It's A Shame I'm A Dream

Throughout the day the manila folder felt like a block of lead weighing down his normally half-empty backpack. Aiden didn’t get a chance to go right home after school, either – he had to pick up his brother and run some errands for his mom.

By the time he turned his car onto his street, the blue-grey sky was splotched with orange. In the passenger seat, Brad was chatting away frantically about some girl he needed advice on, even though Aiden was still worrying about his decision to take the letters.

“She’s totally hot, but never gives me the time of day. Whenever I see her, she waves at me and everything, but never stops to actually talk.” Brad tossed his blond head. Everyone said they looked a lot alike, except Brad was “cuter,” with a dark tone of blond and hazel eyes, while Aiden had inherited the regular brown.

“Yeah,” said Aiden absently. “Do you even go up and talk to her, or just wait around for her to talk to you?”

“She doesn’t talk to me,” Brad repeated.

Aiden, his mind still on Taylor’s letters, suddenly recalled something that she’d told him once. “Go up and talk to her. Chicks don’t go up to guys look like they’re having a good time with their friends because they don’t really know what to say and don’t want to embarrass themselves.” Reciting Taylor’s advice made him feel odd for a moment – a suspension in time, when he expected to wake up tomorrow and she’d still be alive.

Brad stared. “But that’s just…weird.”

“Trust me,” said Aiden firmly. He parked the car in the driveway and Brad drifted inside, still in a perplexed state. It seemed that Aiden’s words had defined all the laws of middle school. Aiden snorted to himself for thinking about the stupidity of kids in middle school, himself included, and followed Brad inside.

The delicious smell of enchiladas wafted from the kitchen to the front door instantly. Right on cue, Aiden’s stomach growled pitifully. His mother must’ve gotten off work early today.
In the kitchen, Brad was already sneaking strings of cheese from the glass pan cooling on the stove. Aiden dropped his backpack carefully at the foot of the stairs and shoved Brad out of the way, plucking a visible cube of chicken out of the hot mess. It warmed his fingers and he pitched it in his mouth as his mother turned around.

Mrs. Walker was a petite woman with auburn hair and brilliant green eyes. Presently she was finishing washing her hands in the sink and reaching towards the dish towel.

“Aiden, get your hands out of that,” she said swiftly, wiping the already spotless countertop. “We’re eating that for dinner, and, quite frankly, I don’t know where your hands have been.”

Brad snickered and Aiden glared at him disdainfully. “They’re clean,” he replied indignantly.

“Get ready for dinner, I’ll have it out on the table any moment now.”

Brad disappeared into the hallway as Aiden took his backpack upstairs.

His room was decent – not clean, but not filthy, with a desk, a bookcase, and a bed. His black DLT was propped up on its stand under the window, alone with no amps.

He contemplated where to leave his backpack. His mother frequently cleaned his room, but for some reason never touched his things. It sounded weird when explained, but he’d walk in and the place would be vacuumed and smelling fresh. But his clothes would still be on the floor, albeit moved, and his desk would still be piled high with papers and books.

“Dinner!” Mrs. Walker called up the stairs, and Aiden placed the pack on his unmade covers before jumping down the flight two at a time.

They gathered at the dining table, where three plates were already set with utensils and a roll of enchilada in each.

For a while there was only a clattering of forks against the plates until Brad launched into some story about how he single-handedly won the dodgeball match in PE. Aiden was torn between wolfing down his dinner quickly to crack open the letters, or eating as slow as possible so he wouldn’t have to.

“Aiden,” said Mrs. Walker, interrupting both Brad’s tale and Aiden’s train of thought with one word. “I heard at the supermarket today that Taylor Weiss – died?” His mother, usually so cool and controlled, tightened her hand on her fork and pursed her lips.

“Yeah,” said Aiden quietly, “yesterday. They said at school it was suicide.” The word had a hard time moving past his lips.

It was deathly silent in the house. Brad had shut up and was sporting a dumbstruck expression.
“She’s – dead?” he repeated. Aiden nodded without looking up.

There was a sharp intake of breath that was most presumably his mother. “Poor child,” she whispered, almost to herself. “The family must feel horrible.”

Dinner was finished and cleaned up in record time and wordlessly. Mrs. Walker retired to the living room to watch TV and Brad hauled the downstairs landline into the garage, since he’d gotten his cell phone taken away.

Aiden took a long, hot shower. The running water washed away the clench in his muscles he didn’t realize he’d had. The night air in the house was chilly against his damp hair and skin as he shut the door to his room.

There it was, still in the backpack on the bed, waiting for him. He sat down on the sheets, slid it out, and kicked his backpack to the floor, opening the cover of the manila folder to the first page.

Taylor had had a neat scrawl, if that made any sense. Her handwriting wasn’t precise, all-caps, or bubbly. They were somewhere halfway between cursive and print, with tails on her t’s and no follow-throughs on her g’s and y’s. They hung like hooks waiting for the unsuspecting fish – which Aiden tried very hard not to imagine as himself.

The entry was dated and a line skipped. She’d filled only about half the sheet of binder paper and didn’t double-space or indent her paragraphs. However, at the end, she’d skipped another line and signed it, Love, Me.

He was about to start reading before he stopped himself. The questions that had been dammed at bay all day surged forward.

Why had Taylor chosen him, Aiden, specifically him, to leave the notes? She could have given them to anyone, possibly even someone closer to her than he was, or even trashed them. He was a junior who barely knew her. Christ, when his father had divorced his mother and drove off, Aiden hadn’t gotten a look back or a word ever since. He flipped through the pages, not reading. Somewhere in here, he knew, he would come across secrets. Things she’d never say, stories she’d never tell. The question was when he’d hit one and how he would take it.

But how many problems could an illuminated freshman girl have? He knew that she knew that by giving the letters to Aiden, she was carving herself open for his inspection and reactions. So, that rewound him back to his first and most insistent issue – why him and not somebody else?

Aiden sighed. There was a crystal-clear solution to that, one he was purposely going circles around. He lifted the first page to his gaze. The date was New Year’s.

When he was done, he clicked off the light and stared into the darkness, for how long he didn’t know.

01/01

Today is New Year’s Day and I actually want to make some resolutions I’ll keep. I know I’ve said to myself before tons of stuff or else, but this is a special year, or at least it feels that way. Maybe it’s because it’s two in the morning and I’m still reeling from Jenna’s party two hours ago.
My resolutions this year:
• to finish middle school with an A or B average
• to leave the moment they start fighting again
• to quit taking the shit I do
Next year’s hopefully going to be better, school year, I mean. None of that crowd’s going to be at Mountain View and I won’t fall in again. If only Dad would stop making it so hard for me to stop myself.
Happy New Year’s to all. x

Love, Me