The Edifice

“Edifice?” she said. “I’m your edifice? Noah, do you even know what that means?”

He shrugged his shoulders so far they reached the tips of his earlobes, the lobes she teased him about the other day, saying they were “too crinkly”. When his shoulders moved, the bright orange football jersey he wore exposed the pink skin beneath it. She had cautioned him to wear a shirt underneath the jersey when he wore it on Fridays – the one day of the week football players were supposed to wear their uniforms proudly to school – but he had refused, insisting in wearing the garment with its tiny holes to school, where he was bound to get cold in the brisk fall air.

Noah’s toe drew circles in the dirt as they waited with the other students for the bus. The morning dew combined with the dirt and collected on the top of his shoe. She’d told him before how ridiculous this looked.

“A grown man,” she said, “playing in the dirt,” and yet he continued toeing the ground, refusing to look up at her

“An ‘edifice’ Noah, is a building,” she announced, shifting the pile of school books she carried around from one hip to the other. “You can’t call someone a building. I’m not like a brick wall or something.”

Noah stopped his concentric circling and looked up at this creature who had been calling herself his girlfriend.

“I’m not going to be able to take you to Homecoming after all." he said. "I’m going to ask Honey, instead.” 

And with that, the tension he'd been feeling for weeks suddenly dissipated; the formidable wall, the one he’d been slamming into for months, crumbled before him.