We walked out of the apartment building and turned right. We walked on some pretty ordinary gray tiles to the little shop a little further but still in our building (it was a long building). The shop was far from being a supermarket, but it was red, and we liked that. It was only red on outside, but we still called it “the red place.” We went in and she—damn, she truly is a she—chose a one-liter box of apple juice. She bought it with her own money, and I stood by her side, embarrassed. She pointed to the door with her head, and we left, descending down the stairs back to our ordinary tiles.
There were small, square gardens in front of the building. They were very low with only grass in them and nothing more intriguing, and their fences were very low, reaching up to our knees. Those fences were painted black by I don’t know whom, but it was a nice, solid black, and it looked good on the grassy green, although a fractured tile here and there ruined their authority. Lilitt and I drank our juice; of course, I let her drink more, I had to be a gentleman. Damn I hadn’t had to be a gentleman until fifteen minutes ago because I thought she was one too. How could have I made such a crucial mistake, I thought; maybe, had I known she was a girl all the time, I wouldn’t have started playing with her at all, so now I wouldn’t have to drink this apple juice. I would have still been reading in my room and arguing yet ignoring the boys under my window. Although this seemed like a better option, my guts rebelled against it. That would have meant to elevator journeys, they said, and I knew what they meant.
I read her sentences while she drank the better part of the juice. I took out my blue pen, the one the teacher had given me for writing very beautifully. Of course, that made the rest of the section angry, but that wasn’t enough for me to pretend I didn’t want or care about the reward. Because, come on, how does anyone give you a free blue pen? I stood thinking over Lilitt’s five sentences. I underlined some words, maybe even drew circles around them, and connected them with jiggling arrows. The direction of the association, or which brought about which, was the hardest task of all, so I should have just drawn lines, but the damage was already done: I had drawn arrows. I can’t just abandon a decision I’ve made because it bugs me so much I feel I’m going to burst any moment now. But I had to abandon one thing, and that was Lilitt. Don’t be surprised, we all know that a friendship between a girl and a boy at the age of slowly entering puberty is not a good idea for both of our systems. I repeated my decision to myself every morning for about a month, and then I began avoiding Lilitt. I tried to do it slowly, methodically, gently, and I thought I was succeeding, but to her I may have stumbled like an elephant in a glass shop because she stopped contacting me in any way only a few days later.
That was it for the elevator journeys. I felt a little hole, sometimes a big hole, in my chest or throat, depending on whether stupid tears welled up inside my eyes. Please don’t say that to Lilitt, though; I’ll probably get so embarrassed that I won’t talk to her for a year, although we are on good, quite good and hopefully even better in the future, terms now.
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