Always on Your Side (NaNoWriMo 2019)

4.

It was the morning announcements that finally made me cry at school.

It was actually sort of a relief. I knew it was coming. Before that, everything just felt like a dreary blob of nothing. I knew my brother was dead. I knew it was horrible. I knew I would be traumatized. But all I felt was muted dread.

And then the morning announcements came on. A reminder that it was the last call to preorder a yearbook, that there would be no guaranties that there would be extra copies available when they came out.

I'd bought a yearbook. Mom refused to pay for them, so in previous years I'd gone without. It had cost it cost me nearly two hundred dollars; a lot of hours mowing lawns. It seemed worth it for my senior year, the culmination of everything I'd worked for my entire life.

Brendon had had a different mentality. "I don't want to remember any of the intellectually inferior microbes who call themselves my classmates," he had scoffed in the early months of his own senior year, after I had urged him to buy one. No yearbook, no class ring, no class shirt; he wouldn't even attend Senior Prom or Grad Night. When my eyebrows raised at the implied insult to myself and all my own friends, he'd quickly added, "But I'll sign yours."

But he won't, I thought, and suddenly I was suffocating under an avalanche of all the other things he won't ever do. All the plans we'd made, sitting in the backyard swing after his family-only graduation barbecue – he was going to go to college, get a job and make money, and then when I graduated we'd take a month off and do whatever we wanted. Backpacking, LEGOLand, get our passports and fly off to anywhere else in the world; throw a dart at a map or close our eyes and put a finger on a spinning globe like they do in movies.

And then I was crying in math class. I sprinted for the door, grabbing the laminated paper on a lanyard that served as a bathroom pass from off the wall-hook where it was hanging on my way out. Now I'm in the girls bathroom, trying not to inhale the scent of fart and perfume as I sob. I miss him. God, I miss him. Of course I do. I've missed him ever since the day he left for college, I'm used to the ache of him not being here. But now he's never coming back. Not to travel the world. Not for Christmas. And he won't be there to listen when I need to text someone about Mom being a bitch. And he won't be at my graduation, my wedding, his own wedding or college graduation. He won't ever sign my yearbook. He won't be happy for me. And I won't be happy at any of those happy occasions, ever again. How can I?