Beating Death

Chapter four

Song of the day:  For the first time – The script.

Monday morning came before I knew it. It felt like forever, but a short time, and I spent most of it on the couch, mesmerized by the television screen in front of me. As I watched my mom repeatedly calling my dad, my eyes saw her eventually give up and stop calling him. I watched her curl up in her chair and cry, I watched Grandpa Eric hug her, and try to tell her things were going to be alright. I watched Jamie as he sat there, in his little chair, as he cried some more, sketched in his book, and slept never leaving me, It seemed as if it went in a cycle, people would come, and bring flowers, people I hardly knew. People I hadn’t seen in years, people I never talked to. Girls Elliot had fucked brought my mom flowers, and by the end of the day the counter was piled with more flowers then I’d ever seen in one place.

Daises, roses, marigolds, daises were my favorites, and everyone that knew me knew that, they brought those for me, and but most of them had a card telling my mother she was sorry for her loss. Most of them were from friends of Elliot’s. Not friends of mine, the few friends I had knew how to help, and that was just to be there, I never liked those things, not the flowers, or the sympathy cards. I didn’t like that stuff.

Elliot had been a player, he was a guy that girls fell all over, the guy that somehow managed to hurt a thousand girls, and still get the ones he wanted. He was one of the most popular guys in our school. Elliot, was, well he was a great brother, a little brother. He was a minute or so younger than me, and now I had outlived him. I missed his smile, his laugh, and I knew I’d never see it again. Elliot was gone.

I missed so many things, and never would I be thinking I’d be missing sitting in that seat, right in front of Jamie, next to Elliot, and with my best friend Denni at my side. Geography had always been my second favorite class after music, not just because of the people, the teacher, the class. History was my one strong subject, math, you could try to shove it through my brain a thousand times, and I still wouldn’t get it. Numbers went in one ear and out the other, and I blamed myself for my failing grades. I had a habit of doing that, when I messed up I became tense, I wanted to never mess up, but I knew it wasn’t possible. In English I was the one kid that read really badly and never raised her hand to read out loud.

I was that girl that hung her head in shame when she was picked on to read something out loud. The girl that could sit and stare at a page for an hour, go over her research eight times, and still not produce a quality report, however I had a knack for remembering dates, for remembering the little things, the things I paid too much attention to. When I messed up a note, in a song, I’d keep playing until the end, and then go back to that one note, repeat a thousand times until I was sure I knew how it went, and I’d repeat it.

Remembering the little things was one of my strengths in school. The one strength I had, that wasn’t copying things from Denni, or Elliot, or Jamie.

Never would I have thought I would miss sitting in that classroom, never would I have thought I would wanted to be there. I just wanted to see Elliot’s smile one more time, watch him laugh, I wanted to be held by Jamie, I wanted my mom to give me a bear hug like she did every day when  I got home from school, and tell me hello, and ask me how my day was. I wanted to call my dad a listen to him talk about how much fun he was having in Japan, and how awesome he was doing, and how he couldn’t wait to get back home and see me and Elliot again, and how he missed us all so much. 

It only took three days for me to miss these people. Three days of watching them on the screen as I sat on the couch curled up like a little baby, and cried my eyes out. As I watched the same people doing the same thing over and over again, as I watched his drawings go up on the wall, it was amazing how well he drew me. As I watched the life I was once a part of revolve around me if only for three days it felt like too long. I was about to turn off the T.V when mom got up from her chair, the phone rang behind her, and she jumped from her chair, a little jumpy.