He just wanted to sneak that envelope into my pocket and he was done with my crap.
It is what it is, I told myself, desperate to dismiss the whole thing and move on.
Turning the music up, I rolled the window down all the way, the cold air slapping at my still pink cheeks.
My lips sucked into my mouth and I ran my tongue along them.
“No. No,” I muttered, forcing myself to stop immediately. What am I doing?
Trying to see if the taste of him is still on my mouth.
Damn, I’m a sad sack if a kiss that probably occurred simply to annoy Elm, with the dual purpose of distraction, had me so fiercely in its hold.
Blowing out a deep, fuck it, fuck it all, breath, I swapped out my current tunes for my tried and true playlist on random. “Is She Weird” came on, and I felt the tension riding me slowly easing up.
I was wound up so tight I felt like I could pop.
Bobbing my head along to the lyrics, I couldn’t help but automatically think of the Tree guys as I hummed along.
Damn them, all of them. They were everywhere.
Elm had introduced me to the Pixies. Cypress swore we played our music too loud but the second the Pixies came on he was yelling at us to turn it up so he could hear it clean across the house. My lips quirked into a peek of a smile at the thought.
Sometimes Cy would steal Elm’s cord to his boom box and only unearth it after we’d promised to allow him a turn in the rotation, taking turns listening to each other’s newfound favorites. Rock, Metal, the old stuff, new stuff, New Wave,Eighties, Alternative, and everything in between, it all got some airtime.
Cy had a pretty impressive, vast music collection. It helped being on his good side sometimes.
Despite his claims otherwise, that guinea pig haired fiend had a veritable treasure trove of pop and country CDs in the bottom of his closet, hidden beneath everything else. He claimed they were Sunny’s and he was just holding onto them for her but everyone knew better. Did he still have a shoe box full of bubblegum hits in that old work boots shoe box? Had he given up on the genre entirely? Had Elm converted him to the dark side and they jammed out together to epic playlists the way we used to?
Cy could be such a butt sometimes if he felt like Elm was spending too much time hanging out with me. He’d pick fights if he felt I was impeding on brotherly time or whatever it was I shouldn’t be around for. Birch would inevitably jump in, if only to instigate the argument between siblings for shits and gigs. Insults would fly, most of them boy humor stupidity. I’d end up laughing my butt off on the floor of Elm’s room as it all turned into a circus show, until both or one of their parents came barging in to break it all up.
Today’s crazy was so close to the old days. So many memories. It brought me happiness and pain in equal measure.
The Trees had been like a second family to me. It wasn’t just Elm that eased away from me when he pulled back.
Sure, Sunny was cordial and friendly as ever when I popped in, but there were no invites to dinners or hangouts. I wasn’t one of the gang anymore.
I missed it so much sometimes and yet it’s been so damn long I hadn’t thought about it as much as I have been lately. Too much free time and not enough time at the same time can put you in a funny place.
The more I thought about all of this shit, the less any of it made sense. The accident, the sitch with the Trees, the fact this is my life now and what now?
In the grand scheme of things, what does it matter that Elm decided to suddenly stop being my friend a bajillion years ago?
At the very least, I got the last word in with all this shit with the Trees— there was that— tucking that letter into Birch’s pocket.
A sense of victory washed over me, miniscule as it might be.
It was better to think on that than the millions of things gone straight to the crapper.
I was moving. The house was being sold. It was a done deal. There was no way out of this. Even with the money the Trees had tried giving me, it wasn’t enough to save the place. Too late for that.
This was happening.
My parents’ things would need to be gone through. Things I hadn’t touched since the accident. I needed to pick and choose what I should and could keep of theirs, their whole lives reduced to the things they left behind, echoes of a person. It felt so wrong, like I had no right— how dare I.
Stomach churning, I changed my tunes yet again after my song ended, because I could— it was about the only thing I had a lick of control over. Stopping at a light, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. They’d understand, my parents. They knew I wouldn’t take all this lightly.
As “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” began to play, I smiled faintly. Birch didn’t know any of the words to it but he’d rush into the room when it came on the radio in the store and mumble-sing the whole thing in its entirety, head bobbing, braying rendition of his take on it that it was. His attempts neverfailed to make me laugh. Sometimes I used to throw my arm over his shoulder and sing along with him.
