Fall in San Diego

16. part of us

They left me to go search for the next clue in the morning. The sun had come out and it glinted harshly down in the forest. It would've felt weird without hearing birds chirping but I guess I was used to the oddity of the forest already. It had been established that nothing was normal. Okay, not everything but whatever.

That bitch, Tanya left with them, fortunately. I really didn't know what to say to her. I didn't want to say anything in fact. If we ended up staying here forever, I was fine not speaking or even looking at her.

I sat by the shed for most of the day. I had  some fruit and a can of cold meat for breakfast. After that, I changed into some clothes I found: jeans that were twice my size and a plain black t-shirt. It seemed clean fortunately. After spreading my original damp clothes on a cloth line I made, I grabbed my backpack and rummaged through it. I saw the arrow, folded pieces of clue paper that I didn't know why I even left in the bag, a flashlight, my journal, my dead phone, my toothbrush. I searched deeper and then I stopped.

My fingers brushed something thin and wooden. Louie's pencil. I took it out and tears filled up my eyes immediately. I blinked them away and twirled the pencil between my fingers. A smile crept to my lips as I remembered all the crazy drawings he used to make. He used to doodle all these weirdly shaped human beings, like men with four arms or girls with no eyes. When I asked him he'd tell me that that was how he felt aliens would look if they were real. He never believed in aliens or anything supernatural though. I wish he was here with me now. Not just so he'd believe that there was some crazy shit in the world but also because I'd have loved his company. At least he'd make me laugh.

I took out my journal and filled about five pages. I wrote about being stuck in a forest I couldn't seem to escape from, about the girl I met and liked, about looking at the stars with her, about the interesting clues we'd found, about telling the girl that I liked her, realizing that I couldn't be with her, about her telling me she liked me back, me telling her that it couldn't work, the girl a few days later talking about my dead family like that, me feeling hopeless and confused, feeling that nothing could possibly make me stop feeling this way. I wrote until my thin wrists hurt and then when I decided it was enough, I sighed and dropped everything back in my bag.

For the rest of the day, I just sat there, staring off into space, enjoying the occasional breeze that brushed my face and caused the light t-shirt that I was putting on to billow. The smell of the fall breeze, the sight of the orange leaves littered all around, the clouds drifting across the sky slowly. It was eerily silent but I liked the silence. I'd always preferred it.

Suddenly the serene moment was over because I heard the sound of footsteps and barely audible chatter.

I groaned and covered my face with my palms.

“Hey! Larry!” Michelle ran over to me when they arrived and I gave her a tight smile.

“Hi.”

“You've been here all this time?”

I nodded, still staring off into space.

“Well, we found it! The clue!” Peter said as cheerily as he could and walked over to me with an unfolded piece of paper in his hands.

“I don't want to see it.”

He paused in his tracks.

“Larry, you can't keep doing this.”

“It's a good one."  My chest tightened a bit at the sound of her voice. I didn't look at her. I wasn't going to even give her a glance. “It’s something I know a lot about.”

Why was she talking to me?

“Larry, come on. At least hear it.”

“I'm not stopping you,” I said with a shrug.