Blue Doors

Seth Harkins

ENGL 050

January 14, 2010

Blue Doors

"But goats are cool," Cathy sobbed, the silent form of Goat clenched dearly to her chest. The phrase was her talisman against rejection, against sadness. It was not working as well as she wished it would.

Phil Golding sat next to her. He was a whole seven months older than her. Seven months and twelve days, to be precise. He usually just scrunched his nose and squinted his eyes, or scratched his hair that looked like the butt of a chicken, but as they sat on the bus that day en route home, he did something very odd. He talked. "Goats aren't cool, Cathy."

Of course they aren't, she told herself. Goats can't be cool. They're smelly and eat weird things and stand outside when it's wet. But goats have earrings, those big colored tags sticking from their ears on the farm, and cool girls have earrings, too. Shouldn't goats be cool?

Cathy sniffled and wiped her nose dry with the back of her hand, her candy bracelet withered down to an elastic string that caught some stray snot. "I wanted to show them something cool. I'm cool, right?"

Phil looked at her without expression for a moment, and then shook his head. "Nah, salamanders are cool. Salamanders and basketball."

This had surprised Cathy. Had she been mislead all along by her friends? Perhaps this would explain why everyone laughed at her when she showed them her stuffed goat. She gazed in to her goat's eyes, her only friend in the world, wondering whether it could play basketball or not.

"But I don't have a salamander," Phil continued. "And I'm not good at basketball."

"I don't have earrings," Cathy confessed. "And Goat doesn't, either."

Phil put out his hand, which looked white and pasty and had band-aids on its digits. "Can I see it?"

Cathy's stomach got all tight and weird inside. She didn't want to give him Goat. Goat was special to her. But in the end, mostly because he kept looking at her with his hand out, she gave in. Hugging Goat tightly, she reached out and set it in his pasty hand.

Phil brought it up to his face.

"Don't do anything dumb to Goat," she warned.

"I'm not gonna do anything dumb to your dumb goat."

He examined it for a while, turning it left and right, up and down. She felt her pulse quickening as the street signs flew by, afraid that when she had to get off, Phil wouldn't give it back and the mean bus lady would say nasty things to her until she left.

Finally, he handed it back to her, and as if by a whim, he said, "Goat's cool now. Don't worry."

A knot in Cathy's stomach unraveled. "But how do you know that?" she asked.

He looked outside, squishing beads of condensation on the window. "Because blue doors are cool."

The knot in Cathy's stomach was replaced by a fizzy, hot feeling. She scrunched her face up like a squished sponge. "That's stupid. It doesn't make any sense."

"Basketball doesn't make any sense to me but it's cool," he said.

Cathy frowned a little more, but then she thought about it and realized it was true. She didn't know anything about basketball, either, and it was cool. Then she smiled. "Phil, you're cool."

"I know."

When the bus stopped and Cathy was walking up the icy hill, past the pasture with its goats to her pasty white house with its blue door and its mailbox with a plastic salamander clamped to it, she found herself feeling much, much better.