Sunbound

☀ Orchids

C H A P T E R  16: Orchids

☀ ☀ ☀

The thunderstorm outside was one of the greatest. It was eight o'clock in the morning, but, between the brilliant flashes of lightening that shone through the clouds, it was as almost dim as midnight. The rain pelted down on Santan Valley in skewed darts, drumming on the rooftops and sizzling on the shingles that burned in the humidity. There was no breeze. The air was stale and stagnant and partly suffocating.

Beneath one of those rooftops, Scout-Juliet Compton was swathed in bed sheets that smelled of Old Spice and gasoline and rain, wondering how long she had been in room number five of V&L's Motel by herself.

She was mildly hungover. There was a dull throbbing in the back of her head and a corresponding ache in each limb, like phantom pains of where they'd been severed. The rest of her was tingling uncomfortably. She laid still, staring at the ceiling and listening to the rhythm of the rain. She felt like she needed to puke, but there was nothing in her to eject. She had thrown up the Mexican food at some point during the night. She wanted to be upset or raging, but she was just... Just.

When Scout finally found it in herself to roll out of bed, she felt like she left herself tangled in the sheets. Her heart had dropped into her stomach, and she felt like a large part of herself was missing. She couldn't describe the feeling with a word as simple as "sad:" three miserable, self-pitying letters. It was like she was torn up about something that hadn't even happened yet, so she couldn't correlate a word to the feeling.

She sat on the edge of the bed, her fingers collecting the fitted sheet between them. Her hair was a storm all over, and she meant to clear it from her view, but she couldn't part herself from holding onto the sheets. She didn't want to leave Skylar's bed. She felt like that was the only corner of the world that wasn't corrupted by Antonio. It was the only space that wasn't saturated in hues, and scents, and memories of him, but rather a man that had no correlation to a heartbreak as terrible as her last.

She just sat there for awhile, thinking about nothing at all until she began to recall a dream she had. It was like a ghost in the air that slithered into her mind out of nowhere. She didn't know if it was a dream she had had the night before, or at some other juncture of her life, but it was a vivid dream of her dead. Although not the highest on her list of things she hated, being melodramatic definitely ranked, and so she thought that maybe it wasn't really about death; but maybe about escaping this miserable life. In her sleep, the image of herself pale and posed in a bed of orchids surrounded by mourners was the best way to convey it. The funeral was one of the best dreams she'd ever had. She wanted to go back. She wanted to be surrounded by the flowers and the rain-soaked windows of a funeral home as quiet as she was dead. And although she wasn't particuarly religious, she always thought of there being a better place somewhere beyond this life. She wanted to be there sooner rather than later.

And as she sat there still gripping the sheets of Skylar's bed like she could float away through the ceiling, up passed the telephone lines, the hawks, and the clouds, and all of the monotony of Santan Valley, Arizona, (even though that was what she wanted, heights tended to make her nauseous), the thought of that dream transitioned into something less appealing. The thought that she didn't particularly care about her own existence. She thought that, if in some freak accident gravity failed her and a satellite fell from space and landed precisely on room number five of V&L's Motel in Santan Valley, Arizona, and squashed her like a bug on a windshield, that wouldn't really bother her at all. She wasn't suicidal, exactly. She wasn't actively trying to kill herself, but she couldn't say that her purposefully not checking for traffic before crossing the road hadn't happened before. And she couldn't attest that her taking more than the recommended dosage of a medication hadn't happened with many of her prescriptions. And if someone were to hold a gun to her head right now, she couldn't say with absolute certainty that she would plead for her life. Maybe the person with the gun was doing her a favor.