Wall Flower

Screaming shouting verbally abusing,

words dripping with acid and hate

foamed at her mouth as she snarled

and writhed in the pool of her fury

He tried to coax her out of the fury

but she gnashed her teeth, possessed

by something too powerful for her

judgement to fight against and win

Stop, child, said He, this will get

you nowhere. He dared to reach

His pure hand out to her, though

it was wasted, for she spat at his feet

“Where were you when I needed

you?” she growled, pulling herself

up onto her hands and knees. “You

have abandoned me!” she cried.

He did not answer right away; He

said not a word, just looked into

her rage filled eyes, hoping she

would see the pain He felt for her

I did not leave you, He finally

said. I waited for you with open

arms, ready to heal you, but

you must let me, for I won’t force you.

“You – you waited for – me?” she

asked him. “All I had to do

was come to you and ask for help?”

Her writhing stopped and she –

A knock woke me up, and I checked the time on my iPod. It read seven o’clock on the dot. My friends left me alone not even an hour ago.
I was writing for a while and did not realize when I had fallen asleep. The last line I had written on my poem was, “Her writhing stopped and she . . .”

There was another knock and I closed my diary, tucked it under my bed, and got up. When I opened the door I was immediately shouted at by a certain boy that I spent almost every waking hour with. “Nick disappeared! I fell asleep just as he got back to our dorm and when I woke up he was gone and I looked everywhere in our dorm and in both cafés and in the men’s restroom in our lobby and -”

“Joseph, thou shalt not use anymore run-on sentences,” I interrupted, and he stood there gaping at me. Somewhere in the middle of his panic attack he threw his arms up. When I interrupted they did not move, so I grabbed them and put them down to his sides.
He waited for me to finish, so I explained the situation: “Nick and Cass went on a non-date about an hour ago, therefore thou shall calm down. He’s fine – probably having the time of his life with my best friend.”

“Oh, so I’m a loner.”

“Welcome to the club,” I muttered and leaned against the door frame.

“Wanna be loners together?” he asked hopefully. He shouted, “Woo!” when I moved aside and let him in. I closed the door and turned around to face him and found him not even an inch away from me. I bumped into him, screamed weakly, and leaned against the door with wide eyes.

“Wait, I should go get games and movies and food, huh?” he asked.

“Now you’re using too many ‘and’s,” I mumbled. I took a deep breath and nodded my head. I opened the door for him and he saluted me before he left.

While he was gone I grabbed chess, Last Word, and Jenga from the box in our closet. I had just finished setting up the play station set I brought with me to the tiny T.V. Cass and I bought before I began changing from my jeans and T-shirt to my pajamas. There was a knock at the door and before I could say, “Hold on” the door opened and I saw Joe’s silhouette.

“I’m changing Joseph Adam Jonas!” I shouted as I covered my bare torso (except for a bra) with my pajama shirt. “Get out, get out, get out!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said as he covered his face with the games and bags of food he carried in his arms. He closed the door again and kept repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

I quickly put on my shirt, making sure I had every part of my body covered with clothes, and went to open the door, cheeks aflame and not only covered in freckles but scarlet red.

“I’m sorry!” Joe shouted at me once I opened the door. “I didn’t see anything, I promise! I wouldn’t have looked anyway.”

“Just get inside, little snake child,” I muttered, moving aside to let him in, grabbing some items for him as he entered; I grabbed movies and a game: Juno, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Fireproof for the movies, and the game was Apples to Apples To Go.

“We are watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs whether you like it or not,” I said. “So ha.”

“Demanding, are we?” he chuckled as he set down another game and some food. “I didn’t know you liked -”

“Love!” I shouted.

“Loved that movie,” he continued. “I do too! And have you ever played Apples to Apples?” I nodded. “Sweet! What games do you have?”

“There, on my bed,” I said, putting my favorite movie on my desk next to the bags of food before looking inside them. The first bag had fruit snacks and 100-calorie packs of Chex Mix while the other had two bruised bananas and an orange.

“I figured you’d want fruit more than the other stuff,” he said when he stood next to me as I examined a banana.

“I’m actually not hungry,” I lied.

“Big dinner?” he asked. I shook my head. “Any dinner?”

He didn’t have to know me for years like Cassandra did to know me so well. I ignored his question and grabbed the apples game he mentioned and held it up. “You know, this game doesn’t work with two people. Did you think of that before you brought it over, Joe?”

“Loraine,” he warned, and he grabbed the game from me. “Stop avoiding the question. And, by the way, no, I didn’t. I do that sometimes.”

“Then I suppose it’s either Jenga, Last Word or -”

“Eat,” he said, shoving the orange in my hand. “Eat and play Jenga with me, okay?”

I had not told him how I sometimes skip meals because I feel if I eat more, I will gain a lot more, and I won’t just get the curves I want, I’ll get them in the wrong places. My body was not meant for the curves my sister has, and when I eat I just gain weight in awful places. I was not anorexic necessarily, but I was wary about eating and had other reasons, experiences from the past. He must have figured it out just from the amount of time he spends with me.

I silently took the orange from him and peeled it near our bucket/trashcan and let him grab the game he wanted.

He held up Jenga, silently asking if it was okay, though he mentioned he wanted to play it already. “Good choice,” I said, and he sat on the ground in front of the little T.V. and smiled at me. He jerked his chin at my peeled orange and I rolled my eyes. “I know, I know, shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” he said, and I could hear the slight sarcasm.

“I could hear your thoughts,” I replied as I sat beside him.

He poured the wooden rectangles onto the boring tan carpet of my and Cassandra’s dorm room. The wooden rectangles clanked noisily against one another as they fell from the box and landed randomly on the floor. Joe began stacking them as he gave me a look and said, “I really hope you don’t have mind reading powers, ‘cause you’re the kind of person who would, and that’s scary. My mind’s a private thing.”

“As is mine, which you seem to get into anyway,” I said, and I showed him my orange before tearing a wedge off and putting it into my mouth. The skin broke beneath my teeth and the sour juice spilled onto my tongue. “Plus, my power would so be the power to control all biological matter.”

“Sweet power,” he commented, halfway done stacking the already wobbly tower.

“It’s more than sweet, it’s amazing! Think of it: I can just go around and say, You’re gonna grow an extra toe, your heart’s gonna stop, and your ear is going to grow larger – and it’ll happen!”

“’Your heart’s gonna stop’?” he repeated. “And I thought you were nice.”

“It’s an example,” I muttered. “I could grow wings, fly around, and when I’m done, I could ungrow them!”

“You’ve thought this through, haven’t you?” he asked with a smile. I nodded. “Weird. Anyway – tower’s done, and since I built it, you go first.”

It didn’t take long before the tower went tumbling down to the ground. Naturally, it was Joe’s fault and not my own. He was trying to break my concentration as I slowly pulled out a precariously placed block in a peculiar spot: two above there was a missing block, and one below was another missing block, but on the opposite side of the first. The oddly removed ones were from Joe who, I suspected, was purposefully choosing the ones he felt would send the tower to the ground. The smarter moves were obviously from the smarter person: Myself, and as I tried to move that particular block was when he kept on saying, “Oh, Loraine, it’s gonna fall, it’s gonna fall! Don’t do it, don’t do it! Oh!”

“Shut up Joseph!” I shouted, and he laughed the most evil laugh I’ve heard come out of that cheerful mouth of his before he began poking my shoulder. When I glared daggers at him, imagining them hurling through his chest, and said, “Thou art making it impossible to exude love upon thee,” is when he started laughing hysterically and clutching his sides. He fell over on me, knocked me over, and made me knock the tower over.

“It’s time for a movie,” I muttered through my teeth, though he ignored me and began setting up the blocks into a tower once again.

We played Jenga another time, with almost the same scenario, and played one game of Last Word. He won, and he was especially happy about that. He figured since I have a better vocabulary than I would have won, but it wasn’t a game of vocabulary, it was a game of . . . knowing what things and people begin with any given letter. He explained that “his brain no work well” and I gave him a patronizing pat on the head.

“Are you patronizing me, little dragon?” he asked with a smile on his face.

I turned around to glare at him when I pressed the open button on my play station. “Aren’t you patronizing me?” I asked, and turned around when he winked at me, ignoring the unneeded pounding of my heart as I put the DVD in the game consul.
Before the movie started he changed into his pajamas (he hid between Cassandra’s and my bed to do so) to get comfortable. He lied down on his back in between the little T.V. and me as I sat against the wall with my knees pulled to my chest and arms wrapped around them.

Joe was such a good friend to me. I hadn’t known that the moment I saw him we would be here in my dorm room, going to the same college, having almost all of the same classes, spending every day together laughing and talking about God, and enjoying each other’s company. He was a good friend, but unfortunately I had found him distractingly attractive when we first met and I still found him too attractive for his own good.

I wanted it to stop for the sake of our friendship.

I didn’t want to feel this way about him, for I knew that eventually it would haunt me the way it did when I first saw him walk into the reception hall at my sister’s wedding about a month ago.

As if sensing my distress and my decisions, he turned his head at me at one of my favorite parts of the movie (the jell-o house) with furrowed brows and curiosity in his soft brown eyes. “You okay?” he whispered.

“Sure,” I whispered, and I averted my eyes to the television screen, hoping he would not see that I was giving up my romantic feelings for him in my eyes, trying to kill it before it became too much to bare. I hoped he would not see that I was feeling anything like that towards him, only care and love – love for a dear friend and not for . . . anything else.

Eventually he sat up and sat beside me, laughing with me and quoting our favorite parts. When the movie ended, we were bushed, and we put in another movie: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He had rested his head against my shoulder and I tensed slightly, though he did not move. We talked about the things we usually discussed in bible classes, like Romans 8 and what we would say to Paul if he were here with us.

“I still can’t . . . wrap my head around the fact that we don’t have to feel guilt or shame,” he said quietly, sleep heavy in his words. “We’re supposed to have peace with God.” I nodded, and he fell silent for a long while.

Finally he said, “Am I the only one who sometimes . . . most of the time . . . does not feel at peace with God? Like no matter what I do he’s angry at me for what I . . . have done?”

“No,” I whispered. I reminisced on one of the most painful times of my life, back in junior high, when I changed forever. “No, I do too. Not as much as I did before.”

“Before?”

I ignored his question. “We have to remember that God is never angry with us for what we’ve done. He’s the God of -”

“Second chances,” we said together. He chuckled once, and I continued. “He lets us do what we do because of free will, but we are meant to suffer. Nowhere does it say we will live happy, rainbow-filled, riding-unicorns-every-day lives.” He chuckled again. “But when we do suffer and when we do feel pain, God’s waiting for us to come to him; he’s waiting with open arms for us to let the healing begin. For us to say, ‘Are we cool?’”

“What if you’ve tried and the past keeps haunting you?” he whispered. “What if it . . . calls every day, reminding you of what you did?” He was referring to the phone calls; I did not need to think twice about that. “Are we supposed to forgive ourselves before we let God forgive?”

I could feel his breath hitting my hands that rested against my knees. It was a heavy breath, and I could tell he was drifting, as was I.

“He’s already forgiven,” I replied softly before yawning. “He loves us and only wants what’s . . . best for . . . us.” My eyes slowly closed. “He gives us new grace . . . each day.”

“Each day,” Joe breathed, and my eyes closed just as Edmund sat on the White Witch’s icy throne.