Ecstasy

Gilinsky

It's been a week since I've talked to Jack. We graduate today, and I don't know how we're going to hide from our parents that something's wrong, because they want to throw a party for us.
Which we'll both have to attend.
Every time I pass him in the school hallways, he shoots daggers at me with his eyes. I ignore him, and I pretend it doesn't hurt, but it does. I'm just treating him the way he treated me earlier into our relationship.
Sam hangs out more with Johnson than he does me- which is okay, but I wish I had someone to talk to, too. I'm stuck talking to the other girls and guys in our school, and they're only nice to me 'cause I'm famous.
But since we're graduating, we don't have to go to school today. We're given the day off to get ready for the ceremony.
I'm sitting downstairs in my living room eating cereal in my boxers. I'm an only child, and my mother is gone, and my father is at work, so I have the entire house to myself. Once, it was great for having girls over, but that soon lost its fun when those girls were the only girls in the house. Now it's just lonely, and I wish I could go over to Jack's.
I stretch, then put my bowl in the dishwasher after rinsing it out. I go upstairs to my bathroom and take a shower, standing in the hot water, contemplating my life.
After a while I get out and get dressed, putting on a dark suit with a red tie. I roll up the sleeves then go into my parents room and rummage through my mother's closet.
Although it's been three years since my mother died, my father and I have made no move to clean out her stuff. We still have her clothes and perfume, and her candles are still littered about the house. If you had walked in, you wouldn't have known that we were lacking a special woman in our home.
I sit on the floor of her walk in closet, pulling the box marked Graduation towards me. I open the flaps, then take out her photo albums and flip through the pictures.
There she is, in almost all of them, smiling. Happy. She had no idea that twenty years later she would be dead. I find this picture of her, and it's the best in the collection: her curly hair is down, fluttering around her head in the slight breeze, and under her graduation robes she's wearing a long white dress. Her face is turned slightly away from the camera, and her eyes are looking up at something unknown. The light from the sun really catches the vibrancy of the amber in her eyes, and a large smile is etched across her face as she laughs.
I start crying.
I really wish that my mother was still here. I miss her so much, and it makes me angry that her life was cut so short. The drunk driver who hit her didn't even go to jail. He was charged with something, I can't remember what, because I was too grievous to pay attention. I do remember the phone call, and the police officers arriving at my door. It was my fourteenth birthday.
I was never a fan of parties, so only Jack was over that day. He was the only one besides my father to see me start screaming and crying.
I slide the photo out of its cover, wiping my tears and memories on the back of my hand. I pull my mother's graduation robes out of the box, along with her cap and valedictorian speech. I'm about to slide the box back under her sea of possessions, but then I decide to take the entire thing. I grab a few more boxes, and take them all back to my room.
I sit on my bed and look through the rest of the boxes. I grabbed the ones marked Jack, Marriage, Vacations, and Katherine.
Katherine was my mom's name. In that box, it's mostly things my dad and I did for her.
I decide to look through that box, and despite my growing sadness, I have to laugh. There's a picture of five year old me with her, and we're finger painting. Except my hands are on her face and I've smeared paint all over it.
After a couple hours of going through all the boxes, I hear my dad walk in.
Oh, fuck. I think, and I put everything away and shove the boxes under my bed. I take her robes and hastily put them on. They're not exactly my size, and they're not the uniform robes, but I want to wear these.
"Jack?" Calls my dad.
"Yeah? Up here. I'm almost ready," I say.
"Okay, remember we're going over to John and Jennifer's after the ceremony," says my dad, and I start laughing because Jack's dad's name is John Johnson.
I walk downstairs, and my dad eyes my robes, chewing on his cheese slowly.
"Wow, I never thought I'd see those again," My father whistles. "You look good, son. Your mother would be proud."
I smile at him. "Thanks, Dad. Can we go? I want you to get good seats, and the ceremony starts in an hour."
My dad looks up at the clock, then nods. "Okay. Let's go. You got everything?"
I nod. "Yep."
We walk out to the car, and I look a little ways up the street to Jack's house. I see his family get into their car too, but Jack doesn't look in my direction. Go figures.
I get into my dad's car then we drive towards the stadium that we're graduating in. I hope tonight goes well. I hope Jack and I can figure something out. I really hate being away from him.