Chapter 2 #5
Sometimes bad shit happens to good people.
They didn’t deserve it. They’re never coming back.
It’s sad and awful and leaves huge empty holes in our lives and there’s no amount of anything that’ll make any of it better, especially not weird, gross, supposed supportive sentiments that just make you want to throat punch a bitch for saying it.
If only for a brief moment, the Tree boys in all their zany glory had offered me a brief reprieve from it all, a distraction I desperately needed from my own jumbled thoughts.
Reality clearly back in focus, the stomach twisting was back. Everything was all over the place. Much like my life.
A soft groan left me as my face pulled into a grimace.
There was no one to go home and talk to about all this, confide in, seek comfort, tell me I’m an idiot, just talk it the hell out over a can of pop, a bowl of popcorn, and a good rom com, help me feel human again and not like I’m a total weirdo that’s incapable of peopling. I had no one.
This was probably the most alone I’ve felt in a while.
Thinking of that kiss with Cy once more, I winced. Unbidden, my hand lifted and my fingertips brushed my lips. I hated to say it considering Cypress’ motives planting one on me, but that was- It was-
It hadn’t meant anything to him… and my mouth still tingled from it.
I got all shivery and bothered in that stomach flip flopping and full of butterflies way just thinking about it.
Our mouths had fit together perfectly. It had been…
He’d tasted- I’d felt- I didn’t want to use the word perfect in reference to anything with Cy, did I?
God, what was I saying? A soft, semihysterical laugh left me. One kiss from my ex bestie’s brother and I’m instantly ga-ga over it? A smooch that meant bupkis to him?
Yeah. Sounds about right. That’s just the shitshow that is my life.
But it was fireworks and butterflies, all that stupid crap spouted out of lovestruck numbskulls trying to wax poetic. I felt the earth move. I was dizzy with it.
He just wanted to sneak that envelope into my pocket and he was done with my crap.
It is what it is, I told myself, desperate to dismiss the whole thing and move on.
Turning the music up, I rolled the window down all the way, the cold air slapping at my still pink cheeks.
My lips sucked into my mouth and I ran my tongue along them.
“No. No,” I muttered, forcing myself to stop immediately. What am I doing?
Trying to see if the taste of him is still on my mouth.
Damn, I’m a sad sack if a kiss that probably occurred simply to annoy Elm, with the dual purpose of distraction, had me so fiercely in its hold.
Blowing out a deep, fuck it, fuck it all, breath, I swapped out my current tunes for my tried and true playlist on random. “Is She Weird” came on, and I felt the tension riding me slowly easing up.
I was wound up so tight I felt like I could pop.
Bobbing my head along to the lyrics, I couldn’t help but automatically think of the Tree guys as I hummed along.
Damn them, all of them. They were everywhere.
Elm had introduced me to the Pixies. Cypress swore we played our music too loud but the second the Pixies came on he was yelling at us to turn it up so he could hear it clean across the house. My lips quirked into a peek of a smile at the thought.
Sometimes Cy would steal Elm’s cord to his boom box and only unearth it after we’d promised to allow him a turn in the rotation, taking turns listening to each other’s newfound favorites.
Rock, Metal, the old stuff, new stuff, New Wave, Eighties, Alternative, and everything in between, it all got some airtime.
Cy had a pretty impressive, vast music collection. It helped being on his good side sometimes.
Despite his claims otherwise, that guinea pig haired fiend had a veritable treasure trove of pop and country CDs in the bottom of his closet, hidden beneath everything else.
He claimed they were Sunny’s and he was just holding onto them for her but everyone knew better.
Did he still have a shoe box full of bubblegum hits in that old work boots shoe box?
Had he given up on the genre entirely? Had Elm converted him to the dark side and they jammed out together to epic playlists the way we used to?
Cy could be such a butt sometimes if he felt like Elm was spending too much time hanging out with me.
He’d pick fights if he felt I was impeding on brotherly time or whatever it was I shouldn’t be around for.
Birch would inevitably jump in, if only to instigate the argument between siblings for shits and gigs.
Insults would fly, most of them boy humor stupidity.
I’d end up laughing my butt off on the floor of Elm’s room as it all turned into a circus show, until both or one of their parents came barging in to break it all up.
Today’s crazy was so close to the old days. So many memories. It brought me happiness and pain in equal measure.
The Trees had been like a second family to me. It wasn’t just Elm that eased away from me when he pulled back.
Sure, Sunny was cordial and friendly as ever when I popped in, but there were no invites to dinners or hangouts. I wasn’t one of the gang anymore.
I missed it so much sometimes and yet it’s been so damn long I hadn’t thought about it as much as I have been lately. Too much free time and not enough time at the same time can put you in a funny place.
The more I thought about all of this shit, the less any of it made sense. The accident, the sitch with the Trees, the fact this is my life now and what now?
In the grand scheme of things, what does it matter that Elm decided to suddenly stop being my friend a bajillion years ago?
At the very least, I got the last word in with all this shit with the Trees— there was that— tucking that letter into Birch’s pocket.
A sense of victory washed over me, miniscule as it might be.
It was better to think on that than the millions of things gone straight to the crapper.
I was moving. The house was being sold. It was a done deal. There was no way out of this. Even with the money the Trees had tried giving me, it wasn’t enough to save the place. Too late for that.
This was happening.
My parents’ things would need to be gone through. Things I hadn’t touched since the accident. I needed to pick and choose what I should and could keep of theirs, their whole lives reduced to the things they left behind, echoes of a person. It felt so wrong, like I had no right— how dare I.
Stomach churning, I changed my tunes yet again after my song ended, because I could— it was about the only thing I had a lick of control over. Stopping at a light, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. They’d understand, my parents. They knew I wouldn’t take all this lightly.
As “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” began to play, I smiled faintly.
Birch didn’t know any of the words to it but he’d rush into the room when it came on the radio in the store and mumble-sing the whole thing in its entirety, head bobbing, braying rendition of his take on it that it was.
His attempts never failed to make me laugh.
Sometimes I used to throw my arm over his shoulder and sing along with him.
It felt a bit like the world was ending right now, even if I knew that wasn’t true. My world as I knew it was gone but is that not the start of a new beginning? I was struggling for a thread of that silver lining to grasp onto, trying to think of something Mom would say.
What the hell did I really have going for me?
A smooch that was all too brief and knocked my socks off. I could check that off the list? Pfft. Yay me? Womp-womp.
Instead of looking for the rainbow after the rain, masochist that I am, my mind has subconsciously decided to tie me to the bumper of my clunker and drag me down memory lane, willing or not.
I couldn’t help but wonder what I had done to find myself cast aside from their lives so thoroughly. Had I been deemed a bad influence? Had I committed offenses I was unaware of? Had they spoken to my parents about any of this? Perhaps it was none of that entirely. Maybe I’m not meant to know.
My mind kept circling the drain. I was obsessed, fixated. I’ve got a real problem here and the problem isn’t really the problem. I’m so the problem.
Elm hadn’t just been my best friend. That boy had been my world.
Was I the weird girl to them too and they were too nice to just come right out and say it? Was I being too… clingy? Coming around too much? Were they tolerating me all those years because Mom and Sunny were so tight?
My Mom would know what to say about all of this, and Dad would back her up, ludicrous as my worries I purged to them may or may not be.
I missed them so damn much I physically ached. No jokes with Dad that had Mom snort-laughing, no sweet family moments to be thankful for, no one shouting my first and middle name because I thought it and I said it and it was a wee bit too far because I was comfortable and unfiltered.
“This is all fucked,” I muttered as I adjusted my beanie. The hair attached to my wig, a wig-beanie— or wignie as I found it more fun to refer to it, if only in my head— had gone askew at some point and the hair was slapping me in the left side of my face.
I’m totally overthinking all of this crap. What the hell does any of it matter? It’s all ancient history.
Hell, soon enough I’ll be moving to who the hell knows where for good, doing god knows what just to make ends meet, and they’ll all be nothing more than a bunch of wonky memories from an ill fated point in my life I’m not crazy about dwelling on.
Glancing at the car stereo, still stuck on the old days, I turned off my playlist and switched to the radio and put it on a pop station. The bubblegummiest song I’d ever heard in my life popped on.