Seaglass Promises in the Midnight Sky

Sandy Olsson

Sleeping on the couch meant that Lorraine woke up when the first person in the house decided to brave the downstairs.

Out of solidarity, Taylor spent the first night with Lorraine. They watched movies until they could barely keep their eyes open, a bowl of popcorn between them and Taylor's relentless thinly-veiled attempts of getting Lorraine to talk about the past few weeks.

It was nice. It felt familiar in a way Lorraine desperately needed after so much foreign.

Even so, Taylor didn't last long. When Jeremiah came down the stairs at four in the morning, less than three hours since they fell asleep, with no regard for those in the living room to make breakfast, Taylor called it quits and trudged upstairs to catch a few more hours of undisturbed rest in Belly's room. 

Lorraine was alone the next night, feeling altogether uninspired by the selection of movies available. It was a rather impressive collection, but none of them seemed worth the trouble of wasting hours getting invested in characters and plots.

She had eventually decided, come hell or high water, today was the day she was finally going to watch Back to the Future.

When she first met Steven he was obsessed with the movie, called it a masterpiece of cinema. She never got tired of bugging him about it, getting him all wound up trying to explain the plot while she pretended none of it made sense and asked stupid irrelevant questions. It became a bit of a pass time for her and Taylor on the nights they spent by his side. It was one of their patented methods of distracting him during Mario cart games.

She was maybe twenty minutes in when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Lorraine had made sure the volume was low enough that it wouldn't bother anyone upstairs and she hadn't even started looking at movies until she was sure everyone was asleep. Still, worried she had inadvertently woken someone up, she paused the movie and waited.

God obviously hated her, because there at the doorway stood Conrad Fisher, bathed in a mixture of the moonlight and the tv. And really, he was not the boy Belly had always described him as.

"Hey." His voice was soft and in the silence, it felt breakable.

Lorraine never had a good track record of doing the right thing. Frankly, she sucked at it most of the time. She was careful with drugs and alcohol but she had never been graceful with love. Some days she felt entirely alone, even with Taylor right by her side.

Many times she's considered horrible things just to get the feeling to go away, to fill the void it carved in her, if only for just a second. She's dabbled in some of it as it is.

She's a horrible, terrible, no-good person. And she responded, just as softly, "hi."

And the wall between them, invisible and of her own creating, crumbled down. Sixteen days. She had made it sixteen days of ignoring Conrad Fisher and she couldn't bring herself to reject him.

"Can I...?" He gestured to the couch and she gave him the weakest smile known to man.

"Sure."

He sat further from her than before, but still much closer than necessary considering the expansive nature of the couch. Conrad offered nothing more so Lorraine hit play, not bothering to rewind, confident that Steven has forced the Fishers to watch the movie, likely more than once.

The silence was troubled, but after a while not uncomfortable. Then, just as Lorraine was getting invested in the movie and its absurd plot, Conrad jumped up from his spot on the couch.

"Fucking really?" Lorraine looked up at him to find that he had her phone. He continued, not waiting for a response from her, "You're passcode is Taylor's birthday?"

"Oh my fucking god!" She whisper shouted, scrambling to get to her feet and lung at him. Unfortunately, he was a skilled former football player, easily dodging her attempts. It became laughable once he started dancing away from her hands.

"Daddy Zucko?!" He nearly yelled in surprise, Lorraine was mortified.

"Shut up! People sleeping upstairs remember?" She urged him, giving up on getting her phone back.

"I think they need to hear this." Conrad joked, at least she hoped he was joking.

"I think I could kill you." He only smiled wider at that, but he relinquished the phone back to her and settled back down to watch the rest of the movie pointing out that she was missing the best part like none of the past five minutes happened.

Even so, Lorraine kept a good grip on her phone throughout the rest of the movie and the next until she fell asleep.