What Goes Around

Tick, Tick, Tick

        My mother was, as always, no help.

        "I heard there was a new kid at your school, hon. Is she nice?"

        I stared out of the passenger-side window. "It's a boy."

        "Oh, okay. Is he nice?"

        I said nothing. Of course he wasn't nice. 

        "Well, what's his last name? Maybe I heard about his parents moving in. We should welcome them!"

        I took a deep breath. "Terrensaw," I mumbled.

        "What? I didn't hear you, can you speak up?"

        "Terrensaw."

        My mother's eyes widened. She remembered that last name, I knew it. 

        "Is he Aaron?" she asked slowly.

        I nodded and resumed looking out of the window.

        She stayed silent the rest of the ride, and I wasn't sure why.

        I sat at my desk, eating a Three Musketeers candy bar. I stared at the off-white wall and chewed. It was silent, aside from my clock ticking in the corner of the. The wall blurred in front of me and the sound of the clock made it's way into my brain. It became the ticking of a bomb, a bomb that walks into my social studies class and blows up the life I had recently accepted and settled into. A heat-seeking missile that followed me and waited to blow up again and again, destroying me and my surroundings and everything I had just begun to understand. 

        And I hated Aaron Terrensaw a little more each tick.

        How dare he come back only when the dust, that he had fanned up, had settled? He broke my world and then expected it to be fixed when he came back. 

        You can glue a broken vase together, but it won't always hold water the same way. It would be crooked and scarred and still broken. Broken and loosely held together, ready to break at the slightest touch.

        I was that vase.