Work Text:
The midday sun flooded the school courtyard, making the still-warm paving stones shine. Our little group had already formed a tight circle, laughter and secrets mixing in the hot air, when Alejandro appeared.
He walked over a little too quickly, as if he were afraid of missing something. His eyes stopped on me right away. A wide smile lit up his face.
— You’re gorgeous in that cropi topi.
The sentence fell right in the middle of us, clear, enthusiastic, and completely twisted.
Half a second of silence. Then the explosion. Some people burst out laughing without restraint. Others turned away discreetly, biting their lips so they wouldn’t hurt his feelings, and walked off under the pretext of going to get something. Me, I stayed frozen, my heart beating a little too hard.
Alejandro was on a scholarship. His family had never been able to afford private lessons for him, let alone English. Foreign words always came out a little sideways, as if they slid across his tongue before finding their place. “Crop top” had become “cropi topi” from the very first day, and he pronounced it with disarming conviction, stressing every syllable as if it were a magic word.
I could have corrected him. A simple “It’s crop top, you know…” would have been enough. But I never did.
Because those two words, coming out of his mouth, had become mine. They sounded softer, more absurd, more precious than the correct version. They tasted like something unique, something that belonged only to us.
Every time I arrived at school in a crop top, I already knew: Alejandro would show up, eyes shining, and give me his “cropi topi” with that same slightly awkward pride. And every time, my face lit up in spite of myself. All the fatigue of the week, all the little tensions, everything disappeared at once. As if those two ridiculous words had the power to set the world right again.
So if anyone asked me why I wore short tops more and more often…
I could answer that it was for fashion, for the heat, for any credible reason.
But that would be the biggest lie of my life.
The truth was simple: while putting on my crop top in the morning, I was already waiting for the exact moment when Alejandro would say once again, in a voice a little too loud and perfectly wrong:
— You’re gorgeous in that cropi topi.
The End.