Fish Eyes

19

Summertime sadness was no joke that year.

It was never fun, but in the years past, at least Dalia knew what to expect. That year, there were so many new variables that made her head spin. She didn't know how to attach all the new working parts, so she just left them in their respective bags.

School had been out for over a month, and even though she was closer to her junior year than her sophomore year, it felt like summer was going to last forever. The days had all been blurring together, she was running out of movies to watch, and she was growing more and more irritated with her parents. 

It felt like she was moving backward, but in reality, she was going through the worst type of growing pains.

She'd been relegated to her bedroom and forced to reflect on life as it was. The only problem was, she wasn't doing much reflecting. She was using books and movies to feed into her escapism until school was back in session and she was forced to face her problems head-on.

Wendy and she had an unspoken agreement that they were not talking to each other until further notice; their rough patch was never medicated, and neither of them was making any moves to do such. Dean decided he'd stay out of grown folks' business. His idea of staying out of that was also dodging Dalia and keeping Wendy happy. She could respect that.

Julia Ramirez was still the great Julia Ramirez. Dalia just couldn't frequent her when she knew that her situation with Wendy still was in shambles. She couldn't help but feel as though she took wine from Wendy's glass and poured it into Julia's. Her guilt was secretly eating her alive, but she would never say that.

Those days, she didn't frequent anybody. She'd shoot a generic text out and continue dully existing. She had not tried any new hobbies or made any new messes.

She was learning to accept changes, finally, and all that came to a halt when her parents put her on lockdown. The societal timeclock had started ticking again like it always did. She wished the batteries could have stayed dead for a little while longer. 

The one positive about punishment was that it disallowed her from developing any more sentiment towards Lawrence. Even if she didn't care about her parents' consequences, she did fear the consequences of her emotional impulses. She didn't want to embarrass herself, and she knew that if she kept going the way she was, she would.

It hurt, but she knew that it would hurt more if she waited around and let them leave her. So she did the job for them. Everyone left at some point, for something or someone that was more important to them.

"I''m turning into my mother."

She had a bag of Hershey's kisses in the bed with her as she stared blankly at her TV. Her room was clean. It wasn't because she cleaned it; it was because she never left her bed. She'd hung some new pictures up the first week of her grounding-- that was when she still had some zest left over from her strike against authority. She even painted her room a new peach color. Break had started pretty fresh. 

Through her thin-wire glasses, she looked at the picture of herself that she'd framed and hung on her wall. It was one of the ones Lawerence had forced her to take. She looked down at her stained t-shirt and back up at the picture and felt an extreme wave of guilt. She had let herself go.

It's my parents' fault. They have me locked up and sad. Maybe it'll all go away when the summer ends.

Then, Julia's voice rang in her head.

"You don't have to leave your world to find something great."

She stared at the picture on the wall and thought about how beautiful she'd felt when she saw it for the first time. She felt beautiful looking at it then, despite the pizza splotch that sat right on top of her baby blue shirt. That picture was a part of her world, and it was definitely something great. What made it even better was that it came from someone great.