Between You and Me

Chapter 6

"Fuck my life!"

Her days were becoming a blur. Pretty much every day the same. She may or may not see Tristan and they would say a few words but that was it. Her sister would come home late after school and her part-time job at Walmart, or hang with friends or whatever it was she did. Sometimes she would not come back home until super late.

She probably saw more of Tristan than her sister. Tristan would do work around the house, hang some pictures for them, fix the wobbly stairs on the back porch, retile the kitchen floor, update his bathroom, and even do menial jobs like changing the light bulbs. He did everything with no complaint. He may or may not prepare something to eat, but mostly he went out for fast food a lot.

She spent much of the week at home by herself, reading and doing nothing. She needed to find something to do.

By Friday she finally decided to tackle her grandmother's spare bedroom filled with so much junk she could barely open the door. Since her cousin Rocky put all of the things from her closet in that room, there was no room to even turn around. The room was a nice size, just weirdly shaped. Long and narrow versus more boxy that could fit a queen-sized bed.

It ran along the opposite side of the wall as her and Tristan's room, so it had the length, just not wide enough for anything other than a twin-sized bed. When her grandmother was raising her kids, her father had that room. It was the outcast room for sure.

The first thing she started on was a taped-up box with no markings on it. She ripped the tape off and looked inside. Stacks and stacks of notebooks. They seemed old, like nothing she saw in her lifetime. They were not the spiral-bound, college or narrow-ruled notebooks she was used to. These had to be over forty years old, or more.

She picked up one and flipped through the yellowing pages. This had to be a journal, or maybe a diary. There was a lot of writing in it. Should she read it or was that an invasion of privacy? Her grandmother was gone and she missed her terribly. If she was here she could talk to her about all the things.

Even about boys. Even about Tristan. She would tell her she was good enough for any boy and to look up and smile more. She always would say that to her.

"You need some help?"

She nearly jumped out of her skin. How was he so huge yet so quiet sometimes? She did not even know he was home.

"Fuck!" she screamed out when she jumped.

"Sorry, my bad. I didn't mean to scare you." He looked her over, probably because she looked like a basket case. "You good?"

"Yeah."

"You need help moving these boxes or something?"

"Uh...no...no, I don't think so." Her grandmother's words echoed in her ears and she looked up into his face, directly into his eyes for once, and smiled. "Just going through my grandmother's things. It's so much stuff I don't know where to start."

"I heard she was a great lady, from some fellas around the block. She was a teacher, right? Sounds like one that cared about her students beyond just the classroom."

"Yeah, that's her."

"Wished I had a chance to meet her."

She wished that too.

"You sure you don't need help with these boxes, moving them around or anything?"

She squinted her eyes a bit and nodded. "Sure, this one maybe. I think it has journals or something in it. I want to go through them. Can you bring this to my room? It's not that heavy, but-"

"I got it." Tristan grabbed the box and headed out of the room, across the hall, and into her bedroom.

He had never been in her room. Now he was here, in her room. His large, hulky self was only a few inches from her messy bed. She felt some kind of way about that. She quickly scanned her room to make sure none of her undies were on the floor. She typically kept things nice and tidy, but one thing she did not like was making her bed.