Word Prompt: Wine
Dialogue Flex: "Do you remember this song?"
Something True
Wine
This Summer
Another blue line at the base of her wall. Two-hundred sixty-two days to go until graduation.
Bella has started walking her short-cut to and from school again. When Rose offers her a ride home, she says she wants to walk. Royce is usually there anyway, and she's uncomfortable around the two of them. Bella knows too much and she knows better, but Rose won't listen. She's afraid to push it, afraid to get Rose mad at her the way the other girls are mad at her, or the way Rose is mad at Edward.
Every day she gets close enough to see the cottage, the little tree in the barrel on its last limb, but without Edward in sight she walks on toward home. She doesn't have the guts to knock on the door without Rose around, and after what happened between Edward and Royce, Rose has been avoiding her brother.
When she gets near the point of the old forest where her fallen tree used to be, she steps over it like it's still there. But if it were, she wouldn't be able to step over it. She'd have to climb over it or walk around it.
Moving on, looking around at the nothingness, she wishes something good, just one thing good in her life could stay, not change, not burn to the ground, not go to Hell.
Gossip and taunts have gotten quieter at school, but Bella knows that's when you have to be careful.
They're playing softball in gym. Some of the guys are hanging around watching the girls play. Bella holds the bat, preparing to hit the ball, she swings and misses. Her teammates keep reminding her to bend her knees.
"You can do it, Bella," Paul says. "No one's saying get on your knees, just bend them." Male snickering breaks out.
"Shut up, ass!" It's Alice. Bella drops the tip of her bat to the ground and turns to her, but Alice is looking in the opposite direction.
She sets up again, getting into position, bending her knees. She watches the ball come toward her, and she can feel it before her bat strikes; it's going far. She sprints to first, passes, runs to second, where she stays.
"Oh, come on," a deep voice yells, not Paul this time. "Could'a at least made it to third." Laughter again. Bella pretends she hears nothing but the wind and the birds screeching in the sky. She wants to rub her face, but keeps her itching hands at her sides, flexing them and fisting them, waiting for the next batter. She focuses on the game, nothing but the game.
…
"Do you remember this?" Her dad asks, pouring himself another glass of wine then pointing at the ceiling. But it isn't the ceiling he's asking about, it's the music.
Bella bites into her chicken leg.
At the other end of the table, her mother gasps. "It's the mixed tape I made you." She laughs. "We were nineteen." She looks at Bella, who's wiping her greasy fingers off on her napkin.
"All the bands you wanted us to see together," her dad says.
"Did you see them together?" Bella asks.
"Two or three," her mother says.
Standing up her dad says, "Dance with me, Renee."
It takes some coaxing, but eventually she takes his hand and lets him spin her there in the dining room.
They look like kids and Bella feels too much like the adult. She has to get out. She mumbles something about a study date, throws her chicken bones in the trash, rinses her plate, places it the dishwasher, and then heads to her room for her jacket and backpack. She takes off while her parents are still dancing.
Ten minutes later she's ringing Edward's doorbell. The door squeaks open.
"Hey." He pushes the screen out for her so she can pass through.
Arms around her middle, holding her jacket, she steps in.
He looks better, like he's been sleeping. No more red around the eyes, and his hair is neater, like he might have actually combed it after a shower.
The table lamp by the couch is the only light on in the place. The cottage glows yellow.
Edward puts a movie in and they sit on the couch, Bella's backpack between them. Last year, to be this close to Edward would've killed Bella. Her heart would've been racing, her palms sweaty, but not now. She's warm, but not sweaty and her heart rate is normal, if not a little slow. They don't say much, but that's okay. It isn't like her first time here when Bella prayed that Edward would say something.
About halfway through the movie, Bella pushes her shoes off with her toes and lifts a foot to the couch, hugging her leg, chin resting on her knee.
"Want a drink?" Edward asks.
"No, thanks."
She leaves at the end of the movie, shoving her feet back into her shoes. She doesn't know what else to do. Edward may look better, but he still isn't the Edward he used to be. It's clear she isn't the person she used to be either. She wonders if he recognizes this, if he thinks about it.
She wants to know what changed him, but she doesn't want him to know what changed her, so she asks no questions.
He walks her to the door. He doesn't ask her to come back, but on Saturday she does. It's easier this time.
He answers the door in a baseball cap and jeans with white splotches on them.
"You're painting."
"What gave it away?" He holds up a hand, white fingertips.
"Need help?" Inside she takes off her jacket, laying it over the back of a kitchen chair. The thick fumes of the paint fill her, waking her senses.
The furniture muddles the center of the room, the coffee table upside down on top of the couch.
Walking across plastic tarps laid over the floor, she takes the extra roller Edward's handing her and saturates it with paint from a shared pan. She starts on the side of the cottage near the hallway, the bathrooms, the bedrooms. The white looks so much more alive over the dull blue.
Edward takes a break from painting to water his tree outside. When he comes back in, he plays music from his iPad. "Remember this song?"
"No."
"No?" He turns the volume up. "Madness. Shut Up."
"What?"
He laughs and Bella's eyes jump to his. He's really smiling. It's the first time since they've been hanging out that he's smiled, let alone laughed. "No," he says. "Shut Up. It's the name of the song." He picks up a roller. "This song, it's all about the piano. Listen."
Maybe's it's the music or his laugh or his smile, but Bella finds the courage to ask Edward why he didn't go back to school when he only had one more year left.
He stares at her for a few seconds, the music blaring on around them, the heavy sound of piano keys Edward seems to love, the strong, repetitive beat of the bass, the British accents. Edward sets his roller in the pan and motions for her to follow him. He leads her to his music studio.
"This is why." He opens the door but doesn't walk through. Standing in the hall he says, "I want to be a composer. I mean, I am one. Or was. I don't know. I've composed for theater, for some video games, some documentaries. I started to get repeat work from directors. It took up most of my time. I quit school to compose full time. Out here, by the lake." He shuts the door. "I haven't been doing it lately." He scratches at dried paint on his temple. "I will, though. I have to."
"Because of the money?"
"Because I have to."
Back in the living room a new song is playing, another upbeat one that Bella assumes is Madness again, the same non-serious sound—the opposite of their conversation.
"Some people can be a lot of different things, you know? Maybe that's why some people have a hard time deciding what to do, because they have a lot of choices. But that's not me. I'm one thing. A composer. Not a student, not anything else. My parents don't get that. Do you?"
"What about making a living? If you're not composing..."
"If I have to work somewhere to pay the bills, then I will, but that won't be who I am. It'll be nothing but a job. Temporary until I can compose again."
"Your parents aren't..." She decides she's prying and stops, going back to her painting. She isn't paying enough attention and some of the paint sprays off the roller and onto her face. She blinks.
"My mom's disappointed in me. I can't look at her. Even if she doesn't say anything - and usually she does make some comment. But even when she doesn't, I can see it all over her face. They want me to continue school, compose after I'm done. But I couldn't let these opportunities pass me by just because I had a class."
The music changes again, the blank space in between filled with the sticky, rhythmic sound of two rollers.
"What about you? What do you want to do?"
She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. "Used to be English, but now I don't know. Maybe I'm one of those many things people." Bella likes the thought of having a lot of choices. Edward might be happy being one thing, but she has to hope she has more options than who she is, who she's been. She crosses her fingers on one hand while she continues rolling paint with the other one.