October

October

Peacefulness had settled within me, bottled tight and sunk straight to the bottom. It was the year my mother drifted away into her three-week coma and all I could do was lie on our guest room bed and dream of ‘That 70’s Show’. Back then, I didn’t care about things the way I do now. I had crimped hair, grey skirt, and Shakespeare shirt from the Globe. I put my yellow tennis shoes with everything (I felt like somesort of teenage bohemian), and that night, they were chasing rabbits in astrange backyard on 19th Avenue.

Kadie’s house was small, not in size, but in the way houses are when they’re filled up
with too much stuff. You could see and smell the personalities of every resident when you stepped into the front room, distinct odors stewing amidst the clutter. It was rare to find a family of all red-heads, but the Elton’s all bore the same crisp autumnal tone. Their similarities stopped here, though; Kadie had her dolls, ballet shoes, and sex, while the rest of her family ran askew with their own equally diverse set of hobbies.

I had received an invitation to the Eltons’s after I had broken the silence about my mother in study hall, and she said ‘pizza’ would be the perfect fix. Sitting in a small room on a worn 80’s sofa, Kadie indulged me of her affairs with Produce Preston, and where I sat was, in fact, where they had ‘done it’ just two days before. I shifted a little, fiddling with the too-hard crust of my
pizza as I became embarrassed by my own innocence.

Kadie and I usually sat next to each other on the bus, but recently I had taken to obstructing her chatter with the aid of small, white earbuds. One day she sat in front of me, twisting around with her backpack to discretely show me a box of Plan B. On another, she sits across, leaning over in the seat to show me two handprints of paint on the seat of her blue jeans. It was pieces of physical evidence like these that made me believe Kadie’s tall-tale stories less and less.

“I had a miscarriage, you know,” she said, smiling through teeth that jutted out a little too far.

“You did?”

“Yeah, I fell during ballet and lost it.”

At this statement, I slumped back down into the hot vinyl of the bus seat and looked toward the aisle. Kadie remained at her perch, but didn’t say anything more. After several moments, she retreated between her slot of brown pleather, and I sighed, praying that everything she told me on these bus rides was just make-believe, created to fill some void of boredom that hurt her too much to leave empty.

Her father and brothers were out at the mouth of the car port with Jeff, their twenty-something neighbor with an office job and a rental full of booze. Bottle in hand, he motioned for us girls to come see the rabbits in his backyard, trapped eternally by one of those ugly, rotting wooden fences. The rabbits streaked back and forth between a piling of overgrown shrubbery and weeds, and Kadie and I danced around them by the floodlight of Jeff’s patio.

“He wants to sleep with you.”

“He does?” I questioned, confused.

“He thinks you’re hot,”

Out of breath from the dancing, I looked down at my clothes, feeling stupid for
wearing such childish things. She’s lying, I thought, as I made my way back across the dark street alone. Kadie’s made-up stories weren’t worth it anymore, and like my own, her fantasies were lies. Silently, I dialed my father from the Elton’s kitchen, fingers shaking slightly as they hit the hard plastic.

“Hello?”

“I want to see Mom.”

And then I hung up.