8
"The Beginning"
My eyes spread across the room like a knife. I had to find something, a pencil, a crayon, anything to keep me occupied. I turned over books and leafed through papers slewed across the room.
"It was never as hard as this," I revealed out loud. It was barely over a whisper, I liked it that way.
"A-ha! Gotcha!" I had finally found it: a dull brown pencil under the smooth maroon sheets of my bed. Oh, how I loved those sheets, the new fragrant smell to the familiar smells of love-making. No wonder I didn't notice it.
Long strokes of my hand took me to the places I had been that day, across the beach, down by the park. I sketched everything that had escaped into my imagination: a black cat trailing the ocean, an old man playing basketball with his sons, two teenagers who stared each other down with shame. Before, I had imagined them to be sailors on my dad's boat, yelling and screaming to no end. Yet I just sat there in my breezy room, surrounded by the subaudible: a car driving by, the brush of the trees against the cool summer wind, kids playing in their backyards, a dog barking at a squirrel. To me, that was silence, the pure silence that I needed to draw. I needed to feel the rhythm of the outside world in order to live in it as I drew what came to mind, what was in my imagination. The subaudible kept me grounded in this world so I could go into the next, my own. It was filled with trees and laughter and people who never said goodbye, with animals and kids who played but never screamed. It was my world, my pleasure, my dream.
And they were, they were parts of my subconscious. Their eyes burned like the fire-red stripes in tigers, with anger, glory and pride, repentance, injury betold, jewels in their own way.
The old man, the father, his name I knew to be Dan. His son Nathan I knew as well. He was quiet, unlike his father. I had even started dating Nate—he seemed nice at first. Then the fighting got so worse that I thought of breaking up with him, but when I did I eventually ended up crawling back into his arms. I needed another body for comfort, for warmth, someone to hold onto me when my daddy went away for his job. Even if it was just for sex.
And his other son, Lucas. I didn't know much about him, he was a mystery to me. He was a loner, his mother had raised him. I knew his father hated him, the son he never knew, his illegitimate child born out of wedlock. Dan was disgusted with him. But what was I supposed to do? I had a life; I didn't need to get involved in someone else's family issues. Dan was just someone from a distant memory, some relative of a close friend. Dan and I weren't friends, not even close. Dan looked shamefully upon one son and with the other, pride. Dan and I were a mile apart when we were in the same room, at Nathan's. I came to his parties and got drunk, got off, stayed the night. I came home when I heard yelling and went back each weekend to continue the cycle. Dan was just someone in the back of my mind who stood scolding at his sons in the basketball court outside. His gaze was far fiercer than in the rest of my drawings, deadly.
I saw now what I had drawn: Lucas, Nathan, and Dan together again. Family reunion from hell. Lucky I wasn't invited. Probably would've hit on Lucas again, like we didn't do that countless times before, the teasing, the flirting. We never acted on any of it, of course, that staring, that lonely staring. Longingness, I thought, that longingness of being together kept us from being together. We were trapped in the subaudible.
He was cute, I'll admit, he had the brooding times in his life, but he was never alone like me, all alone. He always had his Haley, a good friend of the family's, cheery, respectful. He knew so little about me, about my life that he might as well just go away right then and there. Leave Tree Hill; find a new home in France, Italy. See the sites, read your favorite novels in a different language, Edmond Dantes in the South of France.
If I ever did that, I would draw, I couldn't write. My imagination loomed far better in the drawings of the Eiffel Tower, the Tour de France, priceless paintings in The Louvre, than in that of paper and pen and words. Words only meant so much, but gazes, the look of someone's eyes, you couldn't always write that, only draw and I did. I could see those paintings, gaze at the European styles, enlighten my mind with all the handsome colors and designs, and learn the ways of my ancestors. That was what art was all about, knowing, learning through curiosity and letting it all pour out on paper. That was my journal, my language, my passion.
And that brown leather basketball. I sketched in its Nike symbol, the checkmark that meant, "Just do it." I laughed at all it implied, sex, drugs, all negative. And what they wanted was for people to go, to do. The "it" was definitely its only flaw, only imperfection. "It" was too vague to be there, on the basketball teenagers played with. Yea, you did great good, Nike, telling two brothers to fight each other. Like their dad's not enough of a pain, now you gotta spread the ego. Dan. I scoffed. He had a wife, Deb. Mother, father, and son. Big happy family. And Lucas, the shadow of their family tree. His mother was beside it, lying, hoping. Waiting for her son to grow out of this mess, for his father to let him back in. And with Deb, I didn't blame her. She barely ever came home, like my dad. She helped the war on poverty, did something like probono, I think. She cared enough not to accept money for the work she did, I knew. But Dan, he cared all about money, used it for bribes, to get what he wanted out of life. That's not how you do it, I thought, you can't be the star of your theater—you have to let others in at some point in time, it won't work if you're the only one. Other people, everyone, humanity— they are the stars, the lights that keep your play illuminated, strong like wood, the wood you need to burn for light in a black hole of loneliness. Humanity is what really deserves all the attention; after all, it was them that sacrificed the larger roles for a few lines that gave you a moment of silence to look back upon from the play of life, that stillness you can only feel when you're underwater. My mother knew that.
I cringed, winced my eyes.
My mom had died when I was young, on her way to pick me up from my very school.
I had stayed late to talk with my friends, mainly because Brooke had made me. "Don't you wanna be popular?" she had said. I really didn't give a shit; I was going home anyways, to draw. And all we were really doing was talking about why Spencer Elliot got a Mohawk and Salmanaca Harris was going out with him. Stupid shit, rumors. We were only little kids then, fourth graders who thought we were cool to smoke with the older kids, rude twelve-year-olds who eventually became the cheer squad before us at Tree Hill High. And when my mom didn't come, I started to worry, thinking that everything I was doing was wrong and I should've just walked home. But Brooke relaxed me, saying, "Don't worry, she's probably just working late, she had a meeting, she'll call."
She didn't call, never came back either. Her meeting was with a semi-truck at the intersection seven blocks away. Seven blocks. And when me and my friends heard a siren, we all hid in the alley behind an old dumpster, smelling the sewer and bird poop under our breaths. We put out all our cigarettes, thinking we were the ones to be caught. But the car drove by, past us to where the crash had happened. We were too busy talking; I was too busy turning my music up so loud into my headphones to even hear it, the boom. The death. And when I finally had walked home with Brooke, we noticed a police car parked on the curb. We knew it wasn't good. And Brooke, being my best friend at the time, gave me a hug and said, "Don't worry, I'll be there. You don't have to be alone in this." And I wasn't. She stood next to me when the police sat me aside, told her to go home. "Peyton's my bestest friend and I'm not leaving," she said in a pout.
The officer just shook his head, looked me in the eye and said, "I'm sorry. Your mom was in a car accident and didn't make it." He paused before he continued, "We think she ran a red light."
Brooke's face, her sweaty palm against mine, all I could remember. And the officer's sad hazel eyes looking down at us. Brooke's clear chocolate eyes blurred into tears of sympathy as I stared blankly into space, the blue couch, the birds singing outside. The window's Venetian blinds, the swirl of the car's red lights. Tim had stopped, along with me. My brain stopped functioning, my eyes stopped focusing; I was in my imagination, my own reality. And I wished it gone so I could see clearly, so I could see the officer speak, "I think we lost her." I dreamt that entire day; it was a fog that had come to pass.
I blinked, opened my eyes.
"Peyton?" My father.
I had been daydreaming, not focusing on the clearness in the haze. I had imagined my mother dying in the doctors' arms, her last breath, what she would've said. "I need to pick up my daughter," I had thought. Just for me. She ran one red light in her entire life. Just to pick me up for something I shouldn't have been doing in the first place. Smoking, spreading rumors, the crude laughter of my friends. Brooke's façade, her false beauty in all that make-up. And me. I had leaned against the wall and smoked my cig, pretended I was Brad Pitt's girlfriend. I let out the tobacco I was breathing, made little O's with my breath. I giggled, thought it was funny, like Cheerio's. God, I was so young. And stupid, stupid for not caring about what my mother went through to pick me up. The traffic in Tree Hill, even in a small town such as our own.
"Dad, I'm so sorry. I should've walked home. Mom didn't need to pick me up— I – I…" I couldn't speak any longer. The clock was pulling at my throat—tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Ring. Tears rolled down my cheeks so freely, like in the movies. But they didn't show this, the heavy sobbing, runny nose. Snot would go all over actors' precious wardrobe, faces would be ruined, make-up removed, ugly. People remained ugly when they sobbed, like me, vulnerable in my father's arms, his wet shirt, somber attitude.
"It's okay, baby. Your mom's in a better place now, it was her time."
That just made me sob harder, stare at Brooke's face in the background, the silence of the place. Dead silence. The kind that no one likes, it feels like a zero, a nothing. Nothing existed around you and you had to either create something out of it or sob from the emptiness. I cried about existence, flushed over by nothingness. It was destroying me and I just let it, let it overcome me, my strength.
A warm hand fell on my shoulder.
"Remember, you're not alone," she whispered. Our secret. We weren't alone, we were friends, we were us, Brooke and Peyton, bestest friends for life.
Somehow a smile crept onto my face; I had discovered it, a new reality, a world to live in. Never alone. Never say "never," I'd thought. And I was right, nothing's never.
But Brooke still came by every day after to check on me, spend the night, hold me in her arms when I cried, sobbed. "That's what friends are for," she'd say.
And when I thought back on it, I whispered, "You were my only true friend. I love you, Brooke." Love was such a wonderful thing to be given in a crisis like that.
It was always the best to hear those words come out of Brooke's slender mouth, "I love you P. Sawyer, now go to sleep before we grow up and my clothes go out of style." And I would just laugh and shut my eyes. You were right, Brooke, that's what friends are for.
I had finished sketching by now, a toned-out black and white version of the three Scott men, Lucas with is brow raised and eyes narrowed to the basket he was aiming for, Nathan throwing an angry glare at Lucas, waiting for his chance at the ball. Dan was behind, lurking in the shadows where he belonged. His eyes were red with fury, gazing obsolete upon his sons. But his strength, his past had weathered him. He looked down on them in shame, not theirs, but his: He had had a son, a child out of wedlock, not them. It was his past that kept an eye on them, that fought with them, not theirs. Theirs were two different homes, both alike in dignity, pride. Nathan's was his popularity, his girlfriend, me. Lucas's was his novels, Shakespeare, his mother. She had raised him herself, a souvenir from high school. Lucas and Nathan were on opposite ends of the town. One poor, one rich, on learned, the other to learn. And to choose between them, which one was better?
Being me, I couldn't choose. I always left them blank in their unsaid question. I dated Nathan, daydreamed about Lucas, drew both of them. But I could never choose, who to marry, who to love. Being with Nathan only went so far— sex, fights. Eventually, we'd break up and I'd be alone again. I hated that feeling, so I just took note of their appearances, attitudes.
I watched them both, observed every detail in the way they walked, every movement, every feature. Lucas's sad face, sad eyes, tortured with memories, retrograde. Nathan's lively character, his energy, his voice. The other side, the other times with Nathan, his sweetness, his coolness, his strength. His ability to collect himself in order to talk to me, peacefully. But to get drunk, to order his teammates to "take care of" Lucas, that was his bad side, taking it too far.
Why did Nathan have to take it so far? I thought, wondering, hoping. Nathan was such a jerk, all guys were. Both Nathan and Lucas had done wrong, Lucas in flirting with me, Nathan in his aggressiveness. But even if they had done wrong, they were being true to themselves. They were acting on impulse, of course, hating each other for their family's past. But they had no past of their own, though. They were two complete strangers before Lucas joined the team, I thought. And that's why, that's why it's so ironic that they were being true, just not to each other.
It seemed like everyone in Tree Hill didn't want to reveal their true selves, the ones that hid under the safety of facades all the time. I hated it, I wished everyone could reveal themselves, be true with each other all the time. But I knew I was wrong, that I couldn't change it. I couldn't change the way people put themselves into a category, father who pushes his kids too far, son who tries too hard, loses. I hated labels; people were so fluid, they changed with their surroundings, latched onto the glass of friends, like a river, a pool, a sea. Damn seas, I thought. Across countries, oceans.
And the black cat I had drawn, a mystery to say the least. Everything in Tree Hill had become that black cat, that symbol of all the secrets kept in it. All those vulnerable secrets in that solitary scaredy cat.
And the ocean. The waves pushed white foam slowly in, the spray of salt water beads. The rushing sound with the gradual waves, the tide was in. The cat was afraid. His eyes, dark with coldness, rang with green devils. They were having a conversation, the cat and the wave. The ocean had spoken, revealed one of its secrets, waited for the cat's response. He had his mouth open, the cat, but no words fell out. No secrets returned, dear Atlantic, you're lucky; you may see everything but our town's no match for you.