Page 58 of Unlikely to Stay
“You must have been so cool.”
“No…I wasn’t,” he said softly, a hint of sadness tinging his voice.“Not at all.”
“You must think I’m a total jerk,” she said.What a dumb thing to say.“I’m sorry.”
Brant smiled at her, his dimples deepening in his cheeks.How any girl in her right mind could not look atthatand drool needed her head examined.CC would like to go to every one of the girls in Brant’s high school and call them all idiots.“Nah.It’s all good.I’m good…now.I wasn’t so much back then, though.Did I tell you why I wear suspenders?”
She shook her head.
“I haven’t told anyone.”
“Why not?”
“Embarrassed, I guess.”
“I just thought you liked dressing up like an old man.”
Brant threw a piece of wadded up paper that he found on the floor her way.“I was always the outcast.The foster kid who bounced from place to place, never really making any real friends.When I moved in with Betty, I was in a school with kids I didn’t know.Kids who knew I was a foster kid.Everyone in the neighborhood knew who Betty was.I got called so many names.”
CC’s heart ached for the little boy she imagined Brant to be.Kids could be so cruel.
“There was this one kid, Bryson.He was such a little shit.Thought he was the cool kid in school.I had gotten some award for reading or science in a morning assembly…I don’t even remember what it was.I was walking back to my seat when he reached out in the aisle and pulled down my pants.The entire school saw me in my Fruit of the Looms.”
“Hedidn’t!”
Brant nodded his head.“He did.After that, every time he walked by me in the hall he tried to do it again.I told my mom, who told the principal, but nothing got done about it.Apparently, his dad was a school board member and big businessman in Oklahoma City who contributed a lot of money to the school.Once she realized we weren’t going to get any help, she took me to a store and bought me every pair of suspenders they had.”
“I got red suspenders, brown suspenders, suspenders with sailboats on them.She bought me several jackets to go over them, too, so the kids couldn’t make fun of me for wearing them.”
“What about in the summer?”
“She put a drawstring in all of my shorts and helped me tie them in a double knot so no amount of pulling would get them down.I wouldn’t go to the bathroom all day out of fear I wouldn’t be able to get them to my ankles,” he chuckled.
“So the suspenders worked?”
“They worked.I had gotten so used to wearing them I just continued to wear them through college and nursing school and now…” Brant popped the gray suspenders with the black and white penguins on them against his chest, “Now they’re like my second skin.”
CC laughed.The suspenders suited him.“I’m guessing by the penguins on your current pair that you own quite a collection.”
“Oh, I do.”
“Where do you find them?”
“You’d be surprised what you can find on eBay.SuspenderSeller247 has great deals.”
“I like them.They suit you,” she replied, echoing her thoughts.
“You should come see my collection sometime.I think you’d be impressed,” he said with a wink.
A family of butterflies took flight in CC’s stomach.That wink of his was killer.
“So?”he asked.
“So what?”
“Do you have a list?”
“Oh!No…no list.”