The Junk Drawer

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” scrawled Amy, in the small spiral notebook that she had plastered with magazine clippings on the outside, and filled with her innermost thoughts on the inside. Pondering these comforting, yet somewhat ominous words, lyrics from a familiar Semisonic song, Amy wondered if there was any truth in them. Hours earlier, the one place where she felt truly at home had been closed down, and now, the “Junk Drawer,” a small dingy shop that had once been full of teenagers dressed in thrift-store clothes and hemp necklaces, talking and laughing together, was no more. All that remained was a gloomy black emptiness, and a block-lettered government eviction notice Scotch-taped to the impenetrable locked door, emotionlessly marking the end of an era.
Amy rolled over onto her back, and let her head hang over the edge of the mattress. She stared around at her pristine bedroom, which she kept meticulous because of her mother’s mandate that, if so much as a sock was spotted on the floor, all her belongings would be taken and stashed away in garbage bags. Even upside down, the room still looked perfectly ordered, as if nothing could disturb the excessively regimented aura of the overly organized bedroom. This eerie feeling of seemingly unshakeable perfection bothered Amy. In her mind, nothing would ever replace the comfortably messy shop, and all the good times that she had once shared there with her friends, a gang of other teenagers whom society had written off as “freaks.” It seemed that, no sooner had Amy found a place where she fit in, than it was cruelly snatched away from her. It was like a part of her had died.

The story had begun months earlier, when Amy found herself walking home from her high school in the evening, after a parent meeting about an upcoming school band trip, about which Amy’s parents had complained so bitterly when she first told them about it, that she had just given up and offered to go to the meeting alone. There, she had vainly and self-consciously tried to ignore the stares from her fellow musicians, and her band teacher, whose steely eyes bore into her, silently demanding to know why she had had the audacity to show up without her parents. Well, it’s all over now, Amy thought to herself. And I can’t ask my folks to go to those meetings if they really hate it that much. Maybe if I was first chair, or if I’d won more awards, or something, it’d be a different story, but never mind……
“Hey, nice necklace,” said a deep, masculine voice out of nowhere. Amy looked around, and replied tentatively, “Who, me?” She realized that it was something of a stupid question, as there was nobody else within speaking distance, and turned towards the owner of the voice. “Oh, of course you mean me. I’m so dumb.”
“You’re not dumb. And, by the way, I like your necklace.”
“What, this?” Amy ran her fingers over the sterling silver pentacle around her neck, which she viewed more as an extension of her being than as a fashion accessory. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, you a Wiccan?” asked another voice. Amy looked down. Sitting against the rough cement bricks of the wall in front of a nondescript, forest-green awning was another boy, who, like his friend, looked to be about twenty years of age. His sand-brown hair was shorn into a bristly buzz cut. His eyes were a deep greenish-hazel colour, and appeared as though they held the key to an incredible wealth of knowledge and wisdom, yet retained a unique childlike innocence that Amy herself had been without for so long, she had almost forgotten what it felt like. The other boy, who had first spoken to Amy, had short, messy black hair, dark eyes, and an easygoing smile on his face, which created cheerful, laid-back aura about him. Both boys were dressed in secondhand corduroy pants, and T-shirts emblazoned with obscure band logos. The dark-haired boy was wearing Doc Marten boots that were cut off at the ankle and painted bright green. Torn between curiosity, apprehension, and relief over not having to explain, for what felt like the billionth time, that she wasn’t a Satanist, Amy decided that since these boys appeared to be friendly, the only thing she could do was keep talking to them. “Yeah, I am,” she replied.
“Oh, that’s great! You know, I have a whole bunch of books about witchcraft. You can borrow them if you want. Of course, I just bought them at a secondhand bookstore for a little background reading. I’m a Buddhist. By the way, my name’s Sticklee, and he’s Colin,” exclaimed the dark-haired boy enthusiastically, his eyes alight.
“Oh, hi, Sticklee…..Colin. I’m Amy.”
“Nice to meet you, Amy. Wanna hang with us? Come on, pull up a piece of concrete.”
“Umm…..isn’t the ground dirty?” Amy remembered all the times her mother had reprimanded her, when she had come home filthy, with her jeans torn and her hair askew, after entire days spent playing in the woods behind her house.
“Dirt is nature!!!” exclaimed another voice, this one sounding softer and more feminine, but at the same time full of energy. “Dirt is where everything begins…plants, animals, everything!!! Don’t be afraid of dirt!!!”
“Oh, hi Kelly,” said Colin. Amy turned around, and found herself face to face with a girl, quite as strange-looking as the two boys, with her reddish-brown hair twisted into a long, loose braid that cascaded down her back, almost brushing the hem of her sweatshirt, and her khaki pedal pushers that exposed muscular, unshaved legs that looked almost manlike. However, the thing about Kelly that Amy found most compelling was her intense, piercing blue-grey eyes. There was a fire in these eyes, whose comforting, maternal glow sparkled with a kind of omnipotence, warning onlookers of its ability to grow in intensity, from a beningn, hand-warming flame to a scorching red-orange monster capable of ravaging an entire city within seconds, leaving only blackened ash in its wake. However, Amy had little time to ponder this, because just then, Kelly grasped the trunk of a small maple tree just to the left of the sidewalk, and began trying to climb up into its spindly branches, clutching the trunk between her knees, while using her hands to pull herself upward.
“Hey, don’t climb the tree! You might fall onto the cement!”
For some reason, Amy’s words now sounded preposterous to her. She did a double take. Suddenly this tree, topped with an explosion of emerald-green foliage, growing out of a gap between the dull, brown-grey paving stones in the midst of the bustling cacophony of downtown, appeared as out of place as would a skyscraper in a forest. Amy gazed, transfixed, from this beautiful, intricately original specimen awkwardly decoupaged into the beige-drab, assembly-line world, to its human counterparts. Amazingly, she needed no words to make her feelings understood. The silence of Amy’s revelation was broken only by Sticklee, who gave voice to the group’s common desire.
“You guys wanna go to the park?”

A battle of wills raged in Amy’s mind, daring her to make a choice. The sun was already setting, and, that night being a school night, she knew her parents expected her home. Yet, at the same time, she knew that she had created a kindred bond with these young people that she would likely never encounter anywhere else. Ignoring her nagging wristwatch, she nodded along with the general consensus, and allowed herself to follow her new friends, as they proceeded toward the park. As a child, on the frequent occasions when she had visited this park with her nursery-school class or day camp, Amy had always raced for the equipment, never bothering to notice its immaterial charms. Now, for what seemed like the first time, her senses were bombarded by the unkempt riot of green alongside the gently rushing stream, bursting with a life full of secrets that remained untold to all but the rare few willing to listen. Everything felt as if it had been magnified a thousandfold; the refreshing evening air, the tickle of grass on Amy’s toes, which peeked out of her sandals, the chorus of crickets, and the sense of utter spontanaiety, with golden-yellow dandelions and deep purple violets growing in sporadic clumps, mingled with the long, unmowed grass, which, in some places, was tall enough to just barely touch the leaves that hung down from the ancient, wizened trees.
“You know what I like best about this place?” asked Kelly.
“No, what?”
“It doesn’t belong to anyone…..you can’t buy, or sell, or own nature. It’s like it has a whole personality of its own. Just like us…..”
“Just like us….,” Amy repeated, with a mixture of intrigue and newfound understanding. Oddly, Kelly’s simple words had the power to sever Amy’s guilty feelings of compulsion to her family, like an updraft freeing a kite from the thin, almost invisible line binding it to its owner. All inhibitions forgotten, Amy flopped down on the grass next to her new friends, and allowed herself to become part of the teeming, exuberant beauty of the riverbed.
“Have you ever noticed how obsessed our society is with possessions?” asked Sticklee.
Amy was momentarily silent, never having given it much consideration.
“Yeah, when you think about it, there are no possessions, just energy,” said Kelly. “Our things are only ours until we don’t want them anymore. Then we throw them out, and they go back to the earth from where they came. Then the whole cycle begins again, from the same earth, with the same energy.”
“Wow….so, everything’s always changing, but at the same time, it stays the same…..”
“Yeah, exactly. And people have energy too…..Look at you, with your open mind, and your necklace, spirit, air, water, earth, fire…..”
“So I have good energy?”
“Yeah, of course you do!”
“Wow, thanks Kelly. I’m feeling good energy from you, too. And Sticklee, and Colin….I wish there were more people in the world like you three.”
“There are,” said Colin.
“Really? Where?”
“I think we’ve just found one,” replied Sticklee, his jet-black eyes meeting Amy’s.
A wave of relief, of acceptance, washed over Amy, warming her from the inside out, despite the chill of the gathering dusk.
“He means you, Amy,” said Kelly softly. “Welcome to the Junk Drawer.”
The Junk Drawer…the junk drawer….now, where had Amy heard that term before?

“What’s this, Mommy?,” queried six-year-old Amy one rainy Saturday afternoon, as she hovered around her beleaguered mother in the kitchen, out of sheer boredom.
“It’s the junk drawer. For all the useless crap I have no other place for. Now, for the love of God, stay out of there! I don’t want you making a mess!”
Amy nodded in assent to disguise her curiosity. Cautiously, she waited until her mother left the kitchen. As soon as she heard the sound of her mother’s retreating footsteps fade into silence, she slipped over to the forbidden drawer, its taboo drawing her closer. Amy pulled the drawer open, and stood up on tiptoe so that she could peer over its edge to see its contents. Amy’s chocolate-brown eyes widened at the dazzling treasure trove that lay before her: marbles, barrettes, stray playing cards, Lego figurines, broken crayons, clothes pins, and Matchbox cars, as far as her young eyes could see. In Amy’s mind, the sharpness of her mother’s admonition was somehow dulled, softened by her intrigue at the sight of the limitless possibilities she saw in what her mother callously and unimaginatively labelled “junk.”
Quickly and quietly, she stuffed the front pouch of her hoodie with as many of these mundane wonders as she possibly could, until its seams protested, threatening to burst, and litter the immaculate white tile with these shameful secrets of the personality that her mother had worked so hard to conceal from her. But the threads of Amy’s sweatshirt held fast, as she folded her arms over her stomach to hide the telltale bulge from her mother’s ever-scrutinizing eye, and scurried to her bedroom. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, Amy became captivated by the ever-changing bounty of the junk drawer. She clothes-pinned playing cards to the spokes of her bicycle, and became the leader of her own imaginary biker gang, spent entire afternoons building complicated marble runs out of cardboard tubes, and revelled in the private, chaotically comforting world which she had created.
“Amy, what did I tell you about making a mess?!?!? Don’t you ever listen to me?!?! Are you even listening to me now?!?!? Amy?!?!?!? AMY!!!!!”

“Amy?” Kelly’s voice gently roused Amy from her silent reminiscence.
“Yeah?”
“We have to go now.”
For however long Amy had been with her new friends, part of her had known that this moment would eventually, inevitably, have to come, yet somehow, it had never truly dawned on her that they would have to part, and return to their separate worlds, with no guarantee of ever meeting again. She stood up, brushed the grass from her jeans, and faced Kelly. Sticklee and Colin were already leaving, walking purposefully across the darkening playground, toward a rusted pick-up truck that was plastered with bumper stickers. Seeing them, Amy waved, and shouted a goodbye that wavered, unheard, in the obscurity of the night air.
“Kelly, don’t go! I don’t want to go home, I can’t!! I mean, you guys are so awesome, you’re so different from everyone else I know--What if?!?!….” Amy’s voice trailed off.
“Don’t worry, you can come see us anytime you want. We’re usually at the shop. Here.” Kelly rummaged in her purse, pulled out a scrap of paper, scribbled her phone number on it, and handed it to Amy, who tore off half and returned the favour.
Amy tried to speak, but was somehow unable. Her words got caught in her throat, as it began to tighten.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, you can see us anytime,” repeated Kelly. “Come here, give me a hug.”
Amy tentatively encircled her arms around Kelly, who embraced her like a long-lost soul mate.
“You’ll be fine, I promise…..you’ve got so much love in you, you’re beautiful!”

“You’re such a retard!! I can’t believe I got stuck with such a shitty sister!”
“78% is not good enough, young lady!! Until you get your act together, I’m going to have to call the school and have you suspended from all your activities!! What are you going to do with your life?!? How do you expect to succeed with those grades?!?! And lose some weight while you’re at it!!”
“Hey, lookit the witch!!! Whatcha gonna do?!?! Curse me?!?!”
No, stop!! I do my best!!! What do you want from me?!?!?!, Amy shouted silently, in her mind. The words of her tormentors bruised her, invisibly, indellibly, as she ran, away from the abrasive cacophony of insult and belittlement. Tears welled up in her eyes, and everything around her became an incomprehensible blur. All Amy could see was the green awning, an oasis in a desert of indifference and uncaring. Her throbbing, burning legs carried her closer, closer.....towards her one true home.