365 Cups of Coffee

Twenty-Three: Blackberry Chocolate Latte

    The days begin to lengthen, and I am stuck in an endless cycle of classrooms and homework and studying once again.  I nearly forgot what it was like to live like this, after taking months off from a real school setting, but it’s really starting to get to me.  My mind wanders too much to be bottled up in a classroom.  The only nice part about school is English honors with Eternal and Logan.  It’s like a barrier has dropped between the two of them, now that Logan is part of our group.  I do learn from Logan, however, that I am the only other person that knows him and Daniel have ever done any sort of drug, so we keep quiet about the incident, apart from over Skype.

    Gale, Eternal, Logan, and I go to the coffee shop together now every Friday morning, and I talk to Ryan for a good ten minutes before we all drive with Logan the rest of the way to school.  There’s something I learned about Logan: he was going through a rough patch of his own years back, and stayed back a grade in third grade.  But he’s on track to graduate in three years: he’s taking two science classes this year, and he took an extra math course over the summer and he’s taking a few extra English electives to meet graduation requirements.  He’s smart, too, for sure.  I can’t even begin to believe why he stayed back, but apparently it had nothing to do with academics.

    I begin to learn things about everyone, like I’m actually making lasting friends.

    Gale tells me about his travel with his family when he was younger.  Tells me that his memories are “scattered around the globe.”  And it’s true: he’s got stories from nearly every state, and a number of European countries.  They all fascinate me in a way I can’t even begin to describe.  Then there’s Eternal: she’s lived in the same town nearly all her life, but she likes to paint her way elsewhere, and one night I go over to her house and sleep over, and see she has a room full of different worlds, the walls painted a plethora of different colors, canvases tacked up everywhere and lying in stacks, some old, some new, some empty, some unfinished.

    And then there’s Dylan.  He tells me he’s so proud of me for performing poetry in front of a crowd, that he wishes he had helped me be so brave in Georgia.  Eventually, I tell him I have a new Facebook, and add him, slowly add back all my old friends from Savannah and reconnect.  Mostly, we share our two worlds with pictures, but no one posts any pictures of our old school.  No one talks about what happened, either.  At least not with me. 

    At some point, I tell Dylan about Daniel, and I can tell he’s a bit disappointed, but that he’d already expected I had a relationship by the way it had taken me so long to get back to him after the shooting.  One night, we get on Skype and talk at length about what happened the day of the shooting, how I was trying to save myself and save him, and how it felt to see Landon die.  But I don’t tell him the times I envisioned our roles reversed, and I don’t talk about it with him again after I spill. 

    For the most part, life is looking up.  For the most part, I’m feeling my life finally fall back to normal.  And for the first time since the shooting, I actually feel normal. 

    And I suppose a warm blackberry chocolate latte in the morning definitely helps me get through the day.