I was reading some stories I had once published when I realised my narrative technique just randomly changed. I've never seen something similar around here either, so I'm wondering if it works. Oh well. You tell me. Thank you Lollita for the review – I uploaded mainly because of you, although I was quite amused to know Zack and Cloud still have some followers (at least according to my Stats).
Disclaimer: I own the plot and Grandma Grace. Enjoy.
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I knew the frenetic knock on the door was a bad omen as soon as it echoed through the dirty-white walls of our house. My eyes didn't rise from The Twits as I pretended the world outside that undersized bedroom did not exist. Sephiroth tried to knock my door down as he walked the hallway through – a warning, probably. He must have reached the entrance door eventually. I heard her voice from the hall, growing stronger and bolder by the spit.
"Where's Cloud?" she asked, her footsteps getting closer.
"Oh, picking the boy up, are we? That's how little you think your life's worth?" he scorned.
I couldn't hear her answer, if she ever gave him one. I walked over to the doorway and held the knob with a trembling hand, biting the nails of the other. She knocked.
"C'mon darling, grab a few things. You're spending Christmas with me!" she said, livid yet.
"What about my mother?" the words came as a mutter.
Edea caressed my forehead with a cold hand. Her purpled-glossed lips tried to smile, and I instinctively knew whatever word came next would be a lie.
"She is coming over later. Don't you worry."
Edea was Joanna's father's first daughter and Grandma Grace's only child. They looked alike.
Her eyes were big and emerald-green, her skin of a porcelain-white. She was a novelist, a poet, and always wore dark sunglasses no matter the weather. She was also a lesbian out of the closet and spent most of her lifetime pursuing her lovers across the globe, living passionate and fortuitous encounters under the stars and drinking port, only to wake up to an empty hotel room, a thank you note written with lipstick.
She was a friend so I took her hand and left.
Funnily enough, it was not as much of a crappy Christmas as most people would think. I felt strangely complete for a little while, until I thought of Zack and my stomach mewled.
We didn't eat turkey because Edea was a vegetarian, even though Grandma Grace sternly refused to eat of the same grass and eventually prepared some pork chops. I was silently thankful for that. We watched Pride and Prejudice twice in a row and Edea nearly cried to how beautiful Greer Garson was. There were no lights around the Christmas Tree and it was not until late into the night that I realised there was no baby Jesus in the manger either.
"William ate the damn child last year." Grace later explained. William was the dog.
"He ate a piece of porcelain?" I asked, not believing her.
"Oh yes," she said and took a last drag of her cigar. "It was a terrible mess when he pooped it out."
The nativity figures were never the same after that, I might add.
I woke up to the sound of his voice the following morning. He was waiting outside in the garden, gloved hands in his pockets and a knitted hat that almost covered his eyes. I later discovered Joanna had told him where I had spent the night, and I was happy to learn she was home at last.
There was no time to wash my drowsy face properly. He was to be home soon, still had a lot of things to do before leaving to Icicle Inn – to his grandparents' – where he would spend the 25th.
But first he needed to ask me something, something I didn't quite understand then.
"Will you come and live with me when we're older?" he asked, sitting on the fenced wall that separated Edea and Grace's world from the rest of misery.
"Why wouldn't I?" I asked back, "When we're older we can do whatever we want."
"Just like the song." he laughed and mumbled a few words of Wouldn't it be Nice.
I smiled. "Well, would you rather live with me or by yourself?" to me it was simple.
He shrugged. "I just don't want you to be alone, that's all…"
His voice was grave; it was changing already, giving in to puberty as the imperceptible acne that was starting to appear on his forehead. I finally understood why he wore his hat so pulled down, nearly over his eyes. I hadn't thought of that before.
I kept biting my thumb. "It's easy then, isn't it?" I muttered.
"Yeah, you're right." he said with a smile, stretching his back as he stood up. "Don't forget!"
I smiled back and saw him finally taking off, running down the road trying to keep his balance above the tricky snow. And I kept on looking until he turned right and I lost sight of him.
I couldn't know then what drove me to wait outside in the cold for the following fifteen minutes. I bit my nails and I kicked the snow about and I shook my head to prevent the scarce drizzle from pouring in. I entered the house just in time for the real rain to kick in.
Edea was waiting for me by the kitchen table with butter biscuits and a mug of hot chocolate.
Her dark hair was a mess and her dishevelled nightgown revealed the upper part of her light-blue bra beneath. She wanted to know why Zack hadn't come in like he used to, and I said he was a bit in a hurry.
"Just wanted to know if I would move in with him." I explained with my mouth full.
"Oh… That's a little unexpected." she said, half amused and half clueless. "And what did you say?"
"Said it was ok I guess," and took a long gulp of chocolate.
I wasn't quite sure she had understood the situation, since she only laughed for a while and then excused herself into the bathroom. Then again, even I didn't know what to think of it, seeing as we still had a long time before «being older» became a problem. Or did we?
He, for one, didn't seem to wait much longer.
By the age of fifteen, when he finally entered Avalanche High School, I was the one who had lost my balance towards him. He no longer wasted his Saturdays playing Doormat and walking me home, taking the longest way. He put aside his chestnut parka and began to wear denim jackets and silver chains around his wrists – called it an American thing, but I've never been to America. Suddenly he started to worry about not growing a moustache and having too light skin. He even smoked a few times, during our lonely afternoons in the Train Graveyard.
I said to him once that I liked his light skin and I liked that he couldn't grow a moustache and I mocked his chains and called them stupid.
He called me childish.
Then I began to realise how I missed him. Not the new him but the one he was replacing, little by little.
I would sat by the window sill and breathe out towards the glass, blurring my sight and creating some sort of temporary writing surface. I liked this technique because as soon as I wrote down whatever crossed my mind, the word would melt as the vapour turned to water. And no one would ever read it.
Come back. Come back. I always wrote the same, until the day Joanna caught the words from behind me and I recoiled in my embarrassment, promising myself I would never think of it again.
Zack would stop by less and less as time went by.
Edea said it was normal in boys his age to create a world of their own in which true friends didn't usually have a place.
"Like women on the Rebound!" she explained, almost enthusiastically. I had no idea what that meant.
Nothing she said made sense to me.
Why would he hide from me behind walls when we were friends? More so when I was his closest friend – or the only one, as I later came to understand. And how come I wasn't building my own world of manhood, when I was only two years younger? What difference did a number make?
It was something that puzzled me to no end.
I started hanging around with Cid's boys more often, the ones that were left.
I still didn't like them much, thought them too stupid and almost bizarre, but Joanna convinced me bad people always turned out to be good. Maybe that was why she waited so long for Sephiroth to change…
Adaptation was tragic. I was news and they mocked me for it – you're too small, you're too clean, you're too thin, you're too white, you're too quiet. All I could hear was: you are completely different from us.
I was labelled the Pussy because I sucked at football and was always worried about my hands. In other words I was the girl of the group, something I believe they would have called me then if they had the slightest clue of what kind of specimen a girl was. Barret Wallace was the only kid in the crew that showed some sympathy, normally patting me on the back every time they pushed the rope too tight.
He was a bulky friendly negro the average person would be terrified to run into in a dark alley. His weight and worn clothes made him look older, his combat boots made him feel heavier. He lived with his oldest sister in a part of Little Traverse I was not allowed to go – Barret himself said he was a marginal.
"I'm more of a social outcast," was my answer when he first said it.
"Can see why. What kind of dude yells out in the middle of a game that his hair is falling off?" he said.
"I was trying to amuse myself!" I said, handing him over the ball.
He laughed almost grotesquely. "Hey, no judge. But in the middle of a ball game?"
"Get to know me, pal. I'm fucking weird." and we laughed together, as if the sound of it could restore to light the innocence we had already lost, and the one we were chosen to lose.
I never thought my friendship with Barret could have grown the way it did if he wasn't the person he was. If he wasn't chubby and poor and dark and pure. He protected me into and through the years, from Cid's boys in the open field to real High school bullies. Sometimes he protected me from Zack, not really sure of what he was protecting me from.
Sometimes he protected me from me.
I was confronted once about it, right in the middle of the road when Zack stopped on his feet and turned.
"Who the hell is Barret?" he asked, cutting me off.
"Used to play Doormat with us. The strong one." I said, chewing the lace in my sweatshirt.
He made a scoffing sound. "Right, right. So you're friends now." he repeated.
"We play football together sometimes. Not every day." I shrugged and resumed my walking.
His hand around my elbow stopped me once again. I turned around to a face I didn't quite recognise, a face I hadn't seen or talked to for weeks.
"You can't like him more than me." he said, nearly apologetic.
"I don't," I said.
"You can't tell him about the Sanctuary." he muttered.
"I won't," I said.
"You can't cry in front of him." his eyes lifted towards me.
"Of course not," I said. His hand loosed its grip.
He smiled. "That's alright then."
I knew then that, somehow, I had opened the door and was finally breaking into the new world he was creating. The one in which true friends usually didn't have a place. But I did.
Keep the author alive: give me your opinion, will you? Ah, that would be great.
PS: As Cloud and Zack grow older I'll tend to concentrate more chapters on their relationship only, and not just these fragmented pieces that we now see.