Hello, my name is Jeremy and I am new to these forums. I am 23 years of age and an English teacher. Although I love teaching, my dream is to be able to make a good living writing novels and short stories. This has been a passion of mine since the fifth grade.
I'd also like to note, before you read my short story, that I take my writing style inspiration from Ernest Hemingway. I love for my stories to be ambigious. To me, a good story means different things to different people. I hope you enjoy my lastest work "Will You Be There?" Please let me know what you think! And don't be afraid to hurt my feelings.
Will You Be There?
“Will you be there?” I can hear the hope in her voice, the embarrassment, the confusion. “Tell me I can count on you.”
“You can count on me.”
“So you’ll be there?”
I let out a decision of breath. “I don’t know.”
“But you said I can count on you. If I can count on you, you’ll be there.”
“You’ve always been able to count on me.”
“I know.”
“Good.” I go out on the porch and light a cigar in the winter night. The ashes fall from the edge and blend in with the gray slush. “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
“I can never be sure of anything. That’s my curse.”
“So I’m your curse.”
“I never said that.”
I can hear the dog in her background. “How’s the old pup?”
“Doing good,” she says. “He misses you.”
“How can you tell a dog misses someone?”
“The same way you can tell a human misses someone. It’s just a look they get in their eyes.”
“Yeah.” I inhale to sustain a comfort.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that all you can say?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not coming, are you?”
I throw the cigar out in the snow and watch the flame, the small, valiant flame, finally burn out. “I don’t know.”
*
I was in the third grade when I saw her. It wasn’t love at first sight, but only because at eight years of age I didn’t know what love was, let alone love at first sight.
I was a weird kid, to say the very least. I remember on days that school would be cancelled because of snow I would sit in my room, alone, and write stories about people in my classroom, my classmates, my teachers. I’d put them in odd situations, in adventures of death-defying nature. The stories were always different except for one constant: my classmates always died.
Run over by a car, electrocuted by a stray power line, drowned in a teaspoon of cough syrup, mauled to death by Bigfoot’s cousin, trampled by a group of oversized hyenas, sealed shut inside three or four caskets, squashed to death by a piano storm. All of these, and many more, became the fate of my classmates. Only in my stories, of course. In reality, their lives were perfect. Maybe that’s why I hated them. Maybe that’s why I killed them.
Killed them in make believe, silly.
I would continue to write these murderous tales up through high school graduation, but something changed that one afternoon in the third grade.
She came in through the front door, holding her mother’s hand. The class whispered, as groups of children will do when encountering a new soul. Her hair was tied straight back in a curly pony tail and she was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. She smiled at me, I could have sworn she smiled at me, or maybe that was my wild imagination running away again.
For the next seven years I silently took in her evolving beauty. I watched her cup size go from nothing to something. I watched as her hair progressed from a matted child’s wig to a long picture of splendor. And her eyes morphed from a smoky gray to a striking color of green.
Yet, I remained silent. And the silence ended one day on a landscape of ice.
We were skating. Ice skating. I remember on the way to the rink I was scared to death because I had never been before. The school bus was full of kids who had been to the rink with their dates, their parents, whatever. Not me. I had always tried to avoid natural ice. Man-made ice was a huge no-no, especially on a single skinny blade made by some guy getting paid minimum wage to make sure your safety is of the utmost importance.
We filed in and checked in and settled in and everything else high school gym classes do when they go ice skating. I laced up my skates and looked across the room. There she was, sitting on a wooden bench next to her friend, tying her hair up and putting on her green mittens. A cold chill ran down the back of my neck and I swore it was something like love.
No, you idiot, it was just the chill coming from the main room of the rink.
No, it was love. And I knew, somewhere within my freezing body, that today would be the day. Sink or swim. Hopefully neither, in the ice and all.
I eased onto the ice, one inch of blade at a time, and it wasn’t long before my backside was covered with freezing, wet particles. I was tired of being laughed at, so I got off the ice and scooted onto the bench. Here, I pulled out my pocket notebook and continued a story I had started about the class jock and how he was to be melted by hot radiation pouring from the town nuclear power plant which had been overrun by flesh-eating elephants.
“Why aren’t you skating?”
I looked up into the prettiest view I had ever seen. Mount Everest, the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China, the greenest fields flushed with the most attractive sunset, nothing will ever compare to what I saw that day.
“I fell.” It was so simple, and it felt like the only thing I could say, and it got a laugh out of her.
“I can see that.” She smiled and, despite the cold of the ice, I melted. “What are you writing?”
“Nothing.” I quickly shoved the notebook in my pocket. “Just stupid stuff.”
“I bet it’s not stupid.”
“Yeah.”
To break the uncomfortable silence, she extended her hand. “Want to try again?”
“With you?”
“Sure. If that’s okay with you.”
“I guess.”
We drifted around the ice, and I wouldn’t fall, I couldn’t fall, because she was there, grasping my hand, keeping me afloat, and even though people were watching and pointing and gawking, she kept on going, and I kept going with her.
*
I hang up the phone and go inside. I open the refrigerator and pull out a soda and lay back on the couch. I open my laptop and pull up an old picture. Us, senior year, in our cap and gowns, smiling, arms around one another.
The football game on the television is muted. I reach for the remote. When my fingertips touch the buttons, I stop. There is something else I could be doing.
*
“Why do you act the way you do?”
I dropped the bag of chips in my lap, licked my fingers, and said, “What?”
“Why do you act the way you do?”
The drive-in was packed with cars, some rocking back and forth, others with headlights on, the passengers hooting and hollering at the horror show on the screen. The main lady ran up the stairs when she should’ve been running out the front door, screeching and waving her arms franticly from the six and a half foot masked killer.
“I don’t understand.”
“Why do you not talk to anyone? You’re an interesting person and nobody knows it because you won’t open up.”
“I’ve opened up to you.”
“Have you?”
“What do you think?”
“Sometimes I don’t know.”
“Of course I have.”
“Nobody knows the real you. Nobody has ever read those stories ―”
“Those stories are personal.” I wadded the bag of chips and threw them out the window.
“That’s littering.”
“I know.”
We both laughed and I put my arm around her and brought her close, her head resting on my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. I will work on it.”
She looks up at me. “Opening up?”
“No, littering.”
We both smiled.
*
I chug the rest of the soda and toss it in the trash. I hurry to my room and pull the pocket notebook from the top dresser and flip through the pages of scrawl.
The last four pages are blank. Plenty of room.
*
I came home with a stack of books. My mother was cooking bacon and eggs in the kitchen and my father was getting ready to go back to work for the second shift.
“Bacon and eggs in the evening?” I asked.
“Your father loves them.”
I gave my mother a kiss on the cheek and asked her if she had made extra for me.
She smiled her sly smile. “Nope.”
I ascended the first step when my mother said, “Oh, honey, you have a visitor in your room.”
“In my room?”
She smiled again, that sly smile, and it was brighter than ever, like a mother giving a child his first Christmas present. She nodded.
I ran the rest of the stairs, almost falling up them, and pushed my door open. There she was.
“Hi,” she said, simply.
“You’re back?”
“I took the week off. My classes are ridiculously easy this semester.”
“Classes have always been ridiculously easy for you.”
She smiled. “Enough of the small talk,” she said.
I took my cue, dropped the stack of books, and wrapped my arms around her, covering her face in kisses.
“Excited to see me?” she asked.
“No, not at all.”
She had to practically push me off of her. “There will be plenty of time for that later.”
I saw the small notebook in her hand. “What is that?”
“Yours.”
“You found it?”
“Underneath your bed.”
“Did you read it?”
“Some.”
“You read it?”
“Yes.”
“You read my personal notebook?”
“I didn’t think you would mind.”
For the first time, I could feel my rage boiling, pointing towards her. “You read my personal notebook?”
“I knew you would never let me read it.”
“How much did you read?”
She stood up from the bed. “Not a lot, don’t worry. I like the stories.”
“You like the stories?”
“Yes.”
“You like the stories?”
“I said yes.”
“Why would you go through my personal stuff?”
“Isn’t your stuff my stuff? That’s what you told me.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. I stood up from the bed and yanked the notebook from her hands. “Do you understand why this is wrong?”
“Not really, no.”
“You need to leave.”
“I didn’t mean ―”
“Get the hell out of my house!”
“But ―”
“Did you read this!”
“I said I did.”
“Do you realize what this is!” I waved the notebook in front of her face. “Do you realize this is how I deal with all the people who made fun of me in high school, who looked at me all the time, who gawked at us when we held hands at the ice skating rink! Do you realize this is my life, that this is who I really am!”
“I love who you are.”
“No, you love who you want me to be! You don’t know the person who is in this notebook! You don’t know the person who sat by himself all the time because nobody wanted to be by him! You don’t know how that is!”
“I love you.” She began to cry, but my anger was already at the rupture, too hot for tears to cool.
“Get the hell out of here! Now!”
Two sets of feet trampled the stairs, one going down and one coming up.
“What happened?” my mother asked from the doorway.
I slammed the notebook to the floor. “Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.”
*
I don’t know how it happens. It just happens. It just comes. The pen touches the paper and words are formed. Sentences show up and combine to make paragraphs. Eventually, there’s a story, and the finished formula is nothing like the beginning thought, if there is a beginning thought at all.
I write. I look at the clock. It reads midnight. The last time I had written for so long was in high school.
I don’t like what I have written. I don’t like it one bit. But I don’t like a lot of things. It doesn’t stop them from happening.
*
I sat in my room for the next week, only coming out for dinner, and rarely for that. I was sick. I had yelled at her. For the first time, I had yelled at her. Words are rare things. They always remain, even if you do your best to make them disappear, to shove them off the edge of the Earth, they are always there, lingering, saturating the skin, drenching the heart, flooding the soul.
Then the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hi.”
I didn’t know how to start. “Hi.”
“How are you?” she asked, and I don’t know if she asked it to really ask it, or if she wanted to show me she still cared.
“I’m terrible. How are you?”
“Same.”
“I am so sorry. You have no idea.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“Then what did you want to talk about?”
“You and I.”
“Is there still a ‘you and I’”?
“I hope so.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I know you love me,” she said.
“I do.”
“You know how I know?”
“No idea.”
“Because I read the story you wrote about me. In every other story the main character died, but not me. You let me live forever, happy.”
“You read that?”
“Yes, and it was the nicest thing I’ve ever read.”
“I want you to be happy.”
“I am,” she said. “But there’s something else.”
I listened to her voice crack, her words fracture, her thoughts divide into a million pieces.
“What’s wrong?”
“I really don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Try.”
Through frightened tears, she said, “I’m pregnant.”
*
The story is finished and I go outside and light another cigar. The smoke stings my nostrils and my eyes. The flame burns faster than usual.
“I never thought it would come to this,” I tell the night air.
It is 1:00 A.M. I am tired. I cannot sleep.
*
I stood at the foot of the bed. Monitors and beeping machines surrounded her sweaty body. She was covered with nothing more than a nightgown. Her chest pleasantly moved up and down, up and down, up and down, in accordance to her lungs. She was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
And I had scarred that beauty. I had tainted it. Me.
The nurse walked past me and checked the machines and scrolled down some medical nonsense, as if anyone could read her writing anyways. She looked up at me and saw the dark circles under my eyes and the agony in my face.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“As good as anyone could be doing right now.”
“She’s gonna be okay.”
I nodded.
“You made the right decision.”
“With all due respect,” I said, “how would you know what the right decision is?”
“I don’t,” she said. “But, I do know you made the decision for a reason. And I’m sure that reason was true.”
“I don’t know what the reason is.”
“There’s always a reason,” she said.
I grabbed her unresponsive hand as my brow wrinkled. “I love her.”
The nurse walked to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Love is the greatest reason of all.”
*
I text her. Whether she will get in trouble or not doesn’t cross my mind. I tell her I will be there. This will make her happy. She can count on me.
*
“Do you regret it?”
“What?”
“What we did.”
We stood in the kitchen. My parents had went out to a summer blockbuster movie and said it was okay if she slept on the couch. She’d end up in my room. She always did.
“It’s taken you this long to ask me that.”
“It’s been a year.”
“I know,” I said. “Almost exactly.”
“So, do you regret it?”
I put the knife down next to the cut potatoes. “Everyday.”
“Me, too.” She put her arms around my neck and pressed her body against my back. “We’ll never be the same.”
“I know.”
“It’s always going to be a void between us.”
“I know.”
*
I park in the lot. The sun beats on my black attire. Sweat beads run down my face, from nerves or from the heat, I don’t know.
She sees me and smiles. She is beautiful. Yet, she is not as beautiful as she once was. I ruined that.
I watch her make the walk. She is happy. I try to tell her I am glad she is happy as we embrace, but the words won’t come. I’ve never had trouble writing words, but saying them is twice as difficult.
Everyone is eating, visiting, having a good time. I am there, on the bench, alone. I take the notebook from my pocket and rip out the last four pages. A new story. One of rebirth, of revitalization.
I fold it and approach her. I take her hand and open her palm. I lay the story there.
I walk out. I will never see her again.
