(NOT fan fiction!) Kurt Cobain and Tally Fisk

Chapter Thirty-Five

Spence!"

My mom's voice rouses me from a deep and dreamless sleep.

"Get up!" she says, poking her head into my bedroom. "John's here. With Mavis."

It's Sunday morning. My friends know I go to church. They've never shown up randomly on Sunday morning.

My friends.

Call me lame, but sometimes it still gets to me. It gets to me that I have friends. Living breathing friends.

That night after John showed me the bike, and Mavis and I walked back and forth, not wanting to say goodbye, I went home and laid awake, thinking, rather than trying to avoid my thoughts.

I thought again about how lonely I used to feel. And I thought about how lonely everyone feels sometimes.

I mean, not everyone has the ghost of a dead rockstar to help them through hard times.

But if you work hard to see people, really see them, some of them might eventually see you too. Even if it takes time. Even if that time seems like forever.

All these years, I was so caught up in the fact that no one could see me that I blinded myself from seeing them.

I'm pretty sure that when I go back to school, I'm still going to be invisible to some people. Maybe even some of the people who saw me this summer won't see me when school starts back up.

But I'll try to see them anyway. It's not all about me, after all.

"Spence! Get up!"

I pull the blankets from my face and look at my mom, hands on her hips, scowl on her face, annoyed with her teenage son who, as is typical for teenage sons, won't get out of bed.

And for a split second, I don't see my mom. I see the girl my age who got pregnant in high school and gave everything she could to raise that baby. I see the young woman in her twenties who lost her father in a gut-wrenching way when she was doing all she could to save him from himself. And I see the still-young woman she is now. Thirty-five. Still dreaming of a house with a fireplace and bay windows someday. Maybe a house with a sun porch where she could host a book club or have the ladies from church over. I hope she gets those little things.

"I'm up," I say, tossing a pillow her way.

"Good because-"

She stops and sticks her head into the hallway.

"What?" she calls.

Then she looks back at me. "Tally and Kyle are here now too. You'd better find out what's going on."

All the Invisible Woodsmen are at my house on a Sunday morning. This better be good.

I roll out of bed and glance around my room for a shirt before deciding that basketball shorts and bedhead are a fine uniform for a surprise meeting at the crack of dawn. Or the crack of nine a.m.

When I round the corner into the living room, there are all my friends, Kurt included, clustered on the porch, peeking in the open front door with beaming faces.

John waves his hand, motioning for me to hurry out.

I step into the already-too-hot morning light and Mavis pushes the Sunday paper into my hands.

I look down.

"State legislators at stalemate-"

"No, no," John says, flipping the folded paper over. "Below the fold. We aren't famous enough to be front page above the fold."