At the End of the Garden

Chapter Fourteen

I hadn't noticed before but one of the porcelain vases in the porch at home had a long crack down the back. Someone must have broke it and turned it around to face the wall so no-one would see it. I did. I might have commented on it but I was alone in the house. Obviously, I hadn't gone back to Eden's that night. Not only had Victor Quinn told me to go home, Eden didn't seem to want me around either.
When I got in, the first thing I did was get my phone. I always left it by the door so I could keep checking bus times right up until I left in the morning. I had no notifications. I didn't know what I was expecting. Eden wouldn't want to chat about what just happened, it wasn't in his programming. Sidney didn't even have my number.
There was an awful thought I couldn't shake from my head. What if I had been the reason they were fighting? It felt vain, but it made sense. Eden and I had been civil since we broke up, but Sidney had arguably been the reason for Eden wanting to end our relationship in the first place. I knew first hand how irritating Sidney could be. Could he have started winding Eden up about being jealous? He must have really said some things to anger Eden.
I laid on the sofa for an hour and switched on the TV to let it take my mind away from the situation that just passed. It didn't really work. And it wasn't until I heard my dad call me from the front door that I realised I forgot to text him to let him know I wasn't at Eden's. It didn't seem like anyone else had either. I sat up immediately. I wasn't worried I would be in trouble. If it was my mother who had gone out of her way to pick me up only to find out I'd made my own way home, I would be terrified. Dad had a different kind of power, inflicting guilt. My mother would be so mean about it, so much I would stop caring about how she felt.
"You weren't at Eden's." He said after seeing me in the living room.
"I know. I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you."
Dad just hummed. He sat in the armchair opposite me to take his shoes off. If he was annoyed at me, he was doing a good job at hiding it. He was calm, but not in a Victor Quinn way who would still be unwelcoming and scary. My dad made feel like I was forgiven. Though, I worried that if he wasn't just a little mad I would be more likely to forget again.
"Did something happen? Did you and Eden argue again?" He asked, picking his shoes up and momentarily going into the hallway to put them and his coat away. "You two seemed to be getting on better this past week."
"No we didn't." I told him when he was back in the room and sitting in the armchair opposite again.
"Really? When I got to the house, he didn't even open the gate for me." He shook his head. "He just told me you'd probably gone home over the intercom. I had to reverse the car over the pavement."
"Who did? Eden?"
"Who else?"
I shrugged.
"It wasn't me he fought with." I eventually said.
Dad seemed hesitant to respond. Probably because he thought it was out of character for Eden to fight with anyone other than me, who he'd known his whole life. That was if you classed the constant bickering as a fight to begin with.
"Wow." Was the response he eventually settled on. "What happened?"
I explained to him briefly what I saw when I got out the car to find Eden. I missed the parts about this fight happening in the heat of our break up and how it could have been my fault, and how I'd actually touched Sidney's face. I touched Sidney's face! My explanation eventually turned into a whole rant about how it was unfair that Sidney got a worse punishment, or a punishment at all for that matter.
"Your friends with this boy?" Dad asked.
I nodded. Slowly. Sidney was my friend. I thought. He was one of few. But I didn't really like calling him my friend, and 'best friend' wasn't exactly the phrase I was looking for either.
"It will be boring without him." Was the only thing I could say, not that it was a lie. Who was going to make me laugh with him missing?
"Do I need to go get a shovel?"
I laughed heavily. He was a little late to play the overprotective father fending off boys from his daughter. When he realised my laugh was actually half a sigh, he followed up his comment.
"It's not the end of the world sweetheart. If you like him that much find him on snapchat or whatever internet thing."
I hummed in response. It wasn't really a yes or a no. For no reason in particular, I had already looked Sidney up on Facebook and found nothing. But really, who used Facebook in 2016?
"Or." He began, getting up from his chair and messing up my hair as soon as he was in reach. "Go to your mother with boy problems. She'll probably be more help then me."
I highly doubted that. The story of how my parents got together wasn't particularly romantic. They met when they were my age. They didn't go to the same school like me and Sidney did but my dad was in the same class as Victor Quinn. He had already known my mum. I couldn't imagine Victor Quinn being involved in any teenage drama outside of being a headteacher, but as the story goes, he was the one who introduced my parents to each other. In fact, if not for Victor Quinn, I wouldn't have been born. A disgusting thought.
I would usually go to Angie if I felt like this. But I was starting to see through her pretty dire advice on boys. Making them jealous, as I'd learned too late, was not the way about it. Perhaps Ren and Michael should have been who I went to. They'd helped me out before and, I had to admit, what they told me was more than reasonable. From what I guessed though, they both lacked any sort of relationship experience. If it had to be an adult I go to for romance, my dad had no choice but to listen. Things might have been different if Evelyn Quinn had still been alive though.
I had one embarrassing memory from when I was so little I barely remember it, I had asked her: "you're so pretty, was it easy finding boyfriends?"
She was pretty, pretty young, pretty lively, pretty clever, pretty talkative, pretty different from her husband. When I looked back to it now, it was obvious that she put a lot of effort into her appearance. I always saw her wearing make up that was meant to look she wasn't wearing any at all, something I had tried and failed to replicate through out school. She dyed her hair blonde too, but it was done so often you would hardly ever notice. It clashed nicely with her tanned skin she'd bought with her from Greece. I always thought it was a shame Eden didn't inherit it.
At my question, she laughed nervously at first. It was a weird question to ask, and it took her a moment to think of a four-year-old appropriate response. In the end, she said: "the good ones? No."
I had asked her because she'd always had something to say. Evelyn Quinn was filled with adventure stories. Before coming to England, she'd travelled around all of Europe and Asia. She must have met so many people, I thought she must have been able to help.
Then she proceeded to tell me I was pretty too, and asked if there was a boy I was having trouble with. She was right, but I think she assumed there was a boy I liked. The case actually was a another boy in my class asked me to be his date for the school disco and I didn't like him. I had felt guilty turning him down. I didn't end up telling Evelyn this, but her words gave me the courage to reject my classmate.
"You should check on Eden and see if he's okay." Dad said, making his way to the kitchen. "It's, um, unlike him to act like that."
I agreed and let my dad leave the room before I grabbed my phone to text Eden. The last message I had sent to him had been when I tried begging him to take the bus to school with me. I scrolled up further to read more monotone messages that were along the lines of 'are you staying after school tonight?' followed by a yes or no response.
I started to compose my message. I didn't want to come across too pushy or forceful. This was Eden after all. He would barely even smile. If he thought I was trying to pressure anything out of him he'd probably just ignore me. I eventually just sent:
'Are you feeling any better?'
It took a couple of minutes to get a response. Which surprised me. I'd expected to wait hours, or get no reply at all. He wasn't one to check his phone often. His reply read:
'I'm fine. Sorry for what happened.'
My text back told him he didn't need to apologise, though I'm not sure I meant it. He stopped replying completely afterwards.
That's when I realised I wouldn't be seeing Eden for a whole week. We hadn't been separated that long since summer. I spent the most part of my day with him. It was sort of a sad feeling, not one I mauled over for long. I didn't have any siblings but I wondered if this is what it felt like to separated from a brother.

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I'm back! Hello to the max two people who read this. Sorry for the extra week of waiting. The rewrite of part 2 did not go as smoothly as I planned. Luckily part two is the longest section of this story (part three will be relatively short), so it's the largest bit of work out the way. I know the rewrite of part three will go even less smoothly, but that's a bridge I'm gonna have to cross when I get to it.