Ten & Levan

20. Twenty

LEVAN

Brown trees, brown leaves, dry breeze; there's nothing to see. So I turn back to these pages on my desk, bright as day and blank. I spent all of Sunday inside my room pouring out words onto these pages. I wrote and wrote and wrote, from sun up to sun down. And now, I've got two thick stacks of the darkest starless nights under my bed.

Maybe the teacher has decided to not show up after all. Just like the girl who's supposed to be sitting next to me right now. But what sits next to me instead, is the piercing silence. It has no face, no limbs, no body. It's just there. It's followed me from the dead house to school. I try to shake it off of me but instead, it creeps inside my head. I watch my vision contract until all I'm seeing are a bunch of brown leaves falling in the slowest motion to the ground. And that's even though they're still ordinarily green and stuck to their tree.

I pick up my pen, and write about the woman who sang me to sleep every night, the woman who would make me laugh until it hurt to laugh anymore, who would tell me stories so animatedly that I'd often lose myself in them, the woman who walked a tightrope like a lioness, who swam like a fish and flew like a bird, the woman who was perfect.

I write about the time when things were perfect. When I would ride my bike around the town and fall more than I pedaled, when I'd come home with scratches on my knees and elbows and dad would ice me and tell me how brave I was. I write about the time when dad was the best dad in the world. About when he wasn't such a drunkard. When he loved me, and I loved him.

I take a deep breath through my flared nostrils. Writing about him infuriates me to a level that I rip the pages out, crush them and stuff them inside my bag along with my notebook. I close my eyes and wish to disappear, be blank, as bright as day. So no one would see me. So no one would point at me and laugh. So one would whisper about the boy who's too weird, like they are right now.

I gather up my stuff and bolt out of the thinly populated room when I decide that I need to be alone. I charge through the hallway invisibly, but look how invisible Levan is still a weirdo. He doesn't even breathe, Jeez. Truth is, there's not enough air for giant, invisible Levan to breathe. But other ignorant Levans don't get it, they're shallow.

I find an empty table in the cafeteria, drag a chair out and sit down on it. It's not break time yet so only a few people are scattered over the vast space. That's the most amount of privacy I'm going to get here so I suck it up, slap my notebook onto the table and start writing. I'm hungry, I have been for a while, but I don't have food or the money to buy it so I chug from the water bottle I filled up this morning, until my stomach feels somewhat full. That should do.

I start fresh. I write about the man who can't get enough whisky in the world to fill him up, and the boy who felt so huge, he couldn't breathe and yet so small, he couldn't be seen, the man who forever mourned his dead wife, and the boy who lives on cereal and water, the boy who died with his mother.

***

"Where have you been?"

I jerk back to life. I'd lost myself and the track of time six pages ago and now, Ten's hand on my shoulder shakes all of me so frantically I almost have a heart attack. She pulls her hand back when she realizes that she has scared me.

"Are you okay? You look freaked out," she says sans her usual goofy smile. I quickly haul up my notebook and stray pages before stuffing them in their hiding place "Were you writing? Did I disturb you?" she asks me.

Even though it's not all that odd, I struggle to get the words out of my mouth, "N-No, It's alright." I exhale in a rush, running my fingers through my sweaty hair. Then I look around to find the whole cafeteria flooded with people. It must be lunch hour already. I can smell the food that's not going to be in my stomach.