As Amber walked out of Beaver Brook High School, she blinked her crystal blue eyes, squinting to adjust to the bright light of a beautiful spring afternoon. Fucking A that school is dank, she thought to herself as she walked cautiously into the blinding light. It was like leaving a matinee and forgetting that it's still daytime. Thankfully, she would be free from that dungeon forever in just three weeks. Amber was a graduating senior with less than a month to go and summer vacation couldn't come fast enough. She planned to spend as much time as possible at the beach with her boyfriend, Chad, before they went off to college. She was tired of telling him about the cute bathing suits she was going to wear for him — she was ready to be in one.
Out of habit, Amber began walking in the direction of the student parking lot, before catching herself and pivoting, shoulders slumped, towards the garish yellow bus belching fumes as it idled fitfully in front of the school. For a minute, she had forgotten that her parents took the keys to her new Audi convertible. It was an early graduation gift and Amber loved cruising around town with the top down, her long, shiny black hair whipping in the wind. But while Amber's parents were well-off and generous, they were also strict. When Chad dropped her off after curfew two nights in a row, they decided she needed to go a week without the car — and without seeing Chad — as a reminder that she still needs to respect their rules.
The dejected way that she slouched onto the green plastic bench seat showed that she got the message. It was humiliating to ride the bus like a lowly freshman — especially for Amber, whose exotic beauty and cheerful demeanor made her one of the most popular girls in the senior class. But there she was, sitting on a hot, smelly bus with the rest of the losers, watching through safety windows that only open halfway while the cool kids piled into the sparkling new cars their parents bought them. Adding to her embarrassment, she could see Chad leaning against his Land Rover, looking hot in his Aviator shades, sexy stubble darkening his chiseled jawline. He had his letter jacket slung over one shoulder as he joked around with some of the other guys from the football team.
A frown crossed Amber's pretty face as she watched the boys swivel their heads in unison to watch a group of freshman cheerleaders prance off towards the line of buses. It was an unwelcome preview of all the tempting freshman girls who would surround Chad next year in college. Amber didn't have time to dwell on the thought, though, because just then the bus lurched forward and began rumbling noisily out of the driveway. Above the din, Amber could hear a familiar voice yelling for the bus to stop. Even before turning to look out the dusty rear window, she knew it was her next door neighbor, Page.
Page was a boy, as he constantly needed to inform people who were confused by the name. In the small Greek village where his parents grew up, "Page" was considered an honorable and masculine name. In Beaver Brook, he had been mocked for it since childhood. It didn't help that he worked at his father's cosmetics boutique as an apprentice perfumer — the insults virtually wrote themselves.
As she watched her neighbor frantically shuffling towards the bus, hands waving, Amber yelled to the driver that a friend of hers had been left behind. It may have been the first time in Page's painfully awkward four years at Beaver Brook High that someone had publicly referred to him that way. He was by no means part of the popular crowd. Most days, he rode the bus alone and unnoticed, silently staring at the graffiti and wads of gum that adorned the exposed metal interior. But right now, as he chased after it with an ungainly gallop, his backpack bucking wildly against his shoulders, Page was hardly unnoticed. Even the jocks stopped checking out the cheerleaders to watch the stocky young man flailing his hairy arms and legs as he ran. When the bus creaked to a stop, Chad led the gawking students in sarcastic applause.
The paunchy senior was out of breath and pouring sweat, his shirt soaked through and clinging to his protruding gut as he chugged his way through a cloud of exhaust to the bus. Chad and his buddies started a chant and it caught on all across the parking lot. "Per-fume Page-y! Per-fume Page-y!" they mocked him in a singsongy chorus. Even the bus kids joined in, cementing Perfume Pagey's status on the bottom rung of the social ladder.
The chant started to die out as he mounted the steps of the bus, but in his haste to bring down the curtain on this unwelcome moment in the spotlight, he slipped on the top platform, grasping at the bus driver's sleeve in a desperate bid to avoid disaster. Page managed to stay upright, but the graceless entry convulsed the entire bus in fits of laughter and renewed chants of "Per-fume Page-y" followed him to his seat in the back.
To his surprise, he saw the girl next door, Amber Absinthe, waiting for him, an empathetic look on her pretty young face. With her pale complexion, big luminous blue eyes and luscious black hair, Amber was a rare beauty — all the more so in the midst of the unwashed ghouls who rode the bus.
"My parents took the car away," she said before he even asked, her ruby lips twisted into a pouty frown.
Page managed a wan smile as he flopped down in a pool of sweat on the seat across from her. "I don't have that problem," he said with a self-effacing shrug. "My graduation gift was a new condenser machine for the perfumery."
Amber nodded and smiled. "Well, if it's any consolation," she said, "I bought a new fragrance at your father's store and it's my favorite. I'm wearing it now! Do you like it?"
She flipped her hair away from her neck and a burst of the fresh scent wafted through the air. Lilac Spring. Page knew that particular fragrance well — he had extracted all the oils himself. Looking at Amber swipe her hair back coquettishly, all he could think about was taking her petite body in his arms and burying his nose in her neck, inhaling her sweet aroma while kissing his way down to her small, firm tits. Years of staring at the gorgeous girl next door had made him familiar with every inch of her tight little body, but he knew she would never let him touch her. Amber had made that clear in eighth grade.
Page could remember the moment he learned how repulsive he was to Amber in excruciating detail like it happened yesterday. They had attended a co-ed birthday party where the teenage revelers, drunk on Pepsi and hormones, began to play Spin the Bottle. Eventually things escalated to a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven and boys and girls were coupling off for some exploratory groping. Page wasn't invited to play — that always stuck with him — but he lingered on the fringes of the game, hoping to worm his way into a turn, and when it happened, he gave the bottle an exuberant spin, knowing exactly where he wanted it to point. The bottle came to a rest midway between Amber and another boy, who quickly moved before there could be any suggestion that he was the chosen victim. That left Amber, sitting on her feet, her inky black hair covering the shoulder straps of her tight red party dress. He took her hand as she looked at him wide-eyed, then escorted her to the closet, closing the door on the knowing "oohs" and "ahhs" from the crowd of horny teens. What came next was seven minutes of Page's personal hell. Finally alone with a stunning girl in a dark closet, he lost all nerve, so instead of making out with the beautiful babe he had his eye on for years, when the game was designed to give him permission to do just that, he made awkward small talk. He could still remember the actual question he had asked her as they stood almost nose to nose in the closet, but the words were so painfully stilted that he blotted them from his mind. Just thinking about it now made him cringe. When he realized that he had nearly wasted his seven minutes, Page made a belated and clumsy attempt at a kiss, but ended up planting a tentative peck on Amber's cheek, tangling his hand in her hair in the process. By the time he had removed his hand, she sprung for the door, walking out to a room of full of giddy eighth graders and their prurient questions.
Everything had been fine at first as Amber deftly deflected all inquiries by insisting that a lady doesn't kiss and tell. If anything, her scrupulous sense of discretion made Page seem like an intriguing lover, a secret worth keeping. For a moment, it looked like his mortifying misadventure in the friend zone might stay hidden in the closet. But then the truth came out, with a vengeance. Someone asked Amber if Page had grabbed her tits and instead of giving her stock answer, she brushed the front of her dress and proclaimed loudly, "No! It probably looks like he did, but that's cat hair all over me, I swear!" The joke fell flat at first, until someone glanced at the course unruly hair covering Page's forearms and hands, right to the knuckle, and collapsed in a fit of delayed laughter. Soon Page felt his ears burn hot as his dark, thick body hair, something he had hardly even thought about and no one had ever mentioned, suddenly became the object of universal amusement. He felt like a hideous troll. He knew Amber was just joking, but to his fragile pubescent male ego, the wound was devastating just the same as if she was serious. More than four years later, he remembered it all. And he assumed that Amber remembered it as well, even though, in actuality, it was an offhand quip that she had never given a second thought.
Page was suddenly snapped out of his self-loathing reminisces when he realized that Amber was leaning towards him, as if expecting an answer. Oh, right, the perfume, he thought. "Yes, Spring Lilac! I think it agrees with you."
"Thanks," Amber replied, noticing that Page seemed a little distant. He was probably still upset about the chant that serenaded him on the way to the bus. Hoping to show him that she didn't approve of all that "Perfume Pagey" nonsense, she decided to ask him about work. "You and your father do such an amazing job with your seasonal scents! What are you guys cooking up for summer?"
Page gave Amber a little inside scoop on their upcoming scent of summer, but he was savvy to what was really going on here. Being the son of immigrants gave Page the keenly observant eye of an outsider, and he could read these spoiled suburban kids all too easily — even the ones, like Amber, whose beauty made it difficult to notice anything else. She didn't give a shit about their new summer scent. She just felt guilty that her asshole boyfriend had humiliated him in front of half the school, so she was trying to make it up to him by feigning an interest in the craft of perfuming. He could see that Amber was just another vapid self-centered rich cunt. She didn't really give a fuck about a fat, hairy brute like him — she just wanted to assuage his hurt feelings so that, later on, she could hook up with that douchebag Chad without feeling guilty and conflicted.
Wiping a furry backhand across his sweaty brow, Page decided that, if Amber wanted to make him feel better, the bitch was going to have to work harder than that. So he played along.
