Trapped in Forever

65 ~ The Roxanne That I Knew

I hadn’t turned the lights on the bathroom that night as I knelt down in front of the toilet, the seat lifted up, and the water was murky from what I could glimpse through the moonlit glow emitting through the gap in between the fluttering curtains. It was still cold, and the breeze drifted rain droplets onto my bare shoulders, but the chill of the September night made me feel more awake, alive, and as I ran my fingers through my hair, heaving my breaths, all I wanted to feel was alive, the way Reese or even Roxanne would have if they had ambled down the length of an alley and abandoned their boyfriend, muttering that he no longer had to chase after me when I “freaked out” and “ran away,” without the slightest pang of regret rattling in their chests as the rain wetted their hair and darkened their clothes while they heard the back door to Mo’s close with a sense of despondency but also knowing, as if even the hinges knew that this had been coming, and I didn’t glance over my shoulder until I knew that he had left, then I stared at the vacancy in the alley, before I reached into my pocket and took out my cell phone, calling Veronica and asked her to come pick me up. When I came home, my parents had already retired to their bedroom, a sliver of light stretching across the carpet in the hallway from under their door. I wondered, briefly, as I passed the door if they were discussing me, quietly, while my mom brushed her teeth and my dad halfheartedly observed the news or something, talking about that I had been fired, that I had slapped a girl, that I had been dating Roxanne’s boyfriend, and staring at my baby pictures, wondering where they went wrong with their precious Amanda Rose.

As I wiped my mouth when a crumpled piece of toilet paper, reaching my hand out to grasp the cool porcelain handle to flush, I remembered how Orion had declared that he knew about Evan Dillinger and about that night at the party, how they dragged her out of that bedroom and how she frantically tried to tie together those sleeves to that hoodie, a couple of guys hooting in the background and someone shouting if the owner of the hoodie wanted them to burn it for him. I wondered if that look in her eyes, the hysterical and desperate gleam in her eyes as she struggled, her eyes searching for me in the crowd below from where she stood, hovering, over the banister, had been ingrained into his mind as well, or if he knew that I had grasped a red plastic cup of beer, brought it to my lips, and ducked away so she couldn’t see me, so that they wouldn’t see me and call me the names that they were calling her. She would understand, I thought. I had convinced myself that when we had left, quietly, and maybe even separately, I would be the friend she needed me to be, embrace her and let her rant, maybe even turn away when she reached for a box of Crayola, and that seemed to make sense to me.

But it didn’t to her.

Hours before those juniors stumbled upon her with Evan Dillinger in that bedroom, naked and exposed in front of them and their judging and mocking gazes, Roxanne had been convinced that this party was her big break. That after a couple of beers, maybe a round of Beer Pong, and a few flirtatious gazes and winks in the right directions, that she could finally rejoin the cult that had excluded her for her “freakiness” and she prepped herself with excuses and reasons on why her “freakiness” was a thing of past. She was armed with sentences such as “I saw a therapist and how chalk is just, like, bleh,” and “Yeah, that was weird. Good thing that’s over!” and she would force a bout of laughter after every statement. She had bought new mascara, applied her lipstick three times in the car at traffic lights, and wore shoes that she grimaced in when she tried them on in the store, all for her “friends.” If I had the nerve, I would have asked her what I was to her, why their friendship was so much better than mine when they snickered and made cracks about mental institutions, or why she insisted that I went with her to watch her scramble to rebuild pointless relationships that for some reason mattered more than ours.

I wondered for a moment, as I watched her grin at her old friends and wave heartily, so convinced and willing to win them back and determined to persuade them of her sanity, that if I had turned away from her and made comments about chalk, how she probably ate it by the dozen, or that she probably did it to compensate for the fact that she was a loser, if she would suddenly turn around and actually pay attention to me, her friend, loop her arm around mine and ask if anything new was up, if I had gotten a new haircut, or compliment me, telling me that I must have lost weight or done something with my hair because I was stunning that night, like her friends. But instead, she complimented them and grinned so widely at them, it was almost as if she were trying to assure them of her proper dental habits more than anything else.