The summer that Jordan and I worked together we worked on
retrofitting a home that time forgot from a much groovy-er era. The
house was finished in 1968 and had remained frozen in time. The
carpets were luxuriant and perfectly coiffed shag. The kitchen was
bright yellow, all of it. The linoleum, the counter tops, the
cupboards and appliances were a painful yellow that made one question
the sanity of monochromatic styling when risking daily seizures. The
roof was popcorn-ed and the walls were papered. The owner was a
chiropractor who was also a relic from 25 years before his clothes
were in perfect condition and dated. The collars were huge and he had
brightly colored polyester pants that had faced to make him look
like a real life technicolor time traveler. His slang was even
strangely dated he would refer to us as 'cats' as in, 'How are you
cats doing this morning'. We thought it was hilarious and would play
along with the temporally displaced vernacular and call him 'daddy-o'
and tell him that we can 'dig' and just other silly phrases that he
never thought were weird but we thought were brilliantly funny on our
part. We nicknamed him Polyester Pete even though his name was not
Pete, strictly for the alliteration. Crazy sixties fashions
notwithstanding the best part about Pete's house was his amazingly
hot daughter. She was incredibly and painfully cute so we spent a
good amount of time trying to creep a chance to talk to her. She was
playing hard to get in that really devious manner of the femme fatale
which employs the 'completely ignore' technique. She not only ignored
us, but it was not the deliberate and contrived ignoring that a shy,
but interested, girl might employ while stealing glances when she
thought she was undetected. No, her type of ignoring was the type one
might employ when considering a hat rack or a bookcase. As clever as
it was crafty. We were talking about her and thinking of ways to talk
to her in a natural way when we got to the part of the job where we
were putting a duct into her bedroom. We thought this would be a
great opportunity to break the ice so when we told her we needed to
work in her room for a couple of hours she said, 'fine'; gathered her
stuff and left. The flirty minx. While we were in her room Jordan was
cutting to hole for the vent I was snooping around the stuff on her
desk and happened to notice that most of the trophies and papers
seemed to be focused on her accomplishments in middle school. I was
confused because this girl looked our age not 12. I saw a paper that
actually listed her birthday and she was in fact just barely twelve
and four years is along way from 12 to sixteen, a very long way
indeed. As soon as I found out how young the girl we had been
creeping on was I started making fun of Jordan for being a pedophile
but he wouldn't believe she was only twelve until I pointed out the
school paper on her desk that proved the shocking news. For the next
couple of weeks we would tease each other about being dirty perverts.
We did not try and engage the young lady in conversation after that.
