“Everybody get to your seats! Chop chop!” Ms Cranbarragh yells in her always-friendly voice over the conversations of the students filing into her classroom. She’s our English teacher, and we’re late, because our history teacher loves to have animated discussions and forgot to check his watch, and then had to scramble to assign homework before we could leave.
I elbow Sinéad lightly. When I glance up, her lips wear a conspiratorial grin.
“Good luck,” I whisper before heading to my seat next to Drew. Sinéad is in the row in front of us, further to the left. By the windows, and next to Lindsey and Leslie who always sit with her.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us today,” our teacher starts, even before everybody’s fully settled into their seats. “So we should start quickly. This should be fun, right? Last time, I assigned y’all some creative work. Theo, what was the exact phrasing I used?”
Theo looks up abruptly, stopping in the middle of what he’d been saying to Jacy. “Uhm, I think something like ‘engage creatively with a topic of your choice using the English language as a medium’.” Somehow, he manages to perfectly imitate her speech pattern. People all over the classroom snigger or try to suppress laughter.
“Good!” Ms Cranbarragh agrees. “So. I am aware that not everybody will necessarily be comfortable presenting in front of the full class. If that’s the case, please hand in your assignments at the end of class, so I can have a look at them over the weekend. Otherwise, this is your chance to present your art.”
A few hands go up, Sinéad among them. I hold off. The short story I wrote is well-written, but I won’t risk Drew recognizing me because of the cadence of the text.
“Yes, Sinéad? Feel free to tell us a little about the text first.”
Sinéad straightens and tucks a few strands of her hair behind her ear. “I wrote a poem?” she says, not sounding very confident. “It’s about… yearning for somebody’s love?”
Somebody laughs, but somebody else immediately shuts them up. Everybody around here likes Sinéad. Nobody wants her to be uncomfortable.
Sinéad clears her throat.
“You are my sun,” she says, and immediately, Drew goes tense next to me.
“But I am a mere planet,
Revolving around you,
Yearning to be with you
But continuing to fall
Always fall past you.”
I keep glancing at him without turning my face too much. His gaze is glued to Sinéad. It’s like he’s seeing her for the first time. There’s a pulling sensation at the bottom of my stomach at the realization.
“What stands between us?
A thousand unspoken words
And still not an inch.
I scream into the silence
But you don’t even listen.
And I wonder,
If I should be happy with this.
For as long as you don’t notice
I don’t have to fear your rejection.
So I continue to fall
Faster every day
Further every day
And dream that one day
And catch me.”
Ms Cranbarragh is the first to start clapping, but Drew is second. I want to ask what he thought of it. Sinéad and I spent most of the evening when I visited perfecting this, coming up with metaphors and images to use. But I keep my mouth shut. I can’t interrupt the thoughts that are forming in his mind right now like the sprouting seed of a flower.
Sinéad glances up and meets Drew’s eyes. A shy smile sneaks onto her lips and she absently plays with the dangling glass stone of her earring.
By the time we leave the classroom and head down for lunch, Drew is buzzing with excitement.
“Oh my God, Sinéad’s poem?” he says as he shoulders his bag. “That was so amazing!”
I give a nod, unable to suppress the grin that forces the corners of my mouth up. “As she was reading it out, I was like, I wonder if this is the type of poetry Drew would like.”
A blatant lie, obviously. I knew he was going to like it, because I write the kind of poetry he loves.
“Yes!” Drew says emphatically. “I loved it! Do you think she writes a lot of poetry?”
“How would I know? She never mentioned it to me.”
Yet another blatant lie.
“Sinéad!” Drew shouts over the noise of students flocking down to the cafeteria.
Ahead of us, a head of red hair turns and Sinéad waves at us, stepping aside behind the door to the stairwell to wait for us.
“That was so good!” he gushes, as soon as she is within hearing range, and I start looking for somebody else to walk to the cafeteria with.
Jacy is not far behind us, and I wave at him, falling back a little before he falls into stride with me.
At lunch, Drew is almost entirely preoccupied with Sinéad. Her poetry isn’t all he talks about, but it’s more than obvious that it’s all he wants to talk about. I sit at the other end of the table his group shares and talk with Leslie and Jacy.
***
Like wind over the lake’s surface,
Your touch sends ripples through my skin.
I stare at the words, trying to make sense of them. Try to force my thoughts to move in an orderly fashion. But they refuse. The hamster in my chest is back on its wheel, racing. What’s the meaning of this? Am I—?
Do I—?
I let out a heavy breath and lean back against the roof tiles behind me. The sun is still up, shining down on me warmly.
Why can’t I just enjoy this? Drew is trying to help me have some actual fun for the last few weeks of this life, why can’t I let him? Why do my feelings have to get all… weird? It is entirely idiotic, entertaining the pretense that he could—
I pick up the pen that has slipped off my leg and start writing feverishly. It doesn’t make sense!
We sit on the porch roof
Basking in sunshine
You sit next to me
And I laugh at a joke you made
Thinking how
Strange
It is that I miss you
Even as you sit next to me
But the words in ink don’t bring order to the chaos in my mind. They just add another layer of frenzy. It’s like there are two levels in my mind. One layer that writes poetry, that sees things and if it doesn’t understand them, it at least manages to put them coherently into words. The second layer barely manages so much as a coherent thought. It’s mind-boggling. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The sound of a window opening to my left makes my heart skip a beat. But it isn’t Drew, who returned from swimming practice earlier than expected. It’s Amy, who only seems to notice my presence when I wave at her.
“Max!” she says with a broad smile, waving back. Then she hesitates. “Would you mind if I join you for a bit?”
“No, please do!” I say, as the irrational excitement I felt at the sound of a window opening ebbs. I haven’t talked to her in way too long. Maybe having her here will help settle my mind a little?
Against my expectations, however, she doesn’t go back into her room to go downstairs and get up here through the house. Instead, she climbs clumsily onto the windowsill and reaches for the first branch.
“Can’t be that hard, right?” I hear her mutter under her breath, only to swear loudly when her hair gets caught on a little dead branch hanging loosely from a branch above her. “FUCK!”
With that look on her face like she’s expecting to get something in her eye any moment now, she raises her head and laboriously untangles her hair.
“How does he always make it look so easy,” she says with a glare in the direction of his window, when she finally makes it onto the porch roof.
Combing through her hair with her fingers, looking for leaves or pieces of bark that got caught in it, she turns to me. “Nice to see you!” she says, sitting down next to me. “How are things?”
I pull the corners of my mouth back in a not-quite smile. What do I tell her? “Finals are almost over. I think the worst part is over at this point.”
“Drew said you started going to parties?”
I stare down at the closed notebook in my lap awkwardly. “Yup.”
“And? Liking it?”
“It’s fun.” I can’t help the smile on my lips. “I was skeptical at first, but it turns out that for some reason, the others seem to actually like me. So now I’ve suddenly got a whole group of friends besides Drew.”
Amy elbows me lightly. “They grow up so quickly, the young’uns.” Shaking out her hair, she leans back and stretches out her legs, crossing them at the shins. “You know, sitting here, I totally get why you spend all summer up here. There’s really no place quite like this to relax, is there?”
“I also recommend the meadow by the lake. If you don’t mind bugs crawling over you,” I say drily. Then, “How are things going for you?”
“Living the life!” she says with a low laugh. “Almost done with college, got a job, got a boyfriend, party like I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. Things are coming together, aren’t they? Soon, I’ll be done and get into a full-time job, maybe stay in the city, maybe move to another one. Start a family, maybe have kids at some point…” she trails off.
“You like the idea of that?” I ask cautiously.
She raises her head a little to meet my eyes. “Oh, yes. I love it. The idea of this future with Matt, my friends, the city life.”
“But?” I ask, because it really sounds like there’s a but coming.
“But being back here really makes you remember how things used to be, doesn’t it? Working at the corner store to afford those highlights that make me cringe every time I look at old pictures, taking care of you two snot-noses, sneaking out into the field to get absolutely sloshed with my friends.”
“You miss it?”
She pulls a face like she’s not quite sure herself. “Eh, not sure if I’d go that far. But it does make me wonder whether I was right to be so eager to get away from this place. Like, I was always talking about how I was going to move to the city, party, and get a boyfriend, and I did, and it’s just as great as I expected, if not better. But this… this was special, too, wasn’t it? In its own way. Simpler times, I guess. And I know, me five years into the future will laugh at this, because what do I even know? But… yeah.” She makes a helpless gesture with both hands. “What I’m trying to say, I guess is sometimes you’re so eager to leave you forget to take a look around on the way out. And then you only ever remember the bad stuff because you’re so focused on your goals, but then you return and find that maybe there are some nice memories in this place after all?”
I raise an eyebrow. “That so?”
“Yeah,” she says thoughtfully, gaze pointed up at the pale sky above. “Like, a few days ago, I looked out the window in the evening and saw you sitting here, doing homework or whatever it is you do out here all evening. It’s so nice to see you on this roof, you know, like some things just don’t change. Really comforting, somehow.”
“It’s soon going to change,” I say in a low voice. She doesn’t even know. I’m going to leave and then she wouldn’t ever recognize me.
“Well, you won’t be here anymore, but you’ll always be the kid sitting on the porch roof, writing as the sun goes down, won’t you?”
A serene calm settles in my chest. I never thought of it that way. That people might still recognize me, not as the boy, but as the girl that sits on the porch roof, writing poems as the sun goes down. “I suppose I will.”
Maybe she would recognize me? I decide then that I’ll try to contact her after coming out. Because she also got out of this place, so she might understand. I also resolve that I will not make the same mistake as her. I will take this opportunity to look around, to take in the impression and remember the good things, even if I can never return.
The call is so unexpected, that I flinch at the sudden vibration. Quickly, I pick it up and put it to my ear, turning away from Amy. It’s Sinéad.
“Yes?”
“Max, I fucked up!” her voice is all shaky with worry.
“What?” Cold fear constricts my heart. She can’t have told him. Cannot possibly have revealed that—
“I was reading poems to him. My own poems. But then he suddenly asked whether I am Sunshine Girl and I… I reacted so strongly that I couldn’t just say that I’m not without maybe giving you away so I… I said yes.”