Two Of Us

Chapter Three // BEFORE

Drill team in the mornings was the perfect way to put myself in a bad mood from square one.

            I rolled out of bed thinking about Samuel, for some odd reason. I found myself wondering what he'd want the setup to be for our PowerPoint and if he'd be happy with what I'd done so far. I ate breakfast, threw it up, and took a banana for the road. I brushed my teeth and made sure my schoolclothes for the day were packed – last year I'd repeatedly forgotten to bring shoes and had ended up wearing gore boots to class fairly regularly.

            Slowly, quietly, I pushed open my parents' bedroom door to give them a silent parting word. They were sound asleep as I wished I had been at that hour. My body ached for the next opportunity to go back to a deep, deep slumber and never wake up again. And yet, here were my parents, with my mom wrapped in the loving arms of my dad. Their breaths were synchronized even though my dad snored a little louder than my mother. A sliver of light fell upon their faces as I opened the door wider, but they didn't stir. They were so in love.

            Loneliness settled deep inside of me, in my stomach, in my soul. Hunger for something like that erupted within me. I may have only been sixteen years old but the loneliness of not knowing with great certainty, as my parents had, who I would marry one day killed me day to day. Laramie wouldn't be around forever and there was a hole in my heart only a boy, somewhere out there, could fill – however pretty she was I could never find myself to be attracted to her, no matter how much our peers talked about whether it was a possibility or not. I didn't know how she felt but I knew that I needed someone.

            Made my way down the stairs. Grabbed a Diet Coke – I'd need it today, I'd woken up with a headache and I often found that the caffeine alleviated the bloodflow to my overactive mind anyways – and my keys off of the dish on the kitchen table. Opened the garage door and hopped in the driver's side door.

            One perk was being able to see the stars one more time before they went to bed. It was always pitch black outside, but I lived far enough removed from the main part of the city that the stars shone brighter above my house than seemingly anywhere else. Above my head were galaxies and heavens each with stories of their own that outnumbered mine. Among them, my loneliness either felt multiplied or insignificant. There was no in between.

            I lived at the top of a hill. Quick backstory: the self-same summer that I'd begun to hate myself, a fire set my neighborhood ablaze. It went down in history as the Charlotte Fire, devastating everything around me. I remembered Juliette who was frantic as a freshman in high school trying to gather up her drill team costumes as quickly as she could. My mother and father packed what mattered the most to them while I sat in my bedroom, honestly perplexed about the situation unfolding all around me. We, and our neighbors, found ourselves drawn to the nearest church building like moths to a lamp. I remember seeing the flames. I remember watching them climb nearer, and nearer, to my home.

            I lived south enough of town that it engulfed the forest around us. We were in the car and driving down towards the church building. I sat in the backseat and stared into the flames that encroached everything I'd ever known. But somehow, the forest – the trees and the grass, the bushes and all of the animals – seemed to quench the fire's thirst as it reached the edges of our property. Instead, it started to skip downhill, towards the town, before stopping altogether.

            Even three years later, its remnants still remained. I felt as though you could still taste the ashes on the ground occasionally, and the trees rose from the ground as spindly and knobby as I intended for myself to look. They surrounded my household and rose to the sky, pricking the stars and making them bleed. No one bothered to cut down the dead trees and every morning they made themselves obvious among the ones that we'd planted as part of the rebuilding effort because they were dead and gone.