99 Days

Day 2

I spend the next day holed up in my bedroom, with the blinds closed, eating Red Vines and watching weird Netflix documentaries on my laptop, hiding out like a wounded fugitive in the last third of a Clint Eastwood movie. Vita, my moms ornery old tabby, wanders in and out as she likes. Everything here is the same as I left it: blue-and-white striped wallpaper, the cheerful yellow rug, the fluffy gray duvet on the bed. The Golly, Molly a designer friend my moms did when I was a baby hanging above the desk, right next to a bulletin board which holds my track meet schedule from junior year and a photo of me at the Donelly's farmhouse with Julia, Patrick, and Gabe, my mouth wide open mid-laugh at something Patrick had said. Even my hairbrush still sitting on my dresser, the one I forgot to grab during my mad dash out of Star Lake after the People Magazine article like it was just waiting for me to come crawling all the way back here, my head full of knots.

It's the photo that I keep catching myself looking at, though, like there's some kind of karmic magnet attached to it like its drawing my attention to it clear from the other side of the room. Finally, I haul myself out of bed and pull it down to examine it more closely: It's from their family party the summer after freshman year, back when Patrick and I were dating. The four of us are sitting sprawled on the ratty old couch in the barn behind the farmhouse, me and all three Donnellys, Julia in the middle saying something snarky to Gabe while Patrick is whispering something funny in my ear with his arm tucked tight around my waist. Gabe is looking straight at me though and its as if he's ignoring whatever Julia is saying, although I never noticed this until everything had happened. Just holding the picture feels like pressing a bruise.

Patricks not even home this summer, I know this from creeping on his facebook. He's doing some volunteer project in Colorado, clearing brush and learning to fight forest fires just like he had always dreamed of doing when we were younger and running around in the woods behind his parents' house. There's no chance of even bumping into him around town.

There's probably no good reason to feel disappointed about that.

I slap the picture face down on the desktop and climb back under the covers, pushing Vita onto the carpet- this room had been hers and the dogs in my absence; the thick, sticky layer of pet hair has made that much abundantly clear. When I was a kid, living up here made me feel like a princess, tucked in the third-floor turret of my mom's old haunted house. Now, barely a week after high school graduation, it makes me feel like one again- but this time I'm trapped in a magical tower with no place in the world to go.

I dig the last Red Vine out of the cellophane packet just as Vita hops right back up to the pillow beside me. "Get out Vita," I order, gently pushing her off again and roll my eyes at the haughty flick of her feline tail as she stalks out the door, fully expecting her to turn up again almost immediately.