𝐎𝐍 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐄 - 𝐡𝐬𝐦𝐭𝐦𝐭𝐬 (𝐢𝐢) | ✔

twenty-three

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twenty-three: memories
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     Ricky looked at his phone again, trying to find the courage to answer Juliette. He could not believe himself; the girl he so much loved was just asking how he was and wishing him a good time with his mom and he could not even bring himself to send her a two-word message. Instead, he had decided to wrap himself up in a blanket and remain in bed.

     "Hey, brought you a snack," his mother knocked on the door. She had prepared a room for him in her new Chicago apartment and, ever since he got there, he had barely got out of there. "Plaintains and cream cheese."

     "Weird snack," he threw the magazine to his side, as his mother smiled and replied that he was a weird kid as well.

     "Do you... do you wanna talk about it?" she asked, sitting herself on the bed.

     Did he want to talk about it? What was there to talk? He had just broken up with one of the girls that had made him the happiest and that had been there for him for whatever it was he needed, who had made him feel part of the family, and it had been his fault. She had begged him not to leaver her there and yet, he had got down that treehouse and walked home. 

     "It's just," he sat upright on the bed, now looking at his mother, "Juliette auditioned for the musical and got a role, it's small but it's still a role. And I started lashing out at her for no reason at all because I was mad at the world and she just wanted to help me and I guess that I'm not really used to that and I didn't know how to answer. And then, she wrote this song, she cannot write songs for the love of her but she still did it so I must have known something was up. It was to express how she was feeling, how she knew something was wrong and I came down kinda hard on it and then she's hanging out with E.J. a lot and... I'm doing the thing, aren't I?"

     "What thing?"

     "Where I say I don't want to talk about it and then whoosh!" he motioned his hand as if it were a spaceship. He knew he was rambling but he needed to lift that heavy weight from his chest or else it would crush him.

     "Oh, I-I love it when you do that thing?" his mother smiled, caressing his leg. "It's my favourite. But, I don't want to press, so..."

⊱ ────── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ───── ⊰

     There is only so much time you can spend staring at the ceiling completely alone. Ricky was starting to become overwhelmed and irritated with the silence surrounding him, no other noise than his mother's light footsteps throughout the house. Tired of being alone with his thoughts,  the boy stood up from the bed and walked to the door, looking for his mother.

     "Hi," they both said at the same time upon finding each other face-to-face when Ricky opened the door. 

     "Where you just out there staring at the door?"

     "Don't worry," Lynne excused herself, or attempted to at least. "It's not that weird. I do the same thing when you're not here."

     "That's funny. I actually sometimes to that to your door when you're out of town," Ricky admitted, letting his voice lower as he approached the end of the sentence. "Or did, before you... before we moved."

     "I just... I actually wanted to grab your plate," she explained, rapidly changing topics.

     "My friends, like, my castmates..." Ricky started, stopping his mother from exiting the room, "they think it sucks what you did on opening night, showing up with Todd."