MESS
DAVE SETTLED INTO his bench at the harbor. He’d skipped school for the second day in a row because he thought staring out at the cool waters of Morro Bay might be comforting. The bubble tea he’d bought an hour ago was on the ground by his feet, almost full. He’d made a mess of everything, and it served him right to sit there and feel every little bit of guilt that came his way.
MORE OR LESS
ANYTIME SHE COULD get away with it at school, Julia lived within the world of her headphones. For days now, music had been playing almost nonstop. Whenever she was forced to hit pause, the air around her was fraught with tension. No one else seemed to notice it. In fact, everyone else seemed to be drunk with happiness. That sense during school Julia had had only a couple months ago that everything had been dipped in butter, that time had slowed down to a torturous crawl, it had disappeared. The end of the year was in sight and everyone but Julia was giddy for it.
She waited in her car in the parking lot until the bell for first period liberated her from seeing Dave, and even then she’d still be late, waiting until she knew he would be seated dutifully in class. If she saw blond locks anywhere on campus, she turned the other direction. During lunch, she steered clear of the tree house, choosing to sneak bites of her sandwich by the graphic novels in the library, or leaving campus a couple of steps behind the throng of seniors who were known by their first names at the pizza shop.
Music was her solace and her refuge, and rather than trying to cheer herself up, she found herself playing the saddest music she owned. Songs about breakups and their messy aftermaths offered the most consolation. When John Darnielle would sing to her, something like, I will get lonely and gasp for air, and send your name off from my lips like a signal flare, she’d think to herself: Goddamn right. People were always belittling teenage heartbreak. But heartbreak was heartbreak was heartbreak.
What was almost as bad was the increasingly obvious fact that she had no other friends. She and Dave had clung to each other for so long and now she was alone. She ate by herself. She drove home by herself. Her phone’s battery life seemed eternal thanks to inactivity. At night, when she felt like crying, Julia watched the Travel Channel, wrote her mom e-mails, asking when she was going to come. When she reread them, they sounded desperate. Even as she wrote them she knew they were desperate. She had fantasies of her mom whisking her away from San Luis Obispo right after graduation, taking her on a trip around Southeast Asia. They were cinematic clichés, these fantasies. Her mom pulling up in a Thelma & Louise convertible right on the lawn of the ceremony, honking the horn, scarves blowing in the wind, though Julia did not own a scarf. Sometimes, Julia felt like an only child wishing for siblings, like a girl making up imaginary friends.
Thursday morning, she was convinced she had exactly this to look forward to for the last month of school. Lonely moping, tearful nights, music, music, music. She was sitting in her car, waiting for the first period bell to ring when Principal Hill walked out into the parking lot and she was forced to pretend to be on her way. She gathered her bag and walked in a hurry through the front doors with her earbuds in, then walked straight past homeroom, not daring to look inside. She checked her e-mail again and her hear leapt when she saw her mom’s name come up. She almost smiled for the first time that week.