by Dean Murray
Chapter 12
I'd all but run through the house, looking for my mom, excited to tell her about my day. Instead I'd been greeted by nothing but half-filled boxes and silence.
I didn't really want to unpack, but it was long past needing to be done and I knew if I left it to Mom that we'd never really get moved in. If I'd had anything even remotely better to do with my Friday night, I would have done it. I didn't, so I started with the stuff that we'd piled in the living room because it was marginally cooler downstairs.
I got into a decent rhythm, opening boxes, pulling out the stuff that I could easily put away, and then consolidating what was left into fewer boxes. I was on my fourth box when it happened. Mom's jewelry box had somehow got packed into a box labeled 'old photography gear'. As I pulled it out to set it to one side, it slipped from my hands.
The glittering deluge of chains and bracelets that went sliding across the floor would have made me feel bad enough all by themselves, but there was a proverbial scorpion nestled in the midst of all that shininess.
I'd thrown mine out shortly after the accident. Part of me hadn't wanted to. It had felt like I was abandoning Cindi by doing so, but just seeing Cindi's half of the twin pendants we'd received two years before had been enough to send me into a tailspin.
A detached part of me noted that it was just like Mom to have lied about having lost Cindi's. She'd known I couldn't handle the reminder of what we'd lost, but she'd been unwilling to give up that link to the past.
The thought slipped away like sunlight skipping across water a split second before the storm arrived.
The attack was a bad one. I lost more time. I must have slept at some point, but the next time I surfaced it was Saturday morning and I was sitting in front of an empty bowl with an unopened box of cereal and a gallon of milk waiting in the wings. At some point I realized I wasn't hungry. I put everything back away and went upstairs for a shower.
It didn't help. By the time I was done, I was clean but just as emotionally numb as before. At least I'd turned the water all the way to cold there at the end. I came out shivering, but it was a welcome change from the oppressive heat. Even that didn't last; it felt like I was sweating again before I even finished dressing.
I finally pulled out my Biology book. A coldly rational part of me knew that however this ended up playing out, I'd still have a test on Monday, and I'd still want to pass.
It'd be nice sometimes to make the kind of dramatic gesture that you see on movies, or read about in books. Instead, I was sitting here with a stupid textbook while everything else inside of me hurt in a funny, cold kind of way. Like it hurt so much I could only feel the edges of the pain.
Spanish followed Biology; then other subjects came and went until I felt like I'd made enough progress, or possibly wasted enough time. I collapsed into bed hours early and slept poorly.
Sunday was about the same, only my insides felt even rawer under the calm surface. Like maybe they'd had something caustic poured on them. I woodenly went through the motions of studying, and then finally pushed all of my books to the side and opened up Les Misérables. I tried to lose myself in the book, but the same worries that'd pestered me while I was trying to study continued to grate against the back of my mind.
I hadn't wanted to come here, but I'd tried to make it work. Mom keeping the pendant felt like a complete betrayal. She'd known how it would impact me, but hadn't cared. I finally gave up on trying to immerse myself in nineteenth-century France, and cried myself to sleep.
