The Fragmented

Someone please send me something inspirational?  A picture, words, anything you fancy? 

I can’t write for the life of me today.

Hi all, it’s me again. I don’t know how many of you are out there that actually followed along with me as I wrote a book, but I’m back and in need of feedback and thought. I want to change Jake and Savannah’s relationship, for reasons that a select one of you know. I rewrote today how they met and I was hoping to get some thoughts on it. 

:)

I looked at the woman across the table from me and tried to guess her age. She still had deep brown hair that looked natural, but I could see a couple of grays sprouting out from the seams of her otherwise meticulously put together bun. She was wearing clothes that I think my mother would, and my mother had the distinct style of a forty year old. She had a couple wrinkles on her pale face, and that made me wonder if she was older, or if maybe she had just laughed and smiled a lot, and I began to realize that maybe neither of those would be a bad thing.

 She was looking right at me, staring with eyes as green as mine, and I think she knew I wasn’t thinking about the question at hand. Instead I’d gotten lost in haze again, and completely forgot what I was even supposed to be thinking about. She was looking up at me from a downturned face, the way a person does when they’re looking for an answer, which, I knew she was. And I, just like any other day, wasn’t exactly delivering.

            “Savannah?” she asked me.

            “Mrs. Conners?”  I replied.

            “Did you hear my question?” she asked, tapping her pencil against the questionnaire on the table below her.

            “Could you repeat it?” I asked.

            She sighed.

            “Which of the following most describes what brings you to this class,” she said exasperated. “To learn new techniques for general use, to learn techniques for a specific occasion, to improve techniques.”

            I thinned my eyes.

            “Listen, I know it’s a little ridiculous, but I have to ask these questions to everyone, all right?” she pleaded. “The community center requires all classes to fill out surveys to show that their space is being used adequately.”

            “The second one then,” I told her quietly.

            “Oh! An occasion,” she replied, showing the first burst of excitement I ever saw out of her. “What is it then?”

            “I’m making a cake for my boyfriend’s birthday in a month,” I told her, looking down at the table. “I just kind of want it to look nice and all.”

            Mrs. Conner’s nodded in delight. I would be the shining star of her Monday and Wednesday night cake decorating class.

            “Oh I can see why, Savannah,” she reassured me. “If you don’t mind, can you give me a few things that remind you of him, a couple of things we could incorporate into your final design to make it really special and personal to him?”

Ayden liked to laugh at the way my hair always would up in my face when we were on his boat in the summertime. I wouldn’t be able to see him as I desperately pawed the massive strands out of my face, but I could always hear him, the high pitched laugh that so opposed his naturally deep voice, booming over the sound of the sea rushing underneath us. By the time I would have it managed, he would be standing in front of me smiling, always ready to push that last piece away from my eyes. Bless his little heart.

“I’m glad at least you find it so funny,” I told him in July, smirking as I wrapped an elastic around the beast and pushing it into submission.

“Oh everyone does,” he reassured me. “They’re just much more polite than I am.”

Ayden’s younger sister Marlena and his friends Jasper Thorne and Mike Taylor nodded in a chorus of agreement. They reassured me that it was in its own way adorable though, and Ayden always talked about how lovely my ‘plume of brunette-ness’ was. I laughed uncomfortably as Ayden smiled at me and sat down on the seat beside me. I found it hard to believe that anyone there found it quite as adorable as my boyfriend did. None of them had to worry about plumes of their own. Marlena was twelve and blonde, and tan and lovely, and was beginning to understand it.

“Savannah, we need to chat,” Mike announced from across the deck. He was staring at me from behind reflective aviator sunglasses that were glowing gold in the late afternoon sun.

“Is that a fact?” I asked him.

“It is,” Mike replied, leaning forward. “Your friend um… Adriene, what’s her status, huh?”

I thinned my eyes.

“In what regard?”

“The relationship regard. Single? Attached? Semi-attached? She’s a looker and I think I’d like to get to know her. And I think she’s feisty.”

“And emotionally unavailable.”

Mike scoffed.

“That’s a phrase invented by girls who fear rejection.”

“I’m doing you a favor, Mike,” I assured him.

“I think I could make her available.”

“I think you couldn’t handle her.”

Mike laughed and looked at Jasper for support.

“Plus, she’s trouble.”

“She IS your friend, isn’t she?” Mike asked. “You should be doing her the honor of hooking her up with me. Instead you’re bashing her a bit Miss Lewis.”

“ I love Adriene,” I countered. “But I’ll tell you now, and it’s the last I’ll say about it… you wouldn’t have the same sentiments about her.”

“Trust me, man,” Ayden piped in. “She’d chew you up and spit you out.”

The three boys laughed at that thought for a few minutes as we bounded into the ocean, salty water spraying us as we leapt over the waves and moved into the vast mouth of everything. I should have just mentioned to Mike that he’d met Adriene several times, and had several opportunities to try and reel her in himself, but he just hadn’t taken the opportunity. Adriene and Mike had both been at the bonfire when Ayden asked me out in the most obnoxious way. They had both been intoxicated, yes, but both present, and if you ask me, Adriene has always been much more enjoyable when she was a little buzzed anyhow.

Ayden asked me if I wanted anything to drink, and I told him I didn’t. I preferred to watch as Marlena and her mother sipped home made cocktails on the boat out of their old Starbucks cups as not to spill anything as we all together bounded over the waves as we exited breakwater bay and made our way into open water with all the other daring white yachts in the distance. He shrugged and grabbed himself a soda out of the cooler before resting at my side. His warm tan skin against my pale one.

I smiled at him and put my hand on his knee. It was only there for a couple of moments before he brushed it away and checked the time on his phone.

“He really likes boats,” I told Mrs. Conners after a couple moments, and she eagerly wrote that down, her mind already reeling with ideas of blue icing waves and brilliant anchors.

“Anything else sweetheart?” she asked.

“Um… yeah, the beach, the ocean, football, barbeques, and the color red.”

“Awesome,” Mrs. Conners replied. “Thanks Savannah, just make yourself comfortable, and I’ll be all set to start in a couple minutes. I just need to get surveys from a few more people and we’ll be good to go.”

I nodded. “Excellent.”

She stood up,  but before she got too far, she looked back at me.

“What’s your boyfriend’s name?” she asked.

“Ayden.”

She smiled.

“I’m sure he’s going to love what you’re doing for him.”

I felt a knot tighten in my stomach, but did my very best to smile.

“Yeah,” I said quietly, “me too.”

Cake decorating class would serve two equally important purposes for me during November of my junior year in high school. The first was the more obvious one, and that was to do something special for my boyfriend, who happened to have a real aversion to special things. The second, and more terrible one, was to escape the home that had suddenly become comparable to a venus fly trap. In September, my mother and father had brought me into my own bedroom to tell me that the two of them were separating. My father had taken up residency in a hotel in Hallend Valley, where I was to go twice a week at my leisure, and the rest of the time I was to spend with my mother.

I’d looked back and forth between the two of them, and the tears in my mother’s slate blue eyes. I suppose I should have been more surprised about it, but the problem was that I wasn’t.

I was given my own work station in the cake decorating class, equipped with various tools of the culinary trade: measuring  cups and spoons, tools I’d never seen that looked more like they belonged by a dentist chair than in front of someone so uncoordinated, and various icings that were burst of colors in an otherwise disturbingly beige room. I was sitting in a group of mostly mothers and grandmothers. It took me only a couple of moments to understand that no one else my age would actually be coming.

I frowned at the bags of flour and sugar placed neatly before my station, and looked at the forty something sitting at the work station next to mine.

“I think we’re learning how to bake the cake itself as well,” she whispered.

“Lovely…” I said quietly.

Mrs. Conners, who I had actually previously met when she volunteered to run the snack stand at the football games on Friday nights last year, took her stage and smiled at her group of ten hopefuls.For the next hour, she would walk us through the most important part of any cake, the cake of course, and the different recipes we could choose from for our final product. She took us on an adventure through the vast lands of vanilla and its important differences from gold, and then indulged us in a sea of chocolate and the depths we could take it to.

I watched her eyes widen as she mapped out the benefits to each, and the ingredients and techniques they each required. She smiled as students raised their hands and made what she thought were funny jokes about dough and batter and all those hilarious things in the culinary land her head was in. I began to realize that maybe food was this woman’s entire life and it was what made her happier than anything else in this whole damn world. Then I started to wonder if maybe she and I were really that different. Dinner was and is my favorite time of day.

Within a few minutes I had decided on double chocolate for my batter, knowing that Ayden hated all things vanilla, and loathed strawberry with an even more fervent passion. I didn’t require a dive into the chocolate sea, but Mrs. Conners’ enthusiasm, I suppose, never hurt anything.

It was about three quarters of the way through that class when I first saw Jake Exedor, the person who would consume the rest of my next couple of years. He would stumble upon me by accident, and that was exactly how I would fall for him. In the orderly scheme of my whole life he was the purest fluke, and the one I spent years wondering about. When people asked me what it all came down to, him and I, and how we met and got together I would always tell them the same thing.

It was nothing more than the position of my neck at that moment and the volume of his sneaker.

Because boy did it screech as he and his friends stormed through the lineoleum covered floor of the community center, freshly revved off their basketball game in the back court. I looked up, and let me tell you, I was the only one who did so, as four boys ran past the closed door to the room we were in. Their faces flew by me like a blur in the door’s window, a couple of them glancing in as they stormed by in flashes of skin, hair, sweat, and swooshie shorts.

It wasn’t until a moment later one of them walked back, slowly, with one eyebrow raised. He looked into the room and looked directly at me, without an ounce of fear or a single lack of confidence. My mouth gaped open and I learned that I, as strong as I thought I was, could only maintain eye contact like that for a couple of moments, because I quickly looked back down and tried to hide until he vanished. I had never felt anything so direct in my life, anything so unrestrained. That stranger, that person who should have had no business to look at me, was unabashed in what he was doing, in his own personal admiration, and I had no idea how to take that or what to do.

So I waited, thinking it was an isolated incident, and this rare occasion of someone finding me so attractive that I had to be completely consumed in one moment would pass. But the thing about all that was, it just didn’t.