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Jordan
“I got these tickets for you, Annie.” I fan the two tickets in her smooth dark features, while her arms fold in front of her chest. I fight to stay calm, to act as if this familiar situation isn’t hammering my heart into hamburger. These tickets, like so many other things in our relationship, are a bribe. A please don’t leave me again type bribe.
“I can’t take the tickets. I wouldn’t feel right taking someone else.” Annie’s brown eyes shift to the door of my apartment, and I know who that someone else is.
My heart is a moth on a windowsill, banging into the glass over and over, oblivious to the barrier between it and the outside world. All I want is freedom, to get to the light. Annie is that light.
I hand her a small box before rubbing my hand up and down my face as if I could get rid of the sting behind my eyes with a little friction.
“Is he here? You brought him with you to get your stuff?” I don’t want to say the words, but they slide out, pouring over my tongue and through my teeth like a waterfall of hate. She shifts the box of things on her hip. Pictures, books, toothpaste, necklaces... all things that will end up back here as if they were on a bungie. They’ll end up right back where they were along with her tear-streaked eyes and desperate 'I’m sorrys'.
“Jordan, don’t be like that. You knew we were over. We’ve been fighting for months.” Annie tightens her arms around the box.
Thump, thump, thump. The poor moth in my chest, willing to bash in its own skull to get to her.
“You were fighting. Nothing changed with me. Nothing. I’m still the same guy I always was.” I throw out my hands, wishing with everything that she would smile at me again, melt for me again. I hope that she remembers how perfectly she fits inside my outstretched arms and steps inside.
“That’s the problem,” she suddenly yells, and my arms drop. The moth bashes his head for the last time, falling dead to rot on the sun-baked ledge of my soul. “You haven’t changed! You live in this crappy apartment with your brother. You have no plans. No future. You didn't even apply for school. We graduate in a month. Where the hell is poetry going to get you in life? Wake up.”
“Annie, don’t.” She should know better than anyone why I’m here. That my brother was my legal guardian until last week. Until I turned eighteen.
“Someday you’ll have to talk about it, about why you’re so damn scared to grow up, but I’m not waiting for you anymore. We do this over and over. I’m not happy. I don’t love you. I leave you, and you win me back with your words. I get out, and you suck me back in. I can’t do it anymore." Tears fill her eyes, and she quickly wipes at them with the back of her hand. I reach for her, running my thumb over her wet knuckles, and she sighs. "Everyone we know is pumped for high school to be over, to move on, to get the hell out of here and start life. But you still write on bathroom walls, wasting your potential, only using it when I’ve had it and you need me back. You refuse to grow up.”
“You can’t leave me,” I mumble, and she yanks her hand away. “I love you.”
“You say you love me in a hundred thousand ways, Jordie, but I don’t feel it. I’ve never felt it. I never feel you really mean it.” She slams her hand against my chest, and I grab her wrist.
“What does that even mean?” Now I’m yelling, pressing her palm to my chest. “How do you not feel that?” My heart hits her hand with sharp jabs, and I hope it says I. love. you. I. love. you, but the longer she stands in front of me with tears rolling down her cheeks, jumping to their death from her chin, the louder I can hear what it’s really saying.
Don't.
leave.
me.
I.
am.
scared.
to.
be.
a.
lone.
“The only thing you’ve ever loved is the words you use. Not the people you use them on.” Annie pulls her hand away, grabbing something from her back pocket. She places a lined piece of paper into my hand before walking out with my heart in hers. Again. That's always our trade.
4:23 PM
I crack my second beer, trying to fill the void that is Annie with anything other than emptiness, when my best friend Rick buzzes up. I hit the button to let him in and unlock the door before flopping back down on my brother’s vintage couch. Every time I shift, a fresh reel of memories plays behind my eyes. Sleeping on this couch after Dad went away...The first time I got any play from a girl was on this couch...Laying on top of Annie, feeling her warmth beneath me as I recited her my poetry against her skin...Movies, video games, wrestling, sex, coldness, sex, space, fighting, sex. Fighting, fighting, fighting.
“You look pathetic,” Rick says as soon as he walks in the door, moving to the fridge to grab a beer.
“You look like an asshole.” I snap my notebook shut and toss it across the room, the pages fluttering like the wings of a bird that can’t yet fly—frantic and unpracticed.
Rick laughs as the fridge door slams. The bottle cap hisses, and he sinks down next to me, hitting the neck of his bottle against mine.
“Sorry to hear, man.” Rick’s deep dark features sink into his even deeper, darker skin. His face almost disappears into his scrunched up concern, which means I really am pathetic. But after the third time Annie left me he stopped being genuinely interested even though she's his cousin. I can see it on his face that he thinks this is stupid. That I’m being stupid. I probably am, but I can’t stop it. She’s my girl. I need her.
“How’d you hear?” My head falls back against the amber fabric of the sofa. I count the pieces of glitter embedded in the stucco ceiling, but I get stuck at the large crack that splits our apartment in two.
“Ran into Annie. She seemed pretty torn up...”
I shoot up, back straight. “She doesn’t get to be torn up. Not when I walked in on her screwing that guy. Again.”
Rick’s features tighten, his eyes the only in the world that see me for what I am. Except for maybe my brother. “That really sucks. She neglected that part of the story.”
She always neglects that part of the story.
I relax back into the couch and lift the green glass bottle to my lips. Using booze to fill the great disparity between my head and heart isn’t working. Though I shouldn’t be surprised; I rarely drink.
The silence ticks by between my friend and me. The physical space is mere inches, but we may as well be in parallel universes. Disparity.
Such a great word. Totally shit meaning.
“What did you do with those tickets?” he finally asks.
“I thought about burning them.”
“You’re so emo bro. Writing poetry and burning your ex’s shit. Taking her back time after time after—”
“I get it, man,” I say holding my hand between us. “I don’t wanna go. Lemming Garden sucks now, anyway.” That’s a lie. They really don't. They may have sold out, but their stuff is still sort of decent. I guess.
“No they don’t. You’re just pissed.”
“I’m not pissed.” I’m a capacious void of anger.
“Well then, let’s go to the concert if you’re not mad.” Rick downs the rest of his beer in a couple gulps.
“I don’t want to go to the concert.”
Rick sets his empty beer on the coffee table and stands, holding out one of his huge basketball-sized hands. “Then give me the tickets. I’ll take Trooper. He’s always down for some concert action. Those fangirls are crazy, dude.”
I slap my hand over the tickets laying on the coffee table.
“I’m not paying for you to go pick up some woman from a concert.”
“Then...” He lets his voice trail off, but I know what he’s saying. Get off your ass.
I hide the tiny twitch at the corner of my mouth with a mumble and stalk off to jump in the shower. If I’m going to hang out with crazy fangirls, I may as well smell half decent.