d been to the beach many times but of all the shells I had collected I’d never gotten a blue one. Hers was such a pale creamy shade of blue. It probably wasn’t real, I thought to myself when I brought my orange juice glass back to the kitchen. She was probably lying. I bet it was fake.