Chasing William (7 page)

I guess we’ll find out together, though. I’m
actually excited. Can you believe it? Me, excited about something
after doing nothing but cry and sleep for months. I know I won’t
actually see you when I get there, but maybe there’s still a part
of me that thinks I will. If you’re still there, will you let me
catch up with you? I miss you so much, but I’m finally getting out
of here! I just feel like nothing but good is going to come from
this trip! Finally, something good is going to happen! I’m getting
out of here!

“
Things are only as bad as
you think they are.”

I was right. Going back to school after the
weekend of my meltdown was terrible, but not as terrible as I
thought it was going to be. No one really remembered it over the
weekend, or no one cared, or people just didn’t know who I was or
remember I was the one who had a meltdown. The only people who did
anything about it were Amanda and her group of my former friends.
They refused to talk to me, Amanda flipped me off whenever we
passed in the hallway, and I was forced to eat lunch by myself in
front of my locker. None of that really bothered me though. Amanda
told me to fuck off enough when we were friends. Now that we were
enemies the insult doesn’t have much of a meaning. I don’t even
mind eating lunch by myself. It gives me a chance to catch up on
reading and I don’t have to listen to Amanda talk trash about a
“person who will remain nameless”, also known as me.

Besides, nothing really matters now, not
highschool things at least. In just a few short weeks I am going to
be in a car driving to Minnesota, chasing my ghost and seeing where
it leads I might be a mess, friendless, boyfriend-less and a total
loser, but I am going on an adventure. Once I get back from that
I’ll be a totally different person. Maybe William will help me
learn something about myself, or maybe I’ll finally find my voice.
It does still hurt when Amanda and Pru walks past me by my locker
without saying a word. Amanda’s condescending little smirk gets to
me a lot more than I’ll ever admit out loud. My heart even hurts a
little for losing them. But I can think of my trip and that gets me
through the day.

According to Google it should take me nine
hours and fifteen minutes to get from here to there. I figure with
various breaks for gas and the bathroom it would take closer to ten
hours flat. I’ll be staying with my aunt in St. Paul, so my mom’s
been arranging with her, making sure I’ll have a live body to check
in with when I get there. It might be nice having a place I know I
can crash. At least I won’t end up having to sleep in my car.

It will mean taking a week off from work,
and that idea is so foreign to me I haven’t asked off for it yet.
I’m not sure what to say. I haven’t not worked for that long since
before high school. I’m not sure what I am scared of more: not
knowing what to do with myself or getting so used to not working I
won’t want to go back. Either way I am running out of time, so it
comes down to today after school. I’m not really sure why I’m so
worried about all this. The world can’t possibly be out to get me
the way I think it is. I force myself to get through the day,
keeping my head down and avoiding Amanda at all costs before I can
escape to work.

I always think that the closer to the winter
holidays it gets, the more people will be driven to buy used books.
It never works that way though. No matter how crazy the shopping
frenzy gets, people never feel the desire to buy an obscene number
of new and used books. I guess people just aren’t as bookwormish as
I am, or they’re less broke and more technologically advanced than
me and have moved onto e-readers. I hate thinking paper books are
going to be a thing of the past. Not that I have anything against
ebooks. In fact, I think they’re a lot more convenient and in some
cases, a lot more fun. I just like the atmosphere books create.
They make a space safe. They smell like comfort and rainy days and
cups of coffee. Still, even with all these book benefits, people
don’t feel the need to buy them in bulk. Which all helps to make
the point that, regardless of what people are buying in the rest of
retail world, my store stays empty.

As much as I need to talk to Mel about
leaving for break, I decide to use my free time to look up routes
for my upcoming road trip of… well, road trip of something. I keep
trying to think of an awesome name to call my adventure, but it
somehow seems irreverent. I don’t want to “enjoy” it. This road
trip is supposed to be about finding myself and coming to terms
with William’s death, finding my future, and keeping William in my
heart while trying to move on. Tall orders for a road trip, and not
exactly the kind of thing you can think about as fun. I still want
it to be named something. I just can’t find the right words. I
consider that another sign the universe and me aren’t in sync. I do
have a map of Chinese restaurants along the route though. It’s
amazing what you can find when you Google for it. I’m giving
fortune cookies one last chance to come through for me before I
give up on them completely.

After one or two customers walking in and
walking out, the night drag is finally over and I have to tell Mel
I’ll be leaving for a week of my break. We won’t really be doing
much extra business but I hate to leave because this place feels
like my second home. I don’t want to miss the chance to take this
trip. It might be the only time I’m brave enough to try. Besides,
if I don’t do something dramatic, how will I ever figure out what
to do with myself? I have to just focus on the goal, wrangle
whatever courage I can find, and get it over with. Mel will
understand. I know she will.

Mel’s in her office doing some more
paperwork. She’s on the phone and yelling at someone, but it
doesn’t sound quite like a business call. Usually when she’s
arguing with a supplier she’s holding up an invoice and shaking it
at the phone. It doesn’t really help, at least I can’t imagine it
does, but she tries it anyway. She isn’t doing it for this phone
call though. It looks like it might even be personal. Now, Mel
shares a lot more of her personal life with me than I do with her,
but it’s all the “narrated” version. I like to think of the
narrated version as the watered-down, dispassionate version of
events, the kind that lacks the emotion and spirit necessary to
come up with those true-life one-liners. It’s simply a statement of
events. Sure, every story has a side and we’re all biased towards
ourselves, but we can still give an unemotional (as unemotional as
we can get) account when asked about our lives. That’s why it takes
us so long to tell people things that are actually important. It
takes us awhile to get to that point where we can narrate our own
lives. This isn’t Mel narrating: she’s actually yelling and
emotional. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her looking a mess.
Proof that other people really do feel as screwed-up as me. I’ll
never again underestimate the feeling of not being alone.

“Hey, Mel.” I wait ten minutes after Mel
hangs up before I knock on the wall of her office.

“Hey, girl. Have a seat.” Mel smiles,but now
I can see it’s strained. If anyone could understand, I know it’ll
be her.

“I’m gonna have to take off the week before
Christmas. Seniors don’t have exams, so we have the week off and I
won’t be here.”

“Sure. It’s about time you went on a
vacation. Family finally taking off for the holidays? Hope you’re
going somewhere warm.”

Mel is so friendly, and she’s not being
fake. She genuinely cares. All the shit going on in her life and
she still, somehow, has it in her to care about my vacation. I want
to be like her. I want to be able to deal with my problems and
still have time to care about the people I care about. You wouldn’t
think that’d be such a hard thing to do, but from where I stand it
seems almost impossible. It’s not that I don’t want to care. There
just doesn’t seem to be any room in my heart left for empathy.
Everything’s been taken over by this longing for William to come
back.

“No. It’s not really a family trip, just a
road trip I’m going on myself. ” I take a deep breath. If I don’t
get this next part out all at once I may never make it. “Well, my
boyfriend died at the end of the summer and the whole relationship
was just such a mess, but I loved him and I don’t know what to do
without him, and now I have to figure out my whole life in so many
different ways in just a few months and I have no idea how I’m
supposed to do that.” I take another deep breath. The hard part was
out and my voice wasn’t shaking, my eyes weren’t dripping, and
aside from being winded I sounded normal. “I’m taking a road trip
to Minnesota. He lived there for awhile and I just feel like I have
to go there to try and figure things out. It doesn’t make much
sense, but nothing really does now.”

“Of course.” Mel gives a different kind of
smile and gets out of her desk chair to give me a hug. “You poor
thing. We’re both just a mess, aren’t we?”

“Thanks. It’s nice not to be alone.”

To:
William Davis

Message:
Hey Will! I’m coming to
visit you in just a few more weeks. Well, I guess you won’t really
be there, but it feels like maybe if I get there you’ll be around
somehow. I just want to tell someone about you. I’m not sure what
it is. I guess I just want someone to listen and not judge, someone
who doesn’t know me or you or anything. Someone who’ll just listen.
I guess I just want to tell our story, or my story about you. I’m
not sure how it works. I just feel like this trip is really going
to be the start of something. It might be the biggest thing I’ve
ever done in my life. It figures it would all have something to do
with you. I love you, William.

“
The present is better than
the future because it is now.”

Upsetting as it is to no longer have the
safety of a group to keep me from the harsh reality that I don’t
have a group, it enables me to see the world through a new set of
eyes. I am an observer. Through these new eyes (or the new
perspective) I can see the whole group fracturing. Amanda must not
have had the hold on everyone I thought. They all still eat lunch
together but there is hardly any conversation, (it was still better
than eating alone by my locker, but that’s not really the point).
Outside of our table no one really talks. Amanda spends all of her
time checking her cell phone, calling Jake from corners when no one
was looking to see her in violation of the “no cell phones at
school” policy. Part of me wants to know just what they are talking
about that requires constant communication, but another part of me
(the part I try to ignore) know she talks to him that much because
she is lonely too. Jake does for Amanda what William did for me. He
made me feel like there was someone at my side when the tough
decisions had to be made, made me feel like I’d never be alone. We
all want someone like that. I just don’t want to admit Jake might
be that person to Amanda.

Of course, because Amanda doesn’t know what
it is like to live without her “William” she has no desire to try
and get her friend back, or even make an attempt to be civil. She
asks to change seats in English. I am grateful to not have to sit
next to her, but she asks to change seats very loudly in front of
everyone. She makes some comment about how distracting I am, even
something about how I am keeping her from achieving her full
potential in the classroom. A few people snicker, but I think it’s
a fifty-fifty split between who is laughing at me and who is
laughing at her. Miss R. is on my side as subtly as she can be,
reminding Amanda that if she wants to move all she has to do is get
up and walk over to an empty desk.

Amanda positions herself in a diagonal row
where she can stare at me without having to even tilt her head. She
takes advantage of her new position too, making sure to glare at me
whenever Miss R. has her back turned. It doesn’t hurt as much as I
thought it would. Today she flips me off as I walk past her to turn
in a paper. It actually makes me laugh. She is trying so hard to be
horrible to me it’s just starting to get funny. After all, thing in
my life can’t get much worse so there is no point acting miserable
because of a few little things she tries

“Hey, Crissy.” Pru appears out of nowhere
after Amanda disappears down the hall. I can’t figure out where
she’d been hiding, or why she thinks she has to toe the line for
Amanda. Even though I have a new “it can’t get any worse” attitude
towards life, something about no one wanting to call Amanda out
really gets under my skin.

“Why do you let her do this to you?” I snap.
I sound mean. I didn’t mean to sound mean.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d be seeing you before
Christmas, and I wanted to give you a present.” Pru’s eyes are
watching her toes and she is wringing her hands behind her
back.

“No, tell me why. Amanda doesn’t own you,
she doesn’t control what you do or who you talk to, and you
shouldn’t let her. If you hate me, that’s fine, but if you don’t,
stop acting like it! I’m sorry I have emotions, that I can’t be
perfect all the time, but at least when I feel something I know
it’s not because someone else told me to!” I can feel my face
getting flushed, but at least I’m managing to control my volume
this time.

“That’s just it.” Pru sighs, but stops
twitching as she meets my gaze. “You don’t care. You’ll survive all
alone if you have to. You’d rather be alone than be wrong. That’s
great. But I need to be part of a group. I’ve never had one before
and it feels so safe and secure.I have people and I don’t have to
be by myself. I can’t give that up now that I know what it feels
like. Even if that means playing Amanda’s game and letting her win.
I don’t belong anywhere else. This is all I have.”