- Chapter Twenty-Six - "Let's get that door fixed, huh?"
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THE HOUSE FELT ODDLY QUIET.
It was nothing out of the ordinary. There always had been very little sign of life, no pulse from the house that was hanging on to its foundations in order not to go crumbling to the ground, no vibrant atmosphere that often lingered around the other houses in the outer suburbs. Nothing surrounded the Bowers house apart from grass, trees and a dumpster in their backyard which reeked almost as badly as the solitude that Amanda Bowers found herself in.
But that was all normal. Hadn't that been the original mundanity that she had found so comforting at the beginning of summer? The lack of life, the lining of no excitement, the knowledge that every day would be the same. Alone in her ramshackle house with her family who had been broken at the seams for far longer than socially acceptable.
Yet now, in the daytime where normally she would've been surrounded by fresh air biting at her skin, in the closeness of a cluster of schoolmates, Amanda Bowers was now surrounded by nothing but the four walls of her bedroom. And her lack of a door didn't do anything to make her feel less trapped. In her room, in her house, in her body.
Her father was at work. Her brother was out somewhere, probably tormenting more kids or whining about how utterly unfair his life was. Before her mind could stray to anybody apart from her immediate family, Amanda halted those thoughts as soon as they could even consider entering her mind.
It seemed almost laughable, how she felt so detached from who she used to be that she wasn't too sure what she even did before the summer. Cleaning. Cooking. That's what she had done, like a hired housemaid in the 1800s, those were her hobbies. A flash of a conversation with Stanley fluttered through her mind, the one where they had been in his library and he had asked her what she liked doing and she responded with chores.
If she could go back, she wouldn't be sure which answers would pour from her lips. What did she like doing? Swimming, reading, Pac Man, taking photos, speaking with Beverly, speaking with Stanley...feeling like for once, she belonged somewhere. She even liked her bike now.
Wasn't looking back a funny thing? In the moment she would've sworn up and down that if she had disappeared from the moments, no one would miss her and she wouldn't miss them. But now, here she was, discarded from the moments and the group all split up...and she couldn't have chalked up the feeling in her stomach to anything but sick grief.
That was it. Grief. Sickness.
When her mother died, Amanda had been young. Young enough to spend her days in her dark room, sobbing with no one for comfort because her father was lost in his own mind. But not old enough to fully come to terms with the crack in her heart that had been forced there by an irreverent joke from fate.
They looked alike, Amanda knew that. Her father had said it multiple times and the small amount of pictures that still remained told Amanda that much. She had been an angel, her mother. Silky hair the same chocolate colour as Amanda's but not as ratty and not as unkempt, rather beautiful and looking styled even when she was caught candidly. A smile that barely stretched Amanda's face was a permanent feature on her mother's, their same eyes torn between two worlds. One happy, one torn apart by heartbreak so unimaginable that there hadn't been a day of light in them.
