Broken Glass, Broken Hearts part 66

To say that the the weather was warming up would be a bit of an exaggeration. The sun hardly ever shown absolutely clear here. That's not to say we never saw the sun. We just rarely saw the sun without a raincoat of clouds. The air was, however, starting to feel less icy, like the invisible snowflakes that I had imagined flying around in the air for months now were finally melting.

It was unsettling, the fact that summer was coming soon. School was structure, rules to follow, places to go, people to see, every day. Summer was freedom. To most, this sounded just lovely. To me, it sounded... well, like I said, unsettling.

Of course I was happy that the school year was drawing to a close, and excited that my senior year was so close. But the idea of having two whole months in my house, with my parents and my brother, and with no consellation of having Tyler nearby to take me away when I needed escape, was driving me crazy. Jake walked around in a fog, miserable because Milly was gone and bored out of his mind all the time because that's the way freshman boys are. He sat around eating junk food, watching TV, and playing video games, about 80% of the time, when he wasn't:

A. In school

B. In his room blasting music

So a summer alone with him was not exactly an exciting notion for me. And then there was my parents, still constantly trying to entertain themselves, never facing up to the fact that there daughter was dead and no amount of cocktail parties and dinners and movies were going to change that. The worst part about there strange way of mourning was that they seemed to have forgotten that they had other kids, kids who were still alive, and who needed them, were waiting for them to come back, to tell them everything was just fine.

So you see why staying in school for a while a little while longer didn't sound to unappealing to me.

I sat in my room one evening, staring at the essay prompt in front of me and trying to compose my thoughts, to form them into sentences that would make sense of paper, my pencil hovering over the word, "unbelievable" in my third body paragraph- when I realized that I heard music. I put my pencil down and looked around, wondering where the sound was coming from. I stood up, pushing aside my binder, and took another glance around the room. The noise was clearly not coming from downstairs. It was very faint, and... it almost sounded like it was coming from Dustin's and my hallway. I walked slowly over the door and pulled it open, and, sure enough, the faint noise became slightly louder, though it was still muffled, and quiet. I walked to the end of the short hallway and turned the handle of the back room, pushing the door slightly ajar- and the music became clearer, though still quiet. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and walked into the room, and it became obvious that the music was coming from the chest. I kneeled on the ground, my jeans surely getting covered in dust, and pulled the the top slowly up on the chest, looking in. I moved a few things around until I found Dustin's iPod. An unstable tennis ball that had been balancing on a large children's hardcover book for months had finally given up, falling deeper into the chest and startling awake the hibernating iPod. Solar Midnite by Lupe Fiasco blasted from the iPod that had been last been played at full volume. I pulled the iPod out and stared at the screen. It read,

Lupe Fiasco

Solar Midnite

New Moon Soundtrack

I remembered how much Dustin had loved the popular book series. I had loved it, too, but not nearly as much as her- well, I wasn't the one who obsessed over things. I smiled, remembering all her Good Charlotte shirts that were quickly replaced by Twilight shirts when the movies came out. I had really liked the stories, too, though- the enormous poster of Bella and Edward that Dustin had tacked onto our wall still remained there, though it was slightly tattered. I looked back down into the chest where I had found the iPod and my eyes settled on one of Dustin's sketch pad. It was open to an incomplete sketch of Dustin and I, a copy she had been doing of a photograph we took when we visited a beach in California. The faces were the incomplete part of the sketch- Dustin had often done that, gotten completely through a sketch only to get frustrated when she started on the faces, drawing and redrawing them until her pencil eraser was completely gone, at which point she would sigh heavily and go do something else. I pulled the sketch pad out and ripped the picture out, looking at it. I could see that shadows of where the faces she had erased multiple times had been. There was one line that had clearly been erased the most recently, a line across her cheek, a mistake, a slip of her pencil. I remembered her laying there on the day she left me, laying on the glass shards. I remembered the cut across her cheek, the first one I had seen, before my eyes quickly looked down at the huge shard of glass pointing out of her chest. I remembered looking back at her face, in shock, and just staring at the insignificant cut on her cheek, not fully able to process what had just happened.

Dustin had always loved the summer.

I folded the sketch and put it in the back pocket of my jeans, reaching into the chest to find Dustin's headphones, which I plugged back into the iPod before turning it off and wrapping the cord of the headphones around it. I closed the chest and stood up, pulling the door closed behind me as I headed back to my room with the picture and Dustin's iPod.

© 2010