Short Story Part 1 Draft

This is the draft to the first part of my story for my fiction class. Let me know what you think:
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“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 quiet tone as I answered his eighth call.

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

“Liz, please, it’s important.”

Matt had always been the goofball in high school. He would screw around for the sake of a laugh and most times it got him in trouble, usually with the school but sometimes with us. Some days he was my silly friend and other days he was the face I imagined as I punched my pillow. 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 so graciously 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 the next thing I knew, it was Friday. I wasn’t there when his plane landed of course, but I was there later that weekend, waiting for my chance to see him. I was anxious to see him, as horrible as that was, but it had been so long and I couldn’t help myself. 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 began to examine my depressing attire. I hadn’t worn this much black since my so called ‘emo’ 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.

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An eighth grader is oblivious to the fact that in less than a year they will be once again at the wrong end 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. Their 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 with a bit of hesitation.

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 and gathered up her things into her bag. 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.