Ocean Eyes, chapter 3

Her shadowy back arched slightly, her soft thighs touched one another - elegantly crossed. The lovliest aspect that captivated me was her face, a map of the world. I admired the way her chin was always up, a lady-like quality illustrating that she was a strong woman. But, wedged between this beauty, was an extraodinary sadness hiding behind her eyes, drunk in lust and ecstacy and menacing sorrow. Her barely noticable curl of the lips were a facade to hide a passionate burning in her.

Curly ashen hair fell around her shoulders and face, full and provacative. Tendrils touched her cheeks and lips, a spider's web. It dwindled down to her lower back, darkened, shaded, and worn of smudges of mistakes and unruly eraser marks. Everything is colorless.

Like branches in a storm, her face could easily sway or wear away with eraser marks, but truth be told, only time can make her physique lose luster. Perhaps the only thing about her impervious to age is the sensation of evil destiny - the knowing she will never be.

The plush cushion was under her bare bottom, and the flocculent pillow supported her elbows, her milky elbows. She leaned back slightly, almost touching the couch cushion. It was an awing and frightening thing to see.

The finely carved wooden legs of the sofa held her up on the Victorian furniture. Nothing was around her. She didn't move. She held her poise strongly, yet weakly. Her toes touched the coldness of nothing below her. Her crossed legs hung over the side of the sofa, like a wilting oleander, white as a ghost and dangerous as a thorny rose.

My fingers grazed over her perfectly detailed body, overwhelming, inadvertently personal and exsquisite. There was something about this woman that suddenly felt intimate beneath my fingertips - that is, until she was ripped from my hands.

"What the hell is this?"

The voice of Angela Beckett drifted into my ears, an awefully unpleasant sound, mind you. I tried to stuff the peice of notebook paper in my pocket, but she grabbed my hand and squeezed the paper out of my palms. I stumbled forward as she pulled away. I tried to grab the paper back, but each time she would turn the other way and outstretch her arm.

"Give it back!" I yelled. The whole school cafeteria would've turned the other way if I shouted any louder. As she looked over the crumpled up paper, I bit my quivering lip, refraining from bitch slapping that, that...ugly tramp...prostitute...whore...skank...snobby bitch...

Actually, Angela was any teenage boy's fantasy - gorgeous, even. Although I detested admitting it...she was perfect. Ugly personality, but perfect body.

"So Charlie likes drawing pictures of women? What are you? A damned lesbian?" She scoffed. The cafeteria was too loud for anyone to hear her unless they were within a few feet, so I lunged at her, trying to grab it back.

"I said give the fucking paper back!"

"You want it back?" She said sarcastically. I watched a evilness glaze over her blue eyes, miserable and disgusting in every way. I will never forget that look on her face. I will always remember how hollow her eyes were, how they looked down on everyone, how she always thought she was better, and what filth may lie inside her.

I looked at her harshly. I attempted not springing on her and ripping her blonde hair out by remembering I would get suspended if I did. My fists clamped tightly, becoming white and shaky whilst I kept my eyes on her. Jack had once told me to constantly keep eye contact because it shows you are strong and mean everything you say.

She looked at my fists, then back into my eyes like I was pathetic. Then, to my dismay, she ripped the paper up into tiny peices - confetti falling like flakes in a snowglobe. At my feet lied the remains of one of my most eloquent journals, my imaginary friend, my drawing.

Angela walked away like nothing happened as the bell rang. I still stood there, still looking down at the paper.

You fucking peice of shit. You don't even deserve a name. You're worthless. You'll never be anything but a street walking skank with nothing to live for. Don't even look me you filthy motherfucker. I fucking hate you...



* * *

The screen door creeked in a creepy manner, then slammed shut whilst I stepped through our front door. The house was quiet. It's always been quiet. There weren't many cracks in this house, so no light gets in. It's not like any other house. It was a burning paper, the corners an ashy charcoal, decrepit with heated memories, not yet flickering, not yet out.

I strolled through the foyer and into the kitchen. Jack was sitting at the table reading a newspaper and eating a bowl of soup with a beer on the side. I set my backpack down in the hallway and entered the room. Reaching up to the wooden cabinet above the counter, I grabbed a box of Oreos, then got a jug of milk from the fridge.

"Well aren't you going to acknowledge me?" Jack said from the table.

I looked up and saw him staring me down with those same hard orbs, unmoving. He set is beer down and raised his eyebrows sarcastically as I stopped eating my cookies.

"Oh...uh, hey," was all I said.

Jack went back to his soup, beer, and newspaper. I sat down across from his at our big, wooden table and pretended that I didn't have a care in the world...although I did.

"What happened at school today?" He asked slowly.

I wondered why he was so interested in my life, because he usually didn't give a damn.

"Oh...uh, nothing special," I casted my eyes down to my plate and ate my Oreos furiously, wishing I hadn't have gotten so many so I could leave as quickly as possible.

"You're lying."

"No I'm not," I lied.

"Yes you are. I can see it in your eyes. You're eyes lie to me," he insisted. I knew this well. I was nervous. Jack was always good at picking out liars. I knew that his tendancy to force the truth out of me would eventually drive me nuts. "Tell me what happened."

I really didn't like him prying into my private life as much as Andie did conversations. I wanted to run away and hide from him. My mind would be a safe cave I could explore while I escaped embarassment right about now.

"Well...this one girl, this really horrible girl Angela...I almost got into a fight with her," I confessed.

"What did she do you to you?" He asked, setting his beer down again.

"She was making fun of me...she was pissing me off badly," I said. For a moment I thought he was going to comfort me and be the father I never had. I thought I saw a glimpse of sympathy in him at that moment, a flicker of Old Jack.

"What did you say?"

I didn't know how to answer him...because I didn't say anything to her. I felt embarassed and weak after thinking about that.

"I didn't say anything really," I finally answered.

"Nothing? Nothing at all?"

I knew it. I saw it coming. He was going to force his way in, acting like a hero, then insult me by calling me weak. Jack always did that.

"Not really..."

"Oh god, Charlie. You aren't a god damned door mat, are you? Jesus, don't let people walk all over you like that because if you do you're going to be shocked when you get older. Life is really rough, so don't fuck it up by not having a backbone. You're going to need it," he bellowed. The house almost shook with his loud, deep voice. He slammed his beer down and threw the paper over his shoulder into the corner where the litter box was and stormed out of the room.

The house became utterly silent once again. I sat, engulfed in a flame. I didn't blink. The house rekindled into a painful murmer, crackling firewood. Nothing came in, nothing came out. I wished I didn't feel so intensley alone, so inconceivable helpless. I felt like I was in hell, burning, burning, burning...

* * *

...his cigarette was burning.

The snow was falling once again. It caked the rooftops in immense layers, a bedsheet filming Wisconsin. The street cars hid under the snowflakes, the same ones that sprinkled across our jackets and beanies. This wouldn't last. The snow was fading. Spring would arrive and winter would die.

The air around me froze between my lips as Andie and I looked out over the neighborhood in boredom and frustration. Andie's cigarette glowed in the evening shadows while we talked about our day. He smelled of a mixture of smoke and cologne, which was an attractive scent for me.

It had been exactly four weeks since school started again and Andie and I had become good friends. He would invite me to watch TV at his house, and I'd invite him to take a walk with me in the woods. These were times I never forgot. These moments were the most inestimable in my adolescence with him. We frequently fed each other's minds with our own lyrics of songs that played in our heads and made us feel like bleeding.

There are things about your childhood you never forget, I knew that. I knew the atmosphere that always stayed the same would peel away as we grew. Everything we wanted to find would come together for us when we thought up to our age and experienced hardships and troubles that made us not easily believe anything anymore. Our world would changed and we would change. We would never be the same again.

From my childhood...I recieved letters...and postcards...and old, ragged photographs of memories in which I had always tried to forget.

"Life really does suck, huh?" He whispered, a puff of smoke escaping his lips. My eyes roamed over him. I loved having these conversations about life with him. I loved murmuring in small voices so our words wouldn't carry away into someone else's ears.

"Nah...I love life, I'm just not very good at it," I said as the smoke wrapped around me. His smile was astute with his blue-green eyes, bruised by brown and gold, almost cat-like in the dark.

"You're funny, kid," he chuckled. "I guess we just gotta get through this together and do the best we can."

"Yeah...I suppose it's wise to say we should give life our best 'cause we will never be more divine than we are now. We will never be here again..." I trailed off. My hands were sore from pressing on the roof shingles, but I didn't care. I tried to make out the outline of the eventide in the broad nothern skyline, but it was too blurry and incoherent.

"So how are you?" He asked suddenly.

"Oh...fine," I said. I looked down towards the driveway through the bare branches of the tree by Andie's garage. Many trees surrounded the Redding house, none of them evergreens.

"I find that hard to believe," he puffed out.

"How so?" I questioned. I looked him over, trying to define his intentions of figuring me out.

"I dunno...it just seems like you're unhappy," he almost whispered. He looked down at the snow covered yard in a blank stare, empty eyes unfocused and released in thought and grievance.

"Really?"

"Oh come on, Char. You're the saddest girl I've ever seen," he mumbled, then set his cigarette between his fingers and leaned back on the roof. It was getting dark, so I could hardly make the outline of his face out in the shadow. We just sat there, exchanging words we never thought would leave our minds which had a million things in them.

"I'm not sad..."

"I can tell," he pushed, picking up his cigarette again and handing it to me.

"I'm not sad..."

"Then you're not happy..."

"I'm not sad..."

"I am."

I could barely look at him, but every single time I did.

"One day...one day we'll both have something to live for...something to thrive off of. One day we will be happy..." I choked out. I looked back at him in the ending of my sentence. To think I might not see those eyes makes it almost unbearable.

"Yeah...it's kinda cool I found someone who understands," he commented.

"One day we'll both get out of this shithole. I wanna go to California...where no one knows my name...and no one can tell me what I'm supposed to feel," I almost cried. "I want to run. I want to find a place where I can be somebody and make a change...I want to live."

"Same..." he paused, looking out once again above his white lawn that was beginning to melt with the dead season. For a slpit second I saw spontenaiety in him. I saw the person people don't see at school. I saw Andrew. "...in my head...there are things I see no one will ever know."

It was like I was speaking these words myself.

"Well...just so you know, there comes an inevitable point in our life when we are forced to look at ourselves in the mirror and realize who we really are. I'd like to be there with you," I said, smiling a little.

He smiled back. We watched the darkness fall over the shoal of Wisconsin, a long blink good night. I had then realized this was one of the many talks we would have on his roof, my roof, anywhere we could.

I knew this was the beginning.