Chasing After Infinity

by L. Jayne

  Flashes of her dancing with Ryerson comes to me. She was always there, out of reach, flitting towards me as if to beckon me closer. Then she pushes me away.

  Him holding her, him brushing a stray lock of hair out of my eyes sends fire through my veins and I have to keep my eyes straight on the road or else I'd veer off the slope. I curse under my breath.

  When have I, Adrian Huntington, ever have given two shits about anyone that I've ever toyed with? When did this even start?

  The car yanks to a screeching stop at the white line as the light turns red in front of me. I exhale sharply and close my eyes, trying to squeeze the bridge of my nose to stop the aching between my eyes.

  What do you got,

  if you ain't got love

  Whatever you got,

  it just ain't enough

  You're walkin' the road,

  but you're goin' nowhere

  You're tryin' to find your way back home,

  but there's no one there

  Who do you hold,

  in the dark of night

  You wanna give up,

  but it's worth the fight

  I keep on driving, my hands shaking on the wheel.

  If you ain't got someone,

  you're afraid to lose

  Everybody needs just one,

  someone...

  If you ain't got love,

  it's all just keeping score

  If you ain't got love,

  what the hell we doing it for

  I don't wanna have to talk about it

  How many songs you gotta sing about it

  How long you gonna live without it

  Why does someone somewhere have to doubt it

  Someday you'll figure it out

  What do you got,

  if you ain't got love

  Whatever you got,

  it just ain't enough

  I rub my eyes, feeling exhausted as I stop at yet another red light. I can barely keep my thoughts collected.

  This feeling scares me.

  Or maybe it was just awakening.

  Like being asleep for so long and then gradually, one day, opening your eyes.

  I glance at my rearview window and curse when I see the telltale red lights behind my car, zooming closer. The sirens are put up a second later and I hit the gas, willing for speed, for adrenaline. My tires squelch, burning rubber, and jerk around a tight bend as I start to lose the police cruiser.

  As soon as the adrenaline wears off, my mind is wary. I need to get away from all of this for a little while. My life is fucked up as enough as it is and instead of messing things up further, I need to straighten my past mistakes out.

  I need to find my biological father.

  Maybe then finally, I'd have someone to guide me through.

  To help me not to fuck things up again.

  ****

  AVENA

  I look at the night sky, starry and black as charcoal. I have an urge to draw the beautiful sky, as immense and vast as it is. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't sleep. I look at the glowing red numbers on my alarm, reading a 12:38 P.M. My knees are tucked under my chin as I stare out my bedroom window, still in my pyjamas. There's a restless feeling that I just can't shake.

  I close my eyes. An image of Adrian's face appears behind my eyelids. There's something in his eyes--that forces me to exhale.

  Adrian. His green eyes like the mysterious creek in the meadows. His words--that cut into me like no one else's can and bittersweet at the same time. His stubborn and aggravating side--the side that has my teeth hurting in intense itching to kill him.

  But. When I think of the time when we held hands sleeping on the same futon, I've never seen him in the way that I saw him before. He suddenly looked different. Not like the same sarcastic and sardonic person who fights for the hell of it and use girls like wads of tissues, but like a person who held me in my weakest period.

  Because...

  While lying there, pretending to sleep and feeling his hand in mine, I thought I could lay there with him forever.

  And that was scary. Because that was the thing that I was most afraid of.

  Falling too deep into something.

  ***

  ADRIAN

  I had passed the sign OKLAHOMA CITY, five hundred thousand people living in the city a while ago. It's only been an hour and a half drive but it's been feeling like an eternity. I'm dehydrated and slightly half-drunk and lost in the city.

  It's bustling here even at midnight, half-broken inns' neon signs radiating in the darkness, cars passing by with whizzes and I've been trying to find the street, Keelon Road for far too long. I'm cruising past the road with a boarded up convenience store and my phone beeps again. One hand on the wheel, I flip it open and find ten voice mails. Six are from the dance, the girls chirping similar drunken giggles. The others are from home. My adoptive dad's voice yells swear words into the phone, shouting where the hell I am and I have to get my ass back home or else I'll be grounded for an entire year.

  I can barely hold back a drunk snort and cut him off as I flip my phone shut, tossing it into the car compartment.

  It's not like I've heard it all before.

  Five years ago, I broke the family's china and he pushed me so hard that I fell into the cocktail table. The glass had shattered and cut my arms, the shards stuck into my skin. There was this moment--this pause--where he stared at me and I stared at him and we didn't say a word. Then I just tore it out of there. That's what I do. When the going gets tough, I pound my worries away.

  I go back to the present where I look up to see the street Jasper Street, a block away from the road I'm looking for. I speed up, nearly running down a worn mailbox in the row of boxes that are houses.

  And there it is. I hold the paper that I've stolen from my parent's drawer that contains all of my adoption papers and hold it up to the graying house in front of me. The shutters are closed and the steps are cracking, the lawn pitifully yellow. I park the car near the side of the road.

  I go up to the front door, exhaling. I rap the door, once twice and a third time. I hear a dog bark in the house as someone grunts and gets up. A light is turned on and a second later, the door is opened.

  A paunchy bald man with light blue eyes stares squintingly at me, holding a newspaper and wearing a stained pair of nylon shorts. "Who the hell are you--has the delivery come yet?"

  "I'm looking for William Huntington," I say, my voice low. "I'm his biological son."

  First, the man looks shocked, then disbelieving then clear apprehension goes over his pasty face. "Him? You're looking for him?" He pauses. "He passed away two years ago."

  The landlord pats my shoulder but I can't feel anything. I nod slowly. My mouth is dry. A sound comes out--a twisted sound.

  The father I never knew that died already.

  And they never told me. They kept it from me--all this time.

  How long have they known?

  Without another word, I walk away from the porch stiffly and when I get to the car, my hand twisting the keys shaking.

  My eyes sting as I start to drive away. Fast, hard and angry, I step on the pedals, getting away from the neighbourhood.

  When I’m far away enough, I pull to the side of the road when I can’t take it anymore. Finally, the detached emotions that have been suppressed for too long, I bow my head and start to cry.

  ***

  AVENA

  Waking up in a cold sweat, I gasp and my eyes fly open. My hand restlessly gropes for the lamp and my room is enveloped in a warm glow. Wrenching pain and devastation in my heaving chest has shot me awake. I squeeze shut my eyes, remembering the earlier sadness and grief feelings swirling in me. I had dreamt of Adrian.

  He was standing alone in a sea of white, looking lost and so alone. His eyes reflected pain—the kind that you know is like a stain. The kind that can never be washed out.

  I’m still trying to breathe evenly.

  I fall back, groaning muffled by
a pillow held into my face.

  I needed to erase him.

  Get him out of my head. Out of my system.

  I’m not just scared of it anymore; I’m already in too deep. And I don’t know what to do.

  Remembering the dance and what happened, I recall Adrian’s hands on me, his mouth swooping down to meet mine, gnawing on my bottom lip, tasting like tonic and sweet punch, him moaning slightly, me barely holding back a gasp--

  Turning onto my back and biting back a frustrated scream into my pillow, I try to go back to sleep.

  chapter eighteen

  ADRIAN

  Returning to Eiernhill, I straighten my jacket and try to put on the charming smile for the girls that saunter past. Putting on a show is easier than I first thought. Putting everything that happened a few night's ago was easy.

  I look in the mirror, seeing the same face, the same smile, the same eyes but if you looked closely enough, my eyes never quite matched with my smile.

  I'm in the courtyard, smoking, leaning against the back door building with Josh Scotter. I take a long smoky drag and release it into the air, feeling as if my worries are floating away bit by bit. When I got home the day before yesterday, my dad threatened to take away my car to prevent me from going on "more rendezvous trips." I didn't mention my real father. I had enough of it, I was too sick to even demand more information about him. My anger just flared into wariness.

  I didn't know my father. If he would’ve taught me how to fish or helped me with schoolwork, like the others' dads. I never got that chance.

  "Man, you're just so out of it these days," Scotter says. "Did you snort up a shit load of pot this morning or what?"

  I laugh vaguely. "Hungover."

  He nods as if he understands and then he gestures behind me. "Hey, that chick is staring at you."

  I ignore it, smiling slightly sardonic. "Are they?"

  Then I turn, swerving slightly and my smile slides away.

  Avena.

  She's stopped and is just looking at me. From even across the quad, her eyes are as piercing as if she's staring right through me.

  And as always, she had.

  Stared through me and known what I was all along.

  I take a sharp drag and stub the cigarette.

  And then pretending I don't see her, I turn back to Scotter.

  My mind is buzzing and there's nowhere for me to escape. In class, I can barely sit straight and focus and halfway through the biology lab, I roll it out of there along with Lauren, the girl who I brought to the dance as a date. I can't feel anything--I feel muted somehow. I drag her into the janitor's closet where when the light switch is turned off, there's scratching, and hands all over. Lauren's running her hands over my shirt, touching my hair, believing I'm her property. Like I'm no one else's.

  ****

  AVENA

  I haven’t seen Adrian at school for days. Today, he reappears as if materializing from thin air. There’s something tense about him, maybe it’s in the edge of his shoulders or his twisting smile. When the teacher called on him to answer a question, he’d reply with something nonchalant and rude, causing him to be sent out of the class. After the period, I’d see him perched on the school ledge, chain-smoking and staring out at the sky. After surveying his surroundings, he spotted me looking and shook his head once. Then he walked off, tossing his cigarette on the ground where he once has been.

  His bipolar mood swings are disorienting: one week he’s playful and the next he’s cold and somehow just…missing.

  I walk stiffly to my class before I’m intercepted by Blake who blocks me to the doorway. My face is at his chest.

  “Hey there, stranger,” he says warmly. “Got some time?”

  I stare at him. “But Blake—I have class right now.”

  He shrugs. “Come with me to the library. We can study there; you have math too, right? Plus, I’m a whiz at it.”

  As we weave through the crowd, him tugging me by the hand, me curious yet wary. We arrive at the school library; enter the air-conditioned lit room with clusters of students studying in tables and shelves upon shelves of books. He grabs us an empty table by the window and we sit, unpacking our textbooks.

  “So what’s your ulterior motive for leading me here?” I tease, flicking on my pen.

  Blake smiles. “Nah. Just bored and I didn’t want to face my bio class after this huge disaster.”

  “What happened?”

  He sneaks a sly look at me. “You really want to know?”

  “If it’s embarrassing, I’d eat it up.”

  He sighs. “Well, I was doing my aqueous solution experiment the other day and I slipped some of the clear vial into the beaker as instructed. But just when I was about to hand it to my partner, the beaker fell down, splashing her shirt. Her shirt was soaked through and she was screaming because the liquid had scorched her chest.”

  “That’s awful,” I say. “Are you always this careless?”

  “Maybe.” Blake points to my paper. “That stuff is easy.”

  I gape at him, showing him the endless math questions. “Are you serious? I can’t figure the second one out.”

  He sweeps his paper off the table and leans over to me, studying the question. After a moment, he says, “Okay, it’s just memorization. Logarithms are just about formulas. Once you’ve got that down, it’s all going to be flying colours.” He then proceeds to show me how to do the equations as I suck the eraser of my pencil contemplatively.

  “Hmm, maybe you’re a whiz, after all,” I say, grinning. “If I have you as my tutor, I wouldn’t need Mrs. Henridge.”

  As we start talking about not just math but other things as well, he brings up the dance a few days ago.

  “Ack, I’m sorry for making us leave so early,” I say, fumbling for an excuse. “I was just tired and a bit dizzy from all the loud music.”

  He doesn’t mention my dancing with Adrian. “Hey, no worries. It was getting dry anyway. After a few rounds, you get bored.”

  “It’s funny how we didn’t know each other before when we’re in the same school,” Blake says, smiling lightly. “Our school has, like what? Five hundred students?” I understand what he’s trying to say. The only answer is that we don’t run in the same social circle. Before, guys like Blake wouldn’t have noticed me if they’d run me over with their silver Porsches.

  I ease into the lighter side of things. “You must’ve heard about me, you know, with all the rumours.” I try to smile.

  “Yeah, I heard.” His eyes are solemn and he hesitates, gazing at me through those brown eyes. “That you were forced by some guy a few years back?”

  I stiffen. I had not expected that. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Just some buzz.” Blake shrugs again. “Then Michaels tried to spread some pictures around this school and you got hurt during a fight or something.”

  Swallowing, I try to push it away. “It happened a few weeks ago, yeah.”

  He nods, propping his hands on his face, studying me. “You’re tough. Stronger than any girl I’ve met before.”

  Heat flares in my cheeks. “Trust me; I’m not strong mentally or physically.”

  “But you endured, didn’t you?”

  I shrug, flipping the page. “I had no other choice.”

  Blake reaches for my hand while I’m writing and I pause. “You know, I came into the dance just with you as my substitute date but you’ve left me wanting more.” He looks into my eyes. “There’s a Serenaded concert next Monday, are you coming?”

  I blink, uncomfortable. “Blake—I’m…not interested in you that way.”

  He leans back, staring at me. “Is it because of Huntington?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s because of me; I’m not ready to start something real like a relationship just yet.” And it’s true—I don’t have enough in me to start loving someone.

  “Well, pity then.” We both move to get our books from the table as the tardy bell rings. Blake and I walk side-by-si
de to the library exit, our hands barely grazing.

  “Thanks for the math help,” I tell him as we walk through the hall, filled with students swarming out of their classes, shouting and cries in the air.

  “Anytime,” Blake replies. “Maybe if you tutor me in English Lit, I can help you with math.”

  “It’s a package deal.”

  As we start towards the dining hall and continue talking, the flow of students is thinning as we turn a sharp corridor.

  Then I hear a few whispers, a muffled breathy laugh. I pause mid-walk at the door of the janitor’s closet, casting a questioning raised eyebrow to Blake.

  “Lovey-dovey couples,” Blake says, shuddering.

  “I can’t stand them,” I agree.

  While we pass, I see the door suddenly push open. A girl staggers out, her eyes bright and doe-like, trying to comb her fingers through her messy hair. I recognize her to be the same girl from the dance, the one who was Adrian’s date.

  With growing dread, I look at her.

  “Oh, hi,” she says, surprised when she sees me and Blake staring at her, cupping a hand over her mouth as she giggles. She turns to say to the person behind her, pushing at his chest. “I thought we were going to get caught by Mrs. Henridge!”

  His familiar green eyes flick over me and I feel unsettled, suddenly embarrassed for some reason. The girl leans up to him, using her fingers to smear away her lipstick on his face.

  I step aside, letting them pass as Lauren clings to him like plastic sheeting. Adrian moves past me, and just the slightest, his shirt sleeve brushing against me has me exhale.

  The taste of him lingers on me and I close my eyes.

  I don’t know why, but I had thought he’d changed his ways. But it’s like they say, a player can never morph into a saint overnight.