Happy.

Chapter Five: Orange.

Garrett's POV

 

   The cold wind whipped and bit at the back of my neck and I tugged my thin cotton jacket closed. I hugged myself while walking, slightly hunched over, and the passerby threw uncomfortable glances my way, but I didn't care. I just scowled deeper and hugged myself tighter.

    My day had been shit.

    I was pissed when the teachers acted like I cared about their lectures delivered in monotone and I was even more pissed when nobody noticed Audrey was gone. But could I really blame them? She was just a plain girl hiding  and suffocating in her own skin, slowly caving in on herself. Hell, I wasn't even sure she noticed herself half the time. Sometimes she'd stroke my hand or arm with her own tiny hands, not even realizing. And sometimes the corners of her small mouth would twitch up slightly into an unconscious smile. I think it was those tiny actions that made me fall for her in the beginning. Because, even when she didn't mean to be, she was kind and beautiful and thoughtful. Her unintentional smiles and gestures and the gleam in her eyes had always got me to wondering what she was thinking of. It must've been something absolutely wonderful because she was her prettiest in those moments when she was lost in her own world. When she'd let little pieces of her that she kept hidden slip. That's all I could think of and it drove me insane.

    I had practically run out of that godforsaken highschool at the sound of the last bell. I had sped home angrily in my angry sounding car and had come to an angry, abrupt stop in my driveway when I decided home was not where I wanted to be. Not on the front steps where Audrey and I had shared our first kiss. Not in the living room where we'd watched the silly cartoons that she'd liked. Not in the kitchen where she had prepared me food when I was hungry. Not in my room where we'd fallen asleep together after talking of books and stories and runaway dreams that we would try our best to catch. "I'll always help you catch your dreams," she had said. "Even if it means I have to let go of mine."

     And I suppose that's how I ended up on this windy street, the fallen, crisp leaves billowing around me like my own tornado. It seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it. My brain was hazy and it hurt to think so I stopped trying to figure out where I was.

    Still it was bothering me. What was the name of this street again? Tulane and second? Tulane and...and fifth. And it hit me all at once. Just as I came to a stop in front of an old, grimey looking house with a jungle of a lawn and just as I noticed the small boy sitting on the front steps.

    I had found my way to Audrey's house and, it seemed, to her little brother as well. The pang of nervousness hit me hard, but at the same time I felt something will me forward.

   The boy was sitting quietly with his chubby hands clasped in his lap, his face downcast. He slowly lifted his gaze as he heard me approach and his unruly brown hair fell over his face. He brushed it away to get a better look at me and I nearly choked.

    Because looking into this boy's eyes was just like looking into Audrey's. Wide pools of caramel-y chocolate. Big and child-like and sad like you wouldn't believe.

    So what could I do? What else could I do but sit and stay and talk and stifle my sobs? And I learned so much.

    I learned that his name was Wyatt and he was five years and two months old. I learned that his parents hadn't named him, but Audrey had. Wyatt because it meant "little warrior" and Audrey had wanted nothing more than for her little brother to be strong. He would need all the strength he could muster in this world, she had said.

    I learned that sometimes Audrey would sing to him, and if she wasn't too nervous she would smile while she sang and close her eyes. And she would do all of this while spreading her arms wide and twirling around without a care in the world. Then, sometimes, she would take his hand and they would dance.

    And I learned that Audrey liked drawing tiny pictures and bits and pieces of poetry in the corners of pages. Any pages. Library books, newspapers, homework. Any pages.

    And I learned that Audrey's mother told her she was stupid and that her father hit her.

   And I learned that Audrey cried at night. "I heard her sometimes," Wyatt said softly. "Walking by her room to get a drink at night."

   Wyatt had stopped talking after a while, and, instead, he stretched out on the top step with a box of Crayola crayons ("The very best kind of crayons.") and several pages of his own drawings. They varied from pictures of dragons to dinosaurs to flowers to video game characters I recognized.They were all brightly colored in red, orange, and yellow, but mostly orange.

   "They're my favorite colors," Wyatt had explained.

    "Why?," I had managed to ask around the lump in my throat.

     "They remind me of people," he had said, still coloring away with his caramel-y chocolate eyes fixed to the paper.

     "Come again?"

     

     He looked up from his paper, gripping a worn down crayon, and his expression turned solemn. "Red people are angry and yellow people are happy. But orange people are stuck. They are red trying to be yellow, but they can't get it quite right so they're just orange."