Entry 2 -

It’s hard to even list the events that happened. I can’t help but distract myself with metaphors and descriptions but without being even a little frank; I may never have the courage to write the truth of what June became to be. Luckily, I won’t have to write the horrid details. It is my job alone to set the scene of where we live, what we do and who we are, so it becomes apparent what a singular girl can do to the delicate balance of our society. I’ve tried to live in the dreams June and I dreamt for ourselves for five months, but it still isn’t real. We constructed a web of lives and lies, a thousand parallel universes were we were superheroes and lawyers and Oscar-winning stars. June insisted she wouldn’t be an actress, and would prefer to be a director so she wouldn’t have to deal with how much or less she weighed and little mole on her right cheek she always hid when she was nervous by cupping her hand with her cheek. Rose said I should call my segment Sunny days, and that is what is coming, but even if we didn’t notice there have always been her blotchy shadows in the sunlight. After the incidents we noticed that it was almost as if when she stood in the sun, the light seemed to bend around her.

As I look back at every date we ever went on, or joke she laughed at or film she teared up at the ending for, it’s hidden by a mist of purple dark smoke that sparkles and hides my vision. Those memories of love and loss are no longer clear, but instead are defiled by what other people know and see. My plan, if any, by helping contribute to the truth of June Bloomer is simple. I want to thin out the mist and somehow let her become a free and funny girl even just in my mind. Each day I wake to find a heavier head. The mist only thickens.

The third of April began two months advanced in heat but every townsperson was prepared for any weather. In their convertibles tucked in back pockets there were umbrellas, sun cream and window scrapers. There was a groan settling with the bright sun by all of us who would be forced to spend the days locked up in side with a feeble air conditioner and tantalising views of fresh grass and warmth through glass. I had showered and dressed, and swallowed the excessive vitamins my mom insisted on dry before gurgling toothpaste and running out the door just in time for the smelly bus parked and waiting outside my house. By then I had already learnt to drive but I had to admit even taking the bus was probably ‘cooler’ than my mom’s pastel pink mini, adorably unusable for me in the case of almost any emergency.

The bus driver wrapped his hairy knuckles on the window beside him impatiently, rushing me forward into a near sprint as my bag bumped at my side and I could see amused cool faces of students already boarded. I ducked a headphone into my ear as the doors opened and headed for a seat exactly half-way down the bus. It was the happy medium; the ‘dorks’ sat at the front with tucked in shirts and nervous faces while those on the top of the popularity hierarchy, laughing about topics I probably didn’t get, held their territory at the back. I had never got the appeal of having to walk the longest runway there and back, but who was I to second guess anything the superiors stood by?

It feels important that people know how normal the third of April kick-started in a dull, repeated routine. It was in the middle of all that high school blend of reality that the single most important beginning sparked in my life minus possibly the trigger of my life in the first place. I shrugged my way into my seat, relaxing my spine into the tired fabric and glancing through smudged vision into my street. The house I lived in was one in a carbon-copy of twenty others, with another nine beside it and ten facing. Our neighbours were anything but the same; there were quiet people and loud people, happy people and sad people. From the outside, it was hard to tell each house apart except one would have a broken slate or extra flowerpot on their doorstep. Each had a patch of frail grass right outside it and a garden only big enough to play in for a toddler’s imagination.

Two houses down, on a slab of pavement, stood a pair of feet that had never crossed it before. Two houses down, I was exposed to a ray of white light I would soon call June. Her hair was pinned in light braids on either side of her face, emphasising her high cheek bones and her whole slim body moved lightly as though she was being gently swayed by the beat of a fast and dangerously addictive song.

I looked around when I finally managed to drag my eyes away from her to see if anyone else had noticed. My palms began to sweat and my pupils dilated and everything became surreal. She was just a girl, true, but I was just a boy and much more carried away when impossible girls wondered into towns that didn’t see new faces for years on end. How she wasn’t possible, I hadn’t decided yet. The world continued to turn as though she fictional, the popular kids called out names and the target recoiled at the promise of returning home in a matter of hours. I glanced again to remind myself of a feminine miracle, but in the instant I’d taken breath she’d disappeared until I was certain she had really just been fragments of a desperate imagination.

If only that were true. If only I could have had that memory, with nothing more or less. A momentary girl that wasn’t actually tangible or lasting. In the long run, both I and Johnston’s creek might have been thankful. Unfortunately, by the time I stumbled off the bus half an hour later; jammed full of 8tracks playlists dedicated to instant love; there was a golden blur standing at the door, tapping her fingers on the base of a doodled folder and smiling with a dash of worry. So innocent, so new. She was like the snowfall that had fallen on the creek and everyone seemed to attempt to go through her if not run circles to avoid her. After they had passed through the doors there was a burst of new conversation, as though their gossip and curiosity was suddenly sound proofed.

They probably had an intuition built in their systems their parents and grandparents of this town had carved into themselves through suspicions and doubts that had kept them safe.   

The crime level of Mossfield hardly made a mark on graphs despite the measurements. It was almost as though we lived in a snow globe aside from the rest of the world, only stirred and shaken by the geographic and not by people. Did June know in the moment, I wonder to myself still, of what she’d walked into and how it would enclose her? Had she took a chance and wandered into a place so eerie in its tranquillity with the purpose of shaking it up? There were infinite answers that all seemed to create more questions. Maybe I could have saved myself the trouble of her, but that would give an assumption I actually knew what I was doing. Besides, even if I did know, I couldn’t very well count on my teachers to save me from upcoming danger. If anything; they should take some blame for how hard and fast and purposely I fell for her. But I’ll get to that later.