It's extremely short but I didn't want to pair it with anything else because it doesn't really go with what I'm writing next.
So it's like half a chapter.
Review. Or you know.. don't.
The rest of my first day turned out somewhat uneventful, despite it's start. Mostly I just drifted from class to class, down the halls, through lunch, all the way up until I drove home still irritated with the fainting boy. I couldn't get him out of my head, couldn't shake what he'd said. Or that look on his face as he turned to me in the doorway of my first class. Because of it, I was in a bad mood all day, to say the least.
When I walked into my house, there was a note on the fridge. It said simply, "With him - Mom."
I sighed, crumpling the note in my hand and tossing it across the room. Anyone else who saw it might have thought it was written in love. As if the "Him" she referred to was a boyfriend or a husband maybe. But I knew better.
"Him" was my great grandfather. My mom's dad's dad. The reason we moved from sunny California to dreary La Push. The reason my mother and I had been conversing mostly by ink and paper lately, through notes tacked onto the refrigerator by magnets.
To put it simply, he was sick. Nobody knew what he had. He'd been to four different hospitals, several private practice doctors, clinics, case studies, lectures. No one could figure it out. Nothing matched up. His catalogue of symptoms seemed like each one belonged to a different disease or syndrome. And everytime they thought they'd figured it out, a stray factor always factored against it.
He was getting pretty sick of it. No pun intended.
So now he was set up at his house, down the street from our brand new one - the one I stood in now. My mother committed her and I to nurse him until he eventually died, which they all thought would be not too far away. So we moved up to Washington. More like hell.
I however, tried to see him as little as possible.
He was ninety-seven years old, and as previously mentioned, extremely sick. Not to mention weak. It made me more than a little nervous, that kind of suspense. It scared me. Not because I was afraid of getting sick. But because that sort of depression, that sense of giving up, of hopelessness, that sort of... finalness, like waiting and waiting and waiting for that inevitable end. It was more than I could even begin to handle.
So I'd stay away. I'd go to school, I'd come home, cook clean. I'd do whatever I could to bridge the gap, to make it up to her. And to him.
All I had to do was keep my mind busy on schoolwork. Or maybe I could join a club at school. (Not likely.) Or maybe get a job. (More likely.) Anything to keep my min off of old sick relatives.
And, you know. Strangely huge fainting boys.