Thinking Of You

Thinking of You: Chapter Two

I never did get to find out what was in the photo album, though it wasn't from lack of trying. 

After my grandmother's death, my parent's marriage started to fall apart. My dad spent all of his time at work, and my mother just spent her days lying on the couch. Anytime I tried to look around the house to see where my mother had hidden the album, she called out to me in a croaky voice to get her some water and aspirin. I didn't even know how she needed the aspirin, she never did anything that would warrant getting a headache. It was left to my father to make the dinner and do the washing and cleaning when he came home from work, which was around seven every evening. She stopped caring about her appearance as well, and for me that was the worst thing. Her once beautiful blond hair turned lank and greasy, with strands of silver becoming more and more apparent as time wore on. The huge navy eyes that I inherited looked haunted, and they just stared at everything blankly, even me.

It was like she didn't even see me anymore.

Like she didn't have a daughter.

I stopped trying to make conversation, because she would just ignore me anyways. When I looked out the window on a sunny day, I could see the other kids on my street sitting outside on their walls, talking to their friends, eating ice-cream or playing with their pets. Normal kid's stuff that I couldn't do anymore. If Haven ever called to visit, he was forced to sit inside and watch me look after my mother, so eventually he just stopped calling, and made excuses when I asked him over. These got more pathetic as time wore on, so I stopped inviting him.

My family went on like this for four years before my parents told me they were splitting up. I had been preparing myself for this for the past year or so, but I was still crushed. I'd never expected things to get better again, but that didn't mean I hadn't hoped. I mean, I was still only fifteen.

There was no doubt in my mind as to who I would live with. My mother was barely fit to look after herself, let alone a teenage girl. She went off to live with her sister in the city, and that was that. My dad kept the house we had lived in all along, so the only thing different in my life was that I no longer saw my mother. She didn't even come up in conversation any more, so if I mentioned her in passing, my dad would just nod and mumble noncommittally. Her leaving seemed to suck the remaining life out of the house.

It had stopped being my home, and became somewhere I lived until I left for college.

School was the one place that I could actually be me. The house was too solemn and museum-like to act teenager-y in. At school, I could laugh and half fun and talk loudly, without being afraid that I would be shouted at. At school, I was well-liked, and got on well in class.

The girl that Haven talked about at my grandmother's funeral became my best friend when we went to secondary school. Her name was Abigail Hartmann, and she lived about five minutes away from me. I often cycled over to hers to do homework and stay the night on weekends because her parents didn't really care that much about what she did with her time. My dad wasn't at home to miss me, so I didn't care either. 

She had an older brother in the year above ours. His name was Will. I didn't know it then, but he was the boy from the graveyard. He had gotten much taller, but no broader. His hair was long, and fell in his face, hiding most of his eyes.

I didn't see him that much when I went around to their house, but I could tell from school that he didn't have many close friends. He was one of those tortured poet type wannabes, and always had a polystyrene cup of coffee somewhere on his person. The first few times I visited Abby, I tried to talk to him, but he made it very difficult. He usually ended up complaining about the education system in our country, or the economy, or other depressing problems that I really didn't want to hear about. I stopped trying to be his friend after about the third time this happened; I was the perkiest girl in the year, and he wasn't going to change that.

Ok, so some of you were probably expecting stuff to actually happen with the album in this chapter, but it has to wait. I know it's pretty short and crappy as filler chapters go, but I needed to get some of this down, and I couldn't continue on with the story from this chapter I promise the next one will be much better.