the long way home [ h.s. ]

Nine | 9

nine | 9

☓

With the following weekend excluded, it's a total of five days-- five days of staring out the halfway-dirtied windows, listening to the lurching and the coughs of exhaust, wondering where on earth he could be.

And during those five days, my life goes by slowly and uneventfully. It feels like everything has been stalled; slowed down drastically. I realize, as I sit down in my classes and flip my books open to whatever page the instructor has written on the whiteboard in dry-erase marker, that I don't pay a lot of mind to school.

I wake up, I go there, and then I come home. I do my work and give it one hundred percent, but it's all just routine for me now.

His absense, though, brings a change in my behavior. It plants a little seed of worry in my stomach, which grows and blossoms a little more as the time goes by, flourishing into prominent stress. I never really realized that during my lessons, I don't think about my lessons. Somehow I've been pulling my good grades out of a hat.

My brain focuses on two things at a time, maximum. It can only handle two seperate subjects, or it just won't work properly.

The art of the Renaissance, combined with "I wonder how Thomas is doing right now," is a fully-occupied mind.

"I wonder how Thomas is doing right now," combined with Green Eyes' disappearance, is a fully-occupied mind.

Green Eyes' disappearance, combined with mathmatical functions and how to properly calculate a division of numbers, is a beyond fully-occupied mind.

So as I'm sitting in the last class on Tuesday, and I shift my eyes from page 267 of my American History book and out the sickeningly-clean window, I put this all together in my head-- about my brain, and its thinking patterns. And before I know it, the bell rings, signaling the end of the day.

Instead of shooting up immediately and bolting out, I remain perfectly still, hearing the rustling of the people around me, and conversations held in tired tones. "Are you coming over next week," and "history will kill me," and "where'd you get your shirt?"

I let out a breath.

My fingernails feel too short from where I clipped them last-- I never paint my nails, even though it's fun and all. When I see my friends at overnighters, they'll sometimes do them up light blue or pink, but on me it only lasts a few days before they chip and look worn. So I let them go bare.

In my family I do the dishes-- Thomas is far too short to reach up and into the sink, and not built for lifting all the pots and things. My mother always offers to do them, but I don't let her-- it hurts your back doing dishes every night, and she's much older than I am.

Rinsing and scrubbing removes nail polish like magic.

I can't afford to keep them colored.

"Miss Craft?"

My teacher, Mrs. Lienbark, calls me. She's an elderly woman who knows about revolutions and international treaties like no one I've ever encountered before. From her wooden desk, which looks to be about four times her body mass, she stares at me with slate-colored eyes, and smiles.

"You're lingering. Everything alright?"

I look down at my cluttered workspace and shuffle things into my backpack.

"Oh, yes! I'm sorry, I've been kind of slow these past few days. I'm okay."

"That's good to hear," she chirps. "Mary, how's your family doing? I haven't really gotten an oppurtunity to ask-- Thomas, your mother, are they well?"