Black and White Blues

“So, I noticed Ashley’s been avoiding you.”

That was Chloe Tyler. She was taller than I was, and almost as skinny. Her hair was this long, straight sheet that always seemed to catch the light just the right way to make it sparkle a brilliant amber color. She was on the girls’ basketball team, but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at her. When she wasn’t on the court, she wore nothing remotely athletic, and was never seen around the other basketball girls the way the others stuck together. And she always had this spacey look in her eyes, like she was always imagining herself somewhere else. She was beautiful, to boot. She had a few classes with me, and I remembered thinking of her as very attractive, even though I was preoccupied with Ashley. I suppose that’s what made it not-so-strange when, as I was eating lunch inside alone (it was another stormy day), she set her tray down at the seat across from me and said, “Ashley looks pretty down, huh?” one day soon after the shooting. It was almost like I expected her to do something out of the ordinary like that.

“Yeah,” I’d told her honestly, as we both looked over at the spot where she sat. She was alone too. Usually she had a small gaggle of friends around her, but not after the shooting. She was picking at her peas absent-mindedly. “I can’t blame her.”

“No kidding,” Chloe had said. “Your boyfriend getting shot is kind of traumatic.” Then she added, “Just think, if you’d tackled Ender a second earlier, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I felt a pang of guilt. “I know. I’ve thought about it a lot.”

“But the thing is, it did happen.” I wondered where she was going with this. “And if it hadn’t, Ashley wouldn’t be sitting there by herself. Jace would be there with her.”

I gave her a puzzled look. “So…”

She grinned. I was dazzled by her perfect smile. “Just let me say, sometimes, things aren’t always what they seem.”

I had no idea what she meant by that, but I accepted it all the same.

“For instance,” she continued. “You don’t seem to like Ashley, but I know you do.”

I nearly choked on my French fry. How did she know? I hadn’t told anyone, and I’d been careful to avoid being obvious about it.

She laughed at me. Again, her smile was incredible. “It’s actually not that hard to see. You can try to hide it all you want, but the more you try, the more awkward it seems to everyone else. Once you get feelings for somebody, it’s nearly impossible to hide.”

So the word was out that I had a crush on Jace Valentine’s girlfriend. Great. Just what I needed. But Chloe didn’t make that big of a deal about it. And I figured she was probably one of the only ones who knew. She did seem to have extraordinary perception. And besides, who paid attention to the workings of Alex Winters’ love life? No one even knew my name at that school. Not yet, anyway.

The thing she’d said about things not being what they seem stayed with me ever since that first strange meeting. Afterwards, we formally introduced ourselves and had a chatted casually until the bell rang. It turned out, she didn’t really have any close friends either. Everyone was chased away by what she called her “eccentricities.” I took it to mean that spacey look in her eyes and the way she always seemed to be able to read my mind. That and the fact that she replaced the jelly in her PB&J sandwich with hot sauce. But I didn’t mind. In fact, it was strangely endearing. She seemed to have no walls whatsoever around anything in her life. She was completely open with me and talked to me like we’d been best friends since middle school. It wasn’t as disturbing as you might have thought.

It wasn’t long until we really were best friends, albeit of an unusual sort. We didn’t see each other much outside of school, but during school, we spent a lot of time together. We had more classes together than I’d thought, and in classes with more lenient teachers, we’d changed seats to be by each other. It made the days much easier to get through.

Now we were sitting at lunch once again, me with my usual French fries and her with an avocado- and orange-topped piece of chocolate cake (she called it “chocolate fruitcake”), and she pointed out, “So, I noticed Ashley’s been avoiding you.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Usually she waves back when I wave in the halls, but not since what happened after the choir concert.”

When I’d told her about what had happened the very next day, she said she already knew. I was surprised when she admitted that Tommy Watts, the frightfully scrawny boy from health class with the gauged ears, had seen us from inside. That wouldn’t have mattered if Alicia Talantar, self-proclaimed Gossip Queen, hadn’t overheard him mentioning it in passing to his buddies. Unfortunately, Alicia hadn’t heard all the details, so now the word on the street was that we’d full-on made out. In some versions, we’d gone home together. It wasn’t looking good. I hated high school.

“Well, from a girl’s point of view,” Chloe said, gulping down a piece of her horrid concoction, “I’d say that she’s trying to live it down. I mean, you’ve heard what everyone’s been saying, right?”

I nodded. Of course I had.

“She was caught ‘making out’ with you, when she’s already got Jace. I’m sure he’s upset enough as it is, and now you two are the talk of the town. She’s gotta keep clear of you until this thing dies down so people don’t get any more ideas.”

I looked back at Ashley again. For a second, I thought she glanced up at me, but before I could tell whether it had really happened or not, she was back to poking her peas. I cursed myself for what I’d done. If I hadn’t gone after her after the concert, she wouldn’t be looking so down. And, I remembered once more with chagrin, if I’d tackled Ender a second earlier, she’d still be happy, surrounded by friends. I only wanted to make her happy, and I only made it all worse. I was a curse.

*

Mr. Salazar had gone home for an emergency, and there was no time to find a substitute, so his algebra class was to be combined with Mrs. Brown’s advanced class. As Chloe and I crowded into the back of the classroom, I noticed a small bouquet of white flowers sitting on one of the desks. I was curious, but as the room filled up with kids, no one sat there. The kids on either side of the desk looked for a card, but there was none. The tardy bell rang, and still, no one sat in that chair. Mrs. Brown stood to begin her lecture. Then the door squeaked open, and a sullen-faced Ashley shuffled in. I remembered the first day in biology where I first saw her, and how much she’d changed. Instead of looking tan and healthy, she looked pale and sickly. She no longer smiled at everyone with confidence, but kept staring at the floor, hunched over, almost dragging her bag behind her. She hurried across the room to avoid the stares. A few kids whispered and giggled, and I knew she heard what they were saying. I felt so bad for her. And again I was reminded it was all my fault.

The flowers were on her desk. When she saw them lying there, she hesitated to even approach them. When she sat down, she just looked at them, surprised and confused. There were more whispers. Finally, she grabbed the bouquet by the stems, the stiff plastic wrapping crunching loudly, smelled them once, and set them beneath her chair.

I thought they must be from Jace. Maybe he was apologizing for being a jerk, like she’d told me about. I wondered why he didn’t leave a card, though. I saw someone look back at me suspiciously. They thought I must have done it. Chloe actually leaned over and asked me if those flowers were from me.

I shook my head. “No. I have no idea who they’re from.”

“Bet you it’s Willy,” she joked. Willy was the super-nerd a few math classes up who recently had taken a shine – more of an obsession – to Ashley. He was convinced that the stars told him they were a perfect match. No matter how many times Ashley tiredly explained that she already had a boyfriend, he kept trying to ask her out.

I laughed. It was likely. Still, even if they were from Willy, they would have had some kind of card with them. Mrs. Brown began her lesson, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was still watching Ashley, head on her arms, blocking out the light and sound around her, and thinking about the mysterious flowers.

*

That night, I sat down with my guitar to think. I’d let my calluses weaken over the past few months because of various factors that kept me from my guitar, so now my fingertips hurt a bit when I pressed down on the strings. It was satisfying to feel the familiar curves of the instrument under my arms, though. It felt like hugging an old friend after being away for a long time, or slipping into a favorite jacket after dying to wear it all summer long.

As I strummed out the opening riffs to a milder version of “Don’t Wait” by Dashboard Confessional, my mind wandered back over everything that had happened over the past week and a half since Ender shot Jace. Ashley’s life had gone from good to bad that quickly, and it hadn’t taken long for it to show. I wondered what Ashley meant when she’d talked about Jace being a jerk. Was he hurting her? I hoped not. I didn’t imagine a cripple would really be able to hurt her too badly. But then again, he still had his left arm. Actually, he should have been back in school by that time, but I’d heard that his parents were keeping him home until he fully recovered. They were with him on the whole football obsession, apparently – if their son couldn’t play football, then what was the point of sending him to school? I wished my parents were that cool. It didn’t seem fair that Jace had not only the girl, but the cool parents as well. Maybe he deserved to be shot. Karma, and all that.

The sky glows

I see it shining when my eyes close

I hear your warnings but we both know

I’m gonna look at it again.

That got me thinking about Ender, and what must have been going through his mind right before he pulled the gun. A lot of anger, obviously. But anger, they say, is a secondary emotion, a reaction caused my some other emotional stimulus. He was jealous. He was probably scared. He was lonely. Even the kids who’d known Kadmus didn’t know much about him, other than he liked to draw. It seemed like that was all he ever did. His life was in that sketchbook. I knew what that felt like, to put your life into something. It was a lot easier to do than actually living. After I lost contact with Becky… I’d put my life into my guitar. Ender and I really weren’t so different.

Don’t wait, don’t wait

The road is now a sudden sea

And suddenly, it’s deep enough

To let your armor down

To let your armor down

To let your armor down.

As if on cue, the phone rang, loud and shrill. I stopped playing and just stared at it for a moment, suddenly scared of who might be on the other end. It rang again. I carefully set down my guitar and walked over to it. I didn’t have caller ID in my room, but decided to answer anyway. It could have been Chloe calling to ask a question about homework, or Jessica calling from college to catch up with Mom.

“Hello, is this Alex? Winters?”

The last voice I expected to hear on the other end was Ashley’s.

My heart sped up, like it always did. I worried that she could hear it over the phone. It sounded very quiet over at her house, or wherever she was. She was barely more than whispering. Immediately I thought something must have been very wrong. “Yeah,” I say, as casually as possible, Chloe’s voice in the back of my head, repeating, “the more you try to hide it, the more awkward it seems to everyone else…” “What’s going on?”

“Um… This is Ashley,” she began. “I just wanted to say… I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For… Monday night,” she admitted. The next part came in a rush. “I mean, what happened after the concert, how I… kissed you. I didn’t mean to, it just sort of happened, you know…”

I had to strain to understand everything she said. Her voice didn’t sound so good, like she’d been yelling a lot. Or, maybe it was like Ender’s voice – it was getting hoarse from disuse. That thought frightened me. “Yeah…” was all I could think of to say.

“I was just having a really bad day, and you were there, and I just… lost it, I guess. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for leading you on, because…” she paused. I braced myself. “I… don’t even know you, you know? I barely learned your name…”

I nodded. When I realized she couldn’t see me, I repeated, “Yeah,” quietly into the phone.

“So… that’s all I wanted to say,” she confessed with finality. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

I wanted to know how she’d been and how Jace was doing (even though I wasn’t happy about the idea of him being her boyfriend instead of me, I knew she still cared about him and I wondered how she felt about the whole thing). I wanted to apologize for the things that people had been saying about the two of us. To be honest, I wanted to ask her if she’d like to go grab some dinner and a movie with me on Saturday night, but I didn’t say any of this to her. Instead, I just listened to be buzz of static quiet from her end of the phone.

“But thank you for the flowers.”

“I didn’t… do those.”

She paused. “It wasn’t you?”

“No,” I told her honestly. I left out the part where I wished it was.

She didn’t say anything after that, except that she had to go, and I heard the connection end. That was it; it was over. Like the kiss, I’d always wanted her to call me, but it didn’t feel as good as I’d thought it would. Instead of me giving my number to her, she’d probably found it in the student directory. And she didn’t call to try to convince me to ask her out, she’d called to apologize for the other thing I’d always wished she’d do, and to thank me for the first gift I hadn’t actually given her.

So far, a lot of firsts were being ruined by my stupid mistakes.

I picked my guitar back up and kept playing.

Well, you get one look

I’ll show you something that the knife took

A bit too early for my own good

Now let’s not speak of it again.

*

Chloe and I approached my locker, both in fantastic moods, considering everything that had been going on, following our regular morning routine before first period. We were talking about the movie she’d just gone to see the night before. It was an intense thriller, and I’d been wanting to see it, but she kept spoiling bits of the plot for me. I hummed defiantly as she tried to tell me who died next and I worked with the combination lock.

When I opened it, we both stopped.

On a thick sheet of white art paper that looked like it was torn from a spiral binding, a message was scrawled in red ink.

Stay away from her, or I’ll have to shoot you too.