by Riley Jean
I tried to breathe. This was fine. All I had to do was clear my throat, play it off and hold it together long enough to explain. But explain what? My mouth opened again, but no sound came out. The anxiety was rising again, climbing higher with every second.
“Talk to me, Rosie,” he pleaded in my silence. “You’re killing me here.”
Like an idiot, I let out a sob.
Vaguely, I heard him calling out my name. I just clutched the cell to my ear with both hands, apologizing over and over between shaky breaths. All I could picture was my bound and bloody hands as I huddled over his lifeless body. My fault. I squeezed my eyes shut to fight the tears, but somehow they kept slipping out.
“Breathe, Rosie,” he said calmly, the sound of his voice soothing my cries. “Deep breath. In… and out… I’m right here.”
Little did he know, that was exactly what I needed.
I inhaled deeply, then let it all out. Again. And again. In tandem with his words. His reassurances helped me regain my grasp on reality. As the fear from my dream began to seep away, shame took its place. Why had I called him in such a state?
“I’m okay,” I breathed.
“You sure? That almost sounded like a panic attack,” he said gently. “I wish you wouldn’t cry when I’m not there to hold you.”
“It’s stupid, really. Just a bad dream.”
“A bad dream?” His voice was sympathetic, without an ounce of the sarcasm or laughter that I totally deserved.
“Uh-huh,” I sniffled, feeling like a child, but grateful he was humoring me.
“Want to talk about it?”
My eyes squeezed shut, unable to admit that I dreamt of his brutal death. A flash of his eyes, dull and lifeless, found me in the darkness. Gasping, I opened my eyes to focus on the bedroom before me, letting reality chase away the lingering visions. Tears threatened to spill over again.
I let my features crumple, but only because he couldn’t see me. “I lost you,” I admitted, my voice cracking again.
“You’re not going to lose me. Are you still worried about our fight? That doesn’t change the way I feel, Rosie. As long as it takes. I love you, to the stars and back. Never forget that.”
I could breathe more evenly now, using his comfort to fill the cracks in my armor. The more strength I gained, the more I realized how ridiculous I was being. “Sorry for interrupting your trip.”
“Aw, they were getting tired of looking at my mug anyway. I just stepped outside.”
“Outside? Isn’t it freezing up there?”
“Nah. It’s not too bad. There’s only, like, two feet of snow.”
“Vance!”
He chuckled. “No worries, Rosie. I’ve got my boots on. It’s really beautiful here, actually. I wish you could see it.”
“Me too,” I said faintly, picturing the white Christmas he would experience in the mountains. Only an hour away yet he was in a completely different world. “Sorry for calling you like that… go enjoy your vacation. I promise not to bug you while you’re up there with your family.”
“Are you kidding?” He released a single hard laugh. “Rosie… I shouldn’t tell you this… I had to come outside because my punk brothers were laughing so hard. When your name came up on my phone, I was so distracted I walked straight into a wall!”
I had to laugh out loud at that.
“The day is better when I get to talk to you. Know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. I did.
“Never hesitate to call me, no matter the reason, big or small. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning. Good chance I’ll already be awake, missing you twice as hard. Call. Especially if you’re upset. You got me?”
“I got you.”
“Good. I’ll have my phone on all week. I’m only one button away, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And when we get back on Monday, we’ll go to our park, and we’ll talk, just you and me. Deal?”
I smiled. “Deal.”
I felt so much better when we got off the phone. Vance was okay. Vance still loved me and he was okay. Vance would be home in two weeks and we’d be okay.
It wasn’t until about thirty seconds after we hung up that I remembered I was moving away in less than a month.
Damn it!
What the hell did I just do?
* * *
Cole: care for some pancakes?
Scar: …should I be worried?
That night I agreed to meet up at Honey’s. A sandy-haired boy sat in our regular booth—the same seat where Vance had joined me so many times before. Being here without him felt wrong. It had only been a day—one down and thirteen to go—and I already missed him like crazy. Mainly because I knew our time apart would soon become permanent once he returned.
Cole’s friendly smile did nothing to calm me. Even if he invited me here with good intentions, there was no way this was going to end well. He was Vance’s best friend. True, loyal. He wanted what was best for Vance. Whether he knew it yet or not, that didn’t include me.
“Did Vance ask you to keep me company?” I inquired, sliding into the booth. The hostess gave me the stink eye but I ignored her. “Or are you just being a good friend?”
“No worries, Scar,” he said. He sounded so much like Vance it made my chest ache. “You guys dropped a bomb on us last night. I just wanted to chat.”
“I thought for sure everyone hated me after that.”
Cole chuckled. “Well I can only speak for myself, but let’s just say there’s a reason we’re not meeting at my place.”
Summer. His sister. As if he needed another reason to abhor me.
“I didn’t mean to hurt Summer,” I said. “The first time I told her there was nothing going on, it was the truth. After that… I guess I was too stubborn to admit I was wrong and everyone else was right.”
He waved me off. “It’s not your fault Vance never saw her like that. If it wasn’t you, it’d be someone else.”
“Someone more honest, at least.”
“Yeah, we’ll get to that,” he said looking around. “So this is where it all started?”
I followed his gaze around the rustic diner, remembering the first time I shared this booth with Vance… the night he told me that he saw right through my façade to the sweet little blond underneath. Poor guy had been misguided from the start.
“You knew all along,” I said, “Didn’t you?”
“Psh. Give me a little credit. I’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to notice something was going on. I’ve known Vance for almost fifteen years. I can tell when he’s happy.”
“He didn’t seem so happy last night,” I shook my head. “I don’t deserve him.”
“And who does? Someone who’s had the same easy life? Someone like Evelyn?”
Her name struck a nerve. “Why does he have to fall for girls like us?”
He made a face. “I wouldn’t lump yourself in with that girl. No way. The main difference between you is that she thinks she deserves someone like Vance, but she doesn’t. See? You’re both wrong.”
I wondered if he’d change his mind about that by the end of this conversation. “I don’t get it Cole. Why me?” I hated to show him this vulnerable, insecure side of me. But if there was any clue as to how to let Vance go, Cole would have it.
He scratched his chin and watched me while he deliberated. “Has Vance ever told you why he calls you Rose?”
I lowered my eyes. “I remember. It was the first time we worked together. He mispronounced my last name.”
“Nope. He knew you before you came to work at Mooshi.”
“Oh, right,” I said, thinking of Nathan. “He knew of me in high school.”
Cole shook his head again. “You’re gonna have to go back further than that.”
* * *
[Past – Vance]
It all started at recess.
Everyone else was playing freeze tag. Cole was it, running around screaming like a banshee, as gramps w
ould say. Normally I’d join them because freeze tag was my all-time favorite game. But I didn’t want to play. Not today. I didn’t want to have fun at all anymore. So I sat by myself and watched.
Every day this week I came home from school and ran outside, hoping it was all just a bad dream and Bruxie would be right there waiting for me, like she always was. She’d come up and lick my face and bark and be ready to play like every day before.
But she wasn’t.
She wasn’t home waiting for me. So I didn’t feeling like playing anymore.
I heard someone coming but didn’t look up. She skipped by right in front of me, humming some crummy song. All I could tell was she was really small, small enough to be in kindergarten. But they had their own recess time so she was prolly in first grade. She came and sat down. I pretended I didn’t even see her.
“Why aren’t you playing?” the girl asked. She stopped humming but her legs took over, swinging under the bench.
I shrugged.
“Do you miss home, too?”
“No,” I said, sitting up a little straighter. I was a big kid, second graders didn’t miss home. I wiped my nose with my sleeve.
“Why are you sad then?” She talked funny. I wondered why her voice sounded like that. I finally looked up. I saw her hair was really light and really, really curly.
“It’s my dog. Bruxie. I had her since forever. But she’s gone now.”
She didn’t say anything. She just sat by me all recess. And her legs never stopped swinging under the bench.
The next day, Bruxie was still gone and I still didn’t feel like playing. I just sat in the same spot and watched the other kids have fun.
The girl came back again, too. This time she sat down a little closer and handed me a paper. There was a picture drawn on it with crayons.
I tried to give it back to her. “Flowers are for girls. I’m a boy.”
“I know, silly!” she laughed. She looked different when she laughed. Her cheeks and her eyes. “But it’s not just any flower. It’s a rose. Rosies are my favorite!”
She gave me the picture again. I didn’t want to be mean so I took it. She was a pretty good drawer for a first grader. She even stayed in the lines.
“I like the green part,” I said.
She laughed again. Her smile made me smile a little. Her voice may have sounded funny but there was nothing wrong at all with her laugh. It was the first time since Bruxie died, I didn’t feel so sad.
Just when I remembered I was ‘sposed to say thank you, she got off the bench and skipped away. I watched her hair bounce up and down until she went around the corner, humming all the way til she was gone.
I looked at the drawing again. I noticed a sun in the corner. It was smiling. And she called me silly? I was pretty sure the sun didn’t actually smile in real life.
I looked up at the sky. It was too bright to really look so I closed my eyes. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. It felt good on my face. And I decided that something that felt so good couldn’t be anything else but happy. I just stayed like that for a minute until the rest of me started to feel really warm. That’s when I knew the girl was right: the sun smiles.
I folded up the page then stuffed it in my pocket. The guys were just standing around on the field, fighting over whose turn it was to be it. It made me laugh when I saw Cole playing Rock Paper Scissors to settle it. He always got really mad when he lost.
I still missed Bruxie. But today I felt a little better. Maybe I was ready to play again.
“Guys!” I called, and jumped off the bench and ran towards them. “I’ll be it!”
I never minded being it. Every once in a while, I liked a good chase.
* * *
[Present]
My eyes started to burn.
I remembered.
I remembered that day on the playground.
I remembered Vance.
All at once, everything became clear. No wonder he was so determined to see me as that sweet little blond. He’d held on to the memory of me from childhood, after all this time. That kind, innocent girl who smiled at strangers. That moment had always stayed with him. As I suspected all along, he wanted to save me, just as I had saved him that day. All because of one random act of kindness… a connection with a perfect stranger.
“Do you love him?”
I blinked my eyes in quick succession. “Cole… I need to tell you something…”
“Oh jeez, you’re not dying are you?” he joked.
I stiffened. “No… I… I’m moving.”
He didn’t get it. “Moving out? Like getting your own place?”
“Kind of,” I looked away from him. “But it’s not in California.”
There. I said it out loud. And in doing so it suddenly felt more real. Texas had been little more than a pipe dream for the last few years. All I’d wanted to do was get out of this town and leave it all behind. Now it was actually happening.
Dallas would be a fresh start, a new chance to find myself without the distractions and the déjà vu. No more ghost of the sweet little blond girl. No more risk of running into bitter exes. No more places or people that triggered flashbacks to the nightmares in my memory.
And no more Vance…
It was necessary, right? We had to end it. I just hadn’t known how. There hadn’t been a solution.
Until Texas.
He was quiet for several minutes. Then, “Does he know?”
“Cole, I didn’t even know until last night.” And then I proceeded to tell him the whole story.
I kept it positive and focused on everything I was excited for: my dream of returning to my original hometown, my mama’s insistence that I had a southern heart, finishing school, my dad’s offer to cover the expenses. ‘Everything I’ve ever wanted,’ I said. ‘An opportunity of a lifetime,’ I said. ‘Rejuvenating,’ I said.
Even so, he was arguably less enthused than I had been with the news.
“Who does that? What the hell, Scar?”
Meddling mothers do that, I thought to myself. “It is unconventional, I suppose.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
I faced him. “What do you mean, what am I going to do? I have a one-way ticket to Texas dated less than three weeks from now. What else is there to do?”
“You can’t just leave him like that. This is gonna kill him.”
I winced. “He’ll move on… he knew there was no future with me. He’ll find someone better.”
He shot me a no-nonsense look. “You can’t be serious.”
“We had an arrangement—”
“I don’t give a damn. The whole thing was screwed up.”
He was right, of course. However, that didn’t stop me from getting defensive.
“Don’t you think I know that? I tried to tell him from the beginning but he wouldn’t listen. Now we’re both in too deep.”
“So you do care about him?”
“Of course I care,” I said, looking away. “He knows I care.”
“Then why aren’t you guys together? Why the big secret? It looked to me like he’s just as clueless as I am. You won’t even tell him the reason?”
My silence told him more than any response I could give. I wondered if he’d lump me in with Evelyn now.
“So it’s like that, huh?” He shook his head, disappointed. It was the worst thing he could’ve done.
I hated disappointing people. But I’d made my bed. I was letting Vance down. I was letting them all down. At last—a problem not even pancakes could solve.
“Everyone formed their own opinions on us a long time ago, didn’t they?” I said, wistful. “You should have heard Gwen lecturing me on how we made the perfect match. He’d barely been single for a week. And the rest of you watching me like I was bound to realize it at any second. And Vance… he was the worst. Wouldn’t take no for an answer.” My eyes met Cole’s. “I told him I was no good at this. He wants more than I can give and you know what? He d
eserves it. Now there’s all this pressure and expectations and nobody realizes I’m freaking out here.”
“What are you freaking out about? Love is the easiest thing in the world!”
I smiled at him, and believe it or not, it was genuine. “Like for you and Kiki?”
“Yeah. I mean, okay, it took me a while to pull my head out of my ass. But now there’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for her. It’s simple, you know? It’s cut and dry. If you and Vance love each other, you should be together. No one’s stopping you.”
I could see it in his eyes, the same light they always used to see in mine: the fearlessness of an innocent. It’s something you can only identify once you’ve lost it. And I saw it in him. I saw it in all of them.
“Cole… have you ever had your heart broken?”
He shrugged. “No.”
“Have you ever been cheated on?”
The pause was a little longer this time. “No.”
“Have you ever lost everything good in your life, including the one person in the world that you were closest to?”
Silence. He stared at me and I stared back, aware that I’d revealed way too much. I wasn’t sure why I confessed more to Cole than I ever had to Vance. Maybe given the circumstances, very little mattered anymore.
“No.”
“Then no offense, but you can take your ‘easy love’ and shove it.”
In my life, love had been anything but easy. There was a whole other side to it that I hoped he never had to experience. A dark, ugly side plagued with rejection, betrayal and grief. For me, love was meeting that person who was meant to complete you; finding a piece of yourself you never even knew was missing… only to have it ripped away, leaving you with nothing but an empty, lifeless void. One from which you may never recover.
Some people say it’s better to have loved and lost… I wasn’t one of those people. In more ways than one I wished I had never loved at all.
Cole’s view of easy love was cute and all, but experiencing his first love did not make him an expert on the subject, nor did it qualify him to give advice. I’d had three different relationships with three very different men, and all I knew of love was pain. After three failures, my heart wasn’t capable of trying again.