Shattered (12 page)

“Hey buddy,” I said aloud, not sure of what to do next.  I’d seen people do this in the movies and wondered how distraught you’d have to be to talk to a rock.  I was out of ideas. If I couldn’t share my feelings with the living, maybe I could pour them out to the dead.  At least I didn’t have to worry about what he would say in response. “Sorry I haven’t been by.”  I started to feel like a crazy person, talking to tombstone in the middle of the night, but before I could convince myself I was headed to the loony bin, I kept talking. “Things are so messed up right now.  If you can see the mess I’ve made of things, then you’re probably turning circles in there right now.  Before you say anything,” I paused with a chuckle, closing my eyes and shaking my head at the impossibility, “you were right.  I do love her.”  I crouched down and threaded a few blades of grass between my fingers before pulling them from the ground in frustration. “I fucked up though.  I let her down and now she doesn’t want anything to do with me.  I shouldn’t have left.  I should have made her talk to me.  I should have been there for her, instead of just running away.”  I started to think that maybe I had more in common with my parents than I cared to admit.  “Now she’s gone off the deep end.  Did you see her at that party?  Or at the race hanging all over Collin?”  I stood back up when I started to feel myself get angry imagining seeing her with him. Crossing my arms over my chest, I took in a deep breath and shook my head. “I don’t get it, either,” I exhaled, shaking my head, as if he’d spoken to me.  Great.  Now, I’m answering questions for him.  “How do I fix this, Gar?  I know, I know… I’ve gotta talk to her and tell her how I feel.  You’re starting to sound like a broken record, you know?”  I smiled as I walked over and placed my hand against the cold granite stone. “I miss you, man.  I wish you were here to help me figure all this out, but then again, if you were here I wouldn’t be in this mess.  I’m gonna fix it.  I won’t let you down.”

I walked back to my Jeep and headed home.  I needed a new strategy if I was going to convince Alyssa that I was the best choice for her.

Alyssa

The purple paint has to go.  
I looked around my bedroom at the mess I’d let pile up around me.  Dirty clothes, half-empty soda bottles and every single shoe I owned were scattered around the room.  The cleaning binges that I often used to escape my mind had yet to occur in my own room. The purple paint was the least of my worries, but I knew I needed a change and that’s where my focus went.  If I was going to spend the next two years of my life living here while I went to the community college, I was going to live in a room that didn’t make me feel like a toddler and didn’t remind me of the good old days.  I didn’t have enough money saved up to move out on my own.  I had been counting on the job in Florida with Jesse and Garrett and hadn’t bothered making any other plans. I knew I needed a college degree and my parents were willing to pay for me to attend the community college.  I had no choice but to stay.
 

I hadn’t ventured out of the house since the night I went out with Collin.  I did manage to send January a few random text messages to let her know I was alive, but I didn’t really feel like seeing anyone.  I went downstairs to grab a trash bag or two.  I bent down under the sink to retrieve the bags when my mother walked in.

“What are you doing?” she asked, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

“I decided it’s time to clean up my room,”  I said, standing up with two plastic bags in my hand.

She nodded in agreement with my plan.  She’d been after for me for months to pick it up, but finally gave up and just shut the door whenever we had guests over.  “You might need this.”  She handed me a dusting rag from the drawer beside her.  “There’s some window cleaner under the sink too.”

“Thanks.” I took the rag from her hand and grabbed the cleaner.  Simple moments like this with my mother, almost made me forget we didn’t get along.  It didn’t take long for her to ruin it.

“I know that the Vaughn boy brought you home the other night.”  She hadn’t mentioned it, but I should have known that she was waiting up for me that night.  She wanted to see if Collin brought me home and was probably already planning my wedding to the Mayor’s son.

“He did.”  I went about gathering up my supplies, not wanting to get into an argument with her.

“Why?”  She took a sip from her coffee, her eyes waiting for my reply, peering out from over the top of the mug.

“It’s a long story,” I huffed with my arms full of everything I needed to get my room in order, “I don’t really feel like talking about it.”

I could tell my reply was not the answer she wanted. “I thought we agreed that you shouldn’t let him back into your life.”  The tone of her voice was a little off, not her usual nails on a chalkboard shrill.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the idea of talking to her about Jesse was not something I wanted to get into.  She would never understand.

“He’s not back in my life.” I turned and walked out of the kitchen. “By the way, I’m painting my room.”

I thought she might protest the paint, but when she didn’t say anything I knew that she didn’t care what I did, as long as I wasn’t with “that boy
.”
 

It took me the better part of the day to clean up my room.  I moved the bed into the center of the room, along with my dresser and desk, to get the room ready for painting.  It was almost three o’clock so I called January to see if she felt like riding into the city with me to go to the paint store.  She agreed and even said she’d drive.  

“Hey!” she said as I opened the door and got into the car.  “What’s up?”

I would have answered her, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the mower zooming across the property.  My dad usually reserved that job for Sunday after church, but today Jesse was the one doing it.  It was hot enough for him to have his shirt off and it was hard not to look at his golden brown skin glistening the sunlight.  God, he’s beautiful. Whatever he’d been doing for the last nine months had made his body even more attractive.  I could see the sweat dripping down his chest.  I imagined what it would be like to get that sweaty with Jesse Vaughn and a chill ran down my spine, accompanied by an entire string of blush-worthy mental images.  His eyes caught mine as January drove down the drive and we held each other’s stares expressionlessly.

“Must be awkward to see him every day,” she said breaking my concentration. “Have you talked to him yet?”

“I haven’t seen him for a few days.” I filled her in on the night of the race.

“I don’t understand what you see in Collin.” Her blatant dislike for him was obvious.  “The guy’s a douche.”

“He’s not that bad,” I defended him, not really knowing why.  I should have been furious that he went along with Jesse’s race bet and on top of that he hadn’t even tried to call me.

“Really?” she replied sarcastically, letting her eyes roll.

“Really.”  I laughed, “Before the race we were actually having a good time.”

“Was that before or after he had his tongue down your throat?”  I wondered how she knew that detail, when I purposefully left it out of my version of the story. “People talk.”  She smiled.  It was true.  In Harrington, you couldn’t sneeze without everyone knowing about it.

“If you already knew what happened, why did you let me tell you the story?”

“I like a first-hand account.” She laughed as she turned up the radio.

“You’re awful, you know that?”

She just smiled and bobbed her head along to the rhythm as she turned on to the highway.  The afternoon was nice.  Jan didn’t lecture me on my behavior or pry anymore about the whole Jesse/Collin situation.  After we left the paint store, with two gallons of midnight blue paint, we drove back to town laughing and dancing to the music, like two normal teenage girls, without a care in the world.  We stopped by the diner to pick up a to-go order and went back to my house.  We ate our food and began painting the room.

“This color is pretty dark.” January laughed as we look at the first coat we finished.   The rich, navy tone completely covered up the purple paint.

“Yeah.” I sat down on the bed and look around the room. “My mom’s gonna hate it.”

“That’s for sure.” January was one of the only people that had seen my mother’s wicked ways.  She put on good show in public, but Jan knew that behind closed doors, she wasn’t the good Christian woman everyone in Harrington assumed she was.

“Well then… I freakin’ love it.” I laughed.

“It’s almost the same color as your prom dress from sophomore year,”  January pointed her index finger at me a smiled. “And your mom hated that dress.”  We both fell back on the bed laughing.

My mom did hate that dress.  First of all, according to her, “a respectable girl wears pastels to prom, not navy blue,” and it was way too revealing.  The back dipped down low, it had a slit up the fitted skirt and the skinny crystal-covered straps left “little to the imagination.”  The only reason that she finally agreed to let me wear it was because I promised to go the Mother-Daughter Banquet that the church held every year around Mother’s Day.  For the past three years, I’d come up with some excuse to ditch, but it looked like this year I was in for an afternoon luncheon with the United Methodist Women’s group and their bible-banging daughters.  I didn’t care though.  I would have given my left arm to go to prom.  Sophomore girls didn’t usually get asked, but somehow I snagged two dates.

It was my first prom and I was overly excited when Jesse and Garrett said they wanted me to go with them.  We hadn’t been to a school function without each other and they didn’t want to break tradition.

“Wouldn’t you rather take dates?” I asked them, not wanting to sound overly anxious.

“Why?  So we have to spend our night trying to make sure they have a good time and spend our money on a corsage and dinner?” Garrett scoffed.

“I’d rather spend the night having fun with my friends, than some clingy-ass girl who thinks I’m going to be her boyfriend afterwards,” Jesse agreed with Garrett’s sentiment.  “Besides, you’re way more fun and you don’t expect us to woo you all night.”  He smiled as he sat down on the sofa next to me.  It was one of the only times we were hanging out at my house.  My parents had gone into the city for something.  I’m sure it had something to do with farming, but I didn’t even ask.  I was just happy they were gone and I was able to have Garrett and Jesse over.  My mom never had a problem with me hanging out with Garrett.  She’d always ask me, “How are Garrett and his father doing?”  I don’t know what it was about Jim Reynolds, but he had the women of Harrington swooning over him.  I saw the way they all looked at him when he walked by. Wendy was crazy about him and even my emotionless mother couldn’t help but smile when she mentioned his name.  He was good looking and owned a successful business, but it was something about his widow status that just did for them.  They all wanted to save him from him misery and loneliness.

“I most certainly do,” I teased them, “if I’m gonna go with you two clowns, I expect to be wooed. A lot.”  I saw their jaws drop.  You would have thought I asked them to marry me. “I want dinner and a corsage.”

“Really?”  A grin spread across Garrett’s face. “I guess I’ll just ask one of the slutty girls to go.  At least then I know I’ll be getting something out the deal.”

“Go right ahead,” I called his bluff,  I knew there was no way he was going to put himself in the position to have to hang out with one of those girls all night.  He stared me down, knowing that I was on to him.

Before he could reply, Jesse jumped to my defense. “Come on man, I don’t wanna deal with a date.  I’d rather just have a good time and not have to worry about making sure someone else is.”  He winked at me from his laid-back position in the recliner across the room.  He knew we’d won the debate.  “Plus, she really wants to go.”

I stuck out my bottom lip, offering my most pathetic pouting face. “Please,” I playfully whined.

“Fine,” Garrett huffed, while fighting back a smile, “I’ll buy your dinner, but you can get your own damned corsage.  You should be thanking us for taking you.  You‘re only a sophomore.”  I knew he wasn’t being mean.  I had both of them wrapped around my little finger.  It’d been that way since they picked me up in the driveway in seventh grade.

“Great!” I smiled as I leaned over to rest my head on Garrett’s shoulder, wrapping my hands around his arm lovingly.  I just loved getting my way with them.  Almost as much as they loved to make me smile.

When the night finally arrived, I was so excited to go.  January had spent the whole day helping me getting ready.  Jesse’s sister Kelly came over to do my hair and we copied a make-up look from magazines to make sure I looked extra special.

“Jess is gonna die when he sees you.” Kelly smiled when I walked out of the bedroom in my full attire.  The reason I’d picked out the dress and spent all day getting ready was because I was excited to go to my first prom.  It hadn’t even crossed my mind to look nice for the boys, especially Jesse.  The thought of him thinking I looked pretty made stomach do a little flip.  I was flustered and tried to change the subject.

“Garrett probably won’t even notice.  He’s still pissed off that I’m making him buy my dinner.”

“Oh,” January laughed, “they’ll notice.  Both of them.”  My face continued shuffling between shades of red when I heard a knock on the door.  I moved to the top of the stairs to look down at the front door.  I watched my mother open it and let Jesse and Garrett in.  The looked great in their matching white tuxedo jackets and black pants.  

“Come in.” I watched her fake a smile as wide as the Mason-Dixon line.  She barely acknowledged Jesse, but made sure to gush over Garrett.  “You look so handsome, Garrett.  Just like your father did back at our prom.”  I wanted to gag.  Instead, I took hold of the handrail and made my way down, anxious to get them away from my mom.  I watched their eyes as I carefully took each step down, not wanting to embarrass myself like it was some hokey-ass teen movie.

“You look great, Sis.” Garrett’s goofy grin calmed my nerves and I effortlessly walked down the last two steps.  I gave him a hug and turned to Jesse.  I quickly noticed that in his left hand he was holding a clear cellophane box from Evan’s Bouquet.  Inside, I could see one of Wendy’s custom corsages. One single white rose surrounded by greenery and a navy blue ribbon that matched my dress perfectly.