Trapped in Forever

30 ~ Fragments of Broken Hearts

“Yeah,” I heard him murmur, just as I began to remember Mrs. Zebulsky in Good Greens a few weeks ago, purse perched in the child seat of her cart, along with a tanned carton of a dozen eggs and a few stalks of celery, talking with Mrs. Brown beside the checkout aisle, gossiping over their groceries, until they saw me off to the corner, pretending to be engrossed with a magazine about Jennifer Lopez. When I turned to look at him, I found that he was already looking at me, easily, on the verge of being nonchalant, with only the slightest hint of sadness still left gleaming in his pupils as he stared at me, softly. “I saw that picture on her phone,” he told me, and I raised my eyebrows at this, involuntarily, only because I knew how careful she was to hide that. He smiled, again, a little more impishly this time. “I thought it was in her room, though.”

“Oh.” I glanced up at the ceiling, noting how one of the stars near Orion’s (The Hunter) head was beginning to slowly unstick itself from the ceiling, the points falling away from the bumpy surface of my ceiling. I realized, even though I probably wasn’t supposed to, that this meant he had never been to her room. “She thought it made her look needy or something.”

He rolled his eyes slightly at this, but still, he smiled, turning his gaze off to the distance, perhaps at the door—once again to stare at my The Fray poster, with faux signatures Roxanne convinced me to write over their torsos and knees, telling me that it made having a The Fray poster at least a little cooler (she was not a fan); or maybe he went to look at my bookshelf, noting the cracked spines on the backs of the books, crackling the material, making it evident which books I favored, leaving Mikayla’s hand-me-down copy of Twilight untouched, pushed off to the side, crushed between Jaws and a Superman graphic novel. Or perhaps his eyes merely went out of focus, blurring the images of The Fray and superhero graphic novels, so his mind could replay past memories without distraction, maybe of the time he and Roxanne first kissed (he was quick, according to her, as he asked her out just as she ripped the $3,ooo check out of her mother’s deep purple check book, and then kissed her that night, on the doorstep of her father’s house, porch light flickering over their shoulders; she said he was confident, leaving her standing there, sending her a grin in his wake as he walked down the porch steps) or some other distant memory Roxanne kept to herself, making it yet another secret her lips concealed.

But at some point—whether he was truly staring at my The Fray poster, or the faux signatures written in thick, black Sharpie that rolled and rattled in the drawer on the right side of my desk, brimming with unsharpened pencils, dead calculators, and stubbed erasers, or if he was reliving a hazy memory of a blissful summer, millions of heart-beats away—his eyes suddenly widened, much like they had when they spotted Orion’s Belt stuck to my ceiling in cheap, little stars I bought from Dollar Mart, and I frowned, instinctively, as I swept my gaze across the room, in search of anything, especially something like one of my bras fallen on the floor or something, but I found nothing.

“You have Jaws?” he asked, incredulously, and just as I heard his voice, the bed shifted, drastically, the springs squealing briefly as he stood up, the mattress easing slowly back up, and I watched, with my eyebrows still narrowed together, as he ambled across my bedroom floor, his Nikes thudding at what I felt was a deafening volume. Then he stopped in front of my bookshelf, crouched slightly, cocking his head slightly as he scanned my selections—while I silently hoped he would overlook the red apple stamped over the spine of the Twilight novel. “The book? By Peter Benchley?”

 I nodded, slowly, as I stood up, hearing the last of the springs’ chorus as I did, just as he reached his hand into one of my shelves, curling his fingers around the crackled spine, and pulled it out, allowing me to catch a glimpse of a much less famous, paler shark painted across the cover as he did. “Yeah,” I replied, taking a step closer and feeling the material of the rug beneath my feet. “I really liked the film so I bought it off of Amazon.” I watched, silently, lips slightly parted, as he thumbed through the pages, dozens of worn, beige pages flying and falling through the air as he looked through them. “You’ll never be able to read it that fast, though.”

“I already have,” he replied, swiftly, despite the fact that he was still skimming through the pages of the book, filling the room with the smell of aged pages and the sounds of them slapping together as he turned them, black words blurring together as he did this, before, finally, reaching the end of the pages and then closing the book with a slight, muffled thud. “A couple times, actually, but I never met anyone else who owned a copy. My roommates don’t even believe me when I say there was, in fact, a book.” He smiled.

I smiled back, as he turned around somewhat to slip Jaws back into the thin slot where my Superman graphic novel had collapsed over and leaned against Twilight. I was readying myself to shake my head if, when he finally turned back to face me, he would raise his eyebrows at the book, such a stark contrast from the rest of my novels, aligned on my white bookcase, decorated with stickers and photo-frames, sunglasses glaring off of the flash in nearly each shot. But instead, when he spun back to face me, his eyebrows weren’t raised and his eyes weren’t darting over to the black and red spine, nor was he going on about how he probably thought Jaws, the book and the movie, had their own equally good qualities or something along those lines.

When I glimpsed his countenance, after sliding Jaws away, to be sandwiched between two novels until one night I couldn’t manage to fall back asleep and would leaf through the pages, especially the shark attacks scenes that oddly seemed to calm me down, it didn’t look like what I had become used to. There wasn’t a halfhearted, or even hearty, grin on his face, or a slight chuckle to his voice. Now, his features held an almost enquiring smile, biting the corner of his lower lip slightly, and his eyebrows weren’t exactly furrowed, but they had fallen slightly, but not in a frown.

But then his gaze quickly darted away—this was followed by a brief exhale through his nose, and his smile changed somehow, like a flicker, one second it grew faintly more but then the next second, it fell, almost completely—and ran a hand through his hair, before saying goodbye and climbing out of my window.