The Backyard

I am supposed to be cool. My mother is cool, my father is cool, my sister is cool, and my brother is cool. I suppose you could say I used to be cool. Back when I had my common sense, and could be a nice person once in a while. But now…now I’m not cool. Oh, sure, most everybody thinks I’m cool. At least they pretend too…but I’m not, at least not to myself. Although, of course, nobody has the same definition of cool as I do. They all think of cool as going out every night, even though you have mounds of homework to do, or making people feel bad to make yourself look better. Yeah I know that’s really screwed up, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong though, that’s not my definition. My definition is of cool is doing your homework even though everybody thinks it’s not cool to. Or standing up for the people that everybody else puts down because they haven’t got anything better to do. But most unfortunately, I’m not that person. I haven’t been that person since my best friend Olivia moved away back at the end of 7th grade.

She told me the day she left that she’d be back.
“It’ll only be a year or two!” She yelled as she leaned out the back window of her dad’s reddish orange pick-up truck with a dent in the right side.
“Promise you’ll write at least?!” I yelled after her.
When I think back now, I could have sworn I heard her hesitate when she answered me. But back then I took her words and kept them close to my heart.
“Of course.” The moment she uttered those words her car turned the corner of Chernate Boulevard. After the last strand of her vivid strawberry blond hair whipped past the street sign, I was devastatingly sad. Olivia had been my only friend at the time and had kept me grounded and sane. After she left I felt so alone in the world that I was desperate enough to do anything I could to make new friends.

Summer came and went. I spent most of my time writing letters to Olivia, or at least trying to. She never wrote back. Not once, not twice, and not three times either. Maybe she just didn’t feel like it, or maybe she just had better things to do. I doubt I’ll ever know. The rest of my time was spent looking at pictures of the two of us together. In every picture we were hugging, holding on to each other as if neither of us wanted to ever let the other go, except for one. It was taken the day we had had the only fight of our lives. In it, we were both standing on opposite sides of the room, determinedly staring in seemingly opposite directions. Olivia, always being the bolder one, had wanted to create and perform a puppet show for our entire grade the next day at recess. (We were 10 years old at the time) But I always have, and I always will, conform to what everybody else wants me to do, and let the way I act be governed by what they think. And so I refused, thinking they would make fun of us for doing something so childish at the wrinkly old age of the big one zero. But now that I look closer at it 8 years later, I see the signs that while we were mad at each other, we still cared about each other more than you can ever imagine; signs like the fact that even though we didn’t seem to be looking at each other, our eyes seemed to have been moving subtly in that direction. Or that we both seemed to be sagging, as though we couldn’t handle being mad at each other. So now that she was really gone, I seemed to be losing a part of myself. The part that she took care of, and made sure would always stay there, my conscience.

And so, as school started, and I entered into the 8th grade, I began to change. I was ruthless. I would make life miserable for nearly everybody, except those that I deemed worthy of my friendship. I called them my friends, and I treated them like friends, or at least better than I treated everybody else. I had only had one friend in my life though, and that was Olivia. These new “friends” didn’t even come close to filling in the gaping hole she had left in my life. When they came to my house they would treat it as if it had been marked to be destroyed. They would walk on the white couch lining the right side of the living room that my mother loved and tried her best to keep clean. They broke the lamp that my father had gotten as a gift from his great-grandparents when he had married my mother. They ripped up the rug, smashed nearly everything that they came across, and even once set fireworks off in the house. Not to mention that they always ate everything we had in the refrigerator. My parents though, didn’t punish me in any way. They didn’t kick them out of the house, or do anything that would be the norm for parents to do. Maybe they wanted me to realize that I was ruining my life on my own, or maybe they just didn’t know what to do. At first I didn’t mind. I welcomed the new freedom they gave me to do whatever I wanted and not get in trouble for it. I enjoyed being the center of attention of my friends and the whole school. I never did my homework, and I pretended to be one of them. After awhile though, I began to tire of it.

Somewhere in between the summer before freshman year and the beginning of it, I started to remember Olivia, and everything she had ever told me about the people she hated. In other words, the person I was turning into. Gradually, I began to lose interest in what my “friends” did, and all that they stood for. Most unfortunately though, I had already gotten in too far. I tried to tell them off and stop them from coming to my house, but they wouldn’t. They laughed in my face, and the one named Sharlene, who was laughing the hardest, let a big, “NOT IN A MILLION YEARS!” escape from her mouth with its perfectly placed blue lipstick. And so they stayed. They continued to defile the place I called home and take advantage of my unhelpful parents who would still not kick them out. My brother and sister were angry with me, as my “friends” had wrecked their stuff as well as mine. They would no longer talk to me, and would glare at me whenever we saw each other. The rest of my extended family was no better. When we visited their houses for the holidays (they would no longer come to ours because of my “friends”) they would merely sigh, look at me sadly and walk away when I got near any of them. Even our cat hated me now. Whenever I tried to pet her, she would hiss, and stalk away, her orange tail held high in the air. Basically, my life was in ruins. Ninth grade finished in torture for me. I failed nearly all of my classes because of all the trouble that my family gave me. It bothered me so much that I could not concentrate on my work. At school there was no one, as the majority of the students there were involved in the ruining of my life, and the rest of them hated me because I had been so horrible to them in the aftermath of Olivia’s move. But all hope was not lost. I knew that there was still one thing that could come and save me someday if I got lucky.

I had, of course, figured out by now that the reason I had gotten into this mess in the first place was because Olivia was no longer here to help me through, well, life. In addition to that, I had also figured out that to get out of this catastrophe, I needed Olivia to come back. But Olivia did not come back. The rest of high school went by in a blur. It consisted mostly of wallowing in my own self pity and wishing that everything could be happy again. I would stare at people on the street and wish to be them. Then I could leave my life behind and start over. Now I’m in 12th grade. Graduation is in two weeks. I’m not going to college. None would accept me with my dismal grades. I have no future to look forward to. It seems as if I’m going to be living in a house of people who either hate me or just don’t pay attention to me anymore for the rest of my life. I sit here, recounting my life, thinking of all things I’ve done wrong, and wishing that Olivia would some day come back and save me from this horrid mess. She’s the only one who can at this point, because she’s the only one that might still care about me.

It was 12:00 in the afternoon, and Penny Fasmond sat on her bed, surrounded by dark green blankets, the shade of green that you can only find in a box of Crayola crayons. Her room was nearly bare, besides a few bits of broken glass near the walls. There was a book shelf on one side of the room with an array of broken books and an empty desk on the other. Penny and her bed sat right smack in the middle. The only sound in the house was that of a muffled noise of smashes and raucous laughter coming from the backyard. Penny sighed and flopped down onto her back. It was as though she had pressed a button. The moment she had lain down, the doorbell had rung. It tinkled through the house shyly, giving off the impression that it was not used often. Penny sat bolt upright at the sound. Thoughts rushed into her head one by one. Maybe I’m going crazy, she thought, who would come here? Nobody comes here. They’re all too afraid to. They’re worried they might be attacked or something. Maybe it’s a robber…or a murderer…No, no, of course it isn’t! They wouldn’t ring the doorbell... Penny’s thoughts were then cut short as the doorbell rang again. This time it was short and impatient. Penny then decided to answer it, because if she didn’t, she was afraid that they might leave. She slowly got off her bed, walked out of her room, and proceeded to walk down the hall, the floorboards creaking when she stepped on them in places where the carpet had been ripped out of the floor. She finally reached the door and preceded turned the brass doorknob slowly, ready to slam the door if need be. But as the first crack of sunlight filtered into the lonely house, she forgot all about slamming door as she saw who it was, and let it swing all the way open, her mouth falling open, feeling faint. There, in the doorway, stood the one thing she had hoped would return to her home in Winnemucca, Nevada. Olivia Mansing stood on the other side of the door, leaning calmly against the door frame.
Penny stood stock still, hardly daring to believe her eyes. How could it be possible? Olivia…it had been so long. Five years was it now? And here she was, standing at the door as if was perfectly normal.
“So, are you going to invite me in or what?” Olivia asked, peering around Penny trying to look into the house.
Penny still did not say anything, but merely nodded and moved aside to let Olivia into the ruined house.
It was now Olivia’s turn to be in shock.
“Leaping Lizards! What happened here?! Did you guys have a hurricane or something?!” She exclaimed as she took in the surrounding peeling wallpaper and dirt spattered floor.
As she continued to look around, her gaze finally rested on Penny. And Penny knew, from the look that Olivia gave her that she knew it had not been a hurricane that had attacked the Fasmond household.
“It was me, wasn’t it?” She asked. “This is because of me.”
Penny nodded, and Olivia walked further into the house. She walked slowly through the long hall that led to the kitchen, looking terrified at what she had just walked in to. Suddenly, she stopped, as though she had bumped into something.
“What’s that noise?” She asked Penny, pointing in the direction of the backyard, from which smashing and laughter was still coming.
At these words, Penny seemed to come back down to reality. She realized that the solution to all of her problems was here, standing next to her.
“The source of this mess,” Penny said darkly.
Olivia seemed to immediately understand.
“I’ll be back,” Olivia replied, glaring out the window.
“You said that five years ago,” Penny said, daring to go into waters that she never thought she would be able to go into.
“Do you want them to be gone or not?” She asked, and without another word slid the screen door open, and stepped into the backyard.
What happened out there, Penny never found out. About 43 minutes after Olivia had ventured outside, she had given a scream of triumph and Penny rushed outside to see what had happened. All that was left of her “friends” were shards of glass and a couple of plaid leather jackets. Olivia was standing in the middle of the mess, stock still, a wild expression on her face.
“Olivia—“ Penny started.
But Olivia interrupted her. “Whatever happened while I was gone was bad, I’m sure,” she began. “But whatever it was, I don’t want to know. I won’t ask you about that, and you won’t ask me how I got rid of those…those…life ruiners. From now on, it’s just you and me. Like old times. I’ll help you put your life back together, and I’ll help you get yourself a future. I know I’ve been gone for a…well…a long time. But I’m here now, and that’s what counts. So take it or leave it.”
Penny stared at her childhood friend in awe. Even now, when her life was so terribly in shambles, Olivia could fix it. So as she nodded her head in agreement, she thought to herself, Olivia, you should be a repairman.


I based this story off of Book 22 from The Odyssey, and from Penelope’s problem with the suitors in her house.