54This is resurrection, but not the sacrilegious kind. I realize it's been, what, almost two years since I updated? It's been like a monkey on my back, it has. A big, hairy, heavy monkey. So I reread what I had so far and listened to old music last night to get me in the right mindset, and voila. Maybe an end is coming soon? Maybe I'll change the genre classification? Who's to say? Enjoy this rare lapse in my unreliability.
She met him at Starbucks at 6:00 on Friday night. Becca usually avoided the monstrous chain coffeehouses, but this one happened to be within easy walking distance of her house. Stepping into the warm earth tones, she saw that he had already arrived. He waited patiently in a booth in the corner with a nice window view. As she approached, he stood and presented her with a rich red rose.
"A pretty flower for a pretty girl," he said.
Becca smiled shyly, blushing.
Bryan ordered their drinks and brought them back to where Becca waited in an overstuffed leather chair by the window. She took the cup he handed her and sipped gingerly, self-conscious. She let the scalding liquid slide across her tongue as she gazed absentmindedly out the window where it rained with uncharacteristic persistence, her vision seesawing between sharply focused and pleasantly blurred.
"I never liked this place much." The simplicity with which it was stated doubled with the timbre of the rich, deep voice that spoke it cut cleanly through the silence, although volume-wise, it was barely above a whisper.
Becca tilted her head to one side. "What do you mean?"
He looked around a bit, taking another sip of his coffee. "I mean Starbucks. I never really liked it."
"Why not?"
"Too monopolized. Too standard. Too… normal, I guess. And they're all the same. No character." He chuckled a bit.
Becca let the beginnings of a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. "You wanna leave then?"
"Sure."
They finished their drinks and took Becca's flower and stepped out into the cool, misty magic of a winter rain.
It was an early Friday night, but the city was nearly empty. A few cars passed through the lonely yellow of the streetlights, their tires making soft shushing sounds on the wet pavement. Scattered pedestrians hurried along the slick sidewalks, cowering under umbrellas, their eyes held inexplicably by the unremarkable ground. The two teenagers stood on the corner, jacketless, silent for a moment. Becca inhaled deeply. The clean, wet smell of the rain saturated her tired lungs as Bryan shoved his hands in his pockets and turned his face to the sky. Raindrops traced paths through the boy's freckles and clung to his pale eyelashes. He grinned foolishly, ecstatic, and then, coming back to Earth, turned to his companion and offered her his arm.
"Shall we?"
Becca giggled. "It would be my pleasure." She slid her arm into his and they stepped off.
He led her delicately through the city's puddles for a while, but the pair soon tired of the dreary, boxed conformity of downtown and branched off into the residential areas. The holiday magic of twinkling, multicolored lights was not lessened by the lack of snow. Becca and Bryan walked for a long time, passing many places where they knew they would find warmth and hospitality and fresh gingerbread if they crossed the threshold. The rain soaked through Becca's clothes; she should have been cold, but stayed comfortable with a warm boy at her side.
They ended up on the outskirts, where the city got tired and let the hills be just hills. Becca and Bryan stood at the very pinnacle of one of these behemoths, watching the city lights twinkle in the misty valley, just as the stars twinkled, invisible, above the silvery rainclouds.
"It's beautiful," Becca sighed. "Almost magical."
Bryan thought a moment. "Ethereal?"
The girl smiled a bit. "Not quite."
"Leave it at beautiful, then?"
"Yes. Yes, I think that's best."
The earth sang. The raindrops beat percussive rhythms on every surface. A breeze fluted its way through the grasses. Reflected city haze-light in the humid air added its throaty, resonant voice. What they didn't hear, the teens' ears filled in. Sometimes it was a solo, but then in an instant it was fully harmonious symphonic bliss.
Bryan looked at Becca. With carnations in his eyes and viscaria on his lips, he slowly, shyly said it: "Will you dance with me?"
How could she say no? She smiled amicably and nodded.
Their movements were slow and awkward at first. Becca had never danced like this before. Like every little girl, she had dreamed of becoming a ballerina. Her parents had humored her with lessons, which she dropped after a few years. She was glad of it now; she looked at the lives of the girls who still danced, the ones who would continue to dance through high school, with their low-fat lattes and their misshapen feet and thought that that wasn't really much of a life at all. Nonetheless, her body did yearn sometimes to go through the old motions of a tondue or an arabesque. Her gangly teenaged limbs had forgotten how to be graceful, but some of the skill came back as she shuffled to and fro in the arms of this strange redhead boy on the top of a hill in the rain at night in midwinter. Something inside of her, the reasonable part that had controlled so much of her early life, wondered vaguely what her parents would think.
After a while, he walked her home. She was back before ten, a good girl, and they didn't kiss of say anything silly that hindsight would have proven immature or irrational, but Bryan did ask for her phone number and threw a sort of smug smile over his shoulder as he walked away.
It was only an hour after he had left that Becca realized she didn't know where he lived and began to worry whether of not he got home ok and hoped he wouldn't catch a cold on account of how wet he'd gotten walking around with her in the rain.
She sat by the phone. She glanced at her watch. She ignored the nags of "clean your room" that her parents sent up the stairs.
Call. She did the best to send the word from her brain to his. Call me. Please? Just call. Pick up the phone. Dial the numbers. Call.
She waited. She sorted her socks. She beat all the games on her graphing calculator. She cut out words from magazines and glued them back together to make nonsensical, ransom-note poetry. And she waited.
Becca stared at her ceiling until she had found all the pictures in the abstract design. She made her bed. She outlined an essay for English. She divided her laundry into piles by color.
She waited.
The phone didn't ring.
She cleaned her room. She vacuumed. She ate dinner. After that, she got on the internet and was bored for an hour because there was no one on for her to instant message with.
When she dreamed that night, it was all in confusing, metaphorical paradoxes that left her feeling somehow violated and which caused her to wake up confused. She floated through darkness and sweat and roses and woke up tired.
In the morning, she got the message. It was just a hang up, and it was from the previous night. It had to be him. Didn't it? There was no proof, but… it had to be. Right?
So she tried calling him. Looked up the number in the phone book. No listing. She tried star-six-nine, too, but she just got the phony recording:
"We're sorry. Your call could not be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try again, or dial your operator. Thank you." Calm as you please, in that canned voice.
Becca asked questions. What is that, anyway? She thought. What kind of people do they hire to make those recordings? "We're sorry." Who is we? And most of all: How does one call from a nonexistent phone number?
She waited more. What else could she do? Maybe he'd still call.
She wrote her English essay. She washed clothes. She organized her desk drawers.
Call! she pleaded.
She sat by the phone. She solved systems of equations. She brushed the dog.
She waited.
She ate butter pecan ice cream. She wrote in her journal. She bit her nails.
The phone rang.
"Hey, you wanna come over and watch movies?" Sybil's cheery voice piped through the receiver.
Becca cradled the phone gently between her jaw and collarbone. "I—no." No. Movies? No. "Nah," she drawled, faking nonchalance. "Nah, I got homework. Seeya tomorrow?"
"Yeah." Sybil only sounded a little bit hurt. "Yeah, it's cool. Seeya tomorrow."
Becca ate dinner. She practiced her clarinet. She painted her toenails blue.
She waited. She waited until it was ten o'clock.
At ten o'clock, Becca's parents went to bed. At ten o'clock, Becca turned off her light. At ten o'clock, Becca cried.
It wasn't happy joy-tears crying. It wasn't numb shock no sobs tears rolling silently down your cheeks crying. It wasn't even gimme a break too much loud Kleenex crying. It was quiet wracking sobs lost everything life is worthless crying.
Becca wore a drooping, worn-out face to school Monday morning, one that strongly resembled over-kneaded bread dough. She took small, shuffling steps down the worn out, tired halls and if anyone noticed her predicament, they gave no sign.
I've done it, Becca thought to herself. I've finally turned invisible!
Becca stared out the window, oblivious to the classroom she was in or the teacher calling her name. What if, she thought. What if he's right outside, waiting for me?
That's the way it always is in the storybooks. The beautiful maiden, held captive by some villain in a tower, is rescued by the kind knight or squire or stable boy and they ride off into the sunset on a white horse and live happily ever after.
Bryan stood on the sidewalk, smiling. He waved and produced a bouquet of lilies. Becca's mind slipped quietly out of class, creeping down the stairs and out the double doors to the waiting boy.
"I was worried," Becca panted as she trotted up. "You never called."
He smiled sadly. "I know. I tried! But I was out, and… no pay phones. They're so hard to find."
Becca smiled, nodding.
"So—" he bit his lip—"I was hoping I could make it up to you?" And here he thrust the lilies at her. They glowed in the frosty air.
The girl awkwardly accepted the gift. They won't miss me seventh period, she thought. No one ever misses me. "So what is it today? Another walk through the hills?"
He offered her an arm. "Nah, that's only good in the dark. I was thinking art museum."
They wound through downtown again, blending right in with all the high school students out on open campus lunch. The museum perched precariously between downtown and a large, sprawling park. Becca and Bryan paid their student admission fee and were instantly lost in a forest of glass sculpture and impressionist painting. They weren't able to enjoy the art for long, however, before noticing the suited security guard trailing them.
"Don't look now," Bryan whispered, "but we're being followed. We may be in danger."
Becca looked, stifling a giggle when she saw what her boyish companion was referring to. Bryan gave the guard a long look. He could have been thinking hard, but it was more likely Bryan chewed his lip to hide his smile. He grabbed Becca's arm.
"Quick," he murmured furtively. "This way!"
He pulled her through gallery after gallery, maneuvering delicately around sculpture and escaping oil paintings by scant millimeters. Finally the pair stumbled to a halt.
"Now that," gasped Becca, "was fun!"
Looking around, they found themselves in a small, dimly lit gallery, the kind of place an art museum puts pieces right before they are shipped off to storage rooms. Glancing around, Becca could see that some of the pieces were truly nonspectacular, but others were merely too "out there"—before their time, perhaps. There was something at the end of the gallery, though, that caught Becca's eye. She approached, cautious, and was shocked when she realized what she was seeing.
It was a sculpture of a very large bird, about four feet tall at the shoulder with the neck twisting upward an additional two feet. The bird's metal body was painted in red-toned enamels that sparkled and shifted in the light and the long beak and legs shone gold. The eyes, deep and dark, took their life from tiny pieces of colored glass.
Recollection crept around the edges of Becca's mind.
"Endings!" a voice cried. "Beginnings! TRUTH!"
They lied to me. They told me junior high would be better, but it was all lies. I believed them, then. The summer before seventh grade and a new school, I packed all of my stuffed animals and dolls in boxes, labeled them, and stacked them in the garage. On the first day at the new school, all of my imaginary friends, the people and animals and whatsits that had lived in my mind for all those years, keeping me company and guarding my sanity, were abandoned as I walked out the front door to catch a bus for the first time in my life. They stood, huddled together, mumbling to each other and wondering if they would ever see me again. They didn't.
But nothing changed. New building, different schedule, but same old life. Classes were no more challenging or engaging. I struggled to stay awake in my accelerated Math and English classes, to say nothing of the meat-grinder classes like Health. Brochures and orientations made it seem like junior high kids had more freedom, too, but that was just another lie. The golden promise that we would be able to eat lunch anywhere on the premises, not just in the cafeteria, was dashed to pieces on the first day when we learned that we'd be severely disciplined if found in the building at lunch without a pass. I suppose that was the hour when the faculty made margaritas and raced through the hallways in big wheeled chairs.
Perhaps the biggest not-change of all, though, was my social status. I was no butterfly in primary. I was the nerd, the pariah, the girl with maybe one best friend and c'est tout. They tell you that in junior high, there are so many more people, that you're bound to end up with more than a few that you can relate to. This seemed feasible during that first lunch hour, while I waited in line for pizza and gossiped about boys with some girls I'd met earlier in the day, feeling cooler than I had in my whole life. This is it, I'd told myself. I'm finally going to be popular. Not so. Those same girls had dumped me in a couple of months, and I returned to the status quo antebellum, where I was rather waiflike socially.
My status in regards to the opposite sex didn't change, either. I'd had a few crushes in elementary, boys whom I'd fawned over (I can't call it lust, because I don't think I knew what lust was at that point) but barely even talked to. They're not kidding when they say you'll meet new people in junior high, and that includes a lot of fresh meat, but my shyness did not fade as I grew older. I was as lonely and pathetic as ever.
After so many months of lonely, I remember I started to slip. At home in my room on evenings, I'd cry, and exhausted, I'd slip into that place between consciousness and sleep. I'd see things then, weird and wonderful things, like dreaming awake. I loved my visions. I felt like a prophet. I told no one, not only because I treasured the secret of the thing, but because I'd heard horror stories about therapists and didn't want to get myself shipped off to one.
It wasn't long before I started seeing the bird. Few of my reveries had any rhyme or reason to them, and few images occurred more than once. The bird was the exception. It showed up first a couple of times in the same month, then once a week, then every day. Soon he went with me even in the daytime, his drooping red tail feathers trailing behind us as we traversed the dusty corridors of my school, his presence a comforting thing. I wasn't alone anymore, and I smiled, knowingly, much to the confusion of my classmates. They began to avoid me even more, thinking I was crazy or something. The "just thinking about a joke I heard" excuse only works so many times to explain away the weird goofy smile on your face.
I didn't care, then. I got teased about being spacey, but the bird came to my defense. One mean comment and in a golden flash it was on them, nipping at their ankles and picking at their eyes with his long yellow beak. They never knew, of course, but it was something to make me feel better.
But then, one day, my companion was gone. I think he faded when I started making friends again. It was like my extroversion made him weaker. His feathers lost some of their sheen, and then I saw less and less of him until—he was gone altogether. I wasn't sad. I just forgot.
It's easy to forget something that never existed.
"Becca?" Bryan poked her a little bit, wondering if he should call for that annoying security. "Becca? You alright?"
Becca blinked and shook herself. She stared hard at Bryan for a minute before remembering to close her mouth, which had been hanging open for quite some time. "Y—yeah. Fine. I'm fine." She smiled. "Is that a cool sculpture, or what?" She pointed to the big metal bird in front of them.
Bryan's shoulders relaxed visibly. "Yeah," he sighed. "To bad it's only a sculpture, eh?"
"Yeah," mumbled Becca absentmindedly. "Yeah, it's too bad."