Remember Me (On Hold)

FALL

FALL

It is 3:00 A.M. not the most logical time to take a photograph without lights or a flash or high-speed film, but here I am anyway, perched on the hood of the boxy gray car I should be able to drive now, camera tilted to the sky , hoping to catch the moon before a cloud move across it. I snap frame after frame at slow shutter speeds until the moon is gone and the sky is black.          

My car creaks as I slide off, moans when I open the door and climb into the back. I push down the lock and curl up across the cloth seats.

I have five hours to get okay.

Fifteen minutes go by. I’m pulling the fake fur from the front seat covers even though I love them. I can’t stop my fingers; white tufts are falling everywhere.

By four-thirty I’ve thrown several thrashing fits, given myself a headache, put my fist in my mouth and screamed. I need to get the pressure out of my body somehow so I can finally fall asleep.

In the house, my bedroom light clicks on then the light in the kitchen. The door swings open and my mom appears, clutching the collar of her robe. I reach between the seats and over to my flashers, click them twice, watch her shuffle back inside. I have one frame left, so through the windshield I take a picture of the dark house with its two lit-up rooms. I’ll title it: My House at 5:23 A.M. maybe I’ll look at it one day when my head isn’t pounding and try to make sense of why, for every night since I go home, I’ve locked myself in a cold car just a few steps outside my warm house, where my parents are so worried they can’t sleep, either.

Sometime around six I started dreaming.

My dad wakes me with his knuckles tapping on my window. I open my eyes to the morning light. He’s in his suit already.       

“Looks like there’s been a blizzard here.” He says.

The back of the seat covers are furless. My hand aches.

͌

I walk the long way to school, my new schedule folded into the smallest square and stuffed deep in my pocket. I pass the strip mall; the Safeway and its sprawling parking lot; the lot of land for sale where the bowling alley was before the town decided bowling wasn’t important, and levelled it. On a Friday night two years ago, I darted onto one of the lanes and took a picture of Harry sending a heavy blue ball towards me. It rushed my feet as I stood there, one foot in each gutter. The yelled at us and kicked us out but later on forgave us. I have the photograph on my closet door: a blur of blue, Harry’s eyes fierce and determined. Behind him: lights, stranger, rows of bowling shoes.

I stop at a corner to read the headlines through the glass of a newspaper box. Something must be going on in the world: floods, medical breakdowns, war? But this morning, like most mornings, all the Los Cerros Tribune has to offer me is local politics and hot weather.

As soon as I can, I get away from the street because I don’t anyone to see me and pull over to offer a ride. They would probably want to talk about Harry and I would just stare at my hands like an idiot. Or they wouldn’t want to talk about Harry and instead there would be a long silence that would get heavier and heavier.

On the trail between the condos comes the sound of wheels on gravel, and then Zayn Malik is next to me on his skateboard, looking so much taller than before. He doesn’t say anything. I watch my shoes kick up dirt. He rolls past me, and then waits for me to catch up. He does this over and over, saying nothing, not even looking at me.

His hair is jet black and has olive skin. He could play a version himself on a sitcom – the most popular boy in school, oblivious to his own perfection. His TV self would trade his skateboard, he would win trophies. He’d be driving to school in some expensive car with a smiling homecoming queen in the passenger seat, not following a narrow dirt path alongside a quite, sullen girl.