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07: Some Kind of Wakeup Call

07: Some Kind of Wakeup Call

            Charlie’s house is a lot bigger than my own. His dead beat father must have felt guilty for leaving his two sons in a two bedroomed house for most of their childhood, so he personally paid for the wall joining the house and the next one over to be knocked down, connecting the two households. Charlie and his Mom keep to one side, and his older brother, Archie, and his girlfriend, Sienna have the other, as some kind of practice for when they take the next step in their three year relationship. I used to love coming to Charlie’s house a lot, and even before we got together, I had a reason to and that was because of my Mom and her constant need to feel connected to everyone in the local neighbourhood, and with Charlie’s Mom, Marie, Fonts and Benny’s mother along with a couple other women who view themselves as ‘pillars of the community’ events such as the dance-a-thon are arranged.

            The Mayor is corrupt, especially with where the funds are being spent, which majority of the time is on expensive jewellery to keep his girls on the side quiet about their trysts and houses abroad for his wife to spend her time in so the thought of divorce doesn’t even cross her mind. The neighbourhood watch is one of the only ways that the money that locals raise is made sure that it’s put back into the community too, which means that other than a Starbucks and a McDonalds, there are no other franchise chains and other big companies in the area, leaving Mom and Pop stores with a booming business. I know Marie is responsible for organising the big events along with my Mom, so a lot of time used to be spent at Marie’s house, partly because of all of the space, along with the fact that my house is chaos a lot of the time, with Byron’s friends playing video games until the early hours of the morning, and my Dad’s devotion to drinking with his old friends at every sports tournament that is televised.  Since the breakup, I took the initiative to just stop coming to this house, and now is the first time in four months that I’m coming here.

            Mom had been grinning in the car throughout the entire car journey, wrapped in the permanent scent of the iced tea she purchases from Starbucks, along with her new perfume courtesy of a birthday gift from Byron. She seemed a lot more excited than I did, and I’m nothing more than incredibly nervous actually. She’d asked me, “Excited to see Charlie?” a countless amount of times in the space of the fifteen minutes it took to drive to his house from mine, and the slight pucker to her lips as she fought hard to keep a smile contained was engrained beneath my eyelids.

            “Marie is so happy that you’re here,” She says slamming the trunk of the car closed with folders gathered in her arms, with bits of fabric hanging over the edge from various pages of ideas for the dance-a-thon, which is scheduled for this coming weekend but almost nothing has been finalized. “A friend of ours has even designed a dress for you to wear for the dance-a-thon.” I want to tell her that I do not wear dresses, and do not have the required elegance or grace to wear a custom made one either, but the point seems redundant and it isn’t made for two reasons: I’m wearing a leather-look skater skirt and a black halter neck polka dot crop top which almost equates to a dress anyway, and Marie opens the door grinning at the two of us.

            Neither of the Allen sons look anything like Marie, with her russet-brown hair and brown eyes; they’re both spitting images of the father I’ve only seen in pictures and three times under awkward circumstances. It had been expected, almost, for friendships to form between Marie, Fonts and my own Mom and the same for their kids, which is funny considering Charlie hates the ground Benny even walks on, although his Mom is in his house almost every Monday and Wednesday.

            “Kasia! It’s so good to see you, my darling.” She’s quick to wrap me up in a thick hug, and her classic scent of peaches wraps around me along with her arms. “I’m always telling Charlie to just make amends so you won’t feel uncomfortable coming around, but that boy is so damn stubborn.” She beckons the both of us inside, and everything is exactly the same to how it last was, other than another family portrait beside the two that were there already. The first must have been when Archie was barely brushing ten years old, which makes Charlie five, and they both were in matching outfits: striped collared shirts and flared jeans which hit the ankle. I’m sure that the both of them are as equally embarrassed at that particular family photo, and the second one isn’t much better either, Archie with a faux-hawk and a smile which revealed no teeth as a twelve year old with a retainer, and Charlie was seven in the photo looking like a mini-me of Archie, just without the ridiculous amount of hair gel.