The Stars in our Skies | In progress

Two

Gray

"What are you gonna do?" Tyler asks over the phone, his voice muffled as he shifts in the darkness of our once shared dorm. He was my roommate freshman year at UCLA and we had gotten along so well that we decided to room together for the next year. Now, it was middle of the spring semester and I had moved back home to finish the semester until I transferred. I sigh as I turn onto my back, the darkness of my own room swirling into indecipherable shapes.

I raced home after the ice cream, cursing internally when I saw how late it was and I had now induced a sugar rush onto Emma. My parents were gonna have it out for me but by the time I crossed the foyer, Emma gathered in my arms from the short spike and then crash from the long day of performing, my parents themselves were fast asleep on the couch. I had snuck past them and walked as quickly and quietly as I could up the stairs to get Emma to her room. I decided mom could deal with changing her out of the dress in the morning.

"I don't know, man, I wasn't expecting to see her," I finally say. When I had first met Tyler, his long blondehair in a knot on top of his head, arms filled with sprawling and random tattoos, he was like the brother I never had. I confided in him, trauma dumping all the sorry reasons as to why I tried to move from the same town I practically begged to come back to.

"She was the hottest girl in the school, I had that, I had her," I say after the brief silence. It was another thing I liked about Tyler, he just listened and never passed judgement.

A crinkle of a wrapper, "Yeah, well she's hot in the whole energy vampire way, you can't let this be the reason you end up regretting moving home. Plus, I'll be visiting mid summer, you can show me around the hellhole you raved about the past two years."

I laugh quietly as my mind drifted to Katie. Her perfect hair, perfect eyes, her nose that seemed to upturn at just the right angle and the just perfect amount of freckles on her cheeks. Her full pink lips that would-

I pressed my hand to my head and groan. "Tyler, I need to go, I don't think this is helping."

He sighs and mumbles a goodnight before letting me hang up.

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I tossed and turned all night with Katie running through my mind. She is a loose wire, an unsolvable problem. She has the power to break me, to bring me to my knees with just one look and I can tell she already knows that. It's as if these past two years never existed and I'm right back to being her pawn.

"This is crazy," I say around my toothbrush. I stare at myself in the mirror, the hollows under my eyes an indicator that I spent all night driving myself crazy. I was desperate, okay? Sleeping with the senators daughter and falling into web after web to be something I wasn't, was not what I had planned. But Tyler was right, she was only hot because I liked the way she made me feel needed, the way her body pressed against mine, the way she said my name or how she would sneak looks when we were out with her family. She had caught me in a moment of weakness, preying on my insecurities and using them against me.

"That's it, I need to get a job," I say this time. I look past the hollows under my eyes, my hair now curling past my ears and the nape of my neck. I had moved from California in such a frenzy that I had forgotten to even get a haircut. I had only been back for a week but it felt like a lifetime.

I guess in some sense, I had already pre-determined I was coming back at the beginning of my sophomore year, I grew my hair out, started lighting weights, and ditched the glasses. I was determined to start over, to see the beauty of where I had come from and to spend more time with my family instead of running from them.