LINES BOYS DRAW

ALAN WESTBROOK

There was a boy on my bus home from school. He was a Pentecostal. We sat together, and I would draw pictures for him. Trees, mostly, or other

things I knew from memory. He kept them folded in his notebook. He never told me why he liked them, and I never asked. He simply kept them in their

place, just before the math notes. My father got a different job with the city, and we moved just before the leaves fell, which meant I was close enough

to walk to school. When I told him, I couldn't look him in the eye. I don’t know why. I find ballast on the whittled cross, bowed at his collarbone, the

leather cord arthritic and graceless from weather and sweat. He said if I stopped riding the bus, he would stop talking to me, and we wouldn't be

friends anymore. I set my jaw and refused to blink; he did the same—the hard lines of youth. I did, and we weren't, and time passed. I grew my hair out

and joined the track team. He kept his pocket tees tucked into stiff blue jeans, receding to the company of church and kin. We never spoke again, and I

walked to school every day, even when it rained.