Don't Fear The Reaper

{v. what's the worst that i can say?}

Before either of us could even chuckle, the Nyquists' huge Great Pyrenees, Blue, ran into the room and tackled us to the floor in a mix of fur and slobber. We laughed and Blue somehow smiled and everything seemed okay. Slightly stressful, but... okay.

It's funny how insignificant little moments of joy are until you don't have any at all.

In the end, he threw the pass that won the game. Like something out of a Disney Channel movie, after they left the field, he got bombarded with people.

Sure, high school football isn't as popular in Vermont as it is in places like Texas or Pennsylvania, but it's not like there's maple syrup tournaments or varsity snowboarding teams. We've been forced to latch on to football, adopting it as our own and playing it like it was all we cared to play, and that care was evident in the sheer happiness on everyone's faces.

Yet... in the midst of the crowd just off of the field, the local sports anchors and adoring fans, Will ran straight to me, picking me up and spinning me around with a grin on his face.

"We won," he murmured, his eyes alight. "We won, baby!"

I laughed, giddy in the moment. "You won. I just told you so."

"You were right. You're always right."

My laughter grew and I smiled against his lips as he turned his head down and kissed me. And that's where the brittle memory shatters.

Will's dead. The Ashdown Jackals are just some podunk high school football team. Veronica's a bitch, Macy's busy cheerleading, and Kat, although decidedly nicer to me since our lunchtime adventure on Monday, has a life - she's laughing and smiling with her soccer friends at the top most row of the student section.

And besides, would I really want to hang out with her - or anyone, really, besides Will? Once Will died, I've started to see things like football games and spirit days as weak facades, a way to make our school - and world - seem happy and bright and alive when it really had the soul of a corpse.

How could I bring myself to do such cheerful things when I knew it was a lie? And how could I do everything Will once loved when he's never going to be able to do them again?

So why am I here? Good question.

It just so happens that O'Rourke's - Ashdown's very own knock-off ACE hardware store - is right across the street from the stadium. And it just so happens that the light above my bed, the center of the plastic galaxy of my childhood, burnt out earlier in the day. And it just so happens we were out of lightbulbs.

Small town hardware stores at night are a strange place. Dim lighting, settling sawdust, potential weapons everywhere you look. As I traversed the narrow aisles, I felt like I was the last girl in Ashdown, raiding for tools to survive the zombie apocalypse. This theory was supported by the fact that nobody else was in the store while I was there, aside from the clerk, who had a receding hairline and looked at me like I was a cold slab of raw meat.

After I left, I felt myself being drawn towards the sight of floodlights and cold aluminum bleachers. I wandered across the street, leaving my car to sit lonely next to O'Rourke's. I thought I'd only be standing here, outside the fence behind the concession stand, for a few moments. In reality, I don't know how long I've been watching. My eyes have started to tear up from a lack of blinking.