I'll Be Here

parked.  When I get to the car, I wave.  She is leaning against the threshold of her flat house.  She waves back. 
                With a shaky breath I turn the ignition over pull out into the street.  In front of me the world is wide and silent and I can see all around.

 
     
    Be obscure clearly.
    ~E.B. White

 
    CHAPTER NINETEEN
     
    “I have bougainvilleas!”  She throws open my bedroom door with this falsely cheerful, swaggering look on her face as if this exclamation should make sense to me.
                Blink.
                Blink.
                I roll over and try to block everything out, but my mother is in my room, twisting the window blinds to the open position.  It’s far too bright.  And loud!  Mom is shuffling the papers on my desk and talking animatedly about flowering plants.  Aaron is at her heels, chirping in excitement.
                Every so often—no one knows exactly what sets it off—my mother gets the gardening bug.  She dons a straw hat and floral printed gloves especially for the occasion and sets about getting dirty, mucking up the earth, all in the name of “communing with nature.”  Two years ago there was a plan to grow lavender and then to infuse it into soaps and candles to sell at a friend’s shop.  Unfortunately, none of the plants grew. 
    About this time last year, my mother (based on knowledge acquired from an undetermined origin) decided that our soil was perfect for vegetable growing.  She enlisted Jake and me for two straight weekends to help her start the garden from seed.  Four, ten by ten wooden garden boxes were built between the house and the back edge of the lot.  We filled them with dirt and seeds and water and then we waited.  We birthed exactly six ill-formed tomatoes, thirteen green pea pods and seven scraggly carrots from the season-long venture. 
                Today, the entire family has been recruited.  Aaron has been given a small shovel and the task of burying tiny seeds from a paper pouch into evenly spaced indentations in the earth.  Jake is just outside the wooden garden plots planting the aforementioned bougainvilleas along the short retaining wall bordering our yard and the neighbor’s yard. 
    Mom’s pants look like they’re made from a potato sack and I remember that she bought them from an online retailer during her all natural clothing kick.  Jake has on the rubber sandals he normally wears for beach walking.  We could be the poster family for an au naturale commune. 
                I try not to remember that it’s Saturday.  Prom Day.  This week moved by in a strange sort of way for me.  Some parts went so slowly that I would find myself spacing out into nothingness and when I came back to earth I’d have forgotten what I’d been doing.  Like I’d stand in the kitchen for five minutes wondering why I had a fork in my hand before I remembered the food sitting on my plate growing steadily colder.
                 Other parts of the week moved too quick for me to catch up and I would be barely able to breathe—my chest squeezing painfully like I’d run too fast for too long and was paying the price for it. 
                Even my dreams were strange.  I’d wake up sweaty, trying to grasp something real just beyond the plane of knowing.  These moments shook me up so much that I couldn’t fall back asleep so I’d spend tedious hours in the dark thinking about Alex and what a mess I’d made.
                Laney tells me to call him and get it over with.  Colleen suggests texting—a technique that she claims was invented by someone with a deep-seated fear of rejection.
                I have explicitly forbidden Laney from contacting him in any way and she looked at me with this sympathetic expression that made me want to barf, but she nodded her head. 
                I’m sick.
                Alexlessness is a disease that I’ve acquired. 
                I think about all the “I’m sorry’s” I’ve ever said in my whole life.  I think about tying them up on a big balloon and sending them on a gust of wind to land at his dorm.  But obviously that’s stupid. 
    His charred words that night under the stars keep coming back to me.  I’m not so good with jealousy. 
    Yeah.  And I’m not so good with life.  So there. 
    Alex hasn’t posted a thing online.