Yellow (editing)

You Are Not Alone

Like I had suspected, once my grounded days were behind me, my motivation to actually complete (or start, really) my assignments had diminished almost completely.

I failed pretty much all of my tests in the weeks following being unsentenced. And it wasn't that I stopped caring per se, it was that I simply couldn't do anything without thinking about Orenda and how she was doing. We met up a few times but I could never stay longer than an hour because she would complain about being too tired, or too busy with homework, or her mom would say, "Finnegan needs to leave immediately," even if her mom didn't even care. So we called instead, but even then she couldn't keep a conversation long enough for it to matter.

I confided in Egan about my lack of connection with Orenda, but he was always studying or unable to do anything because of some family problems that were arising. I understood his situation so I just told him that everything was actually perfectly fine and that I was just over melodramatic. So instead of going to Egan, I went to Marybeth's house a lot; mostly to study, but we never actually did but rather we would talk about things I couldn't ever tell anybody else.

We spilled our hearts out in her backyard because the majority of my time at Marybeth's house was spent there. She lived in a really quiet neighbourhood and her backyard smelled like fresh dewy grass, which surpassed the smell of textbooks in a drafty house, so we liked going outside. Marybeth told me that the only thing she liked about where she lived was her backyard because she used to dance around in it and pretend she was a fairy or something weird like that. She told me that it was the only thing she can still remember perfectly from when she still had her vision. She had lost it sometime when she was five years old. She can't remember what her room looked like, or what the interior of her house looked like, but she could describe her backyard to the very last pebble. Of course, when she described it to me it didn't affect me much, but I let her go on anyway. It was hard to get Marybeth to talk about what she loved.

It wasn't so hard for me to talk about it though. I realized that I was rather talented at ranting about my problems. The topic always came back to Orenda, and how I was starting to think that she wasn't really sick at home all the time. I told Marybeth that I thought Orenda used that as an excuse to cover up the fact that she hates me and wants me dead. And I also told her that on other days Orenda sometimes seems to want to spend her entire life with me. I mainly talked about Orenda, which says a lot about what I love.

"Maybe she's going through menopause," Marybeth muttered one day when I was studying math at her house. The bird were chirping in her backyard in a calming way.

"Menopause?"

"You know, when women stop getting their period. They get super moody."

"Marybeth, she's a teenager. Menopause happens at 50."

"It's just an idea."

"And an unrealistic one at that," I said bitterly.

I eventually left Marybeth's house after doing one textbook question, and the first thing I did once I got home was call Orenda. Strangely, it was answered, but it wasn't long until I realized that it was actually her mom talking.

"Hello?"

"Oh, hi, it's Finn."

"Orenda isn't here right now."

"Okay. Um, sorry for the inconvenience." I took a breath and waited for her mom to maybe tell me that she'd tell Orenda to call me back or something like that but the line just went dead.

I wandered into my room and turned Stevie Wonder on full blast until all I could hear was the bass and jazzy instruments and not the yelling children outside my window. In my head I imagined the music pouring out of the window and into the ears of every single passerby on the street.