Writing Exercise #3- Jessica Ste. Croix

I bent down to pick up another rock, curling my fingers around one, cold and damp from the rain that had recently ended. I threw it hard, watching it soar and miss the streetlamp above my head. Without bothering to brush the grit off my hands, I reached for another one. The streetlamp gave off a dim yellow light that reached only as far as the edge of the street, leaving the woods a dark mystery of ferns and trees. The light extended farther down the street, and faded a few feet before it crossed into the next lamp’s territory. Under that lamp, the next one down, Tucker and is ex-girlfriend were fighting once again. I tried to block out hr high-pitched voice and his low mumbling, but out on the back roads there wasn’t any noise to cover it up. I sympathized with Michelle. For as much as I loved Tucker, for as much as he was my best friend, he had recently taken to borderline stalker behavior, which was something I had trouble supporting. A few more rocks sailed into the trees and vanished into darkness. I sympathized with Michelle because she had done nothing wrong. She had broken up with Tucker and he couldn’t move on. I was going on three weeks single. My boyfriend had left on my birthday no less, and I dealt with it. These things couldn’t be explained to Tucker. He didn’t understand how to not care when he drove by Cumberland Farms late at night and saw her standing at the pay phone in someone else’s shirt. Calling her mother to let her know she would be out for a few more hours. He didn’t understand why suddenly he called and no one answered, even when he knew she was home. When the lights were on in her bedroom window (which he knew of course, because he was sitting in the street outside). Three weeks. My boyfriend had gone to Las Vegas to see family. It was where he was born. There was a girl, he said she was on a ski team, who told him about the town where she grew up. She had lived on a cherry farm, and man, the way she described the cherry blossoms in May. Was it May? I couldn’t remember, although I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the point. I guess living on two acres and tilling six beds for tomatoes and peppers isn’t nearly as charming. Tucker was younger by almost three years. He was the age of my younger brother, on his way to college in a year. He’d grow up eventually. He’d forget this. I kicked a rock to the edge of the road and into a ditch. It tumbled down the embankment and splashed when it hit the water that had accumulated there the past couple of weeks. It ran in a fast stream, without much of a future, and emptied into the Turtle Pond a few hundred feet from where they had parked. The yelling had subdued. Michelle seemed to be more frustrated than anything lately. It seemed these late night meetings in the middle of nowhere were getting stale, although something good would come out of it right? Maybe Tucker would get slapped around one of these days, and he’d realize that these high school relationships were a petty waste of time. The things we could have spent time on. I had just graduated from college and planned to find a real job soon. But for now I was satisfied being a hostess by night and a grocery store cashier by day. It didn’t give me a lot of time, but I made good money, and there was always something to do late at night. I listened to see if they had finished, wondering if they would call me and let me know when they were done. I felt like a mother waiting for her child to come out of the doctor’s exam room, minus the sterile coffee tables and pastel wallpaper. Minus the snotty receptionists too. A black and orange salamander wiggled out of the grass and stopped a few feet from my sneakers. I moved toward it and it began slithering again, weaving itself between the larger rocks that were left in the road by the rain. Spring had been surprisingly rainy, and much of the state had flooded, which was unusual. Many of the roads had been closed down because of it and the ones that remained open were left with deposits of sand and rock. Cracks, like big gaping wounds, broke out on the edges where the pavement met dirt. Dirt roads, like the one we were on that night, just washed out, streams of water curling down the center of them, carving out miniature canyons. If I had known they’d be talking this long I would have walked down to the pond. I hadn’t been there in over a year, the last time being right before Lindsey Marten’s body was found there. I was thankful it wasn’t me who found her, although it was such a common hang out for people from school I suppose it easily could have been anyone. I hadn’t known her very well, but Tucker did. She was younger too, although her older sister, Emily, and her cousin liked to make not-so-subtle comments to one another as they passed by me in the halls in middle school. I caught most of what they said, blocked as much as possible from my memory. It bothered me then, although later I realized that to them it didn’t matter what they were saying as long as they were saying something. Those aren’t the kinds of things you hold onto. I didn’t hate Emily, or her cousin, for doing what kids do in school. When high school came they matured. They stopped talking to me altogether and it was perfectly fine with me. More often than not people have told me high school was the best time of their life and they’d go back in a second. I wouldn’t go back unless it was kicking and screaming, but kicking and screaming is just the way you get through things sometimes. At Lindsey’s funeral, I had stood in the back of the church and waited impatiently for the service to be over. I had followed Tucker to the cemetery and rolled the card with Lindsey’s name on it between my palms in the cold. The day had since become a quiet memory, maybe not something anyone but her family thought of anymore. Except maybe, passing by the pond, when they got that eerie feeling that something had gone wrong there, and they slowed the car a little as they drove by and remembered. I followed the salamander only a few steps down the road, then turned back, not wanting to stray out of earshot. I rolled a rock under my shoe and then picked it up, gritty and wet. I swung my arm out and threw it harder than the others and with more precision. It hit the glass of the lamp and a shower of silver fell to the ground. The light flickered out, made a hissing noise, and died. The street was dark except for the glow around Tucker and Michelle. They had stopped arguing and were looking in my direction. I turned and looked back toward the pond. Nothing would be remembered about this night on this road.