What Happened After

Chapter 10

"Won't tell me his name, but he's very handsome and I think you should say yes to whatever he's offering." 

Chapter 10.

          “I am the Mancala champion of the universe!” Taryn shouted at me with his arms in the air. It was a particularly slow day at work (same as literally every other day) and Taryn had dug the board game out of the closet in the morning for us to play to pass time. Two hours and six games later, he had won five times in a row.

          “How do you even do that?” I asked him. “There aren’t any ways to cheat at Mancala. There’s no skill to it, you’re just the luckiest boy in the world.”

          “There is too a strategy to it!” he defended. “A really good one, which only I know!”

          “Fine, fine,” I surrendered. “I bow down to the Mancala champion of the universe then. Can we play something else? Do we have Operation?”

          Taryn scoffed at me, then added under his breath, “’Do we have Operation,’ she asks. As if that’s even a question.” I had just finished putting the Mancala pebbles back in the game board and folded it up so Taryn could put it away. He grabbed it and jogged over to the closet to grab the new game.

          It was about two weeks after the Ruesso Incident, and I hadn’t spoken to him since. I hadn’t spoken about it to anyone else, either. I couldn’t figure out a way to relay the conversation to anyone without making myself out to be the bad guy. I was, though, and I knew it. I knew that I had resented Ruesso for what he had done to my friends, and now he knew it, too. It’s not that I blamed him completely—I didn’t, of course—it’s just that I needed to blame someone, and he was (A) the one that was driving, and (B) the only one that was still alive. It wouldn’t have been fair to be angry with a dead person.

          I blamed Ruesso for getting Lauren pregnant, too. I mean, of course he was the one who physically did it, but it did take two to make a baby. He was also to blame for Lauren not telling me about the pregnancy, because once again, I couldn’t blame Lauren. She wasn’t even alive.

          At first, it was easy to place all of the blame on Ruesso, because now that Lauren was gone, I assumed he would be completely out of the picture. I was never going to see him again. That all changed when I did see him again, that day at the music store. It was like I had forgotten he existed. Out of sight, out of mind, apparently. But he did exist, and whether I liked it or not, he was a big part of my life. Or would soon become one, anyway.

          Now, Taryn was coming back to me with the game, quickly setting it up on the counter while I flipped through a magazine. The bell above the door jingled, signaling a customer’s presence, and he jammed the game under the counter to cover up what we had been doing. Like we were dealing drugs or something. For God’s sake, we were only playing Operation.

          “Hi!” I said brightly to the man nearing the counter. “What can I get for you today?”

~~~~~~~~~~

          Later on, I was on the phone with my mom—our usual weekly call during which my parents asked about my week, and I answered. “So the house is coming along great! We’ve just finished painting the kitchen—they’re a nice teal/turquoise color—and it’s just looking beautiful. We’ve put up a hammock in the backyard, you know, between those two oak trees?”

          I didn’t know when my parents had started this whole home improvement movement, but I assumed they were just looking for ways to fill their time after I had left for college. With me out of the house and with no one to watch out for, they didn’t know what to do, I was guessing. I imagined that I had wasted a lot of family members’ time, what with my constant moping and need for affection.