Fairytale

(This is an edit of an old piece. The changes that I made seemed to make the story a lot better. My teacher liked it, anyway.)

He was walking down the street in the pouring rain.

Everything looked gray. He couldn’t bear to turn his head and survey the houses on either side of him, but everything he could see in front of him was gray. Thinking this way made him feel sort of pathetic, like one of those kids that popular bands write songs about and then the feelings of the kid get commercialized and all the happy people who listen to the radio hear the song and begin to think they’re sad just because they wish the song was written about them. But maybe thinking that way made him one of those happy people who listen to the radio.

God, I really hope not, he thought.

It was Sunday morning. He was tired, but had stayed awake all night. When the sun came up, he felt re-energized, and picked up his guitar to begin to try to sort out some of his happy feelings with the six strings. It was a couple hours later when the phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. He heard the pat of his sister’s feet across the linoleum of the kitchen floor.

“Hello? Oh, hi, Mom.”

Silence.

“What do you mean?” He heard the break in her voice. It made him uneasy.

More silence.

“Oh… Alright.”

There would have been more silence, if not for her heavy breathing and the violent drip of tears off of her face.

“We’ll see you when you come home, then… Yes, I’ll tell him. Alright. I love you, too- bye.”

He had moved himself to the empty corner of his bedroom. Grabbing his legs and pulling them close to him, he sat in a small ball, staring across the room at the heavy wooden door. It was locked. There was no way he would let that girl into his fortress so she could assail him with news he knew would not be true. It was all part of her plan. They just wanted his castle. They were playing make believe, and none of this was real, and the evil Queen of a foreign country was coming to tell him something terrible so he would be distracted and she could take the castle.

The Queen was knocking. Once. Twice. Three times.

“Adam?”

He stayed quiet.

“Adam, I know you’re awake. I heard you playing the guitar a little bit ago.” She still had tears in her voice, and he could see her red eyes and wet face in his mind. He closed his eyes. This was not real. This was make believe.

“Listen, Adam… Mom just called. She’s still at the hospital.” She sniffled. He knew this was hard for her, and he wished that she knew it was make believe, too. They were just pretending. She was just the evil Queen from the foreign country. In real life, everything was okay. In real life, they were happy.

“Dad died a little while ago, Adam.”

A sudden burning overtook his throat and chest, and he buried his head in the space between his chest and his knees. He hated real life. He was sixteen, but he still liked to think he could get away with playing make believe. Right now it wasn’t working.

“The surgery yesterday went fine, but then this morning, he just… He just crashed.”

Crashed. Like he was riding a bike or something. That’s not how it was at all. This was life. Not a bike ride.

“Adam? Can you please say something? Or-” Her voice broke. There was no way he was going to open up his mouth.

He heard her footsteps again, walking back to her bedroom. He lifted his head back up to look at the door. There was nothing on the back. Nothing hanging on any of his walls. He had no posters of girls in bikinis, no black and white pictures of his favorite bands. Just four white walls. It was simple. He could imagine things on his walls if he needed to.

The burning had yet to leave his body. He did not want to cry. He needed to walk. He quickly stood up and put his shoes on, and then headed for the front door. His sister must have heard him- he heard her bedroom door open, and she began to say something, but he would not stop. Walking outside, he found that the sky was letting out all of the tears that he himself could not let drop. He ran down the front stairs and started a slow walk when he reached the sidewalk.

And here he was, walking down the street in the pouring rain. He didn’t see anything interesting to look at, and the grayness of the landscape was allowing for his thoughts to overtake him. But every memory was tainted with his desire to paint it over with something that wasn’t real- something make-believe. He didn’t know why he did it. He didn’t know why it was so easy for him to believe that a car was really a spaceship, that his bedroom was his own castle, that it was dangerous for him to go into the basement because of the ghost. Why couldn’t he grow up?

“Hey, kid.”

He turned to see a girl sitting on the front steps of a porch. “Me?” he asked, gesturing to himself with a confused look on his face. She better not try to sell him anything.

“No, the other fool who’s walking down the street in the rain. Yes, you. What’s the matter?” Her voice was tough, and she had a tinge of an accent. He thought maybe it was Brooklyn, and it wasn’t every day you found a Brooklyn girl on a porch instead of on the corner.

Shaking his head back and forth, he turned away from her. “Nothing. Nothing is the matter.”

“Aw, come on. Something is the matter. Here, why don’t you take a seat?” Adam paused for a moment, but walked over and sat down next to her. He could smell cigarettes, but she was obviously wearing some kind of musky, sweet perfume on top of it.

She held out a hand. “Amanda.”

He took it and shook once. “Adam.”

Sure enough, she pulled a pack of Marlboros out of her back pocket and pulled one out. “Want one?” she asked, holding it towards him.

He didn’t smoke, but he took it. “Thanks.”

“Need a light?” She reached over and lit the cigarette up for him before he could answer. He inhaled and coughed. Smiling, she put the pack back into her pocket and took a hit of her own cigarette. “Not a smoker, huh?”

“No,” he responded, still coughing.

“Just inhale a few more times, and you’ll get more used to it.”

Instead of saying anything, he just nodded his head and inhaled again. Once. Twice. Three times. There was silence for a few more minutes, and then she spoke again, her hard voice breaking the soft misty hum of the rain.

“So what happened? You look like a zombie or something,” she said. He smirked. Zombies. It was a zombie apocalypse, it was just him and this stranger, this sickly scented girl, left to carry on the human tradition and fight the evil that was suddenly taking over the world. Her voice broke through his thoughts. “You’re scaring me, kid. First you’re a zombie and now you’ve got some creepy smile on your face.”

He didn’t want to remember what was wrong. His face fell.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t even know you, you know?”

“Yeah.” An inhale. “I know.”

A few moments of silence fell between them, as well as drops of rain falling from the edge of the small and decrepit porch. One. Two. Three. Drip. It was acid rain, falling from a deep black, polluted sky. Adam quickly drew his legs and arms under the full cover of the porch. The quick movement jostled the silence. He wanted to get away. Standing up, he stuck his head out from under the roof of the porch to investigate the sky, forgetting for a moment the danger that was so real moments before.

“Going home?” she asked. Folded limbs, bare arms on denim legs, with tan skin and the lightest blonde hair. It was the first time he has really looked at her.

“Yeah. Home.” Prison, he thought.

Her tired eyes somehow matched the sympathetic, and yet unknowing smile that stretched across her mouth. A princess, he thought, she’s been sleeping for a thousand years and maybe I can wake her up.

Adam leaned in and kissed his tobacco princess.

Once. Twice. Three times.

 

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