Perception

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Everyone thinks I'm psychotic, except for my friends deep inside the earth.

Unknown

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    It was dark when Petra finally cried herself to sleep. It had really been some birthday. Personally, I couldn’t tell if she had cried so hard because of Matt’s death or because it was death of the last tangible link to a life neither of us wanted to return to.

   Our fathers had known each other for years, his being a lawyer while ours was a cop, but it wasn’t until our mothers had met in neo-natal class that a friendship had grown. Though born on different days, Matt was only forty-five minutes older than me; a fact he never forgot to gloat over.

     I had yet to shed a tear for my dear lost friend. I hadn’t yet processed the information; couldn’t understand what it would mean for him to be dead.

    To be no more...

   I knew it was coming. Anyone who went to visit him on any regular basis could see the cancer slowly eating away at him - turning his once full, suntanned cheeks to sunken-yellowed bowls. It also had slowly zapping the mischievous spark that danced in his deep brown eyes when I suggested something stupid; like sticking a flat head in the engine block of our English teacher’s new car.

   He was gone...

    He was gone and I didn’t know how that made me feel. Six years ago I had packed away all my emotions and locked them in a deep dark vault and swearing never to open it again. The pain and betrayal, the hurt and self-loathing, all packed away in a tight, pulsating little ball where it could no longer cripple me with fear.

      Due to this emotional numbness, I was unequipped to deal with Matt’s death. It was business as usual and would continue as such until I could make sense of things. And business? Well, that was gutting a mouthy dog.

    Checking Petra one last time, I slipped out of the tent gate and locked it behind me.

    “Hey, let us in,” Sookie’s voice whined from behind me.

    “What?” I demanded, spinning around to face her.

      Dino left the light of the barrel fire and pulled at his sister’s arm, his face full of apologetic embarrassment.

     Shaking off her brother, she crossed her arms and planted her feet. “Let us in. We need a place to sleep.”

    I laughed, the audacity of this chick could almost be considered amusing if she wasn’t as annoying as all hell.

  Covering my mouth, I tapped my cheek with one finger as I studied her. “Let me ask you a question Sookie: Can a toddler give birth?”

   The firelight deepened the groves of her frown as she asked, “What?”

   “You’re what, seventeen?” I asked.

   “Nineteen. Again, why?”

    “Really? Well, then you really shouldn’t frown like that.” Leaning forward, I staged whispered, “Winkles,” while waving a finger up and down indicating my forehead, “Anyhoo, let’s revise the question. Can a fetus give birth?”

     “No. What kind of stupid question’s that?”

    Absently, I scanned the camp, looking for my original quarry. My eyes dropped back to the annoyance in front of me. “A relevant one as I’ve just recently turned eighteen and you, as you just pointed out, are nineteen. Thus proving once and for all that I’m not your mother.”