Colin
It had been another night of no sleep. I didn’t have much left in me, and was still struggling to figure out how one adjusts to losing their parents suddenly, especially when being shoved into the face of a former love turned enemy. I should be grateful to Kya and Cristiano for taking me in, I was, but the fact remained that being under the same roof as Tatiana for the rest of the school year was far from the rest and reprieve from my current misfortune that I was hoping for.
I didn’t really have anyone to blame but myself. I didn’t have many friends. Well, I didn’t have many real friends. I had going out friends. Meet up at the movies in a huge group friends. Make stupid jokes on each other’s social media pages friends, but the only person in my life I’d ever trusted fully and allowed into my life was Tatiana, and she’d quickly shown me that was a huge mistake.
Maybe I’d just misread things. I thought that over a year of holding hands, going out on, what I thought were dates, and then finally sharing our first kiss after she gave me a really thoughtful gift meant we were on the road to being together. Her saying being my girlfriend would be ‘gross’ and throwing her half of the locket we’d split at my feet suggested otherwise. I was like a puppy who couldn’t wait to show its owner the stick it found the day I saw I’d made the A-team. People were surrounding me and asking me all sorts of questions and trying to get to know me, and I was just phoning it in until I could get to the one I really wanted to be with; the one I loved.
That joke was on me.
I took both halves of the locket and shoved them and my feelings as far back in my sock drawer as they would go.
Somewhere along the way of the past five years I probably should have accepted that preteens over-dramaticized everything, so the life-ending pain I felt when Tatiana rejected me was nothing more than a boy going through his first heartbreak and I’d have many real loves as I got older, but Tatiana was different. Our love wasn’t just two middle schoolers who randomly decided we had a crush on each other because we thought the other was cute. I’d known Tatiana as long as I’d known my own parents. She was the one constant I’d always had in my life, and I couldn’t think back to a day when I didn’t wake up excited to go and see her. Little six-year-old me only wanted to share my toys with her and eight-year-old me had to be convinced that things were true by her alone. Only Tatiana’s words were true to me regardless. She was a religion to me, the one thing I believed in above all things. Her smile, her laugh, her pout when she lost games, her quick wit and tendency to be over analytical. There wasn’t a thing she did that I didn’t absolutely adore. She was my everything.
And then one day she wasn’t.
All of a sudden, I had to wake up knowing I wasn’t going to see her. I couldn’t share with her and I couldn’t listen to her convince me things were true. Someone could have taken my left lung and caused less damage. I’d built everything on Tatiana, so when that foundation split and left me a pile of rubble, I couldn’t be bothered to build it up again. If I didn’t rebuild it, there was nothing to break.
Slowly, but surely, Tatiana and I grew to hate each other. I never understood where things had gone wrong with us, and any attempt to find out was met with resistance, so eventually I just stopped trying. I went tit for tat with her. Everything she did, I did it twice, at least sparring was still contact. She’d start a rumor, I’d start a worse one. She’d curse me out, I’d blast her on social media. I wanted to be a presence in her life, if even an irritating one. If she never forgot me only because I became someone she loathed, then at least I could sleep knowing I left some impression on her. Not the one I wanted, but such is life.
It took a true twisted and unstable individual to be just as concerned about sleeping across from his former best friend, and the love of his life, than he was about the recent death of his parents. At least I knew what happened with my parents, Tatiana Marquette was just a big ass question mark.
“Colin?” Tatiana’s mom, Kya, knocked on my door from outside. “Are you awake? Are you hungry?”
I climbed out of the bed and walked over to the door, opening it and eliciting a startle out of Kya. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No.” Kya shook her head. “Tati always just yells back at me from the other side of her door, so I guess it caught me off guard.”
“I can hear you!”
Tatiana’s voice amplified from the room across the hall and covered me in goosebumps. She was so close. I was staying in the room that used to be our playroom. The outline of my name was even still marked on the wall from where Tatiana and I had stuck stickers against her mom’s warning not to and got in huge trouble. Her dad eventually designed the playroom around the adhered names. I wondered when they removed them?
Kya smiled and ignored her daughter’s jab. “Cristiano is going to make breakfast burritos I think. Would you like one? Tati never eats before school.”
“I can still hear you!”
“That sounds good, thank you.” I glued on as realistic a smile as I could muster.
She nodded. “Okay. Are you thinking school today, or do you still want to take another day?”
“I want to go today. It’s not really doing me any good to just sit around.” I attempted to feed my fingers through my long, brown hair, but they snagged in several places. I’d neglected my personal hygiene a little too much for my comfort. I probably didn’t have much time before school today, but the evening would have to be one of grooming myself. “Thanks.”
“Okay, well Cristiano usually brings Tati, so I’m sure you can steal a ride.” She grinned. She was trying very hard to make things feel normal. It wasn’t working, but I appreciated the effort. “Just come on down when you’re ready.”
“I will, thanks.”
Kya skittered off down the hallway and I just stood staring at Tatiana’s door. It was dreadful knowing she was just on the other side. What would she do if I just walked in? In the past it would have been welcomed, but it felt like it had invisible bars in front of it now. I returned to ‘my’ room and dressed myself in something that seemed at least marginally normal, tossed my hair into a bun at the top of the back of my neck, and headed downstairs.
Staying in the old playroom was tough enough, but walking through Tatiana’s house was torture. Every piece of peeling paint held memories. I walked down the stairs remembering us sitting there back in the 2nd grade. Tatiana had developed her first crush on a boy in her class and he gave her some of his chips, but then offered some to another girl, and she was devastated. I’d gone out with my dad that night and bought her two big bags of chips and brought them over to her house the next day.
I walked past her living room where we used to hole up for hours building the Taj Mahal of living room forts. It was her birthday, and I was the only one who had the honor of getting invited. We used everything at our disposal: pillows, blankets, chairs, and Tatiana was so intelligent, she designed it a way that made the barred backs of the chairs we used look like windows. She draped sheets over that we could pull shut when we wanted the windows ‘closed’ and she forced her dad to ‘deliver’ all of her birthday presents, which I then had to go and collect, I was the king after all, and the king always gets presents for the queen.