On the Edge

by Third Cousins

  “Do I look like the kind of girl who wants to watch people living by the beach?” Sophie asked dryly, before tilting her glasses back up, so that I couldn’t tell where she was looking. Suddenly I felt under pressure. I didn’t want to look at her in case she caught me staring. I didn’t want to look away, though, because I couldn’t be sure whether or not she was actually looking at me.

  “We could go for a drink?”

  “Do you have a fake ID?”

  “Um, no. I could get one though. I know a dude who makes them.”

  “If you introduce me to the guy, then I’ll go out for a drink with you,” Sophie bargained.

  Dillan squinted. It looked like whatever he was thinking was causing him some pain. “You know, I’ve got loads of girls who want to go out with me,” he threw his shoulders back a bit, so his chest looked wider. I could tell that Sophie’s bargaining had hurt the somewhat fragile and over-inflated pride that he carried with him.

  “Then go out with one of them,” Sophie shrugged.

  Dillan waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t. She just gently put her head against the trunk of the tree. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I could see the tip of his right foot starting to dig into the soft turf beneath him.

  “All right,” he said reluctantly. “I’ll introduce you to the guy, as long as you go out for a drink with me tonight.”

  “I want to see the guy first,” Sophie cut straight to the point.

  “Um,” Dillan said with his hands running through his hair. “I can call him, but he’s a busy guy. I can’t guarantee he’ll see you today.”

  “Then what’s the point in going for a drink, if neither of us can get served?” Sophie countered his argument. “The drink happens after I meet him. That’s the deal.” She sounded confident. She had every right to sound confident, though. Dillan had given her every last droplet of power that had been up for grabs between them.

  “Right.” He pulled out his phone. “You better give me your number, so that I can call you when I know what’s happening.”

  Sophie smiled at him. Her cherry red lips pulling wide, but losing none of their impact in the process. “I’ll come and find you in a few days and you can let me know then,” she said without moving for her phone. “I make it a general rule not to hand my number out to strangers.”

  She was smart. I’d never really doubted that, though. When we had been ten years old, she’d managed to steal the janitor’s keys and had lived in the elementary school for an entire week before anybody caught her. She’d gotten into a lot of trouble for that. Her father had stormed into our history class with eyes full of thunder and had dragged her out for a good telling off. I don’t know what happened after that, but I didn’t see her back at school for three weeks.

  “How will you know where to find me?” Dillan said with a sudden smile, because he thought he’d finally managed to outwit her.

  The smile dropped from her face and was replaced with a smirk. She pulled down her shades, so that her bright green eyes met Dillan’s. She gave him a long, slow look, which crept down from his eyes over his face and settled on the football jacket he was wearing. “You’re a jock. I’ll find you with the other jocks. If I’m having trouble, I’ll just follow the cheerleader’s cries and I’m sure I’ll find you somewhere close.”

  Dillan opened his mouth and then closed it again. I was taking great delight in the fact his cheeks had turned a deep shade of red that almost put Sophie’s lips to shame. “Right, sure, that’s okay, I guess,” he said finally. “I’ll see you around?” he half asked and half started, before he turned around and gestured with his head for me to follow him.

  “I’ll see you around, boys,” Sophie called in a sultry way after us, as we walked back over to the path and the half-naked girls who weren’t quite as beautiful, but would certainly be simpler than the one we had just left behind.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dillan managed to get a meeting with the resident ID maker in record time. It was impressive. I’d never seen him work so hard on a problem before. I’d always wondered what it was in life that motivated him, but after watching his efforts I knew. It was the possibility of getting laid.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked him before he had a chance to leave the room and go meet her.

  “Dude, I spent the last two days hunting this guy down. I’m getting some tonight at all costs.”

  “You realize you share a room with me,” I said with distaste at the thought of them having sex with me in the room.

  “Then I’d put some headphones on before you go to sleep, because that’s not stopping me,” he said with a shrug.

  He pulled the door open and turned back with a hopeful look on his face. “Are you are going to wish me luck?”

  “I’m just wishing you come out of this in one piece,” I said to him dryly.

  He gave me a pitying look and disappeared out the door for his rendezvous with Sophie.

  CHAPTER 5

  I had a cell phone, but I hated using it. The pay phones which were dotted all around campus were cheaper and the signal was better. I rang my mom every Saturday night. I knew that was the worst night for her. I knew that my father and she had gone out on Saturday dates when I’d been younger. After he left, I had tried to spend every Saturday evening at home, just hanging around in the house with her, until it was time to head off for college.

  I felt guilty about that. After my father had left, she’d only had me. I was everything to her. I think she was hoping that I’d go to a college in Texas and stay at home with her, but I couldn’t. Even though I felt guilty for leaving her, I couldn’t stay. I had to put myself first. I had to allow myself a chance at building a life.

  I liked to make the call from outside the library. There were phones much closer to my dorm room, but there were always people outside talking or making some kind of loud, annoying noise. The only phones I’d found that offered privacy and undisrupted time were the library ones.

  I sat myself down on a blue plastic chair, which had been placed beside the wall mounted phone and dialled in the number. The phone clicked and then started to ring. “Jason?” my mom asked when she picked up on the third ring.

  “Hi, mom, how are you doing?”

  “Oh, Jason, you are not going to believe it,” my mom said with such intensity that I found myself slipping forward to the edge of my seat. “I’ve just been on the phone with Carol. You know Carol? She’s the woman who lives over by the pharmacy. She bought you that action figure for your birthday when you turned ten,” she rambled, as she lost sight of the story she had been telling.

  “Is the story about Carol?”

  “Oh, no, it’s not about Carol,” my mom said in a flustered way. “Sorry. I got a bit carried away there,” she stopped for a moment and took a breath. “So, Carol called me because she’s just had police all over her street.”

  “Really?” I asked, because that wasn’t something that happened often in our little town. “What happened?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” my mom said as her voice dropped down to a whisper. “It was that Jameson family. The husband has gone and killed his wife. I’m pretty sure they have a kid together, too, probably around your age, but I don’t think she was there.”

  Had my mom said the Jameson family? Did she mean the same Jameson family that belonged to Sophie? She had to have meant that. There was only one family called Jameson in our town. “The husband killed his wife?” I asked in shock.

  My mom hummed a confirmation. “No one really knows what happened yet, but Carol said that he was a pretty mean drunk. Apparently half of the street had reported him to the police at one time or another over things that they heard coming from their house. His wife never pressed charges, though. I guess she was scared of him or something.”

  There was a long pause. I could imagine my mom comparing her own life to Mrs. Jameson's, and thinking maybe she had had a narrow escape. “Can you ima
gine what their poor daughter is going through though? She hasn’t just lost her mom, she’s lost her dad too, because I mean, how do you forgive a person for something like that? Your father only cheated on me and I still haven’t found it in myself to forgive him.”

  I blinked in surprise. I was glad that my mom couldn’t see my reaction to what she had said. She’d never been so blunt about what had happened between my father and her. She almost always kept up a brave front, like a person who's lost a leg still hopping out to the mailbox every day like nothing had happened. But I guess what had happened to Mrs Jameson had given her a little bit more perspective over how bad things could have really been.

  “I know her,” I said quickly to my mom, before I could stop myself. “The daughter. Sophie. We went to school together. She goes to this college.”

  “Oh, dear, you have to go find her and make sure that she’s okay. You’re probably the only person she has from this town around her and she’s going to need that.”

  My mom was right. I was pretty sure were were the only people on campus who had ever even heard of our home town. I was the only link she had that was close to her parents or the childhood she had shared with them.

  My mom didn’t know her, though. My mom didn’t understand that she wasn’t my friend and that it would probably do more harm than good.

  But there seemed no way to avoid it. “I guess I’ll see if I can find her,” I assured my mom, because I knew that it would be a fruitless task explaining to her the long and colorful history that Sophie and I shared.

  “You’re a good boy,” my mom said warmly.

  “I should probably go,” I told her, because the conversation had drained me. I could feel my head weighing down against my shoulders with the force of the world. The last ten minutes of my life felt like a century and I needed to lie down.

  “Okay, well, you make sure you find that girl and you give her my love when you do,” my mom said. “I love you, son.”

  “I love you too, mom,” I said and then I hung up the phone before she could prolong the goodbye part of our call.

  I put the phone back in its cradle, but I didn’t stand up. I couldn’t. Nothing like what my mom had described had ever happened in our town before. It didn’t feel real. It was horrible, unthinkable, close to hand, and yet distant. I couldn't figure out how to think about it.

  It was a while before I headed back to my room. My head was so full of the graphic images my mind was conjuring to fill in the blanks that I didn’t even think about the fact that Sophie had been going out with Dillan that night. In fact, that small detail slipped my mind entirely until I walked back into my room.

  CHAPTER 6

  My body was in shock and I walked numbly, but my mind was in overdrive as it processed the news that my mom had shared with me. I opened the door to my room and looked over at my bed in a loving kind of way. I didn’t even notice the rest at first. I didn’t notice the broken glass, until it crunched underneath my feet. I didn’t notice the upturned furniture until I’d walked into the room and let the door close behind me.

  “What happened?” I asked Dillan, who was sitting on his bed with his head buried in his hands.

  “You were right, man,” he said with his head slowly shaking from left to right. “You were right about her and I should have listened.”

  The crunching of the glass stopped when I sat down on my bed and took the weight off my feet. I inspected the floor. It was glistening against the incandescent glare of the bulb which hung without a shade above it. “Why is there so much glass? What had we even owned that was made out of glass?” I asked, as my mind clung on to the questions that didn’t matter, so that I didn’t have to ask the ones that did.

  Dillan shrugged. “Shit just went crazy,” he said with a zombied expression on his face, which was expressionless and yet full of rage all at the same time. “She just went crazy on me.”

  I knew who he meant. “What happened?” I asked. Half of my crap had been damaged alongside his. It wasn’t just his stuff that had been trashed and I wanted to know why he’d let it happen.

  “We went and got IDs. I brought her back here so that we could chill for a bit, and she got a call. She went out into the hallway to take it. She was gone ages. I was starting to wonder whether she’d ditched me, but then she came back in. She looked all upset, so I asked her what the call was about and she just lost it.”

  “She just lost it?”

  “She started screaming at me that it was none of my business and then when I told her to calm down, she started picking shit up and throwing it around.”

  “You told her to calm down?” I asked with my eyebrows arching. Even with all that was crashing around in my head, I couldn't avoid smiling. “And you said I don’t have game.”

  “Whatever, man,” Dillan snapped. “When she’d finally done throwing stuff at me, I told her to get her crazy ass out.”

  “You just kicked her out?”

  “Have you seen this place? Have you seen what she has done to this place?”

  “No, because I don’t have eyes in my head,” I said sarcastically. “Was she still upset when she left?” I knew why she’d flipped out and I was starting to worry about her.

  “So, what, she trashes our room and suddenly you care about her?” Dillan turned his frustrated eyes to meet mine. “You were warning me off her the other day and now you’re making out that you care more about her being upset than you do about your shit being messed up?”

  “Stuff is replaceable, people aren’t,” I said, holding his gaze. “Was she upset when she left? I got some news tonight off of my mom that explains what happened and I need to know what kind of state she was in when you kicked her out.”

  “I feel like you’re judging me for kicking her out,” Dillan said and I could tell that his defenses were coming up. He pulled back his shoulders and tightened his eyes in my direction.

  I shook my head. He didn’t know about what had happened. He didn’t know that her reactions to the news she’d received were perfectly understandable. I wasn’t judging him; or if I was, then I wasn’t doing so with the logical and rational side of my brain. “I’m not judging you. I just need to know how she was.”

  He shrugged. I could tell that my caring about her was starting to become an issue. “She was a mess. I’m pretty sure she was crying, but she wasn’t getting any sympathy off of me.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  I stood up. I understood why Dillan was annoyed. I understood that his concerns were with the things he had lost and not the girl who had taken them from him. It couldn’t be that way for me though. I knew the truth. I knew about the things that had been taken from Sophie. I was the only person on campus other than herself who knew.

  I needed to find her. I needed to offer her my support. She had never shown me kindness and to some that might have been excuse enough to turn their backs, but for me, it wasn’t anywhere close. I could not judge myself by the actions she had shown to me, without judging myself in the same light.

  “I’ll be back after I’ve found her,” I told Dillan, who had looked up at my sudden movement.

  “I suppose I’ll just clean this all up by myself then?” he said grumpily, as he kicked away shards of broken glass with his foot.

  “Well, it was your date that made the mess, so yeah, I guess that seems fair,” I said with a quick shrug, before walking over to the door and leaving.

  CHAPTER 7

  I’d watched the scene I was living a thousand times before in movies and on television. I was meant to storm out of the room and immediately know where to find her. I was meant to rush over to her with sweat dripping from my brow to prove the effort I’d gone through to be by her side in her time of need. I couldn’t do that, though. I didn’t know where she was or how to find her. I jogged quickly across the campus to the dorm which was closest to the willow tree where I had first seen her.

  There
were a bunch of girls standing outside. There was a plume of thick, grayish smoke above their heads, with more smoke crawling up from the white sticks between their thin fingers. All of them turned to look at me. It was like they could sense how badly I didn’t belong to that area.

  “What do you want?” the blonde haired one asked, as her eyes narrowed in my direction.

  “Have you seen Sophie?” I asked her.

  “Who?”

  “Sophie Jameson, I think she might live in this dorm.”

  “What are you? Her stalker?” the girl quipped and her friends all started laughing and giving each other pointed looks.

  “Do you know her or not?”

  “Well, you’re rude,” the girl brought the cigarette she held between her fingers to her mouth and pursed her lips in an ugly way to take a drag. “I don’t know anyone called Sophie,” she added, as she breathed out a nice puff of carcinogens.

  “You might not know her by name,” I said, as I thought about the girl I was trying to find. Sophie had never been one to sit quietly, but she’d never had a lot of friends either. She’d always been a bit of a loner. If you asked about her in the town where we grew up you’d be met with puzzled glances, but if you asked about the girl with bright pink hair, then they’d know exactly who you meant. “She’s got dark purple hair, if that helps.”

  The girl glanced at her friends and then back at me. She shrugged. “They’re lots of girls with purple hair.”

  I was wasting my time with them. “Can you open the door, so I can check out the dorm building?” I asked, because I assumed at least one of them would have a key card to it.

  The blonde haired girl shook her head. “You could be a rapist or a murderer or something,” she said with a smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth.

  I sighed. “You know I’m not either of those things. I’m just looking for my, my friend. She’s had some bad news tonight and I want to make sure that she’s okay.”