7
ST. ANNABEL
There was technically no first day in which I met Arden Thorne, he has always been in my life.
I’ve never known a world without him. His mother and mine had been friends, best friends in fact, much to my father’s displeasure considering how much he loathes Arden’s father.
He always said, “Katherine was the best thing about that man.”
On the day I was born, Katherine had brought Arden with her to visit my mother in the hospital.
She would've left him at home but he was such a mama’s boy.
He never wanted to leave her side, he’d wail and wail until he was reunited with her, and she could never handle seeing him cry. It was why he was so spoiled.
I had been laid to rest in the nursery so my mother could have a break, we shared a room for bonding purposes.
The birth had taken a toll on her. Her shiny blonde hair was dewy and matted with patches of sweat sticking to various parts of her.
There hadn’t been an inch of makeup in sight as anything previously applied had essentially washed away.
Ghostly, was how she described herself. Yet, it was the first time in her life she hadn’t cared about looking neither proper nor presentable.
Like motherhood had transformed her and the essence of new life made her understand that nothing else would ever be important.
The irony was that due to the birth complications she received the devastating news that she could never have any other children.
She had cried into my father’s chest, mourning the loss of the life she promised she’d give him.
I said it before, he hates seeing her sad so he made sure to reassure her that I would be enough, despite the fact that they both knew he had yearned for more kids, maybe a son, one day.
Thirteen hours later, when Katherine visited, she’d been so concerned with making my mother feel better she lost sight of her son for a couple minutes as he had wandered in search for something to bite and chew like any child his age.
Arden hobbled around until he found his target: me.
He latched his tiny hand onto mine and refused to let go, even after his mum had seen him and tried to pry him off.
Then he started crying, which woke me up and I started crying too.
Mum said it was the first time she had smiled since the news. It sounded so fictitious and she probably exaggerated certain bits of the story, but it didn't matter. From then on there was no separating Arden from Annabel, we were a set.
He was the eye to my hurricane. No matter how unruly I was when I acted out, he had this unflinching ability to steer me towards a level headed path.
Like that day, he held my hand through every disaster I faced, and when you were little, especially when you’re me, it did often feel like the world was ending.
Then one day the world really did. Katherine had died when Arden was fifteen from a car accident.
She died on impact, so he never got to see her in her last moments and it eats at him terribly.
I don't think I have ever seen him so broken.
He was a shell of the person he used to be, so angry, so lost and confused.
He barely wanted to come back to school but his dad wasn't someone who would ever let him do that.
We had that in common, the two of us. Complicated fathers.
His was a bitter man who never shied away from openly disparaging his son, while mine did the same with false smiles. Arden was back in school the next day after the funeral and things went by like normal, except the boy I once knew was different.
Just after the first anniversary of her death, he left a message for me to meet him at our spot.
It was a place, still on the academy grounds, that the two of us often went off to be alone together.
Nobody else ever went there because it was far out and secluded by a small lake.
Arden had found it during his first week at the school on his quest to be on his own; he was introverted by design but extroverted by choice.
He had been so excited to show it to me when I started at TCA.
We usually sat there and read or talked about everything and nothing all at once until curfew, or broke it if we wanted and asked Dan and MJ to cover for us.
Over the course of that year, we spent it surviving next one another, a lot of it in silence.
I had to put aside the fact that I wasn’t mentally fit myself to be there for him in case he needed me.
Once I was done with classes, I changed out of my uniform and went to find him.
He stood by the tree that we had carved our names into, SAB+RAT = Best Friends Always , and smiled when he saw me.
For a year those eyes had been vacant and lifeless but this time they shone.
I had been so happy to see him lighter and free that I hadn't picked up the signs.
There was a picnic basket on top of a red gingham blanket spread across the grass and a bowl of strawberries–my favourite–next to it.
He wrapped his arms around me as I bounced into them. We stayed like that for a moment as we hadn’t seen one another in a couple days as because he had been busy with mocks. I asked him, “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough. How was English?”
I pulled out of his arms, and humorously rolled my eyes as we sat down. “Mr.Hale tried to keep MJ behind because she refused to say the n-word while reading Of Mice and Men . She spent half the class arguing that he was promoting racism, which led to him starting some spiel about censorship.”
He laid down on the blanket and rested his head on my lap as I played with his hair. “Sounds like her. And him. How he has been allowed to go on for this long is utterly beyond me.”
“That would require for people to care,” I stated, “Either way, she said she plans on getting him fired.”
He scoffed out a laugh, “Of course she is. Hope she can pull it off.”
“She’s extra determined, she was trying to call her dad on my way out.”
“Everyone pulls the dad card. Even you have.”
“Yeah, but we all know mine wouldn’t bother.”
“Neither would hers.” He made a face, saying the truth we all know.
I changed the subject and rambled on about my other classes as he smiled at me so affectionately. It was then I finally picked up on the fact that it was different from the ways he usually looked at me, purposeful.
“So is there a specific reason why we’re here? I mean don’t get me wrong I love being persuaded by strawberries but…” I trailed off, expectantly.
He sat upright and took my hand with his, and with only the trickle of the slow stream behind us, the chirp of birds and the faint blow of the wind to hear, he declared, “I love you, Saint.”
“I love you, too,” I said immediately, because we’ve said those words to one another a million times.
“No, I love you. I’m in love with you and you know that because you love me too.”
My heart had dropped and my body felt paralysed from what he had just said. He continued, “After mum died, it made me realise I can’t lose anyone else…”
I had stopped listening, my ears were ringing. He couldn’t love me, I had thought. I was not the type of person you loved, I wasn’t good enough for him. My father had told me that my entire life; I wasn’t good enough now but I could always be better. I wasn’t better yet.
I gently pried my hands from him and stood up. His face had fallen when he realised I wasn’t smiling along with him.
“You can’t love me, Richard.”
I rarely called him Richard. He hates it because that was his father’s name too and he doesn’t want to be likened to him anymore than he already was.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as he cupped my face, “Don’t…don’t you love me too?”
Of course, I loved him. All I have ever known was loving him but we simply couldn't.
“No. You can’t love me because we are friends. Friends are supposed to stay just friends,” I said, and backed away from him slowly.
“We have never been just friends,” he shouted, dumbstruck. The sun had begun to set behind him as he stood there
“No,” I repeated, then I ran away from him without looking back.
The shadow of my own sadness consumed me so deeply that my selfishness blinded me into thinking I was doing the right thing at the time, but every time I look back on it I ached to have done things differently.
There’s something in me that makes me want to ruin every good thing that I have.
I was no good to people, I'd ruin them too.
That was all I could think about when he had been speaking, I saw how happy he finally was again, it had taken a long time for him to look like he once did. I really believed if he was forced to be with me in that way, my venom would’ve seeped through his veins and destroyed that.
The day after he asked me to be with him, that night I kissed Liam Neeley, a guy in his year that he despised, making sure there was an audience to witness it all.
He was blonde with piercing blue eyes, and nothing like Arden.
I took us into a room under the illusion that we did more than kiss, hoping it’d be the final nail in the coffin.
Making Liam promise not to say a word to anyone, and he could spin whatever tale he wanted.
But when we came out, Arden was there, looking at me with such hatred, that the fear of losing him made me snap out of it. By then, it was already too late. He was gone.
I cried for a long time at how I let myself destroy things because I couldn’t see past myself.
Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about being sad; It creeps up on you, and for me there was no woefully damaging trauma in my life that led me there.
I was just young and held myself to too much, even now I still do.
I was scared to disappoint my father, who had expected too much from me before I could walk; scared to disappoint myself, which I did anyway.
And I let myself shoulder all of that without realising the damage it had done until the effects had set in.
Like a parasite tearing through a garden, feeding off one flower at a time without you noticing, but by the time you picked up on it, all the petals had withered and died.
Sadness chipped away at every part of my soul and left me with a body to carry around with nothing in it.
That was me by the age of thirteen, maybe even now.
For the duration of time we spent together at school, we tried to avoid one another except in group settings. Eventually, our sadness turned into anger, leading to a period of strife where we fought so often that being in the same room was akin to lighting a match to a fuse, only ending in screams.
It was hard at first, relearning to exist on our own, but I did it. I knew him, and then I didn’t.
Then came him and MJ; that one threw us all for a loop.
It had been so quick how one day they weren’t together and then they were.
She had been so excited to tell me she was dating someone; I didn’t even know when they had the time to talk to one another in that way without any of us noticing.
Not even Dan knew about it. But what I did know was that she knew about us, and how I felt about him.
I had told her why I had been so angry that first day we met, because she had caught me taking a match to my thighs.
She had been there with me through every panic attack and been my voice of reason when I let my unhappiness take over.
She even comforted me the day Arden and I fell out.
Then there they were, holding hands and clinging to one another.
And I had to accept it. I had made my bed.
There was no point, he deserved better than me anyway .