What Happened That Night

15 ~ l o c k i n g

"Clara," he said, the tone in his voice somewhat final but soft, and I heard the sound of his Timberlands ambling towards me as I slowly opened my eyes, embarrassed by how watery everything was to me, the lines of definition obscured and blurred, and there he was, Kolby Rutledge, again, in his black puffer jacket, a blue long-sleeved shirt underneath, and a pair of dark jeans, and his brunette hair was tousled, slightly, and he smelled like soap in the cold air. I could still see the comb tracks dividing his strands of hair. He bent down, a few feet away from me, and grabbed an eraser in the shape of a cartoon hedgehog. He glanced at it. "Did the zipper on your backpack break?" he asked, leaning down and grabbing a pencil whittled down to about three inches.

I shook my head, biting down on the inside of my lower lip as I looked down at the erasers, pencils, and books littered around my feet, and I shivered as another small gust of a breeze brushed against my bare arms, my coat still draped against my arm, the hem just barely touching the concrete ground. "No," I murmured, softly, as he bent down to grab a pencil, the corner of my government textbook, and another eraser, this one in the shape of a cartoon fox with a stupid smile. One of his ears was worn away after months of erasing mistakes. "I just . . . Aniston was in the library-" I watched as his eyebrows rose as he looked up from the cartoon fox eraser, his thumb touching the word-away ear-"she's writing an article for the paper . . . about Emily and him and. . . . you know. She was watching this video and this guy, the detective, I don't know, he was saying that she . . ." I stopped. He looked at me, head tilted, my school supplies in his hands, and I knew I didn't want him to know. I didn't want him to know about Griffin's last moments. "He was just saying things that I didn't already know so I left and I was hurrying and now my things are . . . a mess." I laughed, bitterly and quietly, giving a kick to the snowbank beside me. "Kind of like my life, huh?"

He used his pinkie finger to reach down and grab my backpack from the snowbank beside us, laying it against his shins, and slowly depositing my stationary supplies inside, wiping off a bit of murky, brownish sludge off of the corner of my government textbook, and said, placing my fox eraser at the bottom, "Messes can be picked up."

.

Kolby had swung my backpack-now refilled with my pencils, cartoon animal-themed erasers and textbooks, and he even managed to locate my yellow Baby Lips lying, vertically, in the snow near the steps of the library, and zipped-over his shoulder, grasping onto the sleek material of the strap with his fingers, and followed me home, pressing the buttons for crosswalks and giving the obligatory wave to drivers in rusted, old cars who let us pass. He didn't say anything to say, about my flushed cheeks or watering eyes, about Aniston and her stupid article about Emily and Griffin, about how this seemed to mimic exactly what happened nearly a year ago that morning after the Super Bowl. He just held onto my backpack, brought his hand up in short, polite waves, and pressed his thumb into cold, red buttons.

"Did you have anywhere you needed to be?" I asked after a moment of us just walking, together, with my backpack leaning against his back, fingers curled around the dark strap, and he had just lifted his hand in lieu of a thank you to a driver who stopped and let us amble across the street in front of a STOP sign. He glanced at me as he brought his hand down, stuffing it into the pocket of his puffer jacket, and he shook his head, a strand of dark brown hair falling over the top of his forehead. "You don't have to walk me home if you do. Or if you don't. I mean, if there's something else that you wanted to do, you don't have to stop to carry the sister of a murderer's backpack home."

He smiled, faintly, and I noticed how he glanced down at the concrete sidewalk, pale gray and dry, and it looked almost bashful. "I'm good," he told me, his voice quiet but final in the sort of way that made me bite down on my tongue and excuses to him leave. I watched, for a minute, as he looked down at the ground again, his Timberlands taking short steps as they hit the pavement, and I noticed that his fingers squeezed slightly around the strap of my backpack. "You get it."