Captive - FourTris

Thirty

JANUARY 30
5 MONTHS

My hair is piled atop my head in curls and I have a pretty necklace around my neck. A little diamond pendant Tobias bought me two weeks ago.

But I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go. Just sitting on the couch near the door, waiting.

I don't know where he is.

I'm not sure I want to know. Maybe it's better if he never calls to tell me, and I just sit here and wonder.

His dad has been on a drinking binge for two days, and I know that is the problem. I know he's off somewhere dealing with it, dealing with his mom, trying to sort out the problems that never leave him.

I know Christina is going to figure it out. She's going to look everywhere for me. She'll stand at the door to the gym and watch expectantly for me to round the corner in the beautiful green dress she helped pick out. But I'll just be sitting here, waiting for him, and he'll never show up.

I don't know why I thought this would work. Why I thought Tobias could do something... teen like this.

Tobias lives in a world made for people much older than his eighteen years. He lives in a world that ages him faster than is fair.

It's why I feel as if I've been with him for years and not months. Because everything is accelerated and intense and real, and high school dances are childish and silly and pointless.

But I still wanted this. I'm still near tears as I sit here, with my forty-dollar updo and my newly polished nails.

An hour in the salon chair, and no one's even going to see my hair.

The disappointment tastes bitter. Tonight he was going to talk with Christina and laugh with me, and for once it was going to be different. Things were going to be like I thought they were going to be when I met him five months ago. He was going to be a piece that fit into my life and made it whole, not the piece that forced the rest of it all apart.

Tobias wanted to take me to this, wanted to be there for me, and his father ruined it, and he has to save his mum even though she will never save herself.

And yet I still wait, as the night sky darkens and the house goes quiet. It is not until eleven, when the dance is over, that I go back to my room and slip off my dress, hang it back in the closet where no one will ever see it. I shove it far back to ensure that, because maybe if I never see it again I won't remember how this feels.

I sit at my vanity and pull the pins from my hair, watching as it tumbles down around my shoulders. I wipe my face clean of the makeup I'd so painstakingly applied and I climb into my bed, my skin still tingling with the cleanser.

Winter Formal has come and gone, and I was not there to see it.