Falling From Grace

GRACE EXPECTATIONS prt 1.

I dread Mondays.

And the incessant buzzing of my alarm clock heralded it like some newly crowned king. What idiot had set that thing for—I peeked from beneath my pillow at the clock sitting on my dresser, mere inches from the foot of the bed—five-thirty? It couldn't have been me; not in a million years. I wasn't ready, not for today anyway, and I definitely wasn't ready for it to start at five-thirty. The darkness of early morning still blackened my window.

As a rule, Mondays don't start until the sun comes out. Oh, who was I kidding; it was September...in Ohio. There wasn't going to be any sun for another hour at least, and in less than three, I'd have to face the world again. Summer was over and my senior year was starting, just as my life was ending.

It was unavoidable, this first day of school after a lifetime of memory making; all those whispered secrets and shouted declarations between friends were as permanent as time. And yet, nothing could be as permanent as broken promises, or my shattered heart, broken by my best friend. In truth, my only friend; the only person in the world I trusted, who knew me inside and out and who looked past what the others saw as freakish.

Graham Hasselbeck wasn't just my next door neighbor. We grew up together. He had been my childhood playmate, the two of us inseparable all our lives, from diapers to puberty. It goes without saying then that we had the same tastes in just about everything two friends could share. Even fate seemed inclined to throw us together when we started school, with the both of us being assigned to the same classes from kindergarten through high school.

Our life's milestones seemed to run in time together as well, since we learned how to ride our bikes together, broke bones together, even got sick together. We were beyond close, our bond too strong and significant to break.

Even when he grew taller than me and everyone else, when he took off the braces that straightened imperfect teeth while mine still displayed that heinously embarrassing childhood gap, when he became popular with everyone while I lagged behind, when all of the girls noticed his dark blonde spikes and green eyes, and no one noticed me at all—Graham had remained my best friend.

And this summer together, like all of the previous summers before, had been spent hanging out, just being with each other, just being friends...up until two weeks ago. That was when he stopped taking my phone calls, and when he started leaving his house before I got up, only coming home long after my curfew kept me indoors.
That was after I broke the cardinal rule of friendship and told him I was in love with him.

It sounded reasonable enough, telling the person you've known since forever that you're in love with them, especially since I was. And why not tell him? After all, he knew everything about me. Every secret, every obvious and invisible flaw, and every screw up were all well documented in our memories, if not in photo albums created solely for blackmail use at a later date. I had been nothing if not unbearably and unfailingly honest with him.

And perhaps that was where I had gone wrong.

With a dismayed groan I thought back to that moment, that crucial blip in time when I'd finally found the courage to tell Graham how I felt. We had been sitting on the hood of his Buick Skylark, which used to be his dad's. The rusty green coupe with the dented passenger door had been our home away from home when Graham's parents were fighting—which seemed to happen on a daily basis now—or when my dad had his girlfriend over to visit.

The car was a birthday present his dad had told him when he'd given it to him two years ago. Graham had just made captain of the football team—the youngest ever at sixteen—and had also just passed his driver's test. It was a defining moment for him, and receiving that car was like being given the world. Of course, it didn't go unnoticed that Graham's dad had also just bought himself a brand new truck right around that time.