Short Story Part 1 & 2

2010

“He comes home next week. Friday. His plane gets in around two o’clock.”

The words rang in my head as loudly and vividly as a police siren, spinning around and around, giving me that dizzy sensation you get after skating in circles. I had been in a meeting most of the afternoon and my phone buzzed for the seventh time in two hours. I finally excused myself and went out into the hallway, speaking in an unnecessarily hushed tone as I answered his eighth call.

“Mike, I can’t right now, I’m in a meeting.”

“Liz, please, it’s important.”

Mike had always been the goofball growing up. He would screw around for the sake of a laugh and most times it got him in trouble. The only times I had ever heard him speak with any seriousness was when he told me that he was enlisting in the Army and when he had called to tell me he was okay after the shooting at Fort Hood. Everything else was said with a smile on his face. Heck, he’d even been laughing as he showed me the wound on his shoulder from being shot during his tour in Afghanistan. I knew that if he was using his ‘Army Strong’ voice as I had nicknamed it years ago, it was for a reason.

“Alright, fine. But I can’t talk long,” I said.

“Okay. Liz… Lizzie, it’s about Brandon.”

The words began to flow like static, incomprehensible and too sharp to want to listen to for too long. Finally a few fragments managed to piece themselves together in a logical way. “He comes home next week. Friday. His plane gets in around two o’clock.”

The next few days seemed to blur together and before I knew it, it was Friday. I was terrified to see him but at the same time I knew that I had to see his face again. In the last three years I’d only seen him once, about six months ago near the end of February. Before that we hadn’t spoken since December 2007 when he called me from California. The call had lasted maybe ten minutes and consisted mostly of me reminding him that he had a ring on his finger, and I did not. Now all of that seemed unimportant.

Alone in my car I examined my depressing attire. I hadn’t worn this much black since my so called ‘Goth’ days in Jr. High and even that reminded me of him. I remembered how he would tease me about my thick eyeliner or the ‘miles of plastic bracelets’ that snaked up my arms. He knew that underneath I was much brighter than my clothes, which is the only reason I let him get away with it.

These days I barely wore any eyeliner except for on special occasions and my wrists were nearly bare. Instead of the overload of plastic bracelets I only had the one. It was that odd shade of orange that was almost pink. ‘Salmon’ he had called it. He’d won it in an arcade game at the movie theater the night before he left for boot camp. He was very proud of that bracelet. It had been taped down in a scrapbook for the past four years and hadn’t been looked at in two. Today, though, I felt like it was time to bring it back into circulation. The bracelet was just one of many strange but sweet gifts I’d accumulated over the years from him. He liked to give me things, always had. They were usually small and to anyone else they might have appeared to be insignificant, but with Brandon it really was the thought that counted. His gifts were never elaborate and sometimes they weren’t even tangible, but that never made them any less wonderful to me.

2000

Eighth graders are oblivious to the fact that in less than a year they will once again be at the bottom of the food chain. They don’t see that in less than a year they are going to have to start making decisions that will affect the rest of their life. An eighth grader only sees the now, and that now consists of being on top in a school with only three grades and trying to act much older than you are. Hobbies and interests change as frequently as the clothes and hairstyles, which in turn change as frequently as the days of the week. It’s an all-or-nothing age where friendships can be made and broken in a matter of weeks; where love is found and forfeited in a matter of days.

Lizzie was a bit of an outcast, which was exactly how she liked it, and so romance had never been a major part of the equation for her. Even then boys wanted the girls with the name brand clothes and whose figures were beginning to fill out the fastest. Lizzie wasn’t one of those girls. From the back she looked like a boy with long hair and most of her clothes were found at a thrift shop or stores like Hot Topic. Boys just didn’t look at her the way they did the popular girls and that was fine by her.

There was one boy, though, who did notice Lizzie. The teacher changed around the seating chart and now they were sitting at the same table across from each other. To Lizzie he was just the Frankie Muniz look-a-like who was always laughing just a little too loudly and preferred telling jokes to taking notes; and so far he was also nameless.

“I got bored and started making this in English today. It kind of sucks, but maybe you’ll like it. Here.”

Lizzie looked up, shocked to realize that he was talking to her.

He was holding out a poorly made origami flower, looking from it to her hopefully. Lizzie awkwardly accepted it and smiled politely before attempting to hide herself in her book.

“I’m Brandon,” he said, holding out a hand of lanky fingers for her to shake.

“Um, hi. I’m Lizzie,” she said, shaking his hand awkwardly.

He didn’t say anything after that. An hour later the bell rang and Brandon was one of the first out of the room while Lizzie straggled behind. She almost forgot about the flower, stopping mid-step and turning back to carefully pull the delicate blossom into her palm. This time she actually looked at it, really looked at it. It wasn’t the world’s best origami flower by any means but it was rather beautiful nonetheless. She turned it in her hand and suddenly realized that she was smiling from ear to ear.
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Later that day when the final bell rang and the students were freed from their academic prison, Liz managed to track down Brandon and thank him properly for the flower. Thank you turned into an hour long conversation ranging from music to books to their favorite kind of cereal as he walked her home. One conversation turned into a dozen phone calls, frequent visits to each other's houses and late nights of talking on the phone til 1am or until their parents finally forced them to hang up, whichever came first. They went to dances together and were seen every Thursday night at the movie theater seeing whatever old B rated movie was showing. In less than sixth months one paper flower had turned into a seemingly unbreakable friendship. According to the school gossipers there was more than just friendship going on, because of course a guy and a girl couldn't be spending so much time together and just be friends, but Brandon and Liz never let the rumors get to them. In fact, they would sometimes play along just for the sake of fun. They would hold hands between classes, Brandon would blow over-dramatic kisses to her from across the lab during science, and they would pass notes during History. Most times the notes were making fun of their classmates for eating it up, but no one else had to know that. Whether you believed the rumors or not there was one thing everyone who knew Brandon and Liz could agree on; they were truly the perfect pair.

Summer was completely planned out, full of trips to the beach and seeing shows in the city, Thursdays at the movies and Fridays at the arcade. At least, that was the plan until Brandon's mom dropped a bomb shell two weeks into summer break.

Liz was over before noon. It had been raining since 3am and it was suppose to continue through most of the evening. Brandon had still been sleeping when she'd shown up and his mom had let her in. When Brandon came trudging out around noon, still in boxers and a t-shirt and hair that was almost too messy to be real, Liz was laying out on the couch with a can of Pringles in her lap watching some Food Network show.

"Morning sleepy head," she said before crunching another chip between her teeth. He just grunted in response, grabbing a Poptart from the pantry.

"Why are you always here before I even get dressed?" he asked. Liz just laughed, never really answering.

The morning and much of the afternoon was spent in the living room watching whatever they could find that looked even vaguely interesting. Around 5o'clock Brandon's mom came home with a couple of grocery bags in hand.

"You haven't moved all day have you, Liz? Now what are you watching?" she asked from the kitchen.

"Something about endangered eastern spade foot tree toads," Brandon answered.

"Tree frogs," Liz corrected him, throwing a pretzel, their current snack of choice, at his head.

"Frogs, sorry."

His mom laughed. A commercial came on and without a pause both of them jumped up from their seats and came into the kitchen to help put away the groceries.

"You two are going to eat me out of house and home," his mom laughed as she opened the pantry to see how many snack bags had been opened or completely removed since she'd left that morning.

"Maybe if we got a bigger pantry we wouldn't have to worry about ever running out," Brandon suggested with a quirky grin.

"Actually, that reminds me of something I need to talk to you about," his mom suddenly said. The mood changed so suddenly that even Liz, busy stacking boxes of rice on the other side of the kitchen, stopped and turned to look at her. His mom sighed. "Well, I might as well do it while you're here, Liz." Brandon and Liz exchanged worried looks while his mom sat down at the kitchen table. Slowly they joined her, though neither was sure if they wanted to hear what she had to say. The rain continued outside, an ironically perfect setting for not so perfect news.

Three weeks later Liz rode her bike over and dropped it in the grass, running past the moving van and up to the house. Brandon's mom and uncle were carrying some boxes and she jumped out of their way before sliding inside, making a bee line for Brandon's room. It seemed strangely bare, lacking all the rock band posters and pictures that had gradually began to completely cover the walls in the past few years. It didn't feel right. Liz even missed that stupid poster on the back of his door of the swim suit model wearing only bikini bottoms and covering her boobs with her arms. It had been a gift from his uncle. Liz and Brandon's mom had sat on one side of the table arguing with Brandon, his uncle, and his dad about whether or not it was appropriate. The boys had obviously won.

"Hey," she said carefully. Brandon was sitting on a box, staring at a small photo album in his lap. Liz came up beside him and sat on another box, glancing at the picture. It was of the two of them at Liz's birthday party. Liz's dad was falling off the step ladder in the background and her baby cousin was sticking a Cheerio up his nose. It had always made them both laugh, but now it only brought on frowns.

Liz sighed. "It's gonna be alright. I mean, you're only going to be an hour away. It's Buffalo, not Colorado or something." Brandon didn't look up. Her methods to cheer him up weren't working.

"Yeah, I know. But I'm gonna be at a different high school than you now. We were suppose to go to Silver Creek High together. And I'm gonna have to share a room with Mike til my mom and David can afford a bigger house. His house isn't any bigger than ours, I don't get why her stupid boyfriend couldn't just move in here."

"Well maybe we'll play each other in football and you can be a rebel and root against your school. And if Mike snores you can always just stuff marshmallows in his mouth," Liz laughed. "And hey, Buffalo is closer to your dad's house anyway. Give your mom a break, okay? She's trying."

"Yeah, I know. Though a bit more notice would have been nice," Brandon sighed. Liz nodded. Yes, notice would have been great.

They finished loading the boxes into the moving van. Brandon's uncle was driving the van while his mom and David drove the car in front of them. Brandon and Liz stood next to the giant U-Haul. Neither seemed to want to move.

The car horn sounded. "C'mon, Brandon. Gotta get home before dinner," David called from the street. Brandon glared at him and rolled his eyes. Liz frowned in embarrassment.

"At least pretend to be nice for now. You can lock yourself in your room and throw a fit on the phone to me all you want later, but for now place nice," Liz demanded. Brandon didn't look to eager to comply. "My mom is going to drop me off on Friday. You're dad is still taking us fishing, right? Good. Tell him I call the blue rod, it's the only one that ever catches anything. Or maybe you guys just suck at fishing," she shrugged. Brandon finally cracked a smile. "Ah! I saw that," she laughed. He laughed, too, giving Liz a little hope that things would work out. The horn sounded again. Way to ruin the moment, David, Liz thought.

"I better go before he has an aneurism or something," Brandon said. They hugged each other tightly and Brandon picked her up and spun her around three times before dropping her back to the ground, leaving them both a little dizzy and laughing.

"You know I hate it when you do that," she said, hitting him playfully.

"Exactly," he winked. A third honk. "I'll call you tonight. You better answer!" Brandon shouted over his shoulder as he jogged toward the car.

"I'll think about it," Liz grinned as Brandon climbed into the car. A few minutes later they were out of sight, leaving Liz alone in the yard. She walked her bike home, her tears making it too hard to see for her to safely ride it back.