Author's note: Because I am finally done with the draining process of college apps (now I just have to get in!), I wrote this piece to reward myself. The cheese factor is kind of off the charts, but I hope you like it, and I tried to make it stay in character-you'll have to tell me if I succeeded. Anyway, please enjoy this story about a show I still miss and characters I don't own. Oh, and please review!
Tomorrow, it'll be a year. You guess you should be happy at you survived that you survived this long, but you can't think about that right now. All you can consider is how much you dread the chance to remember again. Some days are better than others; some days you can almost forget about the whole thing and shove it back into the darkest corner of your mind, but you know tomorrow won't be one of those days.
Mom's been extra sweet to you the past couple of days, acting like she did when you were a sick child. Sometimes, she'll just randomly come up and hug you and ask you if everything's okay. Neither of you have mentioned it by name yet, but there is no doubt what you're talking about. She understands what it's like, the flood of horrible memories that rear their ugly heads, and you wish so much that she didn't, that you didn't. You can see sometimes how much this is hurting her, and you hate yourself all the more for it. It's just creating bad ripples.
You have permission to skip school tomorrow, but you're going anyway. You figure that school, as hellish as can be, could be no worse than sitting around here and having nothing more to think about than why you now have to care about the day when it meant nothing at all before.
…..
The next morning, you can't decide what to wear. You spend about 20 minutes haggling over skirts and jeans to no avail. The clothes you wore that night were taken at the hospital and now are no doubt sitting in an evidence locker at Dad's work, You wish you had them now, so that you could you use them for a guide on what not to wear. You're treating today with absolute precession as though if you make the right choices somehow time will go back and fix everything for you. You can't mess up something as simple as clothes, can you?
When you finally make your way downstairs, you're wearing jeans and a read shirt complemented with a thick white scarf. You finally gave up and figured that looks asexual enough to work for today. You love the scarf, though; it wraps around you hiding you and keeping you warm. It's like a security blanket, only this time you're eighteen and not four.
Kevin and Luke are sitting a table, staring at you as you walk down. You're not sure if they remembered on their own or if Mom and Dad told them to make them be extra nice to you today, not as if they haven't been nice enough the other 364 days of this year. It reminds you a bit of the year after Kevin's accident, actually. There's the same feeling of fake quiet, the same invisible and unspoken boundaries, the same constant subtext running through every scene. The only difference is now it's you who is the hurt one, the recipient of all the sugary sweet niceness and guarded conversation. You wondered how Kevin lived through all this; you're still not sure how you did.
You grab a Pop-Tart from the counter and sit down. You turn it over in your hands for a minute, unsure of whether to eat it or not. You wish vaguely in the back of your mind that anniversaries came with some sort of instruction manual, a simple list of bulleted do's and do not's that you might actually follow for once. Then again, nothing in your life has ever been simple like that. There is no book entitled So Your Superstar Athlete Brother was Paralyzed, no guide to talking to God, no handbook on the desolation of thinking you almost got yourself killed because of a hallucination told you to. You're definitely different, all right.
Just as you're about to take a bite of that damn toaster pastry, Luke takes the initiative to inform you that you're late. As you stand up and grab your bag, Mom comes up and tells you to come and talk to her if you need to. You smile complacently and nod, knowing you have no such intention. She smiles a bit sadly and then bends down to kiss you on the forehead. In this instant, you realize, her past doesn't matter; she's just your mother and nothing more.
…..
When you get off the bus, Grace is waiting for you. Not for Luke, though she gives him a warm but cursory smile hello, mind you, but for you. She motions for you to come over and then tells you to follow her. You tell her you can't skip class, and she laughs.
"Study hall, Girardi. Remember? They don't take attendance."
You do remember. The Chem class needed morning sunlight for some experiment they were doing, so they shuffled everyone's schedules. As a result, you get study hall first period, and you get out of 3rd period Gym for AP Bio. Grace is right, and you aren't exactly looking forward to having 45 minutes alone with your thoughts, so you acquiesce and follow Grace.
She leads you down a couple of streets and through a couple alley ways until you reach a large concrete pipe. She ducks in the entrance and you follow, curious. When you come out, you find yourself in a dimly lit concrete cavern with a stream of water down the middle. As you look around, words you haven't heard in years begin to echo in your head.
You and me, we used to talk/Down in the sewer where we used to walk…
Careful to keep your scarf from dragging on the ground, you make your way over to the ledge where Grace sits.
"Rove and I always came down here when we were kids. We would do all this stupid crap… One time, I called Rove a wimp and dared him to jump across the stream; the kid actually did it…"
And so she goes on for the next 40 minutes, telling you tons of pointless, meaningless stories about her and Rove. It takes you a minute to get what she's doing, but when you finally do, you're very gratefully. For some reason, either Luke told her or she just knew, Grace remembers what today is. She's giving the only cure she knows, the remedy she gives herself. You wonder how many hours Grace has spent down her, living in faded memories of years gone by. She of all people knows the pain of remembering, of thinking too much; she is giving you an excuse to forget.
As you reach Arcadia High, you pause for moment and thank her.
"Good luck, Girardi," she replies.
……
Your second period class is senior year French, a class you hate but are nonetheless taking because someone told Mom it's "what colleges like to see." Your grades are better this year or at least more stable, back to your old B- average. You applied to bunch of schools by the virtue of rolling admissions and early action, got into a few, and picked a small, relatively unknown one in California. You're looking forward to it, leaving Arcadia and moving to the sunny dreamland all the viewbooks depict. Before all this, you might have been sad about leaving, but now you just want to leave. Your relationship with Adam, while still existent, is obviously screwed up, and the whole town seems to be nothing but unwelcome memories. The only thing you have here is God, and He's omnipresent anyway. So you do well enough to keep your acceptance from getting rescinded and reflect that next year, your friends won't treat this day any differently than the one before it or the one after. You can't decide whether that's good or bad.
……
When you see Adam in the hall before Bio, he looks at you sheepishly and then slowly walks over. You hug him, and he hugs you back, warm and caring, but scared none the less. You have no doubt that Adam Rove has this date stored safely away in his eididatic memory. He looks at you gently, almost sadly, and asks if you're okay. You nod and smile slightly and try not to cry yourself. Then Adam hugs you once and you walk into class together.
Adam has been one of the hardest things about this year. You tell yourself it's getting better (After all, he can touch you now), but you know that's a lie. Your relationship was in trouble as it was, and it certainly didn't help any. Adam sticks by you because it would look horrible to dump his girlfriend after this, and you stay with him because you don't know what else you could do. You're pretty sure you still love him, in the way that love never completely goes away, but there isn't much there anymore. The whole relationship pretty much fell to pieces in your hands, and it kind of broke your heart. You can't convince yourself you don't love him (as much you try), but something got between you that was bigger than both of you. It is bigger than adolescent love, bigger than kisses at the school science fair, bigger than jealous hearts, collogues, or dances in the November night air. It was not big enough to destroy your connection, for nothing ever is, but it weakened it to single strand, and that's too thin to hold up your world.
……..
You make through the rest of the day as though it was normal, though you know it is not. It's like an elaborate stage production you're putting on for the world, only Johnny Godway isn't here to direct. Luke, Grace, and Adam all rally around you like they did that first week. Grace tells Friedman to shut it once, and it made you glad for the millionth time he didn't know. Friedman is Friedman, just like he always has been, and you're glad for that, glad the world hasn't quite turned on its head. The only time Friedman wasn't Friedman was when you happened upon him reciting Hamlet at Judith's grave on November 12, 2005. That day, you knew how he felt; today, you're glad he doesn't know how you feel. For Friedman, one dreaded anniversary a year is enough.
You never saw Fran again after that first visit, figuring that the emotional hell you put her though was more than enough. From time to time, though you think of her and Bill, you a little prayer slips through your lips. You pray that He taught them to juggle.
…..
When you see Dad that night after dinner, you notice for perhaps the first time the guilt on his face. This is torturing him, you realize. He hates himself for not doing his job. He is supposed to protect and serve, and he couldn't even protect his own daughter. At the moment, you hate yourself for making him feel guilty. It's not his fault, you want to say, but you know he won't believe it. Dad, who doesn't even believe in God, is a martyr.
All you tell him is that you love him. You hope he believes that, even if he doesn't believe in Him. Because, unlike your weird, confused love for Adam, you know it's completely true.
Good ripples, you pray.
……
About eight, you go into your parent's room. Dad is still downstairs, but Mom is sitting on bed waiting for you. You stand in the doorway and stare at her, waiting for something to come to your mind, but it's blank. You're still not very good at telling people.
With tentative steps, you walk over and sit down next to her. She takes your head, and gently pulls you close, hugging you and smoothing your hair like she did that night a year before. You start crying, sobbing with the weight of memories, and you feel her start to cry too as the tears fall in your hair. And together you stay that way until you both fall asleep in a mess of emotions that words can never define, and you mark, in great reluctance, the first anniversary of something you wish with all your heart and soul never was.
…..
In your sleep, you just barely feel the hands as they pick up and carry away to your bed. They are strong hands but soft, and they feel familiar somehow but you can't remember where you have felt them before.
And at the very edges of your sleep, you hear a voice whisper, "Good night, Joan. You finally learned to see in the dark."