Later on that week, I got a phone call from my own mother and stepdad, who lived literally down the street from my grandparents.  I didn’t live with them because I just couldn’t…but that’s another book altogether.  We usually spent our weekends together, and that weekend they were going to a car show in Pennsylvania and wanted me to come.  I agreed wholeheartedly, not because I like cars, but because there was a possibility that Ian might be able to meet me there.  I called him up and asked him if he would like to go to it and meet me there face to face.  He said he would definitely try but he wasn’t sure if he could get his car back by that Saturday since his mom and stepdad were pretty pissed off at him at the moment.  If he could, he would give me a call Saturday morning before we left and would tell me where to meet him exactly.  I talked to him everyday, and when Saturday morning came and went with no phone call, I knew I wouldn’t be able to see him.  I went to the car show that morning and spent the weekend at an old friend’s house down the shore.  I got back Sunday night, and was surprised to see that there were no messages from him.  In fact, it seemed that Ian hadn’t tried to contact me since Friday night, which seemed very strange.  I called but his cell phone had gone right to voicemail.  It was odd, because he never left his cell phone off in case some potential client called him at a weird hour.  He even left it on after he went to sleep.  I didn’t think much of it, but when I tried to call him again on Monday there was no answer again.  He didn’t sign online, he didn’t answer his phone, and he didn’t call me at all that day, which was even stranger still.            

   By Monday evening I felt horrible, until he IM’d me out of the blue, acting like nothing had happened.  I questioned him about where he had been for the past four days, and he explained that he had stayed with a friend because he just needed a break from his family for a little while, but everything had smoothed itself over.  In fact, he wanted to know if he could pick me up that night and take me out on a date.  Of course I said yes, and in an overwhelming excitement I hurried as fast as I could to get ready in two hours.  He said he’d be at my house at 9 pm, which was a little more than an hour away.  I was ready, and 9 pm came and went, so I called and he said he had to make a few stops but he’d be leaving for my house in a half an hour.  When he was younger, he had worked at an auto body shop that was literally down the street from my house.  I gave him a quick run down that my street was a few blocks from The Car Stop and he assured me that he would be at my front door as soon as he possibly could.  At 10 pm he called me to tell me that he was starting to make his way down 78 East and would be about an hour.  By 11 pm my grandparents did not want me to go out anymore, and told me this guy was a deadbeat for making me wait so long.  He finally showed up at around 11:30 pm in a gold 2005 Yukon.  I could catch a quick glimpse from the window and saw that he’d shaved.  He came out of the truck and my first thought was astonishment at how tall he actually was.  I knew he was a foot taller than me but actually seeing it in real life is different.  He looked at me with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and half smiled.  He apologized for being late but there was a lot of traffic on 78 because of construction.  He flicked the cigarette off to the side and climbed up the stairs to my front porch, asking to use my bathroom.  I opened the door for him and introduced him to my grandparents, who at first had given an evil eye to him, but had to smile after he started talking.  He apologized again and again for the traffic he was not expecting and that they were sure to know it would not happen to their granddaughter again.  He used my bathroom, talked for a short while longer, and then with the explanation that we were going to get a cup of coffee at the diner, we walked out the front door together and into the SUV.              

     When I sat in the passenger’s seat, I was a little huffy that I couldn’t stay out as late as I had wanted to and he had to laugh at me.              

     “You really are just like a kid,” he smiled.  My temper tantrum was not willing to exclude anyone at the moment, not even him.           

     “Why do you say that?” I asked him snidely.           

     “Don’t worry that you can’t stay out late…I mean they just care about you is all.  It’s actually kinda cute.  We’ll go get something to eat and bring it back here so that way they don’t worry about us,” he promised me.  He even melted my own rising anger; it was such a genuinely sincere thing to say to someone.  Then he smiled at me.  “Open up the console.”                

     “What?” I asked.           

     “Just open it, I got a present for you,” he laughed.  I looked at him weird and opened the armrest like he’d told me to.  In it was a huge brick of weed, almost more than I’d ever seen at one time, packed tightly in saran wrap.  He drove off to a church that had been on the corner of the street next to mine, and pulled into the parking lot.  He pulled out some weed from a hole in the corner that had been worn through and started to break it up.  It was only at that moment that I realized he really did only have three fingers on his left hand.  I hadn’t even noticed it yet, and even after I did, it didn’t matter to me.  He was an amazing person, probably the most amazing person I’d met to date, and I was anything but shallow, especially with him.  He looked at me as I watched him roll a joint with incredible ease.  He started to ramble on about hydroponic Ithaca and church parking lots as the best place to roll.  In no time he was done, and drove off lighting it for me.  He asked me to point him to the closest drive through ATM, and we smoked as we got there.  He pulled up and got $500 out of the machine because he ‘never liked to have less than $200 on him at a time’.  By then the joint was gone, and we went to Dunkin Donuts, where he treated me to coffee and a muffin.  We drove back to my house, high as a couple of kites, walked through my house quickly and sat on the back deck.             

     He told me that he was M.I.A for the past couple of days because he had gone on a drug binge because things were just pretty shitty lately.  I listened quietly and intently as I usually did, since he loved to talk a lot.  We smoked some more and stared out at the night sky, just talking.  We were quiet for a long time, then he looked at me.            

     “Hey, Kiddo, have you ever just wanted to run away?” he asked me in all seriousness.           

     “What do you mean, ‘just run away’?” I retorted.           

      “Well, sometimes I just think about leaving this whole life and starting over someplace new.  Starting over seems like such a great idea to me sometimes.  I want to go somewhere where nobody knows me, I don’t have a history, and people can’t assume things about me.  I want to go to that place and just start my life all over again.  Haven’t you ever felt that way?” he looked at me earnestly, anticipating my answer.  I felt choked up.  How bad could this guy’s life be if he wanted to just take up and leave at any moment?  I personally had never thought about it before, but starting over did seem to have its own sense of adventure and freedom to it.  I looked at him and nodded.           

     “It would be nice if I could do it one day, but not today,” I laughed.           

       He laughed along with me, “No, Kiddo, definitely not today.”  He looked at me then with another half smile on his face.  “Don’t look, I’m gonna make you a present.”  We spoke for a while longer, while he worked hard on something that had to do with a lot of weed and a few papers, but he still wouldn’t let me look.  He took out his cigarette pack when he was done and took the cellophane off of it.  He started to throw weed into the cellophane by the gram and stopped when I asked him what he was doing.           

      “I’m making you a doggy bag to take home with you, silly,” he laughed.  There was already about an 1/8th of weed in there, and he kept throwing more and more in there.  When there was almost a quarter ounce he stopped and asked me if that was enough or if I wanted more.             

     “You know I don’t have any money, right?” I asked him tentatively.           

     “Yeah I know you don’t,” he looked at me dead in the eye.           

     “I don’t know how you wanted me to pay you because, no offense, but I just met you and I really don’t feel comfortable…” I started.           

     He interrupted me in the middle of my sentence, “No, no, no, no.  I don’t want anything from you for this.  Think of it as a peace offering.  To me, this isn’t that much weed, so I’m giving you this too for when you wake up tomorrow morning.”  He handed me the present he’d been working on for the past hour or so. It was a spliff with about 6 grams rolled in it.  He handed it to me in an empty cigarette pack, along with the completely filled cellophane wrapper that he burned shut.  “I should get going anyway its like 2 am and it’s gonna take another hour or so for me to get home,” he explained, standing up.           

     “I’ll walk you to your car,” I said, standing with him.  We walked around the side of my house so not to wake any one inside and stood at his car.  I wanted him to kiss me, but I was way too shy to make the first move so I just stalled for as long as I could.  We talked about absolutely nothing for another 45 minutes while we stood leaning against his car.  When finally he did have to go, he offered me a very awkward ass-out hug and promised to call me sometime.  I walked back into my house with a heavy heart, completely convinced that I wasn’t going to be seeing him again.  I sighed, walked upstairs, and promised myself to not think about the heartache until it eventually went away.