Parker
“Sdjfkweowsiajdkfasdjfaoiwesjdkflasdjfs,” the tinny voice on the intercom seemed to say as I stood on tip-toe, trying to find Taylor and whoever he had come with to pick me up. I had been searching for almost twenty minutes now and I almost wondered if they had forgotten about me. My nerves were in such a frenzy that I was almost hoping for it.
As I wandered around, I saw a pay phone and considered calling Gina to tell her that they weren’t there and that I’d have to come home. My palms were sweaty as I dug around my pockets for a quarter.
“Parker!” someone shouted from right behind me.
I nearly jumped a mile, whirling around to see my own face grinning at me. I had that feeling of staring into a funhouse mirror as I grinned back.
“Hey!” I said back as brightly as I could, aware that my voice was shaking but knowing that, in the volume of the other noises of the airport and considering he was pretty much deaf by then anyway, he probably couldn’t hear that.
Before I could even get my mind to grasp what was going on, he had pulled me into a tight, brotherly hug. Or at least an overly-friendly one. I reflected for a moment as I hugged him back that I had never seen someone so happy to see me before.
As we pulled away, I felt the need to be the one to get the obligatory “how are you?”’s rolling.
“So...how’ve you been?” I asked, my eyes darting around a bit at the people who were beginning to stare at us. I prayed that no scene would be made. If there was one thing I couldn’t handle at that moment it was a scene.
“Uh, good,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, his eyes trying to follow whatever it was I kept looking around at.
“That’s good,” I said, nodding.
An awkward pause.
“And you?”
I shrugged. “Same ol’, same ol’,” I told him.
He nodded, once again turning around to unsuccessfully try and follow my gaze.
“Who brought you?” I asked him, interrupting his search.
“Ike, but we seem to have lost him,” he said, laughing a little bit. His seeming complete and utter happiness to see me was beginning to tangibly melt away.
I tried a laugh, too.
“Are you sure he wasn’t horded by some fans?” I said jokingly.
“You joke, but that’s a very real possibility in the airport,” he said, surveying the area with his eyes, even standing on tip-toe at one point. “Oh, there he is.”
He grabbed my arm and began pulling me in the direction Isaac must have been in and we nearly lost each other in the crowded airport. I began to get absurd thoughts about why everyone in the airport wanted to leave Tulsa so badly and, though I tried to dismiss them, they just kept coming back.
Eventually we found Isaac by the baggage claim.
“Hey,” he said as we came up to him. He looked from me to Taylor and it was obvious that he was struggling to decide who was who. I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at that. I knew we both looked alike (again, the funhouse mirror feeling came back), but Taylor was Isaac’s brother. It seemed as though when someone who knew at least one of us most of our lives was looking at us, they would be able to tell one from the other. Like they would be able to tell that I was the much better looking one. Not.
“Hi,” I said, deciding to make it easy on him. I stuck out my right hand and he took it. I noticed the redness at his fingertips and wondered if they had just gotten done practicing, scraping my own calloused fingertips against the palm of my hand after letting go.
“How are you?” he asked me.
“Uh, good,” I said, nodding. I’d been better, but I could tell he had, too, so I didn’t bother mentioning it.
“And how’s Gina?”
I shrugged. “She’s still...Gina,” I said, not knowing what else to say. Not even really knowing if that was the truth.
“And how’s Lyle?”
Jeez, did he have a list?
“He’s okay, I guess. I don’t know. Haven’t really seen much of him lately,” I told him.
Lyle seemed to have been coming around less and less since the Hansons had stayed at our house for those few weeks in there. Even though I did wonder why that was since he and Gina didn’t seem to be fighting at all, I wasn’t about to complain about it at all.
He nodded, obviously not really sure what else to say or who else to ask about. I breathed a short sigh of relief at that.
“I suppose I should, um, get my bags,” I said, gesturing toward the little carousel where only a few bags were left spinning around and around, waiting for their owners to save them for the monotony before the machine was turned off and the security guards took it to the Land of Lost Luggage (yup, click your ruby slippers folks, he’s going nuts).
“Oh, yeah,” Isaac said as if it wouldn’t have ever occured to him to get my bags if I hadn’t mentioned it to him.
It took me about five hundred tries, but I managed to get one of my bags back from the carousel. Taylor and Isaac, the “experienced travellers,” had to rescue my other ones.
Before I could think to protest and run to the next plane headed back home, I found myself sitting in the cab of Isaac’s truck, driving along a highway that I hadn’t traveled down since I was two years old. I looked around, trying to see something that looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t find anything.
“What’re you doing?” Taylor asked, seeing my searching look.
“Just trying to see if I recognize any of this,” I said, gesturing
to the scenery passing by us rather swiftly outside the windows of the vehicle.
“Huh?”
“I’m trying to see if I remember any of this,” I told him. “I don’t really remember Oklahoma.”
“Why would you?” Isaac asked, just as confused as Taylor.
“I was born in Oklahoma. Gina didn’t bring me to Rochester until I was two,” I reminded them.
“Oh! Yeah,” Taylor said, realizing.
Isaac just got a deeply disturbed look on his face. I think with that particular statement, it just made the situation all the more real to him. I don’t doubt that that’s the last thing he wanted.
We were pretty quiet for most of the rest of the ride. Every once in a while, Taylor would point something out to me such as a place that he liked to hang out, or a house that he liked for no particular reason,
the house of the guy who had the recording studio in which they recorded their independent “records.” I don’t know why, but I found it unusual that he kept referring to them as records. To me, they’re always albums or CDs or tapes. I don’t think I’ve seen a record since I was about six years old.
I felt kind of weird when he talked about the band. It was just strange to think that my twin brother was famous. Especially when I thought about how the famous band he was in was made up of him and his brothers. I think he saw my discomfort and stopped talking about it after a while.
I began to fidget a little bit as the ride began to seem endless. My hands started to play with each other and I didn’t even notice it until Isaac commented.
“Whoa, you bite your nails, don’t you?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, examining the nails on my right hand, which were jagged from being chewed on intensely the whole time on the plane down. “I should stop though. I don’t think it’s very good for a guitar player to be biting his nails.”
“You play?” he said.
“A little,” I answered, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. As said before, I don’t like talking about my mediocre guitar-playing skills in front of people who were exceptionally competent in the way of music.
He nodded but chose not to go any farther on the subject. It struck me as rather odd that these people usually started talking about certain subjects, but didn’t seem to be willing to get into a discussion about them. I wondered if it had anything to do with me.
“Isn’t this the wrong way?” Taylor asked suddenly, his eyebrows creased worriedly.
“I don’t think so,” Isaac said, his eyes searching for a road sign. About two seconds later, we passed one. “Nope, we’re on the right track. Jeez Tay! Don’t freak me out like that.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that An...Mom takes a different route from the airport. I got kind of confused there for a minute, I guess.”
The timidity he used when saying that disturbed me a little bit. But it didn’t disturb me nearly as much as the glare I saw coming from Isaac in Taylor’s direction out of the corner of my eye. I pretended for their benefit that I didn’t notice it because I knew that it wasn’t meant for me to see even though I honestly had no idea what it was for.
“Here we are,” Isaac said, pulling into the driveway of a normal-looking little house that not only looked like it wasn’t fit for “rich”
people to be living in (I couldn’t help but imagine a mansion), but not nearly large enough for nine people to fit into it with some elbow room to spare.
“Wow,” I said, not knowing what else to say. The house was nicer than the one Gina and I lived in, but it wasn’t anything spectacular.
“Wow?” Taylor said.
I shrugged, too embarrassed to tell him why I had said it.
I jumped out of the truck and onto the gravel driveway. I noticed right away the three vehicles parked in the driveway besides Isaac’s truck. There was a van, which was to be expected from such a large family, and two, average, nondescript cars. I was a bit confused as to why there were two of them. Wouldn’t a normal car, a van, and Isaac’s truck be enough for everyone in the house who was old enough to drive get around without having to worry about not having a vehicle? What was
the point of the second car?
Apparently Taylor saw me staring at all the cars and the questioning look that went with the stare.
“Uh, the other car is our, um, friend, Annie’s. She wanted to meet you,” he said.
Oh great. Friends. I knew that keeping Taylor from meeting anybody we knew for the first chunk of his visit to our house made him go stir crazy but I wasn’t exactly the type of person who liked to meet people I didn’t know at all while among people I didn’t know all that well in the first place. I imagined Annie as a person who would probably go on for hours about how much Taylor and I looked alike and blah blah blah blah blah like we didn’t know it already.
I took a deep breath as, bag in hand and a bowling ball in my stomach, we walked up the path to the front door. It wasn’t until the door was opened and I had passed from one side of the doorway to the other that I got a strange premonition similar to the one I had had at the Rochester airport. The one that made it seem that after this, there was no turning back.
We're only on Chapter Twelve and I'm already running out of pleads. Aaah!
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Thirteen
As I wandered around, I saw a pay phone and considered calling Gina to tell her that they weren’t there and that I’d have to come home. My palms were sweaty as I dug around my pockets for a quarter.
“Parker!” someone shouted from right behind me.
I nearly jumped a mile, whirling around to see my own face grinning at me. I had that feeling of staring into a funhouse mirror as I grinned back.
“Hey!” I said back as brightly as I could, aware that my voice was shaking but knowing that, in the volume of the other noises of the airport and considering he was pretty much deaf by then anyway, he probably couldn’t hear that.
Before I could even get my mind to grasp what was going on, he had pulled me into a tight, brotherly hug. Or at least an overly-friendly one. I reflected for a moment as I hugged him back that I had never seen someone so happy to see me before.
As we pulled away, I felt the need to be the one to get the obligatory “how are you?”’s rolling.
“So...how’ve you been?” I asked, my eyes darting around a bit at the people who were beginning to stare at us. I prayed that no scene would be made. If there was one thing I couldn’t handle at that moment it was a scene.
“Uh, good,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, his eyes trying to follow whatever it was I kept looking around at.
“That’s good,” I said, nodding.
An awkward pause.
“And you?”
I shrugged. “Same ol’, same ol’,” I told him.
He nodded, once again turning around to unsuccessfully try and follow my gaze.
“Who brought you?” I asked him, interrupting his search.
“Ike, but we seem to have lost him,” he said, laughing a little bit. His seeming complete and utter happiness to see me was beginning to tangibly melt away.
I tried a laugh, too.
“Are you sure he wasn’t horded by some fans?” I said jokingly.
“You joke, but that’s a very real possibility in the airport,” he said, surveying the area with his eyes, even standing on tip-toe at one point. “Oh, there he is.”
He grabbed my arm and began pulling me in the direction Isaac must have been in and we nearly lost each other in the crowded airport. I began to get absurd thoughts about why everyone in the airport wanted to leave Tulsa so badly and, though I tried to dismiss them, they just kept coming back.
Eventually we found Isaac by the baggage claim.
“Hey,” he said as we came up to him. He looked from me to Taylor and it was obvious that he was struggling to decide who was who. I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at that. I knew we both looked alike (again, the funhouse mirror feeling came back), but Taylor was Isaac’s brother. It seemed as though when someone who knew at least one of us most of our lives was looking at us, they would be able to tell one from the other. Like they would be able to tell that I was the much better looking one. Not.
“Hi,” I said, deciding to make it easy on him. I stuck out my right hand and he took it. I noticed the redness at his fingertips and wondered if they had just gotten done practicing, scraping my own calloused fingertips against the palm of my hand after letting go.
“How are you?” he asked me.
“Uh, good,” I said, nodding. I’d been better, but I could tell he had, too, so I didn’t bother mentioning it.
“And how’s Gina?”
I shrugged. “She’s still...Gina,” I said, not knowing what else to say. Not even really knowing if that was the truth.
“And how’s Lyle?”
Jeez, did he have a list?
“He’s okay, I guess. I don’t know. Haven’t really seen much of him lately,” I told him.
Lyle seemed to have been coming around less and less since the Hansons had stayed at our house for those few weeks in there. Even though I did wonder why that was since he and Gina didn’t seem to be fighting at all, I wasn’t about to complain about it at all.
He nodded, obviously not really sure what else to say or who else to ask about. I breathed a short sigh of relief at that.
“I suppose I should, um, get my bags,” I said, gesturing toward the little carousel where only a few bags were left spinning around and around, waiting for their owners to save them for the monotony before the machine was turned off and the security guards took it to the Land of Lost Luggage (yup, click your ruby slippers folks, he’s going nuts).
“Oh, yeah,” Isaac said as if it wouldn’t have ever occured to him to get my bags if I hadn’t mentioned it to him.
It took me about five hundred tries, but I managed to get one of my bags back from the carousel. Taylor and Isaac, the “experienced travellers,” had to rescue my other ones.
Before I could think to protest and run to the next plane headed back home, I found myself sitting in the cab of Isaac’s truck, driving along a highway that I hadn’t traveled down since I was two years old. I looked around, trying to see something that looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t find anything.
“What’re you doing?” Taylor asked, seeing my searching look.
“Just trying to see if I recognize any of this,” I said, gesturing to the scenery passing by us rather swiftly outside the windows of the vehicle.
“Huh?”
“I’m trying to see if I remember any of this,” I told him. “I don’t really remember Oklahoma.”
“Why would you?” Isaac asked, just as confused as Taylor.
“I was born in Oklahoma. Gina didn’t bring me to Rochester until I was two,” I reminded them.
“Oh! Yeah,” Taylor said, realizing.
Isaac just got a deeply disturbed look on his face. I think with that particular statement, it just made the situation all the more real to him. I don’t doubt that that’s the last thing he wanted.
We were pretty quiet for most of the rest of the ride. Every once in a while, Taylor would point something out to me such as a place that he liked to hang out, or a house that he liked for no particular reason, the house of the guy who had the recording studio in which they recorded their independent “records.” I don’t know why, but I found it unusual that he kept referring to them as records. To me, they’re always albums or CDs or tapes. I don’t think I’ve seen a record since I was about six years old.
I felt kind of weird when he talked about the band. It was just strange to think that my twin brother was famous. Especially when I thought about how the famous band he was in was made up of him and his brothers. I think he saw my discomfort and stopped talking about it after a while.
I began to fidget a little bit as the ride began to seem endless. My hands started to play with each other and I didn’t even notice it until Isaac commented.
“Whoa, you bite your nails, don’t you?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, examining the nails on my right hand, which were jagged from being chewed on intensely the whole time on the plane down. “I should stop though. I don’t think it’s very good for a guitar player to be biting his nails.”
“You play?” he said.
“A little,” I answered, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. As said before, I don’t like talking about my mediocre guitar-playing skills in front of people who were exceptionally competent in the way of music.
He nodded but chose not to go any farther on the subject. It struck me as rather odd that these people usually started talking about certain subjects, but didn’t seem to be willing to get into a discussion about them. I wondered if it had anything to do with me.
“Isn’t this the wrong way?” Taylor asked suddenly, his eyebrows creased worriedly.
“I don’t think so,” Isaac said, his eyes searching for a road sign. About two seconds later, we passed one. “Nope, we’re on the right track. Jeez Tay! Don’t freak me out like that.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that An...Mom takes a different route from the airport. I got kind of confused there for a minute, I guess.”
The timidity he used when saying that disturbed me a little bit. But it didn’t disturb me nearly as much as the glare I saw coming from Isaac in Taylor’s direction out of the corner of my eye. I pretended for their benefit that I didn’t notice it because I knew that it wasn’t meant for me to see even though I honestly had no idea what it was for.
“Here we are,” Isaac said, pulling into the driveway of a normal-looking little house that not only looked like it wasn’t fit for “rich” people to be living in (I couldn’t help but imagine a mansion), but not nearly large enough for nine people to fit into it with some elbow room to spare.
“Wow,” I said, not knowing what else to say. The house was nicer than the one Gina and I lived in, but it wasn’t anything spectacular.
“Wow?” Taylor said.
I shrugged, too embarrassed to tell him why I had said it.
I jumped out of the truck and onto the gravel driveway. I noticed right away the three vehicles parked in the driveway besides Isaac’s truck. There was a van, which was to be expected from such a large family, and two, average, nondescript cars. I was a bit confused as to why there were two of them. Wouldn’t a normal car, a van, and Isaac’s truck be enough for everyone in the house who was old enough to drive get around without having to worry about not having a vehicle? What was the point of the second car?
Apparently Taylor saw me staring at all the cars and the questioning look that went with the stare.
“Uh, the other car is our, um, friend, Annie’s. She wanted to meet you,” he said.
Oh great. Friends. I knew that keeping Taylor from meeting anybody we knew for the first chunk of his visit to our house made him go stir crazy but I wasn’t exactly the type of person who liked to meet people I didn’t know at all while among people I didn’t know all that well in the first place. I imagined Annie as a person who would probably go on for hours about how much Taylor and I looked alike and blah blah blah blah blah like we didn’t know it already.
I took a deep breath as, bag in hand and a bowling ball in my stomach, we walked up the path to the front door. It wasn’t until the door was opened and I had passed from one side of the doorway to the other that I got a strange premonition similar to the one I had had at the Rochester airport. The one that made it seem that after this, there was no turning back.
We're only on Chapter Twelve and I'm already running out of pleads. Aaah!
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Thirteen