Letters From Cages

I remember the first time I saw Carter Wright. We were both seventeen, I was plainly naïve, he was bold and endearing. I was new in school, my father, a retired widower, decided it would be a good idea to move him and I to Oregon to live with my grandmother on my mother’s side. It was odd for me, not that I had much to leave behind in West Virginia, but the fact that I was moving in with my thoroughly Russian grandmother, whom I had once met when I was three at my mother’s birthday party. I didn’t know what she would be like, I had no idea what her values were. She didn’t speak to me much when I arrived; instead she made soup for us immediately after we were done unpacking, and pulled me into a tight hug before I went to bed that very first night. She was quiet, but she was also very serene.

I had just gotten dropped off by my father two days after moving in, for I didn’t have my own car at the time, and I was walking through my school with my schedule in hand and my bookbag hanging off my shoulder. I looked like a deer lost in the forest, just trying to figure its way through. Each person that bumped into me was a car running over me like I had just hopped out of the forest onto a windy road. I felt lost and confused and I remember experiencing those exact feelings every day until that one Wednesday afternoon, a week and a half into my senior year of high school.

I was in P.E. class, kicking around a soccer ball. It was a cloudy and cold day, and the grass was the deepest, prettiest green I have ever seen. I was kicking the ball around lamely at the side of the field, watching two different student led games going on. My eyes had darted over to a game on the left side of the field, and landed right on a boy with messy short dark brown hair who was grinning like he was having the time of his life. He ran and kicked the ball right from under another student’s foot and with full force, kicked it to another teammate for a goal. I watched him, completely captivated.

“That’s Carter Wright,” a girl’s voice to the right of me said. I turned to look at her and she smiled. She had deep brown eyes, thin-almost black-hair and pale skin. She was Asian, petite and had some sort of elegance to her. “He’s on the soccer team and is probably going to be the token for Valedictorian when we graduate. Quite the catch, isn’t he?”

I looked back at Carter, whose eyes, I could have sworn, darted quickly towards my direction. But at the time I thought it was just my eager imagination, wanting to believe and convince myself that he had.

“Try not to take this the wrong way,” The girl began. “But he doesn’t really go for girls. Not that he’s gay or anything, he is just… too busy. His dad is a successful CEO of some corporation, his mom’s an orthopedic surgeon, and they have high expectations for him. He had a girlfriend once, but literally broke up with her after a month, telling her that having a girlfriend just was putting too much on his plate. This girl was absolutely gorgeous, by the way. The whole junior class, we were juniors at the time, were shocked.” She paused for a second to take a breath. “Oh, I’m Piper, Piper Nguyen.”

I turned to look at the completely random Piper girl and smiled a polite smile, because that was what I was always taught to do in these types of situations.

“I’m Gwenith Hewlett,” I replied and shook her hand.

“Yes, the new girl,” Piper replied and smiled. “Nice to meet you.” She paused. “Oh, and, see that guy over there?” She pointed over to the other soccer game towards a good looking blonde boy, “That’s Adam Powell, and I’d advise you, if you are inclined to swoon at good looking boys, to do that swooning towards him. He seems like a more accessible target.”

I laughed and shook my head.

“I’m not looking for anybody to swoon over. I’m merely just observing,” I replied. “That is all I’m doing.”

Piper sighed and rolled her eyes.

“Whatever you say,” She replied. “I have to be getting back to the wonderful world of soccer now, but you enjoy yourself.” Piper waved and trotted off to a group of girls as I returned to fiddling with the soccer ball below my feet.

I looked back up and saw Carter looking at me and once again I could feel it, in the pit of my stomach, that he wouldn’t just be someone to me, he wouldn’t be just someone I was observing. We’d be each others', it was only a matter of time.

That was the day I had first saw Carter Wright, but the day I met him didn’t go quite as well as I had wanted it to. I had gotten a job, through connections from my grandmother. She had convinced me that in order to get acquainted with the new town, I could work for Freigle’s Grocery, a family owned market that was popular within the town, mainly because they offered to deliver groceries to their customers. I’d be working there every other day after school. I didn’t want to take the job at first, simply because it didn’t seem like something I’d ever necessarily enjoy doing, but my grandmother wanted me to and I honestly wanted her to be happy. And I wanted her to like me.

My grandmother, Lyba, from what I heard, did not get along with my mother very much. My mother was free-spirited, and once she had completed high school, she left my grandmother and went off to Europe where she had met my father, who was just a lone unexpecting tourist. They fell in love, got married, and had me a year later. I don’t think my grandmother ever forgave her.

I didn’t want my grandmother to look at me in the way she probably looked at my mother whenever she had used to come to visit. I wanted her to see me as something different. As myself, I guess.

So, as I walked through the aisles of the grocery store on my first day, shivering in the frozen food section, I tried my best to believe that this was going to be a good experience. I walked to the front where Percy Freigle, the owner of the store, was waiting for me.

“Gertrude said that you needed me up front, sir?” I asked. Percy smiled.

“Ah, yes, Gwenith, you have a license, yes?” He replied. Percy had gray hair that was thin but long and curled at the ends right above the end of his neck. He wore a baseball cap and as I looked down at his hands, I realized that he had, weirdly, only one and a half thumbs.

“Yes I do, I just don’t own a car,” I replied and smoothed down my olive green shirt with my name tag on it.

“Okay great,” Perry replied and handed me a clipboard with a pair of keys balanced on top of it. “We have a company van in front of the store, here are a list of deliveries that need to be made by today, and the groceries are already prepared in their bags for you to send out. Just deliver those and head on back, does that sound good?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied and smiled politely. Percy put his hand on my shoulder.

“You look just like your mother,” He replied. I gave another polite smile before turning and heading out to the front of the store.

An hour later, after successfully delivering groceries to four different houses, I finally pulled up to a rather large house at the end of town. It had two gigantic white pillars with a black gate in between them. I looked above me to see that the white house was completely surrounded by large, abundant trees.

After marveling at the beautiful structure before me, I stepped out of the van, grabbed the groceries from the back of it and pressed a green call button on an intercom in front of the gate. The gate opened slowly and I immediately walked forward, following the path of their paved driveway.

I walked up a few steps to the large door and knocked, the door slowly opened to reveal a small boy, who couldn’t be more than five or six, with dark brown hair and bright blue eyes, standing there with a frown upon his face.

“My older brother and my father are fighting again,” He said quietly. “My mom said to let you in, she said for me to tell you that you can put those in the kitchen.”

“Well, thank you,” I replied and smiled. I stepped inside the house, looked up and realized how it was even more beautiful in the inside than it was on the outside, if that was even possible. I saw the kitchen from straight ahead and began walking towards it but stopped in my tracks when I heard yelling coming from inside of it. I leaned against the wall and looked over my shoulder through the opening to see an older man, in his late 40’s with brown hair that was graying at the sides, standing in front of Carter Wright, the boy I had seen merely yesterday, who was sitting on the countertop.

“I don’t want to get into this with you again, Carter,” The man said angrily. “I told you that you needed to attend your internship every Thursday afternoon but yet I come back here for a quick lunch and here you are just lollygagging around the house like you don’t have a damn care in the world!”

“Dad, that place is ridiculous. I don’t need to intern at a corporate business building when I do not even want to be a businessman to begin with,” Carter replied. He put both of his hands down on the edge of the counter and lifted himself up to hop off of it. He began walking my direction and I quickly moved my head away and put my back up against the wall so he could not see me.

“Son, you know how hard I worked to get you that internship! It doesn’t matter if it’s something you don’t want to do because it will eventually pay off with whatever career you do decide on doing. Maybe if you continue with it, working with that company might be something you’d eventually want to do,” Carter’s father responded. “It could surprise you!”

“I went once, Dad, it did everything but surprise me!” Carter began to yell. I heard him walk towards my direction and I held my breath. “Can’t you just respect that maybe I don’t want to be just like you? Can you possibly ever even consider-”

Carter stopped mid-step and mid-sentence when he had noticed me. He scrunched his eyebrows and I laughed a quiet awkward laugh before reaching up and doing a small wave.

“Um, who are you?” Carter asked. His father walked over to see me, while I was still leaning up against the wall, looking absolutely absurd with grocery bags in my hands.

“I’m, uh, I’m from Freigle’s Grocery, I was just delivering, well, your groceries,” I replied.

“Oh, that’s great, you can just leave those on the counter, dear,” Mr. Wright stated while fixing the cuff of his shirt. “Well, I guess I’ll be going.”

Carter’s father then gave his son a sharp look before walking to the front door, retrieving his coat and leaving. Carter watched his father leave but then turned back to me. I smiled awkwardly again before walking into the kitchen and placing the groceries on the counter.

“So were you eavesdropping?” Carter asked while following me in.

“Oh, no, not at all!” I replied nervously. “I’m just delivering the groceries.”

Carter stepped closer to me, making me feel even more nervous. This was not the way I imagined first meeting him. I imagined him walking past me at school, seeing me and instantly knowing that we belonged together. He’d ask me out on a date, take me to a drive-in, and we’d get married on the beaches of California at sunset. I didn’t think he’d first see me as the girl who hid behind a wall and listened in on his arguments.

“You could have just walked in during the conversation, you know,” Carter stated. “It would have saved me a lot of misery.”

Carter walked forward towards me and then turned to reach into one of the bags. I awkwardly stepped to the side while he reached in and grabbed an apple and took a bite out of it.

“I go to your school,” I said quickly. Carter just nodded his head while taking another bite out of his apple. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a $10 bill and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” He remarked and walked out of the kitchen as I stood, feeling completely and utterly dumbfounded.