He finally found her on Facebook, and sent her a friend request. He didn’t anticipate an answer until later in the evening, if he got one at all that day, but that didn’t stop him from opening up the messenger function anyway. He typed in her name and, despite the fact that the program would likely dump it in a weird file since they weren’t friends, and sent her a brief message. Of all the people at school, she was the only one he felt like sharing his whereabouts with. Probably because she was one of the few who wouldn’t harshly judge him for the truth.
Mental health day. Sorry to bail on you again. Maybe tomorrow at my house? Ready to get started on our A+ project.
Alec actually smiled to himself as he closed the applications and turned the screen back off, placing the phone back on his nightstand. Outside he heard the familiar sounds of the SUV returning, crunching its way down the gravel driveway. His stomach growled but he fought it down, his eyes falling shut again. He wasn’t expressly sleepy; it was just that he felt so tired still. His batteries were drained badly, and maybe it would take all day to recharge. It was really hard to tell with things like these, and there was no instruction manual on any of it. The wait and see aspect of mental illness was his least favorite part, even worse than the bad feelings sometimes. It was easy to feel down and out, but it was horrible not knowing if it would last just a couple of hours or a couple of weeks.
By the time his mother got back into the house and upstairs, Alec had drifted off again. He didn’t dream, his sleep wasn’t deep, but he was in and out. He spent the rest of his day like that, wrapped up in blankets and sheets, hiding in a nest of pillows as though they could help protect him from himself. Eventually he would get up to have dinner and take a shower, followed by another dose of medication. Mostly though he didn’t leave his fortress, the only place in the world that felt truly safe.
Ramona didn’t get the message until later that night, when she sat down at the family computer to type up her history paper. The Sanders crew shared a solitary desktop computer that was situated in a corner of the living room. The little kids got to take turns first earlier in the evening, so they could finish any homework they had before it was time to get in bed. She preferred using it later anyway, after they were all asleep and her father was snoring quietly in front of the ten o’clock news.
Normally she would have opened a word document, typed up her written pages, and called it a night. Alec’s absence from school that day, however, had put her in a different frame of mind, so she opened up the web browser instead. She had been worried when he hadn’t shown up in English class, her mind drifting back to his bruised face and the obvious story he had fed her about it. She had talked herself out of her uneasiness though, thinking that perhaps he was just running late. He hadn’t been in the cafeteria at lunch either, and after school she had only seen Bryson climbing into their mother’s SUV. On the ride home Cameron hadn’t passed her going or coming down the road either, so that meant he hadn’t been taking Alec home.
Still feeling a little worried, Ramona went to the primary source of information when you wanted to know something about a person but didn’t exactly know how to ask: Facebook.
She was surprised when she logged in to see that she had a friend request, clicking the icon and raising her eyebrows in surprise when she saw Alec’s name pop up. She had merely intended to try to view his profile, if it was at all public, but it seemed as though he had gotten there first. She quickly accepted and then made her way to his wall, overwhelmed by the messages that had been left in the past few hours. Most of them were pretty generic in her opinion, lots of ‘we missed you in class today’, but a few were genuine. She saw one from Cameron Eccoles asking him to call him, and why wasn’t he answering his texts. That was strange, and it only fueled the ball of worry that was growing in her stomach.
Ramona kept scrolling, hoping for some sort of answer, but the last update had been made about a week previous and it was just re-blog of the high school’s football schedule. Pursing her lips, and cursing herself for not having at least a crappy burner cell phone, she opened up the messaging feature and decided she might try that instead.
Lo and behold, Alec had beaten her there too. She opened up the message and read it carefully, a faint hint of relief washing over her. So he was mostly okay, and had just needed a break from life. She could understand that completely, and it was nice to just know he was at least willing to keep her in the loop. Without thinking she clicked in the box and sent a reply, fingers flying over the keyboard.
Thought maybe you had decided Linton was your guy after all and were too ashamed to show your face. Glad you’re okay. Was worried about you. Whole school was on the verge of collapse without you.
Almost immediately the three little dots popped up that signified someone was typing a reply, and she waited a good thirty seconds before minimizing the box and finally opening up the word document. She was typing up the first few lines of her report when the messenger dinged, popping up in a corner of the screen.
No way. Heathcliff forever. Verge of collapse huh? I’m sure they carried on just fine.
Ramona knew she should just work on her report so she could turn it in in the morning, but talking with Alec was far more interesting. She maximized the screen again, smiling a little as she put her fingers back to the keyboard.
Girls were weeping. Whole ordeal. Mental health day? Everything alright?
Those little dots again, blinking on the screen as Alec typed his reply back to her. It felt like it took a small eternity before anything popped up but it finally did.
Just one of those days, you know. Things are fine. I’ll be in school tomorrow. I should get to bed though, feeling pretty worn down.
Before Ramona could type back the dots appeared again, and then one last message before he signed off from the program.
“I have to remind myself to breathe, almost to remind my heart to beat!”
Ramona smiled at that, recognizing it as a line from the book that was slowly consuming their lives, and that had given them a reason to actually speak to one another. She didn’t bother to respond since he was clearly gone, and instead finally closed the program and settled in with her history report. She couldn’t focus now, though her worry had been replaced by something else. It was something better, something that made her feel light and alive.
Strangely enough what made Ramona feel more alive made Alec feel as though he were drowning. He felt heavier as he turned his phone off and set his actual alarm clock, stretching out on his stomach with his arms wrapped around his pillow. He had wanted to be more honest, to tell her the truth about how bad he was feeling. At the same turn, however, he didn’t want to worry anyone else with such a burden. He could carry the weight alone until he buckled, not wanting to take anyone else down with him. Not even someone who cared enough to ask the right questions.
Chapter Eleven: All the World's a Stage
Ramona arrived at school a little late that morning, her wild hair somehow contained into the world’s messiest ponytail and wearing a Harry Potter sweater that had some of the threads unraveling at the bottom. She hastily shoved her glasses up where they were slipping down her nose, attaching her bike hastily to the rack before she hurried inside. She had been up late finishing her history paper and making sure it printed on their ancient printer, and had then lain awake after finally getting into bed. Her brain hadn't wanted to shut off, thoughts racing a mile a minute as she tried to comprehend everything that had happened in the course of the day.
She didn't know what time it had been when she had finally drifted off, only that the six o'clock alarm had felt entirely too early and she briefly considered hitting the snooze button. She hadn't though and had instead spent the morning dragging through the house before taking a cold shower in an attempt to wake up more. The shower hadn't really done anything except make her shiver, hurrying into her clothes as quickly as she could before wolfing down a quick breakfast.
The world was in a
strange fog as she got her things situated in her locker and headed to first period, barely beating the bell. Upon her arrival she found that Alec was already there, settled into the seat beside of hers again with his things already out and ready.
“You look like hell on wheels,” he grinned as she took her own seat, rubbing her eyes beneath her glasses with her fingertips. She gave him a grunt in reply and he smirked, waggling his finger at her. “I think you're the one who might need the mental health day.”
“Just didn't get much sleep last night,” Ramona finally told him as Mrs. Bond breezed into the room, followed by the heavy smell of Gardenias. Ramona wasn't sure where the older woman got her perfume, but they needed to have a serious talk about how there was such a thing as too much of a supposedly good thing. “Had to finish a history paper, and then I just couldn't fall asleep. I feel like I'm the walking dead today.”
Alec knew better than most just how that felt, so he gave her a sympathy pat on the arm and let it drop. He'd slept his entire day and night away, but he'd had plenty of sleepless nights too. Lack of sleep always made for a rough morning, so he could imagine how fuzzy and out of it she felt. He let her be after that, watching as Mrs. Bond came to stand in front of her desk, raising her hands and speaking loudly at them.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players! They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts,” she announced, trying to be completely serious and very dramatic. It almost made Alec laugh but he contained it, clearing his throat instead and leaning his crossed arms over the top of his desk. “We are continuing with our study of famous plays by exploring the world of William Shakespeare! While most choose to study Bill's more famous works, such as Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, we are instead going to lose ourselves in the world of As You Like It!”
Ramona groaned quietly but held her opinions to herself, putting her head down so her forehead rested against her books. The dreaded out loud reading time began then, moving around the room so that everyone took a turn. When it was her go she didn't think she'd ever make it, stumbling over a few words which was very much out of character for her. She heard Cameron Eccoles snort back his laughter from the back of them room but she ignored him, continuing to read the part she was given. She was thankful when it was finally over, lowering her head again and as the person behind her took a turn. She might have actually fallen asleep but then Alec took his turn, speaking very clearly and with a little bit of conviction in his voice.
“But it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in the most humorous sadness.”
It wasn't like he was reading words off a page at all, but instead speaking from somewhere deep inside of him. Ramona sat up straight and stared at him, like she was suddenly seeing him for the very first time. How did he manage that? How did he read something with that sort of passion so that it seemed like he was speaking from experience? She was still staring as the next passage was read slowly and carefully by the guy behind him, though her attention was kept squarely on Alec.
He felt her looking and he chanced a look back at her, offering her a smile. He gestured between the two of them and mouthed to her that he wanted to meet after school to finally work together. Ramona managed a nod and a little smile of her own, knowing that her after school hours were clear until she had to get home to help with dinner. Mostly though she was thinking about how he had skipped school the day before, and how strange he had behaved when he'd canceled their work hours and had gotten into the car with his mom. She had never seen him, or anyone really, just look so sad before. He was smiling now and appeared to be his normal chipper self, but it still didn't feel right. There was something there she couldn't put her finger on, something she couldn't quite place. Or maybe she was just reading too far into things, searching for answers that didn't even exist.
For the rest of the day Ramona thought about what he'd read aloud in class, and how it had sounded from the heart instead of like just something from a play. She wrote down possible questions to ask him that didn't seem too offensive, or like she wasn't trying to dig to deep. She ended up scraping the list, trying to convince herself it wasn't her business, only to start all over again. By the time the last bell ring she had worked herself up, muttering under her breath as she made her way to her locker.
She was switching books in and out, classmates filtering past her, when someone leaned hard onto the locker beside of hers, startling her so badly she dropped some of her books. Alec bent down to pick them up, handing them over with an amused look on his face.
“You know they say that talking to yourself is one of the first signs of insanity. I'm not sure I believe that though. I mean, you know, everyone talks to themselves. It's when you start answering and the personalities don't quite mesh up that things get dicey,” he told her, waggling his eyebrows in a playful way that actually made her laugh.
A few people who were heading past gave them curious looks, and Casey King went so far as to stick out her tongue and cross her eyes. She didn't say anything in front of Alec though, she just kept moving with the herd. That's what they were, honestly, a herd of lemmings. They were all content to just shuffle along in a somewhat orderly fashion, never stepping out of line or bucking the so-called norms. That, at least, made her feel a little bit satisfied as she closed her locker, shouldering her bag.
“So, I'm meeting you at your place, right?” She asked him, heading toward the front doors now that the crowd was thinning out.
Alec hurried and caught up with her, his own messenger bag smacking against his thigh as they walked. “I was thinking I'd just come with you. You okay with the walk? I mean, I don't have a bike or anything, and I was just going to ride with Cam. He has to swing out to my place and then back to his, and since we're going to the same place it just made sense.”
Ramona stopped when they reached the doors, turning to look at him. She was surprised and she didn't try to hide it, her fingers gripping her backpack as it tried to slide down her shoulders. “You'd rather walk all the way home than catch a ride? Are you serious right now?”
“I mean, I guess I could ride on your handlebars, but I'm pretty tall and that just sounds obscenely dangerous,” Alec teased, shoving the door open. “C'mon, Sanders! We can scout out filming locations on the way! Consider it field research; all the great filmmakers do it! We can't just shoot all our segments in my basement or something!”
That same feeling of something not being quite right, of this all being one big joke at her expense, began to creep up on Ramona again. Her instinct was to not trust a guy like Alec, even after the past couple of weeks, and to naturally assume the worst about him. His smile though, which finally reached his eyes and made them shine, forced her to second guess herself. Could someone up to something totally nefarious look so genuinely pleased with himself? Not unless he was a very good actor, and she didn’t think that Alec was exactly the type to practice his bad guy monologues in front of the bathroom mirror at night.
So she found herself shrugging in agreement as she knelt down to pick her bike lock, popping it open and stuffing it into her already full book bag. “Sure, we can walk,” she nodded, wheeling her bike away from the rack with her hands on the handlebars. “We can shortcut across Mr. Lucas’s field, it’s a straight shot from the main road to our road, and it’ll put us out right near my place. It’s a lot quicker than walking all the way down to the turn off and then up. We’ll save ourselves a lot of time.”
Ramona never took that shortcut for two specific reasons. The first being that it was too rough to ride her bike across the field, the road was much easier, and the second being that you could only cut across after the season was over and the wheat was reduced to pretty much nothing When the wheat was there you spent all of our time pressing through it, and by the time you came out the other side you were hot, sweaty,
and just wishing you’d taken the path of least resistance. The last fields had been cleared now though, leaving Rust a barren land of nothing but dirt that was dotted here and there by colorful trees that were starting to turn the vibrant colors of autumn. They at least offered some beauty to the otherwise desolate looking earth, dusty gray fields visible as far as the eye could see in all directions until you hit the ribbon of highway now observable in the distance, or the impossible to believe mountain s in the opposite direction.
It was not Ramona’s favorite time of year, and the same could be said for Alec. He had gone quiet as they left the high school’s campus, crossing main street and heading out toward the wide open field that would deposit them on their one lane rural road. They stepped over the narrow ditch that separated the field from the main road, both of them hefting Ramona’s bike across to make the burden of it easier. They walked side by side, their feet sending up little puffs of dust that quickly coated their shoes. The field was on an incline, slight but still there, raising them up a few feet as they ascended until they reached the gently sloping top.
From up here the world was more visible, looking down the incline onto rural Route Four that wound its way naturally through the bleak fields. They could see the houses very clearly without the wheat to obscure the views, each one looking solitary with all that empty space between them. Ramona’s was closest to them, and then Alec’s was further away, an imposing but small figure against the horizon. There was only one other home between the two of them in that long mile, a house trailer that sat on cinder blocks with a freshly painted roof but an otherwise faded exterior. Neither of them was even sure who lived there now, or if anyone did at all.
A Crooked Mile (Rust Book 1) Page 8
