The Before

***This post and the post titled "Treetop Secrets" are two short story pieces I had to write for my Creative Writing class last semester.  I'm posting them on here because I really like how they ended up.  We had to write a third person point of view short story and a first person point of view short story.  Treetop Secrets is my 3rd person POV story, and The Before: Sophie's Story is my 1st person POV story.  They go together, and Treetop Secrets is meant to be read first.***

The Before:

Sophie’s Story 

The small town was empty.  The sun was brightly shining down, lighting up the world for children to play in and creating what was possibly the last warm day of fall.  The trees were all bare, leaving behind mountains of leaves perfect for jumping in.  And still, the town was nothing but an empty shell of itself.

 

I walked down the street, wondering where everyone had gone to.  The next door neighbor’s had an 8^th grade daughter and 6^th grade son, who, come to think of it, I hadn’t seen for quite some time.  At a house a bit up the hill, there were a few younger kids who were normally outside for hours each day this time of year, having an absolute blast in the leaf piles.  And the people down the street, in the house at the corner, they had two little ones, a toddler and a four year old who positively howled with laughter when I called him “Spiderman,” who both loved to be outside.  Each yard was empty with the toys left out as if their owners had simply ran in for a minute for a glass of hot chocolate.

Further down the road, at Main Street, a plastic bag and a sign for a long-past yard sale chased each other down the road, swirling and dancing in the light breeze.  At the corner, a look to my left told me the store and one of the gas stations were empty; a look to the right told me the same about the other gas station.  If its parking lot was an indicator, the more expensive restaurant of the two in town was also empty.  It was spooky, like the town had just up and left, leaving me behind like a forgotten-about childhood toy.

I made my way back home to where things were normal, back to my mother cooking dinner in the kitchen and my two-year-old baby brother, Landon, who was smiling up at the TV where SpongeBob and his friends were rehearsing for the Bubble Bowl.  “Horseradish is not an instrument either,” Squidward was telling Patrick.  I smiled and sat down with him, picking him up and plopping him down on my lap.  This was my favorite episode of the show I had grown up watching.

“Soph, I need you to run down and get milk for with dinner,” mom said from the kitchen.  I kissed my brother on the top of his head before lifting him off me.  Like they had for me, genetics had cursed him too with our grandmother’s unmanageable curly hair.  He followed me out to the kitchen, then turned around and went back into the living room when he heard SpongeBob start singing “Sweet Victory.”

“Can I just drive down?” I asked.

Mom kept stirring the rice and looked at me with an are you kidding me right now? expression.  “You’re 16 years old.  I’d have to go with you.  So, no.”

“Come on Mom, just this once.  Please?”

“Sophie, please.”  She sounded exasperated with me.

“It’d be way faster,” I pointed out.  Thinking fast, I added, “and besides I need the practice hours.”

“And it’s sweeeeeeeet, sweeeeeeet, sweet victory, yeah!  It’s ours for the taking. It’s ours for the fight,” came suddenly blaring from the next room.  I couldn’t help but to smile; Landon had found the volume button on the television.

“Sophia Grace.”  She went and turned the volume back down.  “No,” she told him, “that’s too loud.”  I knew I had to stop; she’d used my middle name as well as my full first name, which meant I was pretty much digging myself a grave at the moment.  I wiped the smile off my face and looked away when she came back in the room and turned her attention back to stirring the rice.

I started rummaging through her purse.  She glanced up at me.  “Getting money,” I answered before she could ask.  I grabbed a five and, shoving it into my pocket, headed out to the chilly night air.  The difference between earlier than day and nighttime now was astonishing.  It was as if the town had suddenly awoken from a deep sleep.  Voices and laughter blended together in a sort of song in the dark air.  I walked down the hill, stopping at the corner to say hi to Javier and his family.  He ran up to me and hugged me tight.  “Hey Spiderman!” I said with a smile.  He burst into the laugher I’d come to expect from him.  Was it my imagination running wild in the darkness, or was there a hint of twisted darkness in his brown eyes?  “I gotta go to the store, bud.”

“Can I come?”  I glanced over at his mom, who shook her head no.

“No, buddy, not tonight.  I have to get milk and then get back home quick for dinner.”

“I had dinner!” he exclaimed.  “I had -”

“¡Javier, vamanos en la casa!” his mother yelled, interrupting him.  “¡Ahora!”  He shrugged his shoulders, turned from me, and ran into the house.  His mother gave me a dirty look and let the door slam shut.  I rolled my eyes, half-wondering what that was all about, and walked down to the Family Dollar on Main Street.

On the way back home, milk in hand, something in the air of the town felt weird, different in a bad way.  I saw some people I didn’t recognize talking in hushed tones, huddled close together.  They quieted right down as I hurried past, and probably continued their conversation once I was out of earshot.  Vampires, I thought.  The town comes to life at night.  Then, scolding myself for having such a childish thought, don’t be stupid.  More like drug dealers than vampires.

“It took you almost 20 minutes!”  Mom screeched at me as I walked in the door.

I glanced over at the clock, then looked down at my feet.  “Long line,” I muttered, shrugging my shoulders.  Mom rolled her eyes, clearly not believing my lie.  I handed her the milk, only to be yelled at again.

“Jesus, Sophia!  Two percent, that’s what we get.  Not skim!”

I slammed her change down on the counter.  I knew she was under stress from work, knew she was angry with Landon’s father because he hadn’t sent the child support check in about 3 months, but I just couldn’t get myself to really care.  “Seriously Mom?!?  I didn’t have to get anything at all!  Just... freaking... be happy with that!”  I ran to my room before she could respond and emptied my piggybank onto my bed.  Quickly, I looked over the money I’d been saving.  There were five twenties, at least.  I folded the bills and placed them carefully in my pocket, making sure they wouldn’t fall out.  “I’m going for a walk,” I said coolly.  “You don’t have to save me dinner.”

“You’re not going anywhere.  You’re sitting down and eating dinner with your brother and I.  We’re having chicken and rice.”  I opened my mouth to protest - chicken and rice again? - but she continued before I could get a word in.  “You’re going to eat it, and you’re going to like it.”  The thought of leaving was the only thing that kept me sane during that damn dinner.

Later that night, after dinner, I laid in my bed, staring up at the ceiling of the room Landon and I shared and thinking about how different things would have been if my father had been around when I was busy growing up.  Though I’d never so much as seen a picture of the man, I’d always been “daddy’s girl.”  Mom spent far too much of my childhood putting down the man I idolized.  When the anger got to be too much, I quietly got out of bed, opened the window, and snuck out.  It was ok to do, I figured, because Dad would’ve let me.

I stayed in the darkness, avoiding streetlights and cutting through the neighbors’ back lawns.  Before I knew it, my feet had carried me to the lake at the edge of town.  The full moon reflected on the water.  I tossed a rock into the blackness and watched the moon’s watery image shimmer, break apart in the ripples, and come back together once it had calmed.  I heard my mother’s voice in the back of my mind.  If I’d been older, I would have wanted you more.  Shut up.  He was a drug addict.  No he wasn’t.  I was protecting you.  Even if he wanted to be in your life, I wouldn’t have let him.  That’s a lie!  He cared about me.  He was more of a sperm donor than a father to you.  Another lie.  It was all her fault.  She wouldn’t let him in my life.

“Kid, you buying?” I heard a deep voice ask.  I couldn’t place the voice to a name.  You can’t go out.  I need you to babysit.  I looked around to find the source of the voice.  You could’ve been a good daughter if I’d been older.  Half hidden in the trees stood a big man I might’ve recognized if his hood had been down and I’d been able to see his face.  You’re staying at your grandmother’s tonight, maybe tomorrow too.  “You buying?” he repeated.  I recognized his voice as that of Javier’s father.  I wondered if he recognized me.  Probably not; he was probably too drugged out to be able to pick out his own kids from a crowd.

In my mind, my mother wouldn’t leave me alone.  He’s dead.  It was an overdose.  Maybe now you can stop living in your fantasies of the man he wasn’t.  I was shaking as I remembered this conversation too clearly.  I was fourteen.

“I’m going to the funeral then.”

“No you’re not.  You’re babysitting.”

“What are you doing that you can’t watch him?!” I’d shrieked.  “He’s your baby, not mine!”

“I’m going to the funeral.”

“For a man you haven’t seen in the past fourteen years?”  My hands were shaking and I was breathing hard, as if I’d just run a long race.  “Why do you get to go and I don’t?!  He was my father!”  Her only answer was to smack me, hard, across the cheek.

I snapped back into reality.  “Yeah.”  I touched my hand to my left cheek, half expecting it to be hot from the hit.  “What’ve you got?”  If they’d worked for him as an escape from her, they’d work for me.

*          *          *

It had been at least three nights since I’d been home, I thought anyway.  It might’ve been four.  The past few days and nights had been a blur of colours, hazy images that may or may not have been nothing but my imagination, and strange thoughts that weren’t my own.  I was low on cash already; the marijuana I’d bought to smoke, and angel dust to lace it with, had cost me nearly everything I had, but it was worth it to escape.  I needed more.  I craved it, the crystalline powder especially, with every ounce of my being.  I couldn’t go home.  But I had to.  If I could get in while she was at work and Landon was at the sitter’s house, I could get some of her money.  I needed it.  Had she even called to report me missing?  At least he was planned for.  I had time to plan to love him.  I shook my head, trying to force her out.  Why hadn’t I seen any posters of myself, with big blocky text saying “MISSING” at the top?  She didn’t care.  Bitch.

*          *         *

The sun was up for several hours, probably - I wasn’t wearing a watch - before I made my way back home.  I took a minute to make sure her car was gone before grabbing the key from the flowerpot on the side of the porch and going inside.  I missed being here.  I missed my brother.  I missed dinner being cooked for me each night.  But I needed money more than I missed any of that.

I pocketed two, three, twenties and a ten.  That should be enough.  What the hell do you think you’re doing?!  I closed my eyes tight, trying to forget everything about her.  This wasn’t my house, my life, any more.  She didn’t matter to me; I could make it all on my own.  The house groaned and creaked.  I looked around wildly.  Nothing.  No one.  Just the noises an old house makes.

I knew I wasn’t going to return again, so I wandered around the house, taking everything in.  I needed one last memory of how life was.  The mirror hanging in the living room showed a girl who looked like a mess.  Her blonde curls hung limp around her dirty face.  The mascara she had applied so carefully a few short days ago had run down her cheeks.  Her eyes were wide with fear, but red from a lack of sleep.  It took me a minute to realize the mirror was showing me myself.  Except that I wasn’t myself anymore.  I don’t know who I was.

A short stack of wallet sized pictures of Landon sat on the little table in the living room.  She must’ve taken him for pictures at Wal-Mart.  I smiled down at the top picture, then picked it up and put it in my back pocket, carefully so it wouldn’t bend.  “I love you, Landon,” I said aloud to the empty house.

And then it was time to leave. 

*          *          * 

I was invincible.  I was larger than life, stronger than whoever holds the world record for strength.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, a weak voice was telling me the opposite of what I knew to be true at that moment.  It was telling me that it was just the drugs making me think I was someone I wasn’t, but the bigger part of me told me the truth.  Nothing could hurt me.

I heard the truck coming before I saw it.  I ran to the middle of the lane, to right between where the headlights would be shining.  I stood up straight, with my arms out and my head hung back.  I imagined I looked a bit like a cross, and wondered for half a second if that was ironic or not.

I wanted to count the stars.  I wanted to see the brave, handsome, young man my brother was going to grow up to be.  I wanted to be a better daughter.  I wanted to know my father.  I closed my eyes and knew there was no time left to run from where I stood.  And no time for the driver to stop.