Fused

Chapater 6: James

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James laid on his bed. Well, not really his bed, because his was a queen size bed in his room at home in Sacramento. This bed was small, a twin size his grandmother squeezed in to the small odd shaped room that was meant to be a den but had now become his bedroom.  He felt too big for the space and too big for the bed.  This is temporary , he thought.  You should be thankful for this.  Your grandmother is an amazing woman, kind and loving and she made this space for you.

He loved his grandmother and he loved coming to San Diego in the summer to visit her when he was a child. She always planned fun adventures for him and his sisters, like trips to the beach or to the zoo.  She let him stay up to watch late night TV shows and she let him eat Frosted Flakes for breakfast.  Dad was always adamant that kids did not stay up late and he never bought sweet cereals.

James could hear his grandmother moving around in her room upstairs getting ready for bed. There were two rooms upstairs, his grandmother's room and the guest room that she turned into an office a few years back once James and his sisters had gotten too old to come for visits at Grandma's. Rather than giving up her office, which she used for writing unfinished novel after unfinished novel, she decided to turn the den into a guest room. 

James and his sisters would all share the upstairs guest room when they were young. The twin bed that was now in the den, now his room, used to reside in the guest bedroom upstairs. It had been the only bed in the room and his older sister Sam always slept in it.  He and his younger sister Caroline slept in sleeping bags on the floor.  He never cared that he didn't have the bed back then.  It was fun to sleep on the floor, like camping.  Now James realized the floor was probably a better place to sleep as he adjusted trying to find a comfortable position on the lumpy mattress.

He stared up at the ceiling in thought.  He didn't know what to do now. Two weeks ago, he called his grandmother, and she was excited to hear from him and even more excited when he asked if he could come stay with her. She knew that James and his sisters and dad were going to be moving to the San Diego area in the next few months, but James decided to come sooner and needed a place to stay.  He explained to her how he received a scholarship for school that started in the Fall but  he also had been invited to join a fight team in San Diego, however to be on that team he had to come to Southern California now- waiting until Fall when school started wasn't an option.   It wasn't entirely a lie.  In fact, he had convinced himself it wasn't a lie at all.  Those things he told her were true there was just more he couldn't tell her.  More he couldn't tell anybody.

His grandmother never liked the idea of the fight team.  She couldn't understand why he would want to fight with someone and how that could be a sport, yet she wanted him to come stay so, she accepted the fighting thing and focused more on the fact that he was coming to go to school.    

In preparation for his arrival, she had the den turned into a bedroom just for him.  She wanted him to have a space all his own and a place he could keep all his things.  He didn't have much though, just some clothes, a computer for school and his music collection, which was his most prized possession.  He loved music.  It didn't matter what kind of music, all of it to him had a time or place to be enjoyed.  And he loved CD's.  He had been collecting them since he was a child and not yet converted to digital music like everyone else on the planet had. 

His mother loved music too.  She was a violinist, loved the classics but also and had a massive CD collection with every genera of music in existence.  It was because of her that he developed his own love of music and appreciation for the antiquated discs. 

He remembered his mom on her days off singing and dancing around the house while she performed household chores, music blaring from large speakers next to the television.  His dad would come in and scoop her into his arms and they would dance around the living room together.