Chapter Two

    I woke up on Sunday, a big day, an important day, the day where we would pick up the hotel room that smells like a mouse died under the bed. I figure it would be best to start such a day early, I got out of bed and twirled back to grab my phone and was awestruck. My mind started screaming “You’re Straight!” but my heart was starting to doubt it. I looked down at Sarah, still sleeping, and noticed how the gentle darkness accented every soft curve and shadow, how much I missed the way her soft breath had warmed my skin. It took all the self control I had to keep from sitting back down and running my fingers through her golden hair again. My phone buzzed.

Dad: Breakfast at The Cracker Barrel?

Me: Sure

    Anything to get me out of this mess, at least for the moment. I rushed to my parent’s room next door, not looking back and tried to replace all of the images in my mind of Sarah’s sweet sleeping smile with David Tennant’s toothy grin.

~☆~

    I got back to the hotel room about an hour and half later, not at all shocked that no one had woken up yet. Except Sarah, she was just gone, I figured she had just gone back to her hotel, which may have been for the best, after all the quickest way to stop water from boiling is to take it off the heat. Now to the task at hand.

“Everybody up!” I swear I have never shouted this loud in my life, Canada and Ivan shot up and France just grumbled and rolled over “Clean up time!”

    They all begrudgingly got up and got changed, started packing and cleaning and making the beds. The room was cleaner, looked less like a hurricane had blown threw, but was still going to take awhile for the staff to finish up so I left them forty dollars for even attempting to clean the room. One by one every nerd left and I was alone on the fedora-shaped couch in the lobby waiting for my parents.

    My brain does this terrible thing to me when I’m alone, it thinks and wanders to the place I have tried to bar off in my mind. For the first time in a long time it didn’t wander to death or oblivion or the pointlessness of existence, it wandered to her. It wander to how pink her cheeks were, how the gentle morning darkness had caressed her face and accentuated each curve and how I desperately missed her touch. I was coaxed out of my daze by my phone buzzing, eight missed texts...well s**t.

Mum: On our way

Mum: Here
 
Mum: We’re outside

Mum: Hurry up

Mum: Dad’s getting angry

Mum: Beep

Mum: Beep

Mum: Beep

    To be clear I wasn’t censoring there, my mum actually sends ‘beep’ to get my attention, something that has yet to work but scares the s**t out of me once I look at them. I bolted out of the hotel before the fourth ‘beep’ could reach my phone and headed home to a traditional sunday dinner with my extended family, an experience that can be easily described as the eighth ring of hell.   

~☆~

    Through the next few weeks Sarah and I communicated solely through texts. She was moving from her Mom’s apartment in Naples to her Dad’s house in South Portland, to be closer to USM, where she was starting an degree in English that August. I had found up to that point she was rather dependent and family-oriented, pretty much the polar opposite of myself, her mother was her security and though she was about to turn eighteen she didn’t want to leave the comfort that security brought. I tried to comfort her as best as I could, telling her she would be just seconds away from Shannyn and Mj and only fifteen minutes from Stephanie and I. I figured growing up in hickville, nowhere, the idea of being just minutes away from entertainment was probably a new one.
    After about two days living with her dad, his girlfriend and her two children, Sarah was a bit on edge and wanted to check how close was “close by”. Her dad dropped her off at Red’s, the ice cream shop at the end of my street that tended to make summer yard work a bit more enjoyable. To my absolute horror a dog jumped out of the truck after her, let’s just get this straight I don’t like dogs, they tend to be big, barky and slobbery or worse small, high-pitched and bitey. Sarah’s dog, Sydney, was an Australian cattle dog and the barky kind, she barked when Sarah left the truck and when she hugged me and when they drove away.
    Sarah looked like she was having a harder day than she was willing to admit so I dug some money out of my pocket and bought her some ice cream, which she was blushy and awkward about me paying for. She managed to only spill some on her chest in the two minute walk from Red’s to my house. My little sister Maeve ran down the stairs and hug Sarah tightly without even being introduced, she like Sarah is the polar opposite of myself. Maeve forced us through five episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but Sarah didn’t seem to mind. She just clung to me like a koala and ate her ice cream, I still completely unaware that she cared.