At first I was just aimlessly driving. I drove onto the freeway, got off, got back on, got off, and so on. I was running in circles with no purpose. No future in sight. A sudden bout of depression shook me, clouding my vision with a dull gray.
But at the moment I wasn't sure I wanted a future. Not the future I had planned for myself, anyway. My plan was to continue being hopelessly in love with Wyatt and him with me. To attend the local JC for a year then head off to Cleveland or Chicago or Boston with him. Wherever the wind would take us. We'd eat new foods and visit new places and take hundreds of photos.
But that plan was no longer possible, and I felt my confidence faltering. Reality was suddenly bleak, monochromatic, and endless.
Though I was slowly realizing I didn't really want all of that. Before him I had no cliché dreams or goals to wed in a large chapel or travel to distant lands. I didn't want an archetypical family in the suburbs. I'm not even sure I wanted to attend the JC.
Now is the time where I should probably tell you why we broke up in the first place, if we were so seemingly perfect together.
***
Her name was Skyla Mae. She lived in a beautiful, opulent part of town in a classic three-story Victorian with a wrap-around porch and a dog. She had everything, but she didn't know it, and I hated her for that.
We were friends in fifth grade, back when my hair was cropped short due to a traumatic gum fiasco and she wore ruffled dresses everyday. Every Saturday I'd go to her house and we'd play "house."
Every week, though, she forced me to play the same story. She'd find her soulmate and I, her loyal lifelong house cleaner, would double as the minister for their wedding. We'd gather stuffed animals and her actual house cleaners and organize the event of the year. Peonies were cut from the yard and put in vases, ribbon-embellished chairs were set up in a wedding-like fashion.
Afterwards, I would help nurse her children, also known as her wide variety of various talking baby dolls, until they grew up and had children all their own.
She turned away from me as we got older. It didn't bother me, though. By that time we had had become polar opposites. I honored my role as "fly on the wall" and she wouldn't settle for anything less than international fame. By sophomore year she started coming to school horridly hungover or high out of her mind. She threw parties that would put Jay Gatsby to shame, and she made sure everyone knew it.
It didn't bother me.
That is, until Wyatt called me at 2 in the morning on a Thursday night drunk out of his mind. His voice was hoarse and unrecognizable, as though he had just been sick.
"Baby...baby, come and get me. Who are all these people?"
I struggled to decipher his words, as they all seemed to crash together into one.
"It's a Thursday night, Wyatt. What are you doing?" I asked, half-asleep.
"Tourma...Tarmalin...baby, please. Please. I need you to come...and...I'm at Skyler Mae's." he continued to mumble nonsense underneath his breath.
You'd think her parties would have been forbidden after the third person to fall ill to alcohol poisoning, but no.
I threw on my dad's work coat and escaped via window, my keys jingling obnoxiously in my pocket as I crept to my car. Fortunately I still remembered the way to Skyla Mae's house. I drove fast, thankful to be the only driver on the street.
I arrived in ten minutes, makeupless with my hair in a messy bun atop my head. I could hear her house from a block away. The deafening sounds of untamed dubstep and bright lights led me like the North Star.
YOU ARE READING
Tourmaline
Teen Fiction"Some people are just simply and utterly unlovable." He fell silent. His breathing was rhythmic and manual, as if he had accidentally fallen asleep. I took a moment to listen to the soft whistle of his exhales, the sound of his fingers tapping a fas...
