Flowers in the Wind

The walls in my new room are pink. If this is any indicator of how my stay here is going to be, I’m not looking forward to it.

Grandmother gave me a big hug when she picked me up at the airport, and went on about how pretty I am and how much I look like my mother.

I hate being touched.

She smells like Altoids and moth balls.

I’m not looking forward to my stay here.
*

The Cape is supposed to be a nice place. I mean, people vacation here enough. Maybe the so called “magic” of the Cape is soiled when you’re a teenage girl exiled there for a summer to live with the aging grandmother you never really met.

Grandma Pearl is anything but. She’s overweight, having probably given up on eating right around the time my grandfather died—in World War II. Her skin is sagging and slightly yellow from smoking a pack a day for all these years; a thin film of that very same yellow covers her crooked teeth. Her hair is the whitest color I’ve ever seen. Like one of those flowers you find mass amounts of in the spring to summer time, the ones that you blow on and all the little seeds going flying everywhere. I used to think about how my life would be perfect if only I could live like one of those flowers, going wherever the wind leads me. When I told Michael this he informed me that those flowers are actually weeds, and if I wanted to live my life as a weed, I should stick with him.

Grandmother owns a small cottage on the beach, which would be nice if only it didn’t reek of the offending moth balls I mentioned earlier, mixed with the salty smell of the beach which seemed to leave every bit of furniture perpetually moist. I’m not rude, I sat and I talked to grandma. But I swear the woman has the beginnings of Alzheimer’s and if I had to spend another moment listening to her ramblings on about the “good old days” I was going to pull out my hair.

It took some convincing but she agreed to let me go for a walk around the beach. I hate how everything manages to remind me of Michael. The beach in particular reminds me of the day he asked me out, walking along hand-in-hand with matching cheesy grins—like in one of those freaking tampon commercials where all the girls look way to happy to be alive. But for a fleeting moment I was happy. Last summer, the summer before everything turned to shit. I had a boyfriend and for at least the first few months he was great to me, and then the rest of the time I was too blinded by those first few months to realize that he was no good.

I still remember having that first hit. There’s always that moment where you think, “Wow that did nothing. It’s gonna take much more than that to get me high.” And then two seconds later as the world starts to feel more like a Stanley Kubrick movie than real life, you realize how wrong you were. But it’s addicting, that feeling. And it was that very feeling which took over our whole lives. Maybe Michael really was a good guy before the drugs took over, and it’s that very thought which kills me.

My hair hits my back and blows out in waves as I walk along the beach in my sundress, toes soaking up the sand and the water which was left behind when the tide went in. One minute I’m alone, thinking of old times. (Maybe Grandma Pearl and I aren’t so different afterall) The next minute I’m not alone anymore.

He looks like he should be in a band—like one of the bands Michael used to pick on me for liking, with the pretty boys—Durran Durran or Aha. I feel like I should have a poster of his face on my bedroom wall, sitting beside my cherished Sixteen Candles one, but not too close to Andrew McCarthy—lest they get jealous of each other. I can’t help but comparing him to Michael. His hair does that floppy thing Michael could never get his to do, and instead went on about how stupid the style was. His eyes are an emerald green which seems to absorb light and shine like green marbles, while Michaels were grey. His features are softer and somehow younger looking, there’s a small mole at the bottom of his chin which Michael did not possess. I decide I like his face. I want to reach out and touch it, just to make sure he’s real.

Our eyes meet and we just watch each other for a couple of minutes, memorizing each other’s face. I wonder if he has an ex-girlfriend in his life who he’s comparing me to, and I suddenly feel uneasy.

He must pick up on it. “I’m Brian,” he says, and I realize he comes equipped with dimples.

“I’m Wendy.”