by S. L. Naeole
Didn’t want me to get hurt? The rough exhalation that came out of me told him clearly that it was too late for that.
He sighed, as though a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and ran his fingers through his hair again, calming it down some, only to cause it to stand up at weird angles when he struggled with what he had to say next.
“Erica and I…well, she and I have gotten pretty serious—really serious actually—and she thinks that it wouldn’t be right for me to stay friends with you. And now that I know for sure how you feel, I know that she’s right. It’s not right, and it’s not fair to you, or to me.
“She also said that it would be wrong of me to keep some of the stuff you’ve given me—like that-” he motioned towards the object that he had forced into my hands “-she said that I needed a clean break from you, to rid my life of everything that you’d ever given me. And so I thought that maybe you’d like that back, instead of me just throwing it away.”
I didn’t want to look down at what was in my hands and affording him my reaction. Instead I simply nodded.
Truth was, I was afraid of finding out what he had returned to me. What had I given to him that wasn’t deserving of being thrown away or completely destroyed, like he had just done to my life? He couldn’t be giving me back my heart; that lay in a pile of ashes in my lap.
“I have to get going, Grace. I gotta go pick up Erica at the mall; we’re having dinner with her dad. It’s her birthday today.” He started to walk away then, but suddenly stopped and turned to face me, a wistful smile on his face.
“Um…have a great rest of summer, ‘kay? Maybe I’ll see you around. Or something.”
With a wave, he was gone, back into his house to await my departure. At least he wasn’t just standing there, waiting for me to leave. Or better yet, at least he hadn’t told me to leave. No, he had done me the favor of leaving himself, one last act of kindness from my now former friend. At least, that’s what I told myself.
It was in that moment of comprehension that I knew I had not only lost my best friend, but I had also lost most of my summer as well. All of those moments, those memories that I had stored in my mind, that touched my heart in so many different ways, were becoming distorted now, like an over pixilated movie. All of our conversations, our inside jokes, our confidences replayed in my mind, and all of them were now taking on new meaning for me…because all of them were now meaningless to him.
I was now the inside-joke: His and Erica’s. And whoever else knew about this. Of course, it was a given that everyone else already knew. Why wouldn’t they? I wasn’t popular and they were. Two different leagues, he had said: the reality and the fantasy. But I never wanted to be anything other than Graham’s friend. Even with loving him, I valued his friendship so much more. Now I didn’t even have that.
As I got off of his car and walked towards my house, I started analyzing the past several weeks in my mind. Had we really spent the summer together like my memories had foolishly led me to believe? Every single day, they told me. And that’s how it looked from my end…at least it did on the surface. He would meet me at the small library I worked at every morning, hanging out for a bit before leaving right after lunch for football camp.
When we went camping with our dads every other weekend, something that hadn’t changed since the two of us were in middle school, he had never given a sign that he was distracted by a missing girlfriend. It was only afterwards, when we got home that he’d disappear for several hours, leaving our dads and me to unpack and clean out the gear.
We’d watched campy old movies and held a Rocky Horror Picture Show marathon at the beginning of summer break, holding it at the end of the month like always—it was a Grace and Graham tradition to call each other Rocky and Frank all day until one of us forgot, at which point that person got punched in the arm—because we were buds, Grace and Graham, best friends since forever. But he said he was busy with football and helping out his dad at the store last month, and so he asked for a rain check. I had never thought to question any of that until then.
I calculated the time in my head as I walked towards my front door and the numbers only added to my grief. The burnt out hollowed shell of a person I was when I entered my room was completely unrecognizable. Everything suddenly hurt and I needed to lie down.
I remained that way for the last two weeks of summer, getting up only to head to work at the library, knowing that there was no chance that I’d run into anyone from school there.
My dad, the only other person in my life—in my existence really—had made several attempts to comfort me in his own little way, but quit trying altogether when he received no encouragement on my part. When he couldn’t get an answer out of me as to what had happened after asking on several separate occasions, he went and spoke to Richard. I knew that his goal was to find out what had transpired outside that day to turn me so inside out, but he wouldn’t get a straight answer from that avenue either. Richard couldn’t tell the truth if it killed him—he was a natural born liar.
Dad eventually guessed what had happened, though. He wasn’t blind. He’d noticed Graham’s absence just as surely as he noticed the absence of my sarcastic comments, my ability to laugh at his corny jokes, and…well, me; perhaps even more so, because the absence of Graham meant the absence of Richard as well.
Richard and Dad had become fast friends after they had both moved here to Heath with their wives: Dad and mom came from California—Dad was coming to work as a manager for a chain grocery store—and Richard and Iris from Nevada, Richard having just purchased a small auto dealership near Newark. Both were avid football fans, but only Richard was blessed with a son who would fill Friday and Saturday nights with high school games to cheer at.
James and Abigail Shelley, on the other hand, were blessed with a daughter they named Grace, after the three Greek Goddesses; Mom had been a lover of all things Greek, which was odd considering she was Korean..
Now see, the three Graces are supposed to be these symbols of beauty and fertility, of peace and friendship, and charm and creativity. This Grace, the version I grew up to be, while not ugly, is far from being even remotely similar to what one would describe as beautiful. I’ve got a slightly wide forehead—I’ve been called a five-head a few times, if that means anything. I’ve got dull brown hair that seemed to suffer from fits when the weather isn’t cooperating. My brown eyes are rather unremarkable and owlish, a pretty lousy compromise between my mother’s dark brown and my dad’s bright blue. And the freckles scattered across my pale skin seem out of place for my dark coloring. Suffice it to say, I’m an odd mish-mash of my mixed parentage.
And, unlike most girls who lived in Heath, I didn’t take ballet, or jazz, so I wasn’t graceful. I didn’t enter pageants or talent contests for sashes and trophies, so there went my charm and creativity. I didn’t go to gymnastics, or take swimming lessons, or any of those things that little girls did with their mothers standing by, watching proudly. I was content with my books, my poetry, and my movies. Most importantly, I was very happy being a best friend to Graham. But what symbol of friendship could I be with no friends to speak of at all now? The only thing I had ever been successful at, I had failed the minute Graham had left me.
Lying in bed and remembering so much had me trembling with undeniable and bitter grief; the feeling of loss still felt so new. It was easy to choke on it, to suffocate on its core of bitterness. Its hold on me was so strong that I was bawling and hiccupping like a baby into my comforter, needing it for its imaginary strength almost as much as I needed it for its ability to muffle my sobs. I was in near hysterics…again.
How would I go back to school? How could I? The only person who had ever talked to me just because would no longer be there. I also couldn’t avoid the fact that the person who I partially blamed for all of it—his girlfriend Erica—would, joking and sharing snide comments with the friends I now knew had all been having a good laugh at my expense for the better part of a year.
“Pity, party for one, your table is ready,” I mumbled into my pillow.
Monday.
I think I’ll hate Mondays for the rest of my life.
POSITIVE
With a resigned sigh, I dragged myself out of my bed. It was the first time in nearly forty-eight hours that I had done so for reasons other than to use the bathroom. The ever looming return to school had kicked my depression into high gear when the last weekend of summer started.
I needed to take a shower and wash the stiffness out of my body, as well as my face. Dried tears could iron a face flat, my mom used to say, and she had been right. Plus, I couldn’t face this horrible first day looking my worst, even if my worst was only second place to my best. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and recoiled at what I saw. Ugh, I was ghastly. There were lines imprinted on my face from the creases in my pillowcase, and my eyebrows were all spiky and pointing in odd directions. I definitely needed to shower and shave. And brush my teeth. Ew—I’ve never been a stickler for personal hygiene on an OCD level, but there was something to be said for having smooth armpits and legs, and clean teeth and hair. Gross! At the moment, my teeth felt like they’d been soaking in sludge, my hair…it needed prayers. My legs and armpits? Big Foot would be frightened.
I climbed into the shower and sat on the little bench that was molded into the shower wall; I waited for the hot water to hit me. I had to stand up to readjust the angle of the showerhead, but after a few minutes, I was as close to content as I could possibly be with the world outside waiting for me to face it or return to cowering beneath my blanket.
While brushing my teeth in the shower, I did a very—and highly unusual for me—girl-type thing and thought about what it was that I would wear. I hadn’t bought anything new this year. Dad didn’t have the money for anything other than secondhand when it came to my clothes, and with class and lab fees for school, there really wasn’t much to spend on the secondhand stuff anyway. Everything I made working at the Library during the summer had been socked away for college. My old standbys were a pair of jeans and one of my many garage sales t-shirt finds. So after mulling it over in the steam, I decided that if I was going to be the butt of every joke today, I might as well do it as comfortably as possible.
With that oh-so-important decision now out of the way, I grabbed a bottle of shampoo and started to squeeze the pink, sweet smelling goo into my hands. It was at that moment, while staring at the shimmering pink sludge, that I remembered the object that Graham had placed in my hands before ending our friendship and turning my whole world into one burning mound of rubble. What was it? Where did I put it? With haphazard care, I rubbed the soap into my hair and quickly rinsed, soaping the rest of me in record time before I jumped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my body. It went around almost twice and I made a quick mental note that I had to learn to eat better.
I hurried back towards my bedroom, which was directly across from the bathroom, and scanned it quickly, assessing the most likely places it could be. Ugh, it stunk. It smelled like depression, tears, sweat, and…ashes? Had my figurative burning create actual smoke? I shook my head at my own digressive imagination.
My bed wasn’t made, as usual—why make it when I’d just sleep in it again? Clothes were strewn on the floor, while the hamper sat in the bathroom half-full. The curtain hanging over the large window facing the doorway was closed, letting in no real light other than a small sliver of blue-gray. I pushed it aside and opened the window, letting some of the stale air out. And there, on the floor beneath the sill where it had fallen, lay what Graham had placed into my numb hands.
I got down on my knees to inspect it, a little whimper of delayed grief catching in my throat when recognition hit; it was a little pink ceramic whale that I had made in the second grade. Or what kind of resembled a whale; seven-year-old whales looked a lot different from seventeen-year-old whales.
A depressed smile crossed my face as a ten-year-old memory slammed into my chest. The whale held a shard of ceramic that had once been the tail of Graham’s little green whale, which had exploded in the kiln during firing. He cried so hard that day; I felt so bad that I gave him mine. My seven-year-old mind had rationalized that it was his whale, too, and that he’d appreciate it more than I would. That was the day he told me he loved me for the first time. It was seven-year-old playground love, the kind you have for your favorite stuffed animal, but it signified the true beginning of our friendship, and he needed to get rid of any reminders of that.
I picked up the small whale and threw it against the dresser forcefully, my anger and hurt making me unwilling to believe any of my deceitful memories anymore. The oddly shaped head with its unintended addition broke apart from the raised tail, and both pieces fell to the carpet in a soft thump. Chips of paint and ceramic were scattered around it. It was very symbolic, these two pieces. Once a whole, but neither looking like they had belonged together at any time.
I turned away from the mess and grabbed a pair of jeans from the laundry basket by my dresser. Dad must have done laundry while I was in my cocoon of self-pity—I probably get my weirdness from him. For a guy, he loved washing and folding clothes. It was something that he and Mom had done together after I had gone to bed; it was a nightly ritual for them, he had told me once, and doing it felt good, reminded him of her.
It reminded me of her, too…what little I could, anyway. Little bits here and there of a woman that I remembered had been beautiful, with a glow of happiness that I, in all my childish wisdom, had sworn up and down tasted and smelled just like sunshine. I suppose all little girls think that of their moms.
As I reminisced, I brought out a shirt from the top right hand dresser drawer; I grabbed a pair of underwear and a dilapidated bra from the opposite drawer, and then proceeded to get dressed. My shirt, I noticed, bore one of those ridiculous smiley faces with its tongue sticking out. How fitting. How ironic. How pathetic.
“Grace, are you ready for breakfast?” a voice called from downstairs. I guess Dad had heard me take a shower. People back from the dead needed breakfast. At least, my stomach thought so, if its grumbling was any indication.
I grabbed my brush, resigned with the fact that I’d fallen into a new routine that ran parallel to my old one—just emptier—and headed down the steps to the small kitchen below, where the smell of buttered toast and coffee made my stomach rumble once more like a starved animal contained within another starved animal.
“I’m ready. What’s to eat?” I asked in as cheerful a tone as I could muster. Dad turned around, shocked at my appearance. Had I really looked that hideous before that a simple shower could cause such a reaction?
“Um…I’m making egg-in-a-hole and some bacon. You want some?” he asked me, showing me the pan with the egg that had been cracked into a hole cut out of a slice of bread, then pointed at the pile of bacon sitting on the table. “I can make you something else if you want. I think there are some toaster waffles in the freezer.”
I shook my head. “What you’re making sounds just fine, Dad.” And it did. It smelled wonderful. Not eating for a few days would probably have made my boots seem edible—add some new potatoes on the side and you’d have a gourmet meal—but this, this was bacon fat heaven at the moment. I sat down at the small table that filled up half of the kitchen and glanced over at the clock. It was just a little past seven. I had an hour to eat and get going. We didn’t live that far from the school, but I had to watch the time. Today would be the first time in over a year that I’d be walking to school.
“So, um, G-Grace,” Dad’s nervous speech began as slid a plate in front of me. “I wanted to know how you’re feeling…um…about…you know, school and everything.”
“I’m fine, Dad,” I said, only half lying. I grabbed my fork and started to lean in towards my breakfast, fully intending to concentrate on eating and not talking.
He watched me as I went through the motions—I was so unlike my mom that he could read me like a book. �
��No you’re not. You don’t have to lie to me, hon. I’m your dad. You can tell me if you’re not feeling up to this yet. It’s just the first day, nothing really important going on, right?”
I shook my head even though inside I was thinking that my entire senior year wasn’t really that important. “I’m fine, Dad. Really—I can do this. It’s just school. H-he’s not going to be there anyway, so it’ll be alright.”
He regarded this with shock marking his face. “What do you mean he’s not going to be there?”
Hadn’t Richard told him? Why wouldn’t he have bragged about his son getting into one of the most prestigious schools in the state, with an even more prestigious football program? “Um, Graham was accepted into NC Prep, Dad.”
A moment of silence passed, and then Dad threw down the spatula, splattering the table with grease and bits of egg. “I cannot believe that sonnuva…I cannot believe he lied to you like that.” His voice was drowning in anger, choking on it. I felt the same strangling sensation in my throat.
“What do you mean, he lied to me, Dad?”
Graham wouldn’t have lied to me about not being at school with me, would he? My mind raced around the fact that our entire summer—perhaps our entire friendship—had been a lie; the facts were staring me in the face, and yet I just couldn’t accept it.
“Grace, Graham isn’t going to NC Prep. No one is. The school is no more—defunct. It’s been closed down for three weeks now. Janice told me over month ago that it had lost a lot of money on some big investments and couldn’t afford to operate anymore.”
Janice was Dad’s girlfriend of the moment. Aside from being the one to last the longest among all of Dad’s girlfriends, she was also the school nurse at NC Prep; how had I forgotten that?
