firecracker // rodrick heffley

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

November passed slowly. Sylvia spent her time imagining Rodrick by her side, dreaming and daydreaming that he'd spontaneously return and take care of her again. 

But the month was dragging by and he was still gone.

She sat in chemistry one Thursday morning looking at the burnt spot on the floor from where he'd lit the firework. That son of a bitch! Sylvia thought, I should have seen the arson coming.  She couldn't stop thinking about him. His hands around her neck, his lips hovering over her as his soft breath brushed her skin. 

"Sylvia," she heard her chemistry teacher say through her foggy stupor, "what would be the empirical formula for equation number 3?"

Flushing red, she glanced at her worksheet. "Um," she started, trying desperately to figure out the answer, "CH2O?"

"Yes," her teacher said, writing her answer on the board.

She rested her chin on her arms, leaning into her desk with her whole body.

She ached. For him. 

She missed him desperately. 

---

Sylvia took the bus home from school that day. On the walk home from her stop, she saw his house. She looked up into his bedroom window for a brief moment when she would have sworn she saw movement. It couldn't be - was he back? She stopped in her tracks, turning to crane her neck towards his window. Empty, it seemed. 

---

Christmas spirit had made its way around her school, but she was still crestfallen. She felt like she was just waiting for her life to become unpaused again, like she was on commercial break until he got back. Every single goddamn day she could swear, in her peripheral vision, she saw his scruffy hair and worn clothes, but she never saw him.

Once she had an upsetting thought - if he came back, would he come to see her? What if he was already back and just didn't want her anymore? That would be worse than never coming back, she thought.

---

Christmas eve rolled around. Sylvia was listening to Oh, Inverted World - her favorite The Shins album. She called him for the hundred thousandth time out of nothing but her last sliver of hope. It had been almost two months since she'd seen him; since he left her confused and lost in her front yard after she watched him start the fire. 

It rung.

After about twenty seconds, and expecting the error message, she moved to hang up her cell. 

But she heard, instead, radio silence. For just a millisecond. 

"Hello?" she said desperately. 

"... Sylvia?"

She might have cried right th- no, fuck it, she was crying. "Rodrick," a choking sob racked her body as she spoke. She began to breathe heavily as tears streamed down her cheeks. She tried desperately to control herself, to keep herself together.

"Sylvia," he started, "I just got back into town." She took a rattling breath. "I came to see you," he continued. She heard a knock at her door.

Wiping the streaky tears from her face, she ran to the door. 

She might have been dreaming, she thought. She must have been. This couldn't be real.

She threw her arms around him, finding that he was truly there, flesh and bone. She shook in his arms, crying with an abandon she had never heard from herself. She felt him hold her back, placing his chin on her head, holding her tightly, not ready to let her go.