Always on Your Side (NaNoWriMo 2019)

9.

I'm awakened 5:00 AM by the sound of my mom sobbing loudly in the shower.

There's something unnerving on the deepest primal level about hearing your parent cry. My mom used to cry a lot when she was divorcing my dad, and it terrified me. The first time it happened, I tried to comfort her – after all, that's what I was supposed to do when my friends cried; Mom had told me as much. "It's okay, Mommy," I had said. I tried to hug her, placing the teddy bear I had been holding in her lap and wrapping my arms around her from the side.

But she lightly pushed me away and brusquely said, "I just need to be alone right now, Helen. Go play."

Since that day, I would run and hide the instant I heard a sniffle, or the opening notes of a break-up song coming from the living room CD player. I'd go to Brendon's room and play LEGOs with him until it felt safe to come out.

That urge to seek protection in someone else's company is still there – though Brendon himself, of course, is not. I bike to school early. I could drive, but I don't have my own car, and I don't feel like asking Mom or Adam for the keys. That would defeat the point of going to school early to avoid them.

I buy breakfast in the cafeteria. Cafeteria breakfast is a not-quite-thawed paper container of juice, a pack of raisins, and sausage with the texture of vomit, random too-chewy chunks in the midst of a limp patty. Not my favorite thing to eat, but since I didn't sleep much I'm hoping the sugar from the juice will give me a burst of energy.

I spot Marina in the corner. She's reading a manga book, and she appears to have peeled the paper juice container off the rock-solid hunk of juice and is sucking on it like a Popsicle without a stick. She must have arrived quite early, because she has a doughnut on her tray. The doughnuts are usually gone by 6:30.

I put my tray down across from her and she looks up; the frozen block of grape juice in her mouth making her surprised expression appear comically exaggerated. She removes it, places it on a tray, a flashes a purple-lipped smile. "Len!" she exclaims.

Warm gratitude pools in my heart. Her smile and the excitement in her voice when she said my name are genuine. It's nice to have someone happy to see you, when everyone else acts like you're raining on their parade. I sit down across from her. "Your lips are purple," I tell her.

She shrugs. "It's my aesthetic. What are you doing here so early?" She always comes earlier than me, since her family is low-income and she gets free breakfast and lunch. According to her, she isn't actually that poor enough to qualify, but her parents work under the table and lie about their income on their tax files.

I smile at her and sit down across for her. "I wanted to hang out with you," I say. Her smile widens, creating creases under her eyes. My heart reacts to her smile with a weird blend of warm fuzzies and guilt. On the one hand, her smile is so adorable it makes me want to completely forget our prior agreement to not be out of the closet at school; to kiss her on her cold grape-juice lips. On the other hand, having that smile as a response to such a mundane comment from me makes me realize how much I've been neglecting her. I've been counting on her looking out for me these last few weeks, and I haven't reached out to her.

She must have been traumatized too, I think, as the memory of her horrified gasp runs through my head against my will. I try to avoid flinching as I push the memory away.

We spend the morning chatting about normal, mundane things. But when I say mundane, I don't mean boring. I'm never bored with Marina; that's part of the reason I like her so much. We can talk about anything – classmates, teachers, politics, or memes – and it'll feel like an actual, satisfying conversation. Even though we seem pretty different on the surface, when it comes to the important stuff, we just click. Though, this is the first normal-feeling conversation we've had since Brendon died. And that makes it even nicer.

But still, after just a few minutes, there's a lull in the conversation. More people start to arrive at school, and soon the cafeteria fills with people trying to escape the cold January morning air. Not wanting to fight the rising noise levels, we become quiet.

Finally I say, "So, uh. Brendon –"

I catch sight of her expression when I say his name. Her uplifted eyebrows immediately sink in sadness. It makes me hesitate a bit, it makes me want to cry that not only have I lost him, but now I can't even talk about him without making everyone sad. But I continue: "Uh, I think Brendon set up some kind of scavenger hunt thing that he wanted me to do after he died."

She takes a second to process my words, searching my face for a cue of how to react. She settled on surprise and says, "A scavenger hunt?"

I nod and take out my invisible ink pen, absentmindedly clicking the light on and off as I explain to her what I found last night. "Yeah. He put this note on my wall in invisible ink. It told me to look in my closet. So I did, and I found this card, and it told me to look in his room. There's this hole that he punched in the wall; he used to hide bagels there."

"He hid... bagels?"

"Yeah. Because Mom put him on this gluten free diet and he hated it."

"Oh." She seemed to consider asking me about that and then decided against it. "So. What did you find there?"

"I haven't looked yet. I'm afraid to go into his room."

"Oh." Understanding flashes in her eyes. She reaches across the table and looks at my hand. For a second she looks like she's about to grab it, but she reaches for my shoulder instead. "Do you want me to go with you?"

I shake my head, shaking her hand off my shoulder in the process. "I'll be okay." Whatever was there, it was probably personal.

"Are you going to tell your parents?"

The idea hadn't occurred to me. Brendon and I had an unspoken agreement to never tell Mom or Adam anything we had told each other without permission. We were allies.

"No." I shake my head again. "I think he would have told me that if he wanted me to tell them."

And with the way they're so caught up in fighting all the time, I can't imagine telling them anything.