Control Freak ✔️

04 gone and forgotten

It was a different Friday than any other. It was the last day of high school, and as every kid found themselves dangling at the diminishing precipice of childhood and young adulthood, they could not move themselves but to wade about, lingering, as did Caleb. There, with his frail, slender fingers latched around a slim red hardcover book, he struggled to lift his shoes from the floor as all the other twelfth graders swam around him. Since it was the last day, they were all allowed to make their rounds to other classrooms to say goodbye to their favorite teachers and sign yearbooks.

Ivy's last period was Spanish. He paused beneath the threshold, watching her multitask as she chatted with a group of friends while she quickly signed yearbooks. Walking in a straight line would never feel so treacherous, finding his destination without triggering a landmine of inquiries demanding to know what he was doing there. Luckily, moving through a crowd unseen was his area of expertise. No one bothered him. If anyone stared, it was only briefly. Her desk was covered with a mountain of red books already. She barely saw him approach, and neither did the others.

He cleared his throat meekly, sounding off hardly a gurgle. It wasn't to get anyone's attention, anyway, but a token gesture he'd do to be able to say that he tried.

"¿Qué tal?" she facetiously answered to his astonishment.

He had already made a half-turn towards the exit. He froze. Her actually talking to him was a point he didn't recall even getting to in his dreams. He felt his heart slamming against the inside of his ribcage. His brain was just as frantic. It fired a million crazy thoughts per second, all fantastic and scary and vivid and detailed, yet never in the company of the thing he actually needed to say at the very moment he needed to say it. To say his mind had gone blank, then, was a misdiagnosis. It was more like data overload. The remedy: shut down and let the mouth babble like it belonged to an infant.

"Oh, uh, I'm uh, I uh, I mean," he stammered. He watched her pupils bounce back and forth as she tried to keep track of both conversations going on: the human adolescent conversation with her friends, and the baby talk with Caleb. Her attention appeared to be inching back toward her friends, though. He decided it was better that way. It gave him the impetus to barrel through his spiel. "Could you sign my yearbook?" He let the words burst from his mouth before starting to make that turn again.

"Oh yeah, for sure, just leave it there," she dismissively reassured before returning her full attention to her group. He was alone again. For awhile he hung there in limbo, half-pontificating the surprising yet anti-climactic ease of the recent transaction, and half-wondering how long he should hang around knowing there was no one willing to talk to him and make it seem less weird that he was just standing there, swaying his torso with his clammy hands in his pockets.

Finally he was able to let himself wash away, like a lone slab of driftwood taken by the current. He tumbled back out into the hallway, having nothing else to do but return to his class, park himself in his usual seat and stay there, wringing his hands as he pondered what he was supposed to do next. The bell rang finally, and then all the other kids darted around him, while he stayed in his seat, like a stone caked in the muddy riverbed watching them all race overhead. Even the teacher followed them all to the hallway.

From his desk by the window, he could still hear the cacophony of lockers clashing and banging in great numbers, soon dwindling as more time went on, until finally, nothing. After the silence had been there long enough, he thought he could move again. He crawled from his seat and meandered back into the hallway, shuffling his feet over the ground, making no attempt to avoid the loose papers that had been joyfully tossed about on the hallway floor. He lingered in front of his locker, slowly twisting the lock in its proper combination.

"This is yours, isn't it?" a familiar voice asked.

His eyes scanned the cover of the book. It was attached to an arm, and a shoulder, and a neck, and a cheek belonging to the girl with summergreen eyes smiling brightly into his. It was times like these that his brain would forget to give him words appropriate for the situation, or hardly any at all, for that matter. So, instead, she helped him.