The Mixtape Era Part 2

A few days ago, I wrote about my love of the "mixtape era." I'm not huge on sharing my fiction on this page, but I thought I'd share a snippet of my 90s set YA coming of age novel, FRESH TRACKS (thanks to Aaron Starmer for the title), that's basically a novelization of my high school's "ski club." The frame work is going to be a mix tape. This is the omniscient opening to the novel. Enjoy and feel free to leave comments
Tape One: Blue Squares and Black Diamonds

Side A: Hart’s Way

1. Missed Opportunity-Hall And Oates

“Keep on missing each other

Our world's out of order”

The first time Ellie Brown and Jonah Cassatore met wasn’t supposed to be the first time they met. The first time was a bright, sunny afternoon in Blossom Meadows park in the summer of 1989. Ellie was trying her new Rollerblades out at the winding, asphalt trails at the park with her friend Cassie. They would’ve been hard to miss in the clunky boot-like skates and short shorts as they clumsily made their way around the park. Jonah and his friends were busy playing a complex, made-up sport involving tennis racquets, blue handballs and a rotating, often contradicting set of rules often made up on the spot by Jonah’s friend Chester that resembled a cross between baseball, cricket and tackle football. At one of his turns, Chester smacked the blue ball a mile. Jonah was supposed to misread it and bull into the brown haired girl just beginning to understand how to use a pair of Rollerblades. But that didn’t happen.

As if the Universe itself conspired against them, gravity seemed to lighten just in the spot where the large Jonah stood, making him far lighter on his feet than he ever had been so that instead of the ball bouncing over his head, he almost caught it. Almost. Instead he sent it careening in another direction, towards a sunbathing Rachel Michaelson, who Jonah instantly became smitten with when he saw her lying on a towel in her bathing suit.  

The second time was a cold, wet Friday night on the campus of Milstead High when Ellie’s’s high school, Giammatti High, was playing Jonah’s Milstead Titans. Ellie went to the game with her friends, piling into her beat up Bronco mostly to watch Cassie’s sort of boyfriend Johnny Camacho shred the Milstead defense and win the game. At halftime, they made their way to the Milstead side of the field for hot chocolate. The Milstead side was crowded and wet and on a slope. Somehow, the normally surefooted Ellie got turned around and disoriented, slipping on some mud and stumbling into a wet, muddy, sweaty mass of the uniformed Titans. She nearly fell when Number Seventy-Two plowed into her, nearly sending her sprawling except for a strong arm grabbing her and gently shoving her aside. Number Sixty-Seven, his painted face crammed into a white helmet, started to say something when one of his teammates barreled into him and said, “Come on, Braciole.” 

It was that close. In an abstract kind of way, they did meet. He was Sixty-Seven. She was Clumsy Girl. But really that’s not who they actually were. The rest of the night, after the game, Ellie wondered who the dark eyed Sixty-Seven was. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he had a game to play and all. And Jonah thought about the cute girl with the ski jacket. It almost made him forget about seeing Rachel Michaelson making out with a kid from another school at an after game party a week earlier. And just as Ellie was about to go to the ticket booth for a program, she heard someone call her name. She turned and her jaw dropped.. It was Roger, her sort of ex-boyfriend, in a crisp Marine’s uniform. Sixty-Seven was forgotten. 

The third time was one of those super cosmic things where it seemed like the Universe was really conspiring to get them together but couldn’t quite get its shit together. Over the course of four days of Christmas Break, there were dozens of times that they should have met. A waitress at Friendly’s smoked two cigarettes instead of one before delivering the check to Jonah and his friends, causing them to miss Ellie’s arrival. Ellie dropping a ten-dollar bill in line at the record store just as Jonah and his best friend Meechie walked by. Jonah spilled hot chocolate on his lap just as Ellie pulled up next to him at a stop light near the mall. The two of them, in the same bookstore, looking at books on the opposite side of the display shelf like in a really bad romcom.  Ellie and Jonah were literally ships in the night. Ships maybe, just maybe, not meant to meet until that cold, gray late morning on the Hart’s Way chairlift at Black Mountain.