Forever Us (Chapter Two)

(2) Maybe



Uneven breaths escaped my lungs, threatening to burst the fake sense of security that had overwhelmed me.

I looked at the clock. 12:36 am. Almost two hours after curfew…..

Leah wasn’t yelling, yet. Was she ever going to start? We’d been sitting on the wooden dining room furniture for forever, still silent. It was worse than the noiseless car ride, as she slipped several times when she was driving my suburban over the continuous patches of black ice. Apparently she had gotten a ride to Carter’s house from a woman who she worked with at the hospital. She must not have wanted me to drive home alone.

What, was she worried I would try to make a break for it or something?

I could sense she was watching me, and in the few times I mustered up enough courage to glance at her — which wasn’t very often, to be completely honest — she was staring back at me with the same cold, emotionless expression.

Eventually, she broke the no talking ritual.

“Do you have any idea how worried I was?” she asked blankly.

“Yeah, and I’m really, really sorry, Leah. I didn’t mean for things to go that way…”

“And to find you, sprawling all over him,” she continued as if I hadn’t answered her question. “That was unacceptable.”

Naturally, my teenager instincts kicked in.

“I was not sprawling!” I replied incredulously. “We were watching a movie! A PG movie, Leah!” I threw my hands up in the air, my voice rising to an eardrum shattering yelp. “Rachael turned off the lights so we could actually see the screen. Then the beginning was so slow,” I stressed. “and I was already exhausted from shoveling the snow all morning… and then I got really tired, really fast! Why don’t you trust me when I tell you the truth?” I tried to explain without shouting at her — which of course ultimately failed — and fought back the urge to touch my cheeks to check how warm they were. If I was blushing, she would think I was lying.

But if I wasn’t blushing, would she still have believed me?

“And you just, accidentally fell asleep on top of him?” she asked skeptically.

“I’m honestly not sure how that happened,” I felt my cheeks blush lightly. Crap. So much for staying cool. “But it won’t happen again, I swear.”

“You’re right it won’t. You can consider yourself grounded, Ashlyn.”

“Grounded?! For falling asleep at a friend’s house?” I gave up on the no shouting policy.

“For making me stay up, waiting, worrying for you!”

“I wouldn’t have fallen asleep if you hadn’t worked me so hard this morning,” I countered curtly.

“That’ll teach you to do your chores the first time I tell you to do them.” Her tone matched mine.

We glared at each other for seconds that felt like hours, waiting for one of us to say something that could change the other’s stubborn mind.

I stormed off, out of the now suffocating room I was forced to share with her.

“Where do you think you’re going, young lady?”

“To my room. I’m going to bed. Or do you want to follow me to make sure I don’t go sprawling myself on top of any more boys tonight?” I questioned resentfully. 

“Three weeks.” She ignored my rant.

I sighed, furious. There was no use arguing any more for that night. All it would do was wake Todd up, and I didn’t need another excuse to be grounded for longer than the insane sentence of three unbearable weeks without my best friends.

At least school’s coming soon, though, I thought to myself. I didn’t have to be completely confined to that insufferable house.

I climbed the stairs, making an enormous effort to be sure my steps were as heavy and thunderous as they could’ve possibly been.



*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *



So it was going to be one of those days, was it, I asked myself as I sat in my room, still awake after being home for hours. A day where I was forced to spill my every thought, each emotion, into a blank diary, because there was no one alive that I could share the pain with? No one who could understand?

I flipped gently to a fresh page in my journal, flattening the spine so it lay lifelessly on my mahogany desk. Carefully and swiftly, I licked the tip of my pen, preparing myself for the definite writer’s cramp that was sure to follow.

Softly, only allowing my pen to make the slightest of pressures on my aged diary, I began to engrave the emotions I’d been feeling all day into my personal journal.



December 29th, 2008

Today was hard.



I wrote a set of words to start out my entry for the day, letting my hand sweep from each side of the page in flowing movements. Abruptly, I made a deep line dash its way across those first three words, worrying that, with the intensity of my mark, I had permanently dented my beloved journal. To say my day was ‘hard’ seemed like I was telling a lie. It had been much more excruciating than ‘hard.’ I struggled to find a statement that could even come close to what I was feeling. I settled on awful. That seemed to cover it.



Today was awful.

Well, the end at least.

I never thought that Leah could make me feel so…so…awful! So guilty, so dirty…

Just because I fell asleep at a boy’s house doesn’t make me a bad person. Nothing happened. His sister was right there! It’s not like Rachael would let anything go on. She’s my friend, and even if, by some one in a million chance, something I would’ve liked did happen…



I refused to allow my mind to wander to pointless ‘what if’ scenarios. It was stupid to even remotely consider that Carter, the most exciting, passionate person I’d met up till then, would have had an interest in me. A zombie was more interesting than I was.

Nothing happened, I continually whispered, over and over again.

Nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

Slowly, I regained my steady breathing. The voice in my head was calm then, no longer shouting at me, and I forgot why I was even so anxious in the first place. I stopped my thought mid-sentence, and forced my pen to touch the paper once more.



I told her I was sorry. I made sure she knew that I didn’t want to scare her like that, and I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t be doing. But, still...She made it seem like such a big deal! Why was she so afraid? It’s not like anything was really going to happen that wasn’t supposed to, even if I wanted it to.

She treats me like I’m a little kid. I don’t have any freedom, anything to do! She’s suffocating me. I don’t know if I can survive anymore in this house.

I love Leah, because she’s my mom. But I can’t handle her like this all the time. She’s so wrong about me! Sometimes it feels like she doesn’t know me at all.

I’m not the pretty little girl she thinks I am. I’m not a girl anymore. I’m almost seventeen, for crying out loud! But I can’t say I'm pretty either. Not even mediocre. I'm just…Ashlyn.

And that’s all I’ll ever be.



I unconsciously reached for the tiny, dull picture that was hidden behind the final page—which was reserved for a special entry — of my diary.

It burned my eyes, staring at the woman, about my age at that time, in the image. She was so beautiful, even in a faded picture that was at least sixteen years old. I could see the fire, the intensity in her magnificent green eyes.

The woman, beaming gracefully at the person behind the lens, was my mother.

Was.

That was her, nearly seventeen years before, so alive, so energetic…

Her name rolled off my tongue; I couldn’t resist whispering it to myself. No, not whispering, I stopped before I began the thought. More like singing. Whispering didn’t do it justice.

I allowed it to lull from my lips, to sooth the blazing sensation that still lingered.

“Nicole,” I breathed.

I knew from the start that it was a bad idea to begin this imaginary conversation in my head. It was hardly good for my health to envision myself talking to the mother that didn’t want me when I was just a small infant… nonetheless asking her questions, when I knew better than anyone that she didn’t care enough to give me a straight answer.

But I continued, anyway. I was already in too deep.  Even if I stopped talking right then and there, I would still be crying for hours after anyways.

“Nicole… Mom….” I commenced my pretend conversation. “Where are you? Where have you been for the past seventeen years?” I gawked at how much time had really elapsed since she’d last touched me; put her soft hands into mine. “I wish I knew you better. No,” I shook my head back and forth, “I wish I knew you… period.

“I never really got to meet you…. and that is not my fault. Don’t expect me to beat myself up for not being a good enough kid for you. I was a baby. The blame’s on you.” My tone turned sour. I glared at the gorgeous woman staring back at me in the picture.

“But, no matter how much I hate you now, you’re my mom. It’s wrong for me not to know you. It isn’t fair, Nicole. Do you even realize that? Do you know how many sleepless nights I spend, only thinking about what you’re actually like? The way your laugh really sounds, what it feels like to be warmed by a hug from my real mother?”

My voice cracked wildly on that last word.

Mother. She wasn’t my mother. Leah was. She sacrificed everything to give me a better life. But yet I still called Nicole that. What was wrong with me? Why was I poking holes in the perfect life I could learn to love? I didn’t need her. I didn’t need anyone.

And I didn’t need to cry over her stupidity.

But it was so obvious, then. My hallucinations had gone too far. Just because the picture seemed to pop out at me vividly, just because it felt like she was there listening to me, didn’t mean she actually was… didn’t mean she found me significant enough to bother comforting my tears. It was time to end the living dream, before she talked back. Every word I forced her to say would have been a lie.

“This isn’t fair,” I repeated, hoping that, maybe if my anger was intense enough, warm tears wouldn’t escape from my eyes.  Maybe if I pushed my mind to its limits, my rage towards her that had been bottled up inside me would channel into a single thought bubble, and balmy streams of salty water wouldn’t flow down my cheeks. Maybe if I was fuming as much as I could at her, my sadness would darken into anger.

Or maybe I was just stupid.

My battle against fresh tears didn’t last very long, no matter how hard I tried.

I was weak. Petty. Stupid. Why did I even begin to think that she would want me? I was unexpected, unwanted, and unplanned. There was no reason for her to keep me. She was seventeen, the same age as I was now, and not ready to take care of a kid — to take care of me.

So did she do it as a favor to me? I asked myself bitterly. Did she abandon me so I could have a better life?

I doubted it.

She left me there because I was a useless, pointless girl. My life had no meaning. There was no point.

But then I thought of Leah, how much she loved me, even if we were fighting. And the amount of pain she would be in if I so ruthlessly left her, like my mother had once left me.

There was no other option. I would remain there, unneeded and wasting space, to keep Leah happy.

Maybe if she was fine — even though I was fading away into an unbearable state of nothingness — my life would finally have a point to it. Maybe giving Leah the miracle of a baby daughter was my purpose. Maybe…?

My mind raced in answerless circles, finding loopholes and exceptions to every theory I could come up with.

It took me the longest time to get to sleep that night, and when I finally drifted off onto the supposed-to-be-comforting realm of Cloud Nine, my thoughts were anything but peaceful.