I know this is not as good as my other chapters. It was even more of a struggle than chapter two! >.< Please feel free to tear it to shreds, trample on it, and then put it through a paper shredder.
Oh, but tell me what was wrong with it first.
~Blue
P.S. No, my name is not Alex, and no, no one except you guys has ever called me "Blue." The character came first, then I decided it would be cool to be called that. I'm just saying.]
Munich
An hour later, Will sat on his bedroom floor with the contents of the suitcase and the closet scattered before him. Photographs littered the floor, photographs of an overweight, auburn-haired girl in a sky-blue sundress and a boy with brown eyes and shaggy brown hair. Will grimaced. That was back before he dyed his hair black. And the way it curled up at his ears! He’d hated it; he thought it made him look childish, but she’d loved it. He wondered if she was still just a little overweight or if she had gotten really fat in the last six and a half years or had lost her chub instead.
They were together in every picture – and not by my choice, he thought with a small smile – he’d always preferred being behind the camera to being in front of it, but every time he’d taken his camera out to photograph her, she’d found someone else to hold the camera and dragged him into the picture with her. There they were at sixteen: posed in the promenade position, costumed for the dance recital; in the auditorium of Algonquin Middle School after a play she’d been in (his host school, Algonac High, didn’t have a stage); hugging and grinning broadly into the camera.
He saw a piece of paper peeping out from under a last stack of photos. It must be – it was. Another letter. Out of the many she’d written, only this and the one he’d found first still survived. He seized it eagerly and began to read, but Kristine tottered back into the room before he had gotten any further than the greeting.
“Will,” she whined, drawing his name out into two syllables, “I can’t find it!”
“Find what?”
“Your wallet! You said it was on the kitchen table but it’s not and I can’t find it!”
She took a long swig from the new bottle of vodka clutched in her hand.
“That’s not my problem,” Will said. Of course he’d have to find it himself before he caught the train to his parents’ house in Kiel, but at least he’d still have money left if Kristine hadn’t found it. Oops, he thought, looking around at the photographs guiltily. He still had to pack…
“But Will,” she pouted.
“Kristine, I really don’t care right now, okay?” he said, but she wasn’t listening. She’d caught sight of the photos, and now she pointed at them accusingly.
“Who is that?” she demanded.
Will looked down at the letter in his hand.
“Just someone I used to know,” he said.
“Oh really,” Kristine said. She tried taking another sip of vodka, but she missed her mouth and a spray of vodka soaked her shirt and the floor. Will hastily pulled the pictures and letters out of the way. Recovering, Kristine asked, “If she’s just someone you used to know, how come you have so many pictures of her?”
“Look at this,” Will said irritably, holding a picture up. “Look at me. Do I look like that now? How stupid are you, Kristine, these are obviously from a long time ago.”
“Whatever,” Kristine said. “I don’t care anyway. There’s no way you’d cheat on me with her. She’s fat.”
“She is not.”
“She is. She’s ugly.”
“No more than you are,” Will retorted.
Kristine appeared not to have heard him. Her eyes glittered as she took another swig of vodka, more successfully this time.
“Just imagine,” she taunted, smirking. “You’d get into bed with her and everything would jiggle.”
Will flushed.
“Shut up,” he said quietly.
“And,” Kristine continued, “God, if she was on top – I mean, you’d die. She’d squash you like a bug. Really, I don’t even know how fat people manage to have children.”
“Shut up!” Will pushed himself to his feet and shoved her. She stumbled backwards, looking astonished.
“She is not fat,” Will snapped. “She is not ugly. And I’d rather be with someone like her than someone whose ribs stick out like yours. You look like a fucking skeleton. It’s disgusting.”
Kristine took a final swig of vodka and then, without warning, whipped the bottle at his head. It missed by a good two feet and shattered. Vodka dribbled down the wall and seeped into the carpeting.
“You’re a bastard,” she said. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
Will slid back down onto the floor. The letter he’d found was still clenched in his fist.
“I don’t care,” he said.
Kristine sniffed angrily and stormed out of the room as best she could, weaving and reeling until she fell over with a crash. After a moment, she righted herself and slipped into the bedroom of one of Will’s flat mates, where Will heard her croon, “Oh, Gerrit….” A few minutes later the creak of bedsprings and soft moaning could be heard issuing from the room.
“I don’t care,” Will said again. He pulled the clothes on his floor into a pile and stuffed them into the suitcase, along with the photographs and letters. He left the bedroom, found his wallet right on the kitchen table where he’d said it was, and slammed the door of the flat as hard as he could on his way out.
For a while, he stared out the train window as the German landscape slipped by, but he felt antsy, so he took the photos out of his suitcase and looked through them again, more carefully this time. It was as he flipped through them now that he noticed it – the only photo in which she was alone.
In the picture she stood with her back to the camera, gazing out at the St. Clair River from the boardwalk in Algonac. She leaned against the guardrail on her elbows, and her bare toes curled against the wooden planks beneath her feet. She shone out of the other photographs, but in this one she seemed lost and insignificant. But of course, Will thought, this one was from the day he left. He remembered taking this photo himself.
She'd called him in June, a week after their sophomore year of high school ended. His host-sister had answered the phone and shaken him awake. He yawned through his “good morning.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you up?”
“Kind of. But it’s still good to hear your voice.”
He could practically hear her blushing through the phone at that.
They met on the boardwalk at noon and started walking. She loved walking. This particular walk – down the boardwalk, along the quiet residential roads on the water, all the way out to where Lathrup Avenue jutted out into the mouth of the river – was good for bird-watching. They’d gone this way many times before, wandering along as she identified different species by their markings or call and pointed them out. But on this day, the last day, she walked silently, staring at the ground instead of the sky, her hands shoved deep in her jeans pockets, and Will didn’t know how to cheer her up. At some point he heard the trill of a bird overhead, looked up, and said, “Red-winged blackbird.”
She forced a smile and said, “I’ve taught you something.”
And then she fell silent again.
By the time they got back to the boardwalk, his host family was already waiting for him in the parking lot of the CVS across the street. Will didn’t know what to say. Finally he settled on, “I’ll write a lot. Probably not as much as you, of course, but, you know.”
She looked at her feet and said, “Yeah.”
“Will!” his host-mom called. “It’s time to go! You need to be at the airport by five.”
“Hang on!” he called back. His host-family waved madly at him. He turned back to her, waiting for her to say something, but she just shuffled her feet.
“Alex,” he said. She squeezed her eyes shut. He never called her Alex. It was always “Blue,” Blue for the sky-blue of her notebooks and textbook covers and half her clothes, the t-shirt she wore now.
“Alex,” he said again, but suddenly she rose up on her tiptoes and gave him a swift kiss on the cheek.
“Goodbye,” she whispered. Then she turned away to gaze out at the river, leaning against the guardrail. He waited, but she didn’t look back at him.
“Goodbye,” he said. He wandered away across the grass and was nearly to the street before he turned and snapped the picture. He couldn’t think now why he’d even taken it, except that it was the last sight he’d had of her.
Will leaned against the train window and sighed. Then he remembered the letter. He dug through his suitcase and found it.
“Hey…” it said. His stomach dropped. Just “Hey”? Not “hey, Handsome” or “Guess who” or even just “Hey!”? he checked the date. June 2006. That was nearly a year after he first stopped writing to her. Maybe he didn’t want to read this.
Hey…
Probably you don’t want to hear from me or you would’ve e-mailed or something by now, but I couldn’t help it. I’m lonely, and I feel like maybe you’ve dropped off the face of the earth.
Also, today it is exactly two years since we took our last walk.
I graduated last month, anyway. I wish you could’ve been there. All I could think about was when we ran into each other at your host-sister’s graduation. Remember? I was there as part of the choir…
Will stopped reading. He put the photos and letters away and stared out the window as the train sped north.
Darkness had fallen by the time he reached Kiel. Snow already blanketed the streets and the docks and drifted down from the night sky. Will walked the two blocks to his parents’ house, lugging his suitcase behind him.
Warm yellow light shone through the front windows. His mother opened the door before he got to it and hugged him tight.
“Will, liebchen,” she said, “what took so long? I expected you here two hours ago.”
“I overslept, that’s all. I missed the connection in Hamburg.”
“Hmm.” His mother studied him. Strange how piercing the warm brown eyes could be. He avoided her gaze. “Well, come inside, I saved some dinner for you.”
Will picked up his suitcase and followed her into the kitchen.
“Where’s Father?” he asked.
She gave him a plate filled with bread, cheese, and cold-cuts.
“At the hospital,” she said, handing him a beer. “One of his patients needed a surgery very badly. I don’t remember what it was.”
Will ate ravenously. Between his hangover and finding the photographs and letters, he hadn’t eaten anything all day.
“Good,” he said between mouthfuls.
“Will,” his mother said.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll have to see him at some point anyways. He’ll be home on Christmas.”
“That depends on how busy he is. I hope he will be home on Christmas.”
She sat across from him and watched him eat. Eventually he slowed down and ate like a person rather than a starved dog. He left the beer alone, figuring he’d probably had enough alcohol in the last twenty-four hours. After a while, his mother asked, “How have you been? How’s school?”
“Okay,” he said. No need to worry her with the knowledge that he had failed half his classes thanks to his excessive partying.
“I know medicine isn’t really what you wanted to go into,” she said, “but I want you to know that your father is very proud of you.”
He doesn’t show it, Will thought.
“I’m proud too, liebchen. It’s so good to see you applying yourself. Someday you will be a great surgeon like he is, and then you will have a wife, and a family, and I will have grandchildren…”
Will’s insides squirmed. Did she have to tell him how happy she was? Ugh, and her soft, round face was even lighting up with whatever wonderful vision of the future she saw in her mind’s eye…
“Do you have a girlfriend yet?” she asked suddenly.
Will blinked.
“Um,” he said. No, not anymore…
“Um, no,” he said. “No. I don’t.”
His mother frowned.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You were so popular with girls in high school…”
You don’t want to know how popular I am with them now.
“…but perhaps someday.”
He nodded.
“Perhaps,” he said.
His mother watched him carefully. He gazed intently at the table.
“Have you really been alright, Will?” she asked. “Every time I see you, you seem less and less like yourself…so pale and tired…though at least you’ve finally gained some weight.”
He had, he thought, looking reproachfully at his stomach. He’d been in great shape in high school, but he’d given up jogging when he started college, and it was starting to show. A small beer gut already bulged beneath his shirt. But of course his mother thought he was just eating more.
“I’m fine,” he said. “School is just…it takes a lot of work.”
But not really, he thought guiltily.
“School. Of course.” She looked at the clock on the wall. “Your father should be home soon; he thought he’d be back by eight.”
“Oh— Actually, I’ll have to just see him in the morning,” Will said. “I’m really tired. Stayed up late studying.” Wait, class was out for Christmas. “Packing. I was up late packing. I think I’ll just go to bed.”
“So early?” She looked upset. She knows, he thought. She knows I just don’t want to see him. “Well, if you’re sure…”
He went down the hall to his old bedroom and flopped onto the bed. He lay there in the dark, thinking about Alex and his father and Kristine and his failed classes. A soft knock sounded on his door a while later; his mother opened it a crack and said, “Will? You left your suitcase in the kitchen.”
He breathed deeply and slowly, feigning sleep. A pause.
“I’ll just leave it here,” she said. He heard a faint clunk as she put the suitcase on the floor and headed back toward the kitchen, then the front door opening and his father whistling in the foyer.
He turned over and fifteen minutes later was really asleep.
