“The stars are sometimes hard to see, and it’s dark up here,” he explains, “And besides, we have to make this ruse the best our parents have ever seen, while it lasts.”
My stomach grumbles.
“I guess we should begin our romantic dinner,” I state, unwrapping my burrito.
“I suppose we should,” Marlon agrees, with a chuckle.
To fill the silence, he plays some orchestral music from his phone, with some I recognise from video games I’ve played. I begin bopping my head up and down to particularly upbeat tracks, with Marlon following along with my movements. Until the playlist begins to play an unnerving tune, and I grimace.
“Um, how about we put on something a little more calming,” I suggest, the violent strings of the piece sending shivers up my spine.
“Why, are you a scaredy-cat?” Marlon teases quite childishly.
I roll my eyes.
“Well,yes,if you’re out here playing background music for a murderer while we’re out here in the middle of the woods.”
“Um, this murderer background track is from one of my favourite video games, thank you very much,” Marlon retorts.
He holds up the phone for me to see, and the name of the tune tells me it’s from the horror game Until Dawn. The album cover displays a skull superimposed in an hourglass, and my stomach jumps unnervingly. I reach forward to skip the track, when a notification appears atop his screen, the ping resonating across the car.
It’s a text. From Christine.
“I - uh,” I motion toward the screen, cheeks heating. Marlon swivels the phone, and the moment his eyes land on the text, his shoulders tense.
The music stops, and an awkward pause balloons in the air between us, the silence in the car only raptured by the rapidtap, tap, tapof the digital keyboard. The desire to leave the car, to give Marlon some space seizes me, but I stay.
A sound, caught between a sigh and a groan escapes his throat. This Marlon, this flustered, nervous Marlon is one I’ve rarely ever seen, one I only glimpsed a few times when Tita Regina would chastise him when we were kids.
“Marlon?” I ask, uncertain.
Constellations from the projector blanket his stony expression. It’s jarring, how an emotionless Marlon fazes me more than if he were to have his unbearable smirk right now. I wish he did.
“Well, okay look, some parts of this story might sound cheesy and embarrassing so promise me you won’t laugh,” he says.
While usually I’d retort with a snarky reply, proclaiming I couldn’t make any such promises, something about the genuinity of Marlon’s eyes makes me bite my tongue. Softens the hard spot for him in my chest that’s otherwise always riddled with annoyance.
“Of course,” I say. Then, to lighten the mood a little, I add, “Besides, cheesy and embarrassing is my thing, remember?”
Marlon shifts a little in his seat.
“Okay so, obviously you know all about Christine. I’m not sure if you know this, but she’s my first ever girlfriend. Well,was,” he begins, and reaches up to scratch at his earlobe. “Usually, how it goes, is I would be interested in a girl. We would chat, we would go out for like, a week or something. But there’d be no commitment, nothing on a deeper level you know?”
Back then, I remember hearing the general playground gossip about Marlon and his new girl every month or so.
He and I didn’t attend the same school, but our cohorts were mutuals and so news of Marlon would always travel over to me.
He was also quite popular, unsurprisingly, and tiptoed that reputation of being a player, simply because of his numerous situationships. I don’t think he’s a heartbreaker though. It always sounded like mutual casualness.
That’s the difference between him and I. Regardless of how our families acted with the both of us, he still went ahead and did what he wanted.Datedwhoever he wanted, even if it were simple high-school relationships.
“It was at about Year 12 that, I guess, I wanted to feel a little more than just casual. It’s not like I swore off being in real relationships, it just never happened for me. So I decided, maybe it was time I actually like, try being a boyfriend for once. Try committing. Christine was someone who I’d actually been quite interested in and well, I thought why not, you know?”
I observe as Marlon fiddles with the steering wheel, this thumb creating indents in the foam cover.
“We dated for a year, and obviously you know this part but we broke up, and it was because she told me she believed I wasn’t boyfriend-material. She didn’t feel I knew how to be one. Both our family’s didn’t help with that one either, because she definitely heard all of that.”
He exhales sharply, and I wait a moment for him to continue. He doesn’t.
