12. Chapter 12
Lennon
Every four years, our high school would put on a big Shakespeare production. It was huge, and the older of the two drama teachers was the one to direct it. It was the only show he directed, and you’d think it was like working with Steven Spielberg the way the other kids talked about it.
Not being from the area, I had no idea what any of this meant, but the show came up our junior year.
When the director announced that it was going to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream , everyone went absolutely wild.
Speculations abounded about literally everything.
The staging and costumes, who would be best suited for which role, whether or not they would use music or sing the songs in the play, who they’d hire to do blocking, which person’s parent would be in charge of set design.
But one thing everyone was absolutely sure about was that Lark was a shoo-in for fierce, independent Hermia.
Lark was a triple threat. She could sing, dance, and act. She could play whatever part she wanted, and she did not want to play Hermia.
But she also wasn’t going to make waves. That wasn’t in her nature. Every time someone brought it up, she’d smile politely and say she’d be happy to be cast at all, no matter the role.
Which was bullshit, obviously.
When the cast list went up, she hung back with me instead of pushing her way through the throng of students wanting to see who was playing what part.
I didn’t have any skin in the game, aside from wanting Lark to get the part she was hoping for.
We stood back there, fingers threaded together between us, Lark gripping my hand with a silent plea to anchor her, no matter what.
Like some kind of eighties John Hughes movie, the crowd of teenagers hushed. One by one, they started to turn and look for her. When they spotted her standing at the back of the crowd, they fell silent.
“Is it that bad?” she asked, her voice light and teasing. But I could feel her hand trembling in mine.
“You’re Helena,” one of the freshmen said up front.
Lark visibly relaxed, and her smile turned genuine. That was the part she wanted. The lovesick, witty, skeptical woman. Not the bold, free-spirited one. She thought Hermia was too one-dimensional, and Helena would give her an experience to learn from.
That was Lark. Always learning.
But what keeps me up into the wee hours of the morning isn’t a walk down memory lane.
It’s the image of sixteen-year-old Lark dressed in a Grecian-style costume, standing on a stage littered with so much glitter that I’m sure they never fully got rid of it.
She’s leaning against a makeshift pillar wound with ivy and brightly colored flowers.
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, pinching her eyebrows together as she recites:
O weary night, O long and tedious night, Abate thy hours! Shine, comforts, from the east That I may back to Athens by daylight, From these that my poor company detest. And sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye, Steal me awhile from mine own company.
I don’t know why my mind goes there, but something about that lunch today didn’t feel right.
Lark hiding in her room and not coming out feels even worse.
I wanted so desperately for her to fold herself seamlessly into my life here that I never stopped to think about what might happen if she didn’t instantly fall in love with the sunshine and the ocean like I did when I first came out here for college.
I’m too much in my head about it, when all I want to do is sleep and try again in the morning. I’ll explain about Jessica, support Lark in whatever decision she wants to make about Silas’s clear interest, pray she wants to stay and not throw in the towel early to head back to Michigan.
The problem is I don’t sleep. Not much. Lark is right there, and she’s crying.
A big part of me expects her to come out and talk to me.
But by midnight, she hasn’t emerged from her room, which is about the time I decide I need to let sleep steal me away, and I fall in and out of something like repeatedly being dropped into the middle of a dream and yanked back out again before it can conclude.
Visions form behind my eyelids—Lark coming up behind me at that first day of Drama Club, Lark kicking rocks in a parking lot, Lark leaving Richard and me alone on a park bench so we can get to know each other, and Richard telling me it would be better for her if I left, Lark smiling out at me from her phone screen, Lark and Richard at their wedding, Lark and Devin holding hands and skipping through rows of blueberry bushes on a summer day in Michigan, Lark the day she told me Richard was moving to New York with a look of determination that she could do this on her own, Lark waiting for her suitcase at LAX and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, Lark staring aimlessly out of the passenger seat of my Jeep on the way home from lunch.
And through it all is the never-ending strain of her seductive voice:
We don’t have much time before someone comes looking for us, so I make quick work of the buttons on the fly of his jeans. I reach my hand into them, circling it around the smooth, hard length…
Every time, I’m jolted awake before she can finish that sentence.
Lark has always consumed most of my waking hours, even when she wasn’t here. I’d see something she’d like and text her or land an awesome job and call her to celebrate. For as long as I’ve known her, nothing that has happened to me has felt real until I’ve told her about it.
But now, she’s occupying my dreams, too. And to make matters worse, I wake up from every one of those dreams with a hard-on and a desire I haven’t felt since I was a teenager. The kind that painfully eats away at you, eroding your willpower bit by tiny bit.
At around five in the morning, I decide that I’d rather see Lark’s actual face than another dream version of her, so I roll out of bed and quickly throw on one of my many threadbare USC T-shirts and some sweatpants.
I open the door to my room quietly in case Lark is still asleep and walk barefoot into the living space.
My heart bottoms out when I pass the open door to her bedroom.
The room looks, frankly, untouched. Her bed is crisply made.
I can’t see her suitcase anywhere. More important than any of that, Lark isn’t in it.
A quick glance at the living room tells me she’s not out there, either.
The bathroom door is open and the lights are off, so she’s not in there.
Did she…leave?
I lodge my fingers in my hair, gripping at the strands and using the sensation to distract me from the panic slithering its way up my stomach and squeezing my heart.
It’s a sensation I’m deeply familiar with—an anxiety that would arise every time I woke up to find my parents gone with no idea where they went or when they’d be back, and one that revisits me sometimes when things start to feel beyond my control.
But I haven’t felt that in a long time. Years and therapy healed most of those wounds, though it would seem some are still lurking below the surface.
Breathing in and out as deeply and slowly as I can, I try to get the edge of my adrenaline to soften.
No luck. I scrape the dust off my checklist of things I’d do to make myself at least functional when I used to feel like this.
Deep breathing . No help. Close my eyes and think of something happy.
I try that, but it’s no surprise that Lark’s face is front and center.
Shaking my head violently, I snap my eyes open.
That made it worse. Call Lark . Well, I can’t fucking do that, can I, because she’s supposed to be here and she’s not.
I tug even harder at my hair, trying to at least feel something other than this. Somewhere, a faucet drips, and the sound of it grates on my already-frayed nerves.
Okay, Lennon. Get it together , I tell myself. Deal in facts only, not worst-case scenarios. What do you know?
Yesterday did not go as planned, but was she that upset with me that she’d just up and leave?
Without saying goodbye? No, that’s not like her.
She was always the one who stuck around, no matter what.
Who saw me for who I was—a lost boy needing somewhere to belong, a lost man searching for connection and never really finding it—and was never scared away.
She has to be somewhere.
I force my feet to continue on their way to the kitchen, even though they’d rather stay rooted to the floor. The peanut-butter-and-jelly supplies are still on the counter where I left them, and now I don’t even know if she ate anything. I’m the world’s shittiest host. I didn’t plan for any of this.
Coffee. My brain is in a fog, and coffee will at least help me clear it. I fill the tank, grab a pod, and push the button to start the machine. Which is about when I see movement on my balcony out of the corner of my eye.
Lark is sitting outside in one of the giant outdoor armchairs.
She’s made herself a little nest with a blanket and some pillows that she must have found in the hall closet.
Her short blonde hair is mussed slightly, and her back is to me as she stretches her arms wide, then curls up again, tucking them under the blankets on her lap.
I hadn’t seen her in my panic. I assumed the worst, and my brain on two nights of very little sleep took it from there.