Hawksweed

“Do you know why this is called Hawkweed?” Dorothy asked me, holding out the orange-yellow flower to the teen with her aged hand, stained from tie dying the other day.

“No, please enlighten me, granny-dearest.” I took the flower, rubbing the furry stem between my fingers.

“The pioneers saw the hawks eat them, and since the humans wouldn’t eat it for its bitter taste, they presumed that the flower helped the hawks get their excellent vision.” For a few moments, we just kept walking in silence towards the woods through the field of wildflowers. Once we passed the opening of the forest, the temperature dropped immensely, the shade provided by the trees protected us from the hot sun. However, the humidity stayed, and with that so did the flies.

All I could smell was the aroma of deet from my shirt. I tried shooing a fly from my face, using the same hand that held the hawkweed, so instead of effectively striking the fly away, I tapped myself on the cheek with the flower and the fly kept on pestering me. Sometimes, I felt that the deet did almost nothing, however I knew through experience that it would be much worse without it.

“So, my love, I want to try that path over there.” Grandma pointed to the dirt trail to the right of the fork of paths that was only a couple yards from the entrance of the woods. We were going to collect moss for a garden project that she wanted to try today, which involved stuffing the plant into a wire chicken.

After filling the blue Easter basket, which Dorothy had lined with a grocery bag, with a variety of mosses and a few Rattlesnake Weeds to add to the front garden, we headed back to the house through a deer path.

“So when are you leaving again?” I asked, not liking how quiet my voice became, but then again, I wasn’t really good at hiding things from Grandma. I didn’t like where this was going to go, Dorothy was excited to go, see new things, collect data for a good cause. But it meant a month and a half of solitude for me, and despite what people think at school, I really didn’t like being alone.

“One week from today, and I’ll be back by Independence day.” Dorothy was going to Alaska, she was an ecologist, and NCAR was sending her to Alaska to take samples and observations on how man-made pollution was affecting the environment up there.

The last year she had taken a sabbatical, staying with me while writing a research article for publication and an academic journal. The woman hoped that it would rise awareness on global pollution, however, I had pointed out many times that this was a topic that people would agree that it was awful, but they wouldn’t do anything about it. But now, since mom was working for some nonprofit charity program in Africa, I would spend her first couple months of summer vacation alone, of course mom didn’t know anything about this. And hopefully she wouldn’t ever know.

Food and travel wouldn’t be a problem, since granny opened a new account in which I could take out money for groceries and whatnot, also I had just gotten my night driver’s license, so a majority of the problems made by Dorothy’s leave were already solved.

“I’ll call you when I can, but you know me and ‘new age technology’.” Dorothy chuckled, “I’m missing you already, kiddo. I’m sure you’re going to be able to take care of yourself.”

“I’m not worried about that, I’m just worried that I’ll lose my sanity from being alone. I won’t be bored, I’ll find something to do, and my boss was going to put in more hours for me at the pool once regents week is over.” I had another job as well as a barista at a chain coffee shop, but they wouldn’t need me to come in until August, when all of the employees in college left.

“I’m sure you’ll do fine, you can have some friends over, just make sure the house and yourself is intact by the time I get home, alright?”

“Alright.” I promised, but I wasn’t going to tell her that the few people who were considered to be my friends, were now bickering among one another and I wasn’t going to get into it, so I hadn’t talked to them in a few weeks. None of them tried to contact me, so I guessed that they really didn’t care if I was alone for a month and a half. Just the thought made me sigh, which made grandma give my hand a squeeze.

“You’ll be alright, Emma-darling, you’re smart. I’m sure you’ll be too busy with work and working on your portfolio to be bored.” I nodded, it was true, but the idea of the house being silent, except when the cat would cry out to be let out, without sounds of people living in it, terrified me for some reason. Then again, I could turn on the radio or the record player whenever I needed noise to keep whatever sanity I had left.

We passed the rickety shed on the way back to the house, with its white, probably lead-based paint chipping off in the corners of the wood, almost making it look like it had stripes. The shed was barely touched; we had kept all of the junk that the previous owners of the acreage left in the tiny building. Dorothy had only recently deposited two bags of soil in there with a coon trap.

Once we had reached to the front porch, moving through the low branches of the evergreens that surrounded the house, the cat, a blue eyed Siamese-torte, greeted us with a ‘mer-ow.’ The rest of the afternoon was rather quiet; I had to study for regents at my desk in my messy room until dark while Dorothy started to pack for the upcoming trip. It was only later when I turned on my laptop.

Soon as I went online to check her email, I immediately felt relieved for switching to wireless internet a month back, remembering how it would take over thirty minutes just to check a few messages where it took it two minutes on the wireless. Somewhere between messages from my father’s family; a grand total of two messages, one from Aunt Lorraine and another from Margaret, my half sister, I turned on some soft jazz on the record player. This one was one of my favorites, where I couldn’t help but sway a little bit with the calming rhythm of the band.

“A cup of chai would just make this even better,” I thought, “but of course it’s too late for that.”

Of course, even if it wasn’t too late in the night for a caffeinated drink, I would have been too lazy to get up to make it. Looking outside the window, with my two glass elephant figurines on the ledge, I saw the neighbor’s chickens run off of our lawn and into their coop through the lilac bushes that was used as a privacy fence of sorts. Since it was just starting to get dark, I guessed it was around eight-ish, and the clock confirmed it with 8:12.

With finishing the email, I had absolutely nothing to do. My pile of finished books were at the doorway, reminding me to return them to the library, all homework and possible studying done, and I had watched all of the movies in the house at least three times, if not more. For this tiny problem, I knew I couldn’t turn to Grandma. She would just say, “How could you be bored? There’s so much to do! Go work on your portfolio or something productive.”

And, in all honesty, I wasn’t capable of doing anything productive; my mind was set on wasting the rest of the night on doing absolutely nothing with any rhyme or reason to it.

This is when I surrendered to the Facebook craze. Almost everyone in my grade had surrendered to its siren call almost a year or so ago, but I had held my ground until now.

Name: (ex. Jane Doe, J. B. Doe, etc.)

I typed in “E. Jane Richardson,” well; at least I’d have some privacy… All right, not really, but not putting my first name gave me some false security. It was the Internet, right? There’s a lot of predators out there.

Age:

I spent about thirty seconds debating whether or not to put in my real age or a few years older, but I kept my real age since I was planning on talking to only people from my school. So I typed in “16.”

School:

“Naples High School”

Birthday:

“6/30” Sure, might as well put in the real date as well…

I spent another five minutes setting up my account, filling in only the necessary boxes such as “email address.” The idea of actually putting in my phone and address seemed ludicrous; it was just an invitation for a stalker. So, obviously, I didn’t fill in those boxes.

Soon as I finished all of this, it asked for a picture. This stumped me, since I had no good pictures of myself. All of my school pictures had been hidden from my mom and grandma since I had hated each and every single one of them. In all honesty, I wasn’t photogenic, at least in my opinion I wasn’t. So I kept it blank, for now at least.

And, voila! I had my brand-spanking-new Facebook account. It sent me to my blank homepage where I typed in “Houston, we have lift-off” as my status.

The rest of the night I spent sending messages to my friends and listening to the big band swing.

“So what do you think, Em?” Dan asked me, drawing me out of my day-dream.

“Hmm?”

“Where you even paying attention?” I answered him by rubbing my eyes, “Here I am, going on for at least two minutes and you’re out in La-La Land!”

“Sorry, didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.” We were walking down the empty hallway towards our study hall.

“Oh, right, you were online all night, weren’t you? I can’t believe that you caved in, you being the ‘we can do more productive things’ girl that you are.” He smiled at me, kind of a mix of a smirk and knowing smile, a grin that he had obviously spent hours of his time perfecting in front of the mirror.

Dan was my “study buddy.” We shared only this study hall together and outside of this one class, if one could call it a class, we acted as if we never knew each other, going to our separate cliques. Or rather he went to his ‘popular group’ and I just hung out by myself. It was just something that I had done since grade school, people thought I was weird because of all of the ‘hippie clothes’ that I wore and the fact that I could carry a conversation on politics by the time I was in the sixth grade.

So I hung back, going with the flow, being unnoticed. It was a ton better than when I had tried to fit in with the other girls in my grade, where they made fun of me for my hand-me-down clothes. I knew that a good amount of the girls were being hypocritical since I had noticed that they were wearing clothes with their sibling’s names written on the tag.

“I was bored,” I groaned.

“Sure, whatever. Hey, did you hear that there’s going to be two exchange students next year?”

“Yeah, I heard that, guys right?”

“I hope they’re hot.” I could tell he was practically drooling at the thought. In the Naples school district, there was a total of four people who were “out of the closet,” two guys and two girls. There were also a bunch of bisexuals, but no one really cared these days except for those few redneck kids who were just listening to their ignorant ma and pa.

However, due to a nasty rumor that went around the year before, people considered me to be part of that bunch. I suppose I really didn’t care, they still thought I came from another planet.

“Whatever.”

Once we got into the study hall with a nasty look from the monitor, since we spent fifteen minutes “going to our lockers.” But it became a habit since the beginning of the beginning of the semester and she never reported us, so we knew she didn’t care. I sat at a desk across from Dan as he pulled out a deck of cards.

Halfway through the period, me beating him in the game for the fourth time, Dan picked up the conversation once more.

“So now that you’re online, you should check out this program, Are You Interested or something. Its cool.” He dealt out the cards once more. “I have it, so you should find it on my profile.”

“What is it?” I picked up my cards, which weren’t too bad, a pair of four and a making of a straight in spades. He picked up from the deck first, putting down a ten.

“Its kind of a dating program, but you never meet the people, usually they’re from across the country or in another.” I picked up from the deck, discarding a three from my hand and keeping the four that I pulled out.

“I don’t know, you know I don’t date.”

He got a card, put down four cards face down, and discarded. “Come on, Em, just try it, you can delete the program if you want to.”

“Fine.” I already knew that he wouldn’t shut up until I agreed. I picked up Jack of spades, only one from winning.

However, Dan beat me to it, picking up the five of hearts that I discarded. “Gin,” he claimed, grinning ear to ear. “That was a quick game. You up for another?”

I gave him my hand to shuffle in, “Always.”