It Was Almost a Mix for Chloe

by B.W. Silver

The risk of making a mix tape was that you could never guarantee what another person listening to it was going to hear. If you clearly heard “sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows” inevitably, the person you were playing it for was going to hear “you are a rain cloud and I hate you.” Conversely, if you turned up the volume full blast during the line “I chose to feel it and you couldn’t choose,” they will insist that the line is “I chose you because you clearly feel the same things I do.” Which would just lead to all kinds of trouble. These thoughts, and a whole penny jar of others, clinked through his head while his feet jiggled absently on the bus stop bench. The dirt beneath his cheap sneakers was already plowed into neat rows, and most of the chalkboard green paint within reach of his fingers was peeled off. And still he was waiting, waiting, waiting, mix tape in his hands and self-doubt drooling in his lap. Lovely.

He still didn’t have a name for it: A Happy Day Mix. Songs to Smile to. A Mix for Chloe. You didn’t hear about many girls named Chloe down in the South. At least not outside of college towns where they were all named Chloe or Regina or Suzie. He didn’t see himself ever dating a Suzie. But Chloe… She came in every Tuesday between Psychology and Spinning Class, occasionally abandoning faded jeans in the middle of the aisles. He decided she might be worth listening to when she admitted to stealing her dad’s tapes and recording radio songs off of them when she was 12. Then she rose a notch on mentioning she’d also read High Fidelity; they’d spent more than a few hours arguing about mix tape aesthetics: getting all the songs at the same volume or starting soft then getting louder, white noise before static or the grading of ambient music into blaring anthems. He’d been a whole 10 minutes late coming off his lunch break and three women were huffing and puffing about trying to find ‘Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife.” It was a second-hand bookstore, they didn’t sell it.  The women wanted it ordered, and threatened to make a complaint when he said the bookstore didn’t really do that sort of thing.  He hadn’t really cared since he was memorizing Chloe’s smirk out of the corner of his eye.

CD’s were cheap and he didn’t care about burning the latest Scissor Sisters for her. She’d made a comment that almost all of her music was snatched from other people. “So it turns out that my taste in music is just bits and pieces of everybody else’s.” He didn’t see anything wrong with that. In fact, he’d traded CDs with many friends, girlfriends, people on long bus rides. He’d promised to burn some new songs for her, which made him think about which groups she’d like. That idea had immediately been deposed by one of creating a CD with songs she was sure to like, immediately hijacked by the idea of creating a mixtape with specific songs suited to her general personality. He remembered wondering what songs went with a personality equivalent to a waterfall: thoughts and ideas and words flowing unendingly into a pool of clear, liquid fascination. Consequently, there were more than a few waterfall songs on the tape.

The bus finally crawled up to his stop, snails making faces as they zoomed past and the driver chewing his lips in contemplation before opening the door.   The boy jumped through promptly scraping his ankles against the steps and stumbling blindly through the aisle. The bus lurched forward as his bones dumped themselves into an open seat…and he waited then for the behemoth to crawl its way to the small bookstore he worked at in order to pay for his CDs and tapes. He would then wait for the hours to tiptoe past him, glaring at each minute screaming at them to please just hurry up.

Of course there is no way of telling what Chloe’s reaction would be; the plan was to slip the tape into her backpack. He wiped his sleeve across his face, rubbing at sweat that was probably imagined but gave him something to do with his hands. Maybe she would smile at it, maybe she would really like it, or maybe she would tell him it was a bunch of sappy, overly sentimental poppycock and roll her ridiculously pretty eyes at him. Did people even use the word poppycock still? He did, but not out loud. He’d almost called the tape ‘Poppycock’, instead electing to stick a bunch of Tinkerbelle stickers on it. Cause she liked Tinkerbelle. And he wanted her to know that he’d noticed; that he paid attention. Just… not without actually telling her.

It was Tuesday and by the time the clock finally found where the ’3′ and the ’6′ were, the ink on the label was bleeding from being rubbed against his palms over and over and over.  Grey Earl tea gone cold, reheated and gone cold again. There was the chance that she’d love it; she ought to since he’d made it perfect. Every pitch, every lyric, every order and reorder of the songs done with her very small, slightly pointed ears in mind. And she would know exactly half of them, and the other half she’d spend her time looking up. Of course then he would tell her the really obscure ones, maybe over an actual meal or outside of the four mismatched walls, three of them painted red and the fourth an awful looking rust color.

And then she finally came in….and he slouched in with her. Tall, dark, and musty. Crushed velvet coat of some sort so tight it looked like he’d been poured into it, thin stick legs teetering in brown pants an 8 year old probably couldn’t wear. Snotty. Green knit sweater over a crooked brown tie made out of something fuzzy. Disgusting.  Most importantly, his skinny little arm was wrapped snuggly around Chloe’s waist, beaky white nose nestled in Chloe’s clean, untouchable hair. There was no mistaking the familiarity of that nose with that hair. The tape clattered to the counter, and suddenly it wasn’t so important if he didn’t have a name for it yet. Ever.

Risky business making mixtapes; sometimes they turned out to be a great success, and sometimes they turned out to be a waste of ribbon and heart.

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