What Should I Do?

Chapter 9

In my new room, I dumped my bag of elastic wraps in the top drawer of my dresser and now I'm unpacking all of my new clothes into the rest of the dresser and my closet.

Outside of my closet, there's a shoe rack built into the wall.

My bed is a queen sized mattress with dark red sheets and black trim.

All of the furniture in the room is made from black cherry wood and the lamps seem as if they're a new sort of Victorian.

As I'm admiring my new room, I hear a knock on my door.

When I open it, I find Andre and a pile of my fifteen different pairs of shoes.

He helps me bring them inside and I start putting them away when he says, "Sonya, I have something for you."

I look up at him and notice that he's holding something so I stand up.

"Andre, you just called me Sonya. You need to call me Sonny."

He nods. "I know. I'm sorry. It's just that I wanted to give this to you as Sonya. Not Sonny."

"Well, Andre, I'll be Sonya for one more moment."

He hands me a small box wrapped in a special wrapping paper that my brother had made special. All over the paper there are photos of us throughout our lives and pictures that we drew together when we were little. He only used this paper on special occasions.

Just the sight  of the paper makes me want to cry.

I carefully unwrap the paper, making sure not to rip the paper, and open the box.

Inside the box, is the newest touchscreen phone.

I look up at Andre and he just smiles like he somehow knew I'd love it.

"I went through the courtesy of uploading all of your brother's photos onto it so if somebody were to go through your phone, it'd look perfectly normal. I also put my information in there just in case you need something."

I turn on my phone and see my brother's favorite picture set as the background. It's a picture he took of me on our eighteenth birthday about three years ago in a month and a half.

I'm laughing harder than I ever had before because he made some ridiculous face as he accidentally spilled a bucket of fish chum on a lady as she passed by and she repeatedly beat him with her purse while we were at the beach. I was laughing for ten minutes after the lady stormed off and he thought it was the perfect picture so he pulled out his phone and took the picture as I turned to face him.

He always said that it's his favorite picture because he thinks that it was too perfect of a picture to pass up because my teeth made me look like a horse.

I think he likes this picture because it was one of the few times I laughed that hard.

I stared at the picture until my tears blurred my vision.

I wiped my new phone on my shirt and stuck it in my pocket.

I look up and begin to say thank you to Andre before I realize that the man standing where Andre was is now Nathan.

Nathan sets my last suitcase on my bed before he walks towards me and stops when he's less than a few inches away. He lifts his right hand to my left cheek and wipes away a tear while he whispers, "It's all right."

Without realizing what I'm doing, I tilt my head towards his hand and allow him to wipe away my tears but when I realize what's happening, I yank myself from him and say, "Dude, what are you doing? What are you talking about? I just have allergies and my body's reacting. I need you to go in my suitcase and grab my prescription out of the zipper pocket on the left side."