To Nowhere

Chapter 1.4: Good Mornings

Laney would be up first, going about her strict routine, Sawyer would be lying wide-eyed, unable to sleep on the hardwood floors of his bare room, and Nathanael would eventually be awakened to a morning prayer, forced to apologize for the possibility of his dream being unacceptable. Shortly after their difficult mornings, they'd meet in front of the old house which had been "For Sale" since the moment the first of them moved there. 5 years ago. Then they'd lie to each other and say "I slept well."

None of them went to school together; at least, not since middle school. Sawyer and Laney used to walk to their bus stop together and talk about trivial things on the ride to school, but their lives separated with the double doors of the entrance. Since starting the oasis that is high school, there wasn't much of a change in their relationship, even as they distanced further being put into different schools.

Nathanael could only wish for something like that. His whole life he was put into private religious schools where no one was fun and nothing was interesting. He felt kind of like a dog. One that spent their whole life in a cage, only smiling under the sun outside and chasing after anything which caught their eye. He knew his mind ran like a dog's too, not being able to focus on one thing at a time.

Today, Nathanael was distracting himself with the buttons on his shirt. He picked at them, undoing, redoing, undoing, redoing. He held his head down, facing away from his father as his hand raised. In his head, thoughts were jumping from "This is gonna hurt" to "I wonder which button will pop off first if I tugged hard enough on my shirt." It could have been calming, if not for his tendency to think of every worst outcome in the span of the two seconds before his father's fist met his body.

Meanwhile, Laney and Sawyer sat on the dirty curb with flaking red paint across from the house. Laney was going on about how her younger sister, Payton, had been throwing a fit last night, before eventually cutting herself off and curving the conversation into something which hid that frustration. She had finally aced a French exam and her parents were happy.

Sawyer listened as he always did. It's not that he wasn't given the chance to talk, it's just that he never had anything to talk about. Plus he wasn't very good at the whole speaking thing. People often assume being a listener automatically makes you like an owl, attentive and careful, but Sawyer actually struggled to follow conversations sometimes.

Nathanael showed up late, as usual, and the others always held the assumption that he must have seen a cool tree on the way and decided to climb it, or maybe he wanted to see how many steps it took to cross a block, little things which he could only enjoy at free times like the brief moment between home-church and school-church.

He smiled at them as always and became the new speaker of the group, never taking a breath as he went on and on. His rambles were always refreshing to them two, it made them think like someone who had never seen the world before. Like a kid, per se. He noticed the way the breeze felt prickly in the cold and suffocating in the heat, he noticed the way Sawyer's hair always had a small flat patch from the place he'd lay his head at night, he even noticed the way his voice had become raspy over the years of it not being able to keep up with his thoughts.

Sawyer noticed something else about his voice, though. He heard sadness. The kind of lingering sadness in his own voice when he'd rehearse in the mirror after losing at the game of getting his parents' attention. Maybe he was a little attentive, but not enough to figure out the reason behind this.