​Fifteen

Every time I see a navy blue Volkswagen Golf I can smell the thick haze of Old Spice that choked the inside of your car. The scent was so strong it would cling to the back of my throat and my clothes long after I went home. I used to love that smell, your smell. The smell of a stereotypical teenage boy. I doubt you still drive that little car now but I still try to get a look at the driver hoping it’s you.

You had a box of ramen and stuff you had yet to move into your new house stuffed in your tiny trunk. Your floorboards were always covered in trash, usually empty deodorant spray bottles and Red Bull cans which also occupied your cup holders. Our friends and I usually didn’t sit in your car after school because of the state it was always in and we didn’t sit in it before school either because you always got there ten minutes before the bell rang.

But I’d do anything to be back in your passenger seat. I’d do anything to be sitting in the backseat of our friends’ cars. You always sat closer to me than you had to.

Oh the things I’d do to be sitting in your lap in our friend’s project car as he drove laps around the school parking lot, my head banging the ceiling every time he went over a speed bump. To be staring at you during the club meeting I invited you to just to spend thirty extra minutes with you.

Oh the things I’d do to be watching our friends hold you down on the asphalt to pluck your eyebrows and put eyeshadow on you. To try to coax you out of your bright orange hoodie because I was cold even though I really wasn’t. To be rushing to first period because we spent too long talking outside.

I would do anything to be fifteen with you. Wishing you weren’t seventeen and graduating. I’d say yes to your date proposal on Halloween eve and I’d pick up on more of your hints. Maybe then I’d make it out of the school parking lot in your navy blue Volkswagen Golf that smelled like Old Spice.