The idea occurred to me as I fell asleep, but it isn’t until after I’ve woken up, rolling sluggishly over onto my back in the wreckage of my room, that it really sinks in. I stare at the ceiling thinking it over for a while, but nothing changes. I’ve sorted it out. The only thing left to do is confirm it. Feeling around next to me, I find Cyclamen and flip through it until I find the part I was at, marked by the crease where it fell shut on a bent page. I scan the type for where I stopped reading.
“But what?” I asked. She smiled softly.
“But angels aren’t that pure.”
Here I was. I dog-ear the page and continue.
I was going to ask her what she meant by that, but something about the way she glanced down and turned away, fiddling agitatedly with her sleeve, made me stop. I should have asked then. Maybe then I wouldn’t have lost what meant most to me.
I snap the book shut. I knew it. A love story—one that ended badly, one that he wants to do over. Well, I’m not playing the princess, and he’s not a prince so much as a dragon. He can go barbeque himself.
I skip breakfast and start cleaning up my room. Lunch is short and silent as my dad watches football and my mom irons his work clothes, and I return to my room as soon as I’m done. The day passes quickly, but my thoughts drag. The sun is sinking towards the west when I finish, tossing Cyclamen into the wastebasket, and decide that I need something else to do between now and bedtime, something to distract me. God forbid my parents try to make conversation with me. Grabbing my bag and giving my room another once-over, I call to my parents that I’m heading to the park, decline their company, and flee through the front door.
When I get there, a mother and two children are still lingering on the playground in the pinking sunlight and Kat is nowhere to be seen, so I settle in the grass, frowning faintly at its dampness, and wait. The air is cooling but still fairly warm from the sun beating down through it, so I drop my jacket and, on a whim, roll up my jeans to let the grass cling to my legs with prickly green fingers. A yard or two behind me, a tree whose species I will probably never know rises from the ground, not arrogant, but not humble either; simply, “I am here. You may lean against me, climb me, hang a tire swing from my branches for the little children to play on, because I am here. Merely because I lack a mouth to speak does not mean I cannot say so.” Leaves free themselves from its extended branches and twirl continuously down, forming a blanket that hides the ground it stands in and strains to reach further out, to expand its reign. I am seated just within its territory where the density of the tumbling leaves diminishes, but they still fall. Some brush my legs or shoulders as they go.
The mother is calling her sons back, and I watch their forms recede into the sidewalk until they turn a corner and vanish. I wonder where they live, how old the boys are. I don’t want to know their names, though. I just don’t. Pulling my legs up to my chest, I study the prickle of hair follicles and goose pimples that make up the landscape of my knees, and the subtle rise and fall of the muscle beneath the skin, made stark by the dimming light. I run my hand over it and then turn my gaze to my arms. Without the sleeves of my jacket to cover them, the messy bandage job looks more grotesque than I thought. My scratches itch like my mind itches of guilt.
A shock of wet cold on the back of my neck makes me jump nearly a foot, and I jerk around to find a moist black nose at the end of a fuzzy white muzzle. The dog cocks its head a bit before returning to sniffing me, its nose trailing down my shoulder to my elbow. Letting out a sheepish laugh, I ruffle the thick grey fur around its neck until it sits down next to me.
“Is Kat with you?” I ask it, and it blinks at me with Caribbean blue eyes and wags its tail. I smile and scratch its head fondly. “I guess not.”
