Chalk Outtake

Imitosis

Jasper drug me clear across the meadow to the Passion Pit, but I just didn’t have the head for it, bricked out on a new fantasy. Sparkles had only been gone for sixteen minutes and I was still thinking about her.

Legs, and hands, and that wide-eyed look she got when I caught her blushing about something.

Thinking about how she had a real name, something just as pretty as what I called her in my head and how her eyes flashed frustration with every peel off her rock. She was so close, nothing a week or two of climbing wouldn’t fix and I fully expected her to top it by the end of the month.

Which was good, because I also intended to kiss her at the top of that rock when she finally got there, and it gave me a good two weeks to work up my courage.

“Dude, are you even watching me?”

I shook Sparkles free and glanced up at Jasper who was hanging from his fingertips, leg wrapped around a lip of rock nearly two feet above my head, a long way from his crash pad. With his hair wild and a scowl on his mouth, he hung his feet and dangled for a moment before landing delicately on the pad. When he wiped his hands agitatedly on his shorts, he sent a puff of white off into the air.

“How did you even do it?” He grumbled.

“Do what?”

“Find a girl like that, out here?” He waved an arm at the forest and I glanced around, wondering what the fuck he was getting at and trying desperately not to think about the girl he was obviously referring to.

Poker face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Victoria? Tanya? Jane?” He shot back at me in quick succession and yeah, so he had a point. One had a neck the size of my thigh, another climbed like she was having some sort of neurological fit and the other was just plain annoying, in no particular order. He didn’t mention Maria, which I knew meant he was still feeling burned and edgy. Some girls just weren’t cut out to be gabbys, but Jasper fell hard and landed even harder.

I’d like to think that he was worried for me, but I knew he was probably jealous.

“I don’t know. I swear I thought she was a hallucination at first.”

Jasper stared hard at me for a moment before throwing up his hands and sitting on the crash pad to tug off his shoes. “You’re useless. You’ve got that glazed over look you always get,” he grumbled. “Usually it’s over a rock but now there’s this . . . this . . . girl.”

Yep, totally jealous.

---

When we made it back to the car Jasper plopped into the passengers seat and picked my newly purchased plastic bag of chalk up off the floor, rolling it around between his hands as I drove. I preferred my chalk in loose form while Jasper was a block man. I still didn’t understand why, watching him meticulously crumble bars of chalk into his bag but it seemed to have become part of his ritual, much like the absent-staring thing he always did. Which he was doing again, right now.

The silence was deafening.

“I just fucking met the girl. She’s gonna kill herself out there if I don’t do something.”

“I dunno . . .” Jasper fondled the chalk bag thoughtfully, all three pounds of it. “You’ve never left handprints on my ass.”

“Do you want me to?”

“Not particularly,” he snapped at me. “But I don’t want to loose another climbing partner to some girl.”

He was talking about Rose and the disappearing act Emmett had been pulling for the last two weeks. I couldn’t blame him, even I was getting a little pissed.

“I’m not gonna bail on you.”

“You say that now.” More grumbling and the plastic crinkled beneath his fingers, agitated chalk tumbling around inside. He seemed to be staring far off into the future while I had barely made it past her mouth.

“I’m not marrying the girl, I’m just showing her the ropes.”

The chalk bag exploded.

Fragile plastic torn through by the pressure between his palms. In an instant the entire car was engulfed in a suffocating cloud of powdery white, coating my mouth and stinging my eyes. I slammed on the brakes, sliding to halt in the middle of the winding dirt road that would eventually get us back to the highway, coughing as I tumbled out of the car. The breeze pulled most of the chalk cloud away and left me coated from head to toe in snowy white. The interior of the car wasn’t much better, the grey leather gone all sorts of snow-globe. Jasper looked freshly tarred and feathered.

“What the fuck, J? That was supposed to get me through the summer.”

I whined, no lie. Chalk isn’t cheap.

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