First Half -Middle PT-Rough Draft 1

The night surrendered to deep conversation, while we whisper oaths and meaningless testaments until early morning.  Sitting beside my open window and listening to him talk, I would stare at the airport field just east of town.
I sat on my windowsill, quietly wondering how all those lights could be so close to me. Watching the planes take flight I could think about leaving the city forever. I knew that school would be starting in less than an hour. I had been restless since Mason called me, unfit for sleep and wanting so badly to climb from that window and leave my house forever.
The small bag was opened each hour, helping me lose myself in a world of disregard and anxious excitement, free but chained to the silent dark of my bedroom.

I kept this silent wake all night long, going into the closet and whispering my dull confessions to the only person who would listen. I couldn't let my footsteps betray me, or have the creaking floor board scream in the silence of the lifeless house. I felt the truth trapping me again as light started to lift in the dry of dawn. Refusing to let any noise tell of my sleepless night, I kept myself restrained, although my heart was racing and I minded my pacing steps with a keen awareness. Mason and I combated eachother with words that were better left unspoken, whispering our delight in the night.

 I could hear my father's snoring across the hall, and would be startled every time he stopped. Waiting for his nock on my door, his outburst, I kept looking back at the door while breaking lines onto my desk. But it never came and my mother never woke either. Instead, I held my phone and spoke softly to the man on the other line.

“We have to be in school within the next few hours. Are you okay?” I ask.

"What do you think?" he answers quietly. He looks out his window and at the crescent moon hanging above.

"You know I don't know what to think," I whisper into the receiver, huddling in the closet, furthest I could be from my anyone overhearing me. It would be a painful discord to an otherwise harmonious night.

"Are your parent's still asleep?" he asks me.

I wait for my response, and hear the snoring again. Dad was still asleep.
"Yeah, I wish I could leave already. I could be over there by now." My confession was low and bitter, but honest. I think about this truth I had hidden from my parents, these ideas and these drugs. The memories.

Mason was already getting dressed. It was hard to tell him that the future would be another memory, that this pain and these problems were not new to me.

 In the haunts of my dark room, I could silently recall the memories of youth. More bitter than his tears, my life whispers regret and nothing more.

“The news, Rachel. Have you seen the news yet?” he asks gravely. His hair falls over his right eye,  he pushes it back with annoyance and continues reading the obituary.

His mother had left early for work that day and Jamie was just now starting to shower. Family portraits hung outside his bedroom, but his father he could not remember. He knew his father a little, but there was not a single photograph.

I ask myself whether it was better to have made mistakes than to have been chained to a life you could not live in. Which was more painful? My head starts to ache, and I sigh.

 “No Mayson. I can’t turn on the television just yet. My parents are still asleep, and if they know I have been awake all night, they will lose their shit,” I whisper.

Every thought, every event- it was passing so quick and I felt so anxious about it, although nothing was important anymore. There was a long pause on the phone.

I could feel the distant silence, and knew there was something new to trouble him. It vexes him in a way that could be felt. I try to understand him. I couldn't explain my fear or his, but rub my aching forehead instead.

Feeling beaten I ask, “What is it? Please tell me. What did you see on the news?” My inquiries drill further, and curiously I walk to my window. The stars were fading into the light. I take a cigarette and spark it. The flame lights and he responds finally.

“You will see for yourself soon enough. Something bad is about to happen, and I am afraid to go to school today,” he whispers in his dark way. I knew he was not betraying any emotion, which was an alarm.
 Across town, the memories and the pain haunt him in solitude. The ideas of a void existence and chains worse than the past now torture him from within.
He sparks a cigarette as well, and lets his mind sort out the truth. His truth was to find a way through the dark and confusing night. He wouldn't be trapped again, he confirms to himself.
Through desertion or deliverance, he would arrive one day. With fragrant lips I had touched with mine, his confidence trembles. There is more silence.
He shuts the computer down and turns the television off, it softly hummed through the night. He goes outside and let's the cold air hit the tears on his face. With a deep breathe, he inhales the fresh morning air and swallows the ache, now nesting in his chest. He takes his time smoking and burying his tears.

“Just tell me, Mason. What is going on? I promise I won’t let anything bad happen to you. There is nothing to be afraid of,” I say.
Soothing him in quiet murmurs, he listens and knows this. I am hoping my parents would not wake up.

His shame was not shared, he realizes. He knew I would not understand, and like light dividing day from night, he knew I did not carry the burdens he wishes to share. I could not help, he knew.

He goes to the tool shed outside his house, and feels more alone now for it.
“Who said I was going to need your help? I am not a fool, Rachel. Don’t fucking kid yourself. I just want you to turn the news on Channel 8, just so you will have a chance."
"A chance for what?" I laugh. "You try so hard to intimidate me. What a joke," I confess.

In the shed behind his house he listens carefully, nods while fixing his needle. "Ok fine. But before you pick me up for school, you better watch the televison." He takes the needle to his arm and breaks the skin without pain.
 "Now do you promise?” he asks, now warm and letting the comfort erase the pain.

I take my small bag into my hand, in the closet and unearth an old capsule. Dark and brown, sticky like dark honey and molasses.
 “Yes, I can be at your house. I’ll pick you up for school like usual. Please tell me what’s on your mind?”
My soft voice stung him, touched him in a way that hurt.
 “Trust me, Rachel. You don’t want to know. Trust me. Pick me up on time, though." He smiles and walks back to the house, wondering why he cared either. He hated his first period teacher.
He goes inside and I hear his brother ask him something. He walks back to his room. He doesn't notice the television or the highschool being broadcasted.

"Make sure you watch the news. I will call you in two hours. It’s just," he pauses, and his brother pushes his shoulder to the television. The newscast was on again. Jamie turns the volume down and turns to his brother, cold and scared.

"The police are outside, on the left down bayberry by Ashley's house. But I guarantee they aren't watching her," his brother whispers and I barely move. I wanted to leave. To be there with them both.

"Oh Rachel. It’s just that things are getting worse. Not better. I know you know what I mean. Just turn on the news, I can’t talk anymore." He feels his eyes sting. "I hope you understand. See you at 7:30. Be on time for once.” With that, he clicks the phone before I can hear him.
In his room, he holds his head and starts to cry. Jamie does, too.

I wish I could hold him, I think. I sit up from my closet, and turn the light off. I fall into my bed, and set my alarm. It was time to keep my eyes closed, so that my parents could open my door before leaving for work. They needed to see me asleep, so I would feign sleep for the next hour. But my mind wondered over the conversation I just had.

Mason is in his room now, smoking from his small pipe and listening to music. The high kept him from crying, but he was only half aware now. He felt free from what he was hiding. Old photographs of Stephen Lawson were spread across the floor. The last needle he used, the needle that caused his best friend's death sits on his table now. He cried a bit earlier, but is glad that Rachel couldn’t hear it.

Meanwhile, I wait and listen to the familiar sound of my family waking and rising with the new day.
Inside my dark room I close my eyes, blinded by my impatience. I wait longer and let my heart pound like a funeral drum. Feigning sleep is so hard. I wish I could just be awake. It was painful to think about anything other than Mason or my highschool, without devising a plan or feeling uncomfortable. People were now starting to avoid me. I told myself to not care, but without making sound or sense with the silent room, it was hard not to.

I lie still and sleepless with closed eyes as Mother opens the door to check how my night had been spent. She opens the door and flicks on the light in the most invasive way, so my inner actor rose and made a groaning implication of being roused. My bed sheets a fall to the floor and I pretend to wake up.

The door shut quickly, too quickly. I knew now that she had heard me awake that night, and perhaps my performance made her angrier still. In the small hallway upstairs and beside my door, Mother has her a quick canter with my father.
Her deep voice is followed by the short and clipping response of my Father’s falsetto. There was a deep inclination of a secret intelligence to what I would carelessly deny.

“I don’t know what to do with her. As long as she goes to school,” my Father echoes while walking down the stairs for coffee and his car keys. He looked into the cabinet, before he left, beside the china and plates. His diabetic syringes had been untouched. But he looks closer and observes on his own that the small needles hadn’t been used.
“It isn’t heroin, then” he mumbles with a relief, and goes to the door.

 “Alright, see you at work,” he turns to my mother and they kiss briefly before he leaves.

However he hated to admit this, Father and I both knew how he left several clean syringes for me in the stale cupboard. He knew you could not stop someone. However that was mother’s governing rule to do and oversee. He felt it best to not encourage drug use, yet quietly kept his syringes out for me in case I would need them. He hated to think of me sharing a needle because I could not use his.

It was a way of silent sympathy, just as my mother would leave me money on the dining room table. She knew I would not buy food with it.

The air was low and sweet morning dew added a taste to the air. Cool but without wind, and the sun not yet risen from it’s bed on the east horizon, the day was unbroken and beautiful for my father.

Dad sits in his ridiculed Lincoln and drives through the small town, thinking more about social problems with work than his daughter’s growing resentment. He turns onto the highway, the sun peaking low with pale light in the gray sky where airplanes began flight.

At least his eldest daughter was doing well, and he kept that small gratitude with him and within his head, to quiet any stirring reproaches of his fatherhood.

Instead, he thought of the joke he would forward to his friend before work began. Smiling, the music on the radio lulled him into the daydreams of comfort as he drove to work. His dreams at night were always imageless and of empty terror.

My mother is still downstairs when I dare stir from my bedcovers. The oppression of sound made my pulse quicken with the guilt and urgency. I take the prints and patterns torn from magazine and fabrics off the floor, knowing that interior design class would be expecting my presentation that afternoon.

 The vibrant and amusing classmates listened to my tales of scheme and secret lavishing as we would work on projects. If my throat were parched, or my eyes dilated without explanation, they would bemuse and love my affliction before asking if I suffered the woes.