Missed the first parts of Conner’s story? Catch up with them below:
One night, not long after the band practice and during one of our parking lot breaks, Erin, Aurora, and I were heading to my car, chatting about boys and other plans for the month. Reece hadn’t joined us that night because she had to work early the next morning.
Aurora’s phone rang, halting our conversation. We all stopped and leaned against the trunk of my car.
“It’s Conner,” she announced before answering.
I felt a quick twinge of jealousy, green and bubbly, rising just below the surface of my skin; I hadn’t spoken to him since the practice. But it quickly became clear that he hadn’t called Aurora to chat; he was asking if she could relay a message to someone inside, someone Erin and I didn’t know, because he wasn’t going to be attending that night’s show. The green bubbles dissipated as the gray clouds of disappointment formed.
“I don’t think they’re here yet,” Aurora told him. “But I’ll let them know when I see them. You’re welcome.”
“Bye, Conner!” Erin yelled into the phone. Aurora paused instead of hanging up.
“Yeah, that was Erin,” she smiled into the cell. “Yeah, Rachel’s here.”
My eyes lifted from the ground and met Aurora’s.
“Okay, I’ll tell her in a sec,” she continued, looking back at me and leaning closer to us.
As she did, Erin and I could hear Conner on the line.
“No, tell her now,” we heard. “I’m serious. Right now.”
“Okay!” Aurora answered in mock annoyance. “He said he doesn’t hate you like you hate him,” she stated.
“Tell her I love her,” Conner continued loudly.
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Erin smacked me several times in the arm and opened her mouth in a silent scream, only expressing outwardly how I was feeling inwardly.
“Aww,” I said, because the ability to form coherent words had escaped me. I knew to take the word “love” as lightly as I had meant the word “hate,” but to hear it was still intoxicating.
“Tell him I don’t really hate him,” I said.
“Did you hear that?” she said, tired of being the messenger.
“Good,” she snapped before ending the call.
Erin opened her mouth to speak as we headed into my car, but I cut her off.
“Don’t say anything!” I ordered. She let her face fall into a disappointed frown.
“Why?”
“Because he has a girlfriend,” I reminded them both. Three doors smacked the frame as I turned the ignition halfway so we could roll down the windows, then turned it off again.
“I dunno, Rachel,” Aurora started. “He did say he loves you,” she sang.
“We all know he didn’t mean that seriously,” I turned to them. Erin was to my right, and Aurora was sitting in the back, sipping a drink she’d left in my car, blue liquid floating up to her lips. “I refuse to get my hopes up. Besides,” I continued, knowing Erin was already prepared with a counterargument. “If I were his girlfriend, I wouldn’t want some chick fawning over my boyfriend.”
It seemed a silly thing for me to have said, knowing how much fawning I was actually doing, but I had backed off a lot since I found out Conner was no longer single, made easier by the distraction of the return of the school year.
A voice carried its way through my window, halting my process of trying to convince myself I wasn’t fawning.
“Hello.”
Again, my conversation was interrupted by a guy outside my window with a pick-up truck. He and a couple of friends were hanging out at a truck parked near us, with no cars in between. He was standing next to it, a cigarette resting in his fingers. Aurora quietly pointed out that he had been staring at me.
“Hi,” I said, because what else was I supposed to say?
“Who are you?” he asked, brown eyes curious, taking another hit from his cigarette. I thought smoking was gross, but I couldn’t help thinking how hot it was when guys exhaled the smoke from between their lips.
I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable enough to give him my name yet, so I replied, “Some chick sitting in her car.” Behind me, I heard Aurora choke over her slushee.
“So, are you single, or should I just not even bother?” he asked. If I had a slushee, that is when I would have choked. Instead, I just stared ahead, blinking, taken aback.
“Yeah, she’s single!” Erin yelled out, leaning across the gear shift, her long hair dangling low as she twisted to look out at him. I shot her a look that told her not to egg him on.
“So, what’s your name?” he asked again, his eyes piercing me, patient.
“Rachel,” I admitted, trying to sound confident, not sure that I was succeeding.
“I’m Mike,” he shared, with another luxurious exhale of smoke.
“She’s seventeen!” Erin proclaimed, suddenly protective. I was going to mention this myself. These guys looked a little older, and I often was mistaken for being older than a high school student, even before I was in high school. I always assumed it was because I was unattractive, somehow ugly and appearing to have aged well beyond my years.
“That’s okay,” he replied, “I’m twenty.”
We were silent, wide-eyed and astounded that he wasn’t turned off by my age. Not many college-year guys want to talk to girls still in high school. But for the three teenage girls in the car that night, that didn’t matter two shits. The Shy One had sparked the interest of a twenty-year-old.
“I‘ve seen you here before,” he continued. Still not understanding that my ethnicity in this mid-Texas town made me slightly more recognizable than the average girl, I wondered why this was becoming a conversational pattern.
“Oh really?” I asked, my standard befuddlement settling on my face. Erin and Aurora sat back, enjoying the show. They were very aware how out of my comfort zone I was, talking to yet another strange, attractive guy that recognized me but whom I didn’t know. I did not remember previously seeing this guy, so I didn’t say anything more.
“So, do you come to these shows a lot?”
Unable to handle the nonchalance of this guy, Erin leaned out of the window on her side of my car and yelled out, “Rachel’s getting hit on!” to the open air. A few of the other patrons further down the lot turned their heads.
“Yeah, she’s here all the time,” Aurora shouted from the backseat, unable to keep quiet anymore, ignoring the warning look that she had seen me give to Erin.
“Okay,” he smiled. “If I see you again, can I talk to you?”
What is happening?
I was completely focused on Conner, and I didn’t even really think I stood a chance with him.
Where did this guy come from?
I took a breath.
“If you see me again, talk to me,” I said, turning to look out of the window at him. He waited intently, raising his cigarette to his lips, plush and pink. “If you don’t…then I’m sorry,” I finished with a shrug and a smile.
“Well played,” Aurora whispered behind me.
“Okay,” he said, flicking the dead butt into the gravel. “I hope I see you next time, so I can talk to you.”
He grinned, winked at me, then turned and followed his buddies into the venue.
“What the fuck just happened?” I said, turning to my friends.
“Conner who?” Aurora asked.
Aurora and Erin spent the night at my house that night, and the next morning, we were awoken by my landline ringing. My parents were out, both working, although it was a Saturday. Not an early riser, I grumbled in my spot on the couch—we had all slept in my living room—and grappled for the cordless handset of my home phone.
“Hello?” I said with a morning rasp.
“Rachel? It’s Conner. Is Aurora there? She wasn’t answering her cell.”
The fuck is this injustice?
Conner called my house on a Saturday morning, and it wasn’t even to talk to me. Luckily, I was still too groggy to comprehend that I cared.
“Yeah, hold on,” I told him. “Aurora, it’s for you. It’s Conner,” I said, and nudged her awake with the butt of the phone. She was sleeping on the opposite end of the couch, and Erin was sprawled on the floor among layers of silkily soft faux-mink blankets that my dad had acquired during his year in Korea. I could see her mop of brown hair stirring beneath the lump of minks.
“Ugghhhhh whyyy,” Aurora protested, refusing to open her eyes.
“I don’t know,” I spat bitterly, overcome by the rude awakening of the morning.
I nudged her one last time with the phone, and she snatched it from me. I then made my way to the bathroom, knowing that we were now all up for the day.
Conner had called to follow up with Aurora about whatever message she had relayed the night before. By the time I had opened the bathroom door and started brushing my teeth, Aurora was leaning against the doorway in the hall. She and Conner had moved along in the conversation and were talking about the show he missed.
Overhearing this, the neurons fired in my brain, and I was flooded with memories from the previous night. Rinsing and spitting out my mouthful of toothpaste, I turned to Aurora, stimulated by the memory.
“I got hit on!” I whispered to her with a grin, my eyes widened with wonder that it had actually happened, then turned back to the mirror to wash my face.
“Yeah, you did!” Aurora yelled, never trying to be discreet.
“What?” Conner asked on the other side.
“Rachel got hit on by a twenty-year-old guy at the show last night,” Aurora told him. I didn’t say anything, but I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. I quickly splashed them with cold water.
Aurora suddenly turned to me, covering the microphone with her hand, eyebrows raised. “He just said, ‘What? We can’t have that!” she reported. She put the speaker to my ear next to hers.
“Who was he?” he probed. “I’ll find him and kill him.”
I looked at her, puzzled, as I grabbed a towel. “Why would he care?” I asked her quietly.
“Why do you care?” she interrogated accusingly into the phone. I rested my face on my towel a little longer than necessary. Aurora’s forwardness always took me a little aback.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he replied so loudly that I could hear.
“What’s goin on?” Erin asked grudgingly, having wandered up to us in the hallway, hair askew. Aurora and I exchanged looks.
Does Conner care about me?
📝 Journal Prompts for “The Hit”
🎼 Playlist for “The Hit”
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