Why Not One More Night?

Over the week before school started, I spent a lot of time alone in the house. My dad was a doctor – an ears, nose, and throat specialist to be exact – and had his own practice, which was evidently one of the only ones in town, so he was very busy for the majority of the day. Aiden had her own preparations to make before the school year started, and Mason was busy moving up to Hiram and adjusting to life there. I talked to my mom and Frank every night, though Frank generally asked more questions about how I was doing than my mother did. During the days, I spent a lot of time in the basement. Apparently the only thing my dad and I had in common thus far was a love of working out, and he had a bunch of cardio equipment and weight sets downstairs. So for about an hour and a half every day, I’d work out and then spend the rest of the day alternating between reading, watching TV, and thinking about Shawn’s box. Needless to say, by the time school started the following week, I was more than ready to go.

I started my first day off with a fifteen-minute run on the treadmill, showered, got dressed, did my hair and makeup, and ate a banana for breakfast. By the time I was through with my stuff, my dad was ready to go. As we were walking outside, he tossed me the keys to his car. “Why don’t you take my car today? You can drive me to the office and pick me up later.”

I immediately frowned and tossed them back to him. “I can’t. I don’t have a license.” Besides that, I was still only vaguely familiar with the route to school from our house; there was no way I could even get there if I’d wanted to from his office.

This made him frown even deeper as he crossed paths back over to the driver’s side. “What do you mean you don’t have a license? For Christ’s sake, you’re almost eighteen years old.”

“I’m a good driver, I just can’t do the maneuverability,” I defended myself and climbed into the passenger’s side. I’d never exactly felt pressured to get my license since Shawn had always driven me everywhere, and when he couldn’t, either Aiden or Mason was always available to help me out if my family couldn’t provide me with a ride.

“Well, we’ll work on that,” Dad huffed and started his car. We drove mostly in silence on the way to Black River High School, just listening to the most boring segment of talk radio I’d probably ever heard. Dad eventually cleared his throat and spoke again. “So should I leave early and come pick you up and then bring you back to the office, or what?”

There seemed to be such annoyance dripping from his words that just to spite him, I almost agreed to that suggestion. I thought again about how absolutely bored out of my mind I would be if I had to sit at his office until six or seven at night though and thought better of it. “I’ll get a ride or take the bus or something.” Not that I even knew which bus stopped at my house, but whatever.

“Okay,” he agreed and left it at that. We pulled up to the school several minutes later, which was just as dull looking as it had been when I’d seen it last week. Even the bustle of students couldn’t make it interesting. Dad paused for a moment as he pulled in front of the entrance, like he was debating giving me words of encouragement for the day. Finally he decided on a simple, “Have a good day. See you later.”

“Thanks,” I told him, grabbing my bag and hopping out. “See you later.” I filed in with a group of students and stopped quickly at the door to search out my name and classroom. I was relieved to see that my name was listed next to one of the few rooms that I actually knew the location of, so I headed off to my homeroom class, which was government with a Mr. Kesney.

After about another fifteen minutes, homeroom started and we went through all of the standard first day procedures – attendance, locker assignments, schedules, syllabi, the whole bit. I had a pretty standard schedule, consisting of a second period book-to-movie film/English course, a cow-goes-moo level math class, French II, lunch, health, physics (which, as of day one, it was safe to say that I would not understand at all), and study hall. Most of the day went pretty easily, and I had classes with most of the same students. The school was incredibly small and intimate, which I wasn’t sure that I liked; at Highland, the school had been pretty big and though you still mostly knew everybody’s business due to the rumor mill, there was at least some level of anonymity. In comparison, Black River felt incestuous.

By the time study hall rolled around at the end of the day, I was completely relieved to be done for the day. I didn’t have any homework, so I was looking forward to a nice fifty minutes of relaxation. Sadly, this did not happen since the majority of my fellow study hall goers got exceptionally rowdy and loud, prompting the monitor to assign us seats alphabetically. She sat me next to a girl that I sort of recognized at first glance, and then quickly remembered her from eating at The Hungry Bear; she’d been the hostess.

When the monitor was done assigning seats, everyone still continued to talk though it was not quite as loud as it had been before. I almost wished that it wasn’t the first day so that I’d actually have some homework to work on instead of focusing on trying to figure out a way to make conversation with this girl. Luckily though, the silence didn’t last for very long and she started talking.

“Do I know you from somewhere?” she asked me, looking at me sort of harshly as if she was trying to really study my face.

“I was at The Hungry Bear like a week ago,” I answered, squirming slightly under the intensity of her stare. “You’re the hostess there, right?”

“Only in the summer,” she said, finally backing off a little. I almost let out a sigh of relief. “It’s my dad’s restaurant, so my brother and I help out when we don’t have school.”

“Oh, nice.” I nodded, not really sure how to respond. I used to be pretty good at the small talk thing, but lately I'd felt like I couldn’t even form a complete thought. “The food was really good.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll pass that along to my dad.” The conversation lulled for a moment and I almost started to pray that I wouldn’t have to endure another forty minutes of awkwardness. Obviously also not one for silence, the girl started talking again. “I’m Trina, by the way. Are you new here?”

“Bree,” I introduced myself. “And yeah, it’s my first day.”

“Mine, too,” Trina said, and then half-corrected herself. “Well, my first day at this school, specifically. I’m a freshman.”

“Oh, nice,” I said again. “I had fun my freshman year. I don’t know how it is around here, but all the classes were super easy. It’s kind of a breeze, for the most part. Sophomore year’s a bit tougher and junior year is too, but they’re not that bad. It’s all just kind of what you make of it, I guess.”

“So you’re a senior then?” she asked. I nodded, and she continued. “So is my brother. Zach Levitt. Do you know him?”

The name sounded kind of familiar, but I couldn’t completely attach the name with a face, though I kind of figured that she was referring to the guy who’d been our waiter at The Hungry Bear. “Just from your restaurant, I’m pretty sure. To be honest though, I wasn’t really paying attention to who’s in any of my classes.”

“It’s a pretty small school,” Trina remarked, which truly felt like an understatement. There were over two hundred and fifty seniors in my old high school alone; here that accounted for the entirety of the senior and junior classes, along with a few of the sophomores. “I’m sure he’s in one of your classes. Do you miss your old school?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I admitted with a slight sigh. “I mean, I didn’t love it, but I would’ve loved to finish out with my friends there, but that’s just life, I guess.” Or rather, my parents’ stupid logic.

“Why’d you move?” she asked. The girl seemed like she was filled to the brim with questions, which would have normally bothered me, but at least they kept the conversation going.

“My mom and stepdad thought it’d be best for me to have some time with my father,” I explained hesitantly. “Some stuff happened and they just decided that I needed to kind of take a break, so to speak.”

“What kind of stuff?” Trina questioned almost immediately. When she noticed my discomfort, she retracted. “Sorry. I’m kind of really forward. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, that’s fine.”

“No, it’s okay,” I told her, still frowning. “Just…my older brother passed this summer and it was really hard on me.” Even after all this time, I almost never referred to Shawn’s death as a suicide to anyone else. He’d either passed away or died; no way had someone like Shawn really killed himself.

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that,” she said sheepishly, looking down. That was almost always the reaction I got, and I almost wondered sometimes if people would react the same way if I’d told them that Shawn killed himself. It’s always tragic to die young, but for whatever reason, it always seemed to me like people cared just a little less when they found out that suicide was involved, as if the fact that the death wasn’t an accident or an illness made it somehow less sad. “Were you close?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Very.” His death sounded even worse if I admitted that I’d borderline avoided him for the last few months before he committed suicide.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. We can talk about something else. Uh, how’s living with your dad?”

I laughed at that slightly. “I’d let you know if I ever saw him. It’s pretty boring so far. And it’s kind of hard having my best friend and my boyfriend at other schools, but I’ll adjust.”

“Oh, you have a boyfriend? What’s his name?” Trina asked, her eyes lighting up. If there’s one thing freshman girls ever wanna talk about, nine times out of ten, the topic is usually boys.

“His name’s Mason,” I replied, relaxing a little bit. At least this was a safe, easy topic to talk about. “He’s a freshman at Hiram University.”

“Is he cute?” Trina asked, smiling.

“Very,” I assured her. “Do you wanna see a picture?” She nodded vigorously and took my phone out under the table and pulled his picture up to show her. I passed the phone to her and she mock-whistled.

“Wow. Man, did you hit the jackpot or what?” she told me with a small laugh and passed my phone back.

I smiled a little and nodded. On the surface, Mason was perfect, but like everyone, he was full of flaws. He was especially good at forgetting to call or text, and was also excellent at saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, though never maliciously.

We shifted the conversation away from Mason and talked a little more about our families. I told her about my parents divorcing when I was seven and how my mom got remarried when I was nine. Her parents were happily married, and while her dad owned and managed the restaurant, her mom was basically a stay-at-home mom but did a lot of craft projects. After I informed her that both my mom and stepdad were psychiatrists and my dad was a doctor, she decided that I had the cooler parents, though truthfully the only parental figure that I had any level of closeness with was the one that I was not even related to by blood. I was reminded of this when the bell rang and it dawned on me that I didn’t have a way home. When I voiced this concern aloud, Trina immediately offered a solution.

“Zach can take you home,” she volunteered. I prompted her to text him and at least ask him, not wanting to pose an inconvenience, but she waved me off. “It’s fine, I have blackmail.”

I felt my stomach tighten a little as she and I walked out to the parking lot, genuinely hoping that the fact that my license-less ass needing a ride home wasn’t going to be the cause of some brother-sister squabble. I didn’t have too much time to think about it since Trina located her brother and his car very quickly; her brother was in fact the same giant waiter from the restaurant, and he was already standing there with an annoyed look on his face. Something told me that this conversation wasn’t going to go wonderfully.

“Hey,” Trina greeted him louder than she probably needed to, like she had way too much energy bottled up. “We have to take my friend home.”

I had to fight back a grimace. She couldn’t have at least asked? Frank would have had a fit over that level of rudeness.

“I don’t have to do anything,” Zach answered her, barely acknowledging my existence beyond a two second glance at me. “I don’t even like driving you to and from school, why would I want to take your friend home?”

“Because I totally caught you smoking pot two weekends ago and I’ll tell Mom and Dad about it if you don’t,” Trina reasoned, as if this was an acceptable way to convince someone to do something. Thank God Shawn and I had never been like that.

Zach scoffed loudly. “Please. I can tell you with a hundred percent certainty that they probably know about that. That’s a don’t ask, don’t tell issue and you know it.” He leaned back against his car, though he continued to completely tower over it. “Besides, if you did that, I’d be obligated to tell them that I saw you riding around with Trevor Graham on Saturday night when I got off work, and that would make them pretty wildly unhappy.”

“That’s totally none of your business!” she argued. I got the feeling that at this point she’d sort of forgotten that I was there, engaged in a verbal battle of threats with Zach. “Why do you have to be such a dick?”

He gave her a kind of cocky smile, accepting his triumph. “Don’t make threats when you’ve got shit that you need to hide. That’s the way it works.” He opened the driver’s side door and bent down to start climbing in. Trina took this as a hint to follow suit, though she didn’t gesture for me to follow her. Zach paused when he noticed that I was still standing there. “You coming or what?”

“Uh, yeah.” I nodded and headed to the opposite side of the car, intending to get into the backseat, though Trina was already there.

“You can take the front,” she said, putting her back up against the side window and stretching out across the backseat.

“Are you sure?” I asked, sinking into the passenger’s seat.

“She likes to ride back there for some reason,” Zach said, shaking his head with some level of annoyance, “despite the fact that when it’s just the two of us in the car, it looks ridiculous to have my sister riding around in the back like some kind of freaking five year old.”

She reached forward and tweaked the back of his ear. “Hey Ass, I like to give my legs a little room. If anyone could understand that, I’d think it would be you since you’re bordering on freakdom.”

He turned halfway around. “Do you seriously want to get into this right now? Because I’ll make you walk and just take you friend home if that’s how you wanna be. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Fine.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. She shook her head a little, and I was pretty sure I heard her mumble, “Dick,” but I wasn’t completely sure.

Everyone was completely silent as Zach backed out of his space and began to exit the parking lot. As he was getting ready to pull out, he finally addressed me. “So which way am I taking you? And please don’t tell me you live on the ice planet of Hoth or some shit like that.”

“I hope not.” I gave him my address, and he nodded.

“Okay, yeah, that’s at like the opposite end of my street, so that works,” he confirmed, making a right turn out of the lot and onto the road.

“Thanks for taking me home,” I told him. “I really appreciate it. I’m Bree, by the way.”

“I know,” Zach nodded. I waited for him to expound on just how he knew this since Trina had never mentioned me by name, but it took him a second to elaborate. “You were at my dad’s restaurant a few weeks ago. I was your waiter. I heard your friend call you Bree, and I remember you left me a better tip than your friend did.”

“Ah,” was about all I could intelligently muster up. Zach seemed to take this as an invitation to continue.

“I’m Zach, in case you don’t remember,” he said, and then gestured with his head towards Trina, “although I’m pretty sure she’s convinced that my name is Dick.”

“Did you seriously hear that?” Trina complained. I saw her hands go up in my peripheral and I stifled a laugh.

“I hear everything,” Zach confirmed, nodding again and turning his attention to me. “So do you just not have a car, or do you not drive at all?”

“I don’t have a license,” I admitted, embarrassed. I was aware that it was pretty pathetic that as an almost adult, I still couldn’t legally drive myself around and had to rely on everyone else to help me out. “I never really worried about it until now. I usually just caught rides with friends.”

“Were you popular at your old school?” Trina asked. I wondered if she ever stopped digging for information.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was kind of friends with everyone.”

“Which is something a popular person would say,” Zach chimed in, pausing at a stop sign before making a left turn. “But not a conceited one.”

“Thanks, I guess,” I said, though it didn’t really matter, since Zach started snapping his fingers and beating his hand on the side of his steering wheel excitedly, as if I’d never said anything. He caught Trina’s eyes in the rearview mirror and went on speaking as if I’d never said anything.

“Oh, Trina, guess what happened today.” Again, he didn’t wait for her any chance to respond before he went on. “I was in French today, and you know Reilly Parshall, that girl I can’t stand?”

“You can’t stand a lot of people,” Trina mumbled, and I fought off a smirk.

Zach, however, did not hear this and continued. “Well, she got this tattoo on her foot over the summer, and she was showing it off in class, since it’s in French. I have no idea what it said, but she went up to Mademoiselle and was like gloating about it, and then Mademoiselle let out this exasperated sigh and told Reilly that the tattoo she got was grammatically incorrect and makes absolutely no sense.”

“Are you serious?” Trina started to laugh, and I began to as well. “That’s the best thing I’ve probably ever heard.”

“Right?” Zach agreed, his laugh loud and kind of goofy, which only made me laugh that much harder. “That made my entire day.”

Trina started to add something else about her day, and I sat back and just listened to them banter back and forth for a little while, exchanging first day stories. It kind of amazed me how quickly they could go from antagonizing each other to acting like friends who hadn’t seen each other in years and had a lot of catching up to do. Shawn and I had mainly had one setting to our relationship until the end – best friends. Any other kind of sibling relationship was kind of hard to fathom.

After about another ten minutes, we reached my house and Zach turned into my driveway, parking outside the garage.

“Thanks for the ride,” I told him, grabbing my bag and beginning to open the door.

“No problem,” Zach replied. “So do you have like a solid ride to and from school, or do you want me to drive you?”

“That’s really nice of you, but I don’t want you to have to go out of your way to do that,” I hesitated.

“I live like three minutes away, don’t worry about it,” he waved me off. “I have to drive by your house anyway.”

“Okay,” I agreed, thankful that I wouldn’t be subjected to any more awkward drives to school with my father. “That’d be great. Thanks.”

Zach told me he’d pick me up a little after seven the next morning. I thanked him again, at which point he told me to stop thanking him, and then stepped out of the car, waving good-bye to Zach and Trina, and heading inside. I set my stuff down in my room and settled into my seat on the couch, turning on the TV and flipping around for something to occupy myself with and relax. I eventually landed on some ridiculous talk show where everyone yells at each other. Shawn and I had always watched those together and made fun of how ridiculous people were. Despite the fact that the show was annoying and the topic was stupid, it made me realize for probably the thousandth time how much I missed Shawn. I thought again about the box and maybe just taking a quick look through it, but stopped myself. Opening that box was only going to ruin the day, and though it hadn’t been great, I at least had managed to meet two people who didn’t seem like assholes. I did my best to put the box in the back of my mind again, trying to turn my attention back to the show. However, Shawn and that stupid box continued to linger there, and that was the way it always seemed to go.