That was the day I’d turned six years old.
That was the day I was wearing a pink sequined dress with a frilly tutu skirt, and shiny black shoes strapped just the way they were supposed to be strapped.
That was the day I wore my mother’s coral lipstick, and a plastic, silver tiara sitting lopsided on my perfect coiffure.
That was the day I wore the pearls.
That was the day I grew up.
Outside, it was raining.
It was raining because that was the day my parents left me.
“Are they coming back?” I’d asked my uncle.
He’d tugged on his tie, and I’d known simply from the gesture that they never were. Oh, my parents weren’t dead. I wasn’t that lucky. What an odd and cold way to feel, I know, but with dead parents, maybe there would have been good memories, this hope that with their last breaths, they would have cared … just a little. Alive, they’d simply never cherished me. Alive, they’d given up. Alive, they’d abandoned me.
Outside, the rain poured.
That was the day I quit trying, not at life, just at myself.
That was the day I’d pulled the pearls from my neck and watched as the beads rolled from the carpeted stairs to the hardwood floor below, the clunk, clunk, clunk a loud reminder that I had a heart.
That was the day I’d pulled the tiara from my perfect coiffure, and then screamed, my fingers digging at the hairstyle, tugging my hair so hard my scalp burned.
That was the day I learned why my uncle stayed unkempt. Because if someone was already messed up, then maybe being put together wouldn’t hurt so much.
That was the day my uncle looked up at my reddened cheeks and smeared coral lipstick, his fingers pulling at that awful tie, and he said, “You’ve got this, Hawthorne. Together, we’ve got this. We may not do it right, but you’ve got to try. For my sake.”
Hawthorne wasn’t my name, but that day, it became my name. I often wondered why my uncle called me that, but that day it didn’t matter. The only words I heard were for my sake.
My uncle’s home wasn’t much of a home, and he was a very not typical father, but he climbed those stairs that day and tried unsuccessfully to straighten out my hair, his eyes reddening. That climb and his trying fingers were enough to make him a dad. He cried, and I cried with him on those stairs.
“For my sake,” he’d said.
The sobs were drowned out by the rain.
If you want to know the truth, this is a love story, but it isn’t the kind of love story you think it is. Because this story isn’t easy, it’s hard. This love story is full of fear. Life is downright scary, and if you survive it, no matter how easy you have it, then you’re brave. You don’t live life, you tackle it, jump on top of it, and pound the shit out of the earth all while it rains around you.
Life happens while it’s raining.
Life happens when you’re falling.
Life happens when you exhale.
Life just … happens.
For my sake.
11 years later …
Chapter 1
The first time I ever met him, he was sitting in the back of my last period English class. He was the kind of guy that girls looked twice at but didn’t approach, because no matter how attractive he was, there wasn’t much you could do with a guy who didn’t talk.
Maybe that’s why I noticed him. It wasn’t just because I sat next to him, it was because I wasn’t much for talking either. Our mutual respect for silence was the reason we were relegated to the back. The only difference between us was our appearance. He was handsome enough to be remembered. He was handsome enough to have poems written about him, the kind that called him solemn and stoic, the kind of brooding soul I’d always imagined Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights to have. I was just the strange, unkempt girl with the weird uncle and no parents. I was a bunch of sad stories.
Truth was, life had taught me that words were better spoken when they meant something. Which meant I spent more time talking to my uncle and to myself than I did to those my age. It’s funny, really, how much one moment in your life can separate you from the people you’re supposed to relate to. I’d lost that. I’d lost the need to talk about clothes, dating, and sex. I wanted to talk about the things everyone else wanted to forget; life and death and symbolism.
It was true. I was weird.
I’d only had three loves in my life: my uncle, books, and an overwhelming desire to become a philosophical chef with a Classics degree, because who doesn’t want to eat great food and spend hours lost in history?
It was true. I was weird.
And yet, in many ways, he was, too. So it began, this odd dance of sidelong glances and uncomfortable shifting, as if neither one of us wanted to admit the other was there across the aisle from the other, not talking. For half a year, I spent my last period pretending the guy didn’t exist, that the girls didn’t whisper about him, that the other guys didn’t throw him strange, murderous glares.