Waiting

Jamie Lin

All was silent here except for very low music playing in the apartment across the hallway from me. Spanish music. For once that day, I felt very calm. The coffee and the sugar had worn itself out. Also, I was wearing my Hello Kitty pajama pants. My mom got it for me three years ago when we were spending a lot of mother and daughter time together. I didn't want to disappoint her by saying I had moved on to Fallout Boy and Playboy Bunnies. She still didn't know.

Turning to look at my dog lying there on the ugly blue rug by the bookshelf, memories of a poster I made for science back in seventh grade entered my mind. The science teacher was a man and didn't feel comfortable breaking the news to me. The nurse had to do it. I remembered being called to her office over the speakers in the middle of my math class where I sat on an uncomfortable metal desk learning about Cosine and whatnot. I thought something was terribly wrong.

My mom had just gotten chemotherapy that year. When I left her at dawn, her eyes were closed and her face glowed with a tint of purple, especially near the cheekbones. I used to like to sleep on my parents' bed whenever they weren't home. They assured me they were still together. It had been a year since I saw them look at each other and not at me, the floor or the ceiling.

"Spider web," dad said as he reached for his Red Sox fan mug of green tea, chin lifted upward.

"Acne," mom said, eyebrows in a frown, one eye pointing at me. "Proactive." But that was before she found the lump. After that, they became partners again.

The nurse gestured for me to sit down on the chair that squeaked like a mouse trapped under a paw. She began, "The poster that you made for Mr. Wikison..."

I had leaned forward, not quite understanding where she wanted to head with that. "Well." She bit a fingernail. "You cut animals from a magazine."

"Yes."

"Do you remember which ones?"

"No."

"Well, the animals, they are all, well, mating each...other, you understand what I am saying?" She switched to a different fingernail.

A fifth grader looked up and his lips wobbled. "Oh," I had said.

Later, I fold the poster in half and dropped it into a black trash bag. "Otherwise," Mr. Wikison said as I was walking out of the classroom, "I'd put it up. It was so beautifully done. Very good gluing."

I smiled at him and walked home with my head ducked. I thought about the different positions they were in. For the horses, I thought it was a mother feeding her newborn against an impressive backdrop of the sun's orange glow above the range of crystal-colored mountains. And I thought the lions were just snuggling up for warmth since the moon looked very, very cold. I admit I was a bit suspicious about the stack of turtles on a moss-covered log in murky water.

I had been thinking about that experience a lot lately. Last week, I told my therapist about it once we went out of things to say. The air felt so awkward that the skin around the corners of my mouth itched to break the frost. She crept me out with her stares. She often stubbornly refused to start conversations, would rather wait for me to grasp at flying straw wrappers, witness me struggling even though she knew about my lack of social skills.

"I think I want to be on anti-depressants," I said after she nodded at my poster story.

"Oh?" She didn't sound surprised or even interested.

"But I am worried about one thing."

"Oh?" She pushed her glasses higher on her nose, pressing it into her skin, leaving marks. I wondered if she was bored. Her eyes were so small that I needed to blink twice to make sure they were open.

"It might take the edginess from my short stories. You know? And writing's more important to me than..."

"Your mental health?"

"Well..." I said, looking from her thighs to the polka-dotted painting above her Macintosh. My finger ached then too. I wiggled it back and forth. "I have a PC at home."

"Why did you feel that you needed to change the topic, Merrie?"

"Though PCs are much more susceptible to viruses."

"And since you're rather a sex addict, you are more susceptible than most…?"

Maybe she didn't actually say that. Maybe I dreamt it. Either way, it was emotional for me. The only real trauma that I openly went through was with a boy when I was sixteen. He said to me once, "You look but you don't see."

I said, "What do you mean? What is that suppose to mean?" I really didn't know what he meant. I liked him a lot. Our conversations never went anywhere though. At the end of the night, we'd kiss and he'd drive home with 90s rock music vibrating the windows, waving at me as he rounded the sharp corner out of my yard before disappearing.
 
When we were together, I never felt anything but an animal-like giddiness. He loved to fish so we often spend hours down by the river. He'd stand with one foot on a boulder and look out into the silver horizon with the fishing rod in one hand and a can of beer in the other. I'd be behind him, squatting on the bank looking for special rocks and shells. Two weeks after we first met, he pointed his rod at me and said, "I love you." I saw our future in the brown irises of his eyes.
 
Two months later, he was gone. I dialed his numbers until my fingers grew blisters and shed dead skin. I didn't go to school the following day as I couldn't let myself cry in public. That had always seemed disgraceful to me. I walked around in the woods answering my own questions and questioning my own answers. My best friend told me he ran off to roam around the east coast with a tall blonde from Starbucks who looked like a pixie. She had a loud, free laugh and dancing shoulders.
 
I was mostly angry with him that he didn't warn me before running off. He usually warned me of things. He knew me enough to know that if the keys were not next to the shoe rack, I'd forget it and if the car door wasn't locked when I tried to get in, I'd forget to put on my seatbelt afterwards. He knew me.
 
I had walked upstairs that night to snuggle into my parents' queen-sized bed feeling nausea. They were at a charity dinner. I lay with one hand on my stomach, wondering if something was wiggling inside. I sworn I felt it. Or was it just a fragment of my imagination. It made me feel less depressed thinking about tiny, bright pupils, hair soft as wind and a mouth one could kiss forever and feel a bond like no other.

Now, someone was knocking on my door. I heard music outside my windows. I uncrossed my legs and walked toward the sound. I felt very self-conscious. I hadn't taken a shower since three days ago when my boss fired me for being twenty two minutes late every day for the month of February. She didn't care that my mom's breasts were sick again or that winter made me sadder than usual.

My dad died on the way home from work when I was sixteen and a half. He hit a jeep with two college sophomores. There were three separate funerals and I was dragged to all three. All I remembered were the below zero degree temperature and the brown snow next to the highway.

My friend from across the hallway was leaning against the staircase. His eyes were dazed, the pupils dancing slow motion in thick fog. He smelled strongly of something.

"Pot head," I teased.

"Can I come in?" he asked, his hands already on my hipbones.

We fell onto the cold rug, his teeth on a nipple, his heat sealing me within it's cocoon. His hair smelled like oranges. I pressed my nose into it, inhaling deep like it was a hallucinogen. His growl sent my dog running toward the dim kitchen where the cat lay in the moonlight. The cat who hated me but loved him enough to look into his eyes and purr now and then. I liked to think they were star-crossed lovers. And as long as they were under the same roof with the ability to share water with each other, they were happy. I liked to believe so. It was too depressing otherwise.

Outside, it started raining.


© Jamie Lin 2007

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Jamie Lin is currently working on a collection of shorts and the query letter is driving her insane. She has been published at Laura Hird, Verbsap, Chick Flicks and some others.