Chapter 680: 69 ~ Annie is Okay-5

I nodded, extending my free hand behind me to grasp the flat square casing, feeling the smooth and cool surface underneath my fingertips, and I brought it in front to show him, and I watched as he grinned and then laughed, reaching for the case and held it in his free hand, reading the label I had scribbled on in black Sharpie over a single strip of masking tape that I had stuck to the front of the homemade CD case—OTHER HANS ZIMMER SOUNDTRACKS. “I figured that we were kind of due for his other works. The Lion King, Inception, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Sherlock Holmes are on there. I’m not exactly a master when it comes to burning soundtracks so you’ll have to bear with me.” He gave my hand a small squeeze, smiling softly at me. Love, I thought as I gazed at that smile, directed for me and only me. This boy loves me. “It’s perfect.” . . . I still had one last place to go before I left Shiloh once again and return to the lake house where my mother had probably abandoned her gardening gloves with floral prints and trowel on one of the white wicker chairs with turquoise cushioning and began to fry the pork chops and stir the green beans in a pot, and with the thoughts of holding onto Mrs. Jones’ hand as she listened to her daughter’s last words, of Reese standing up from the porch swing to call out after me, and Orion admitting that he loved me, all of this swirling together in my mind as I ate, but there was one person I still had to see before I left, and I had been avoiding her for months, ignoring her presence or lack thereof in my life, and pressed my foot down a little further on the accelerated when I passed her, where she resided now with her wilted bouquets of flowers gathered around her and the words Loving Daughter were graved into a slab of stone with an angel on it, perched on a cloud, and looked down, as if she were protecting those she left behind. They had installed the gravestone a few weeks ago, around the time I had collapsed and was admitted into the hospital, and I had left without even glimpsing it from the car window as they drove me to the lake house, but today as the sun began to slowly glide away from the center of the sky and dip down into the horizon, the glowing rays of illumination faintly obscured by the auburn leaves of the trees, I knew it was time that I finally saw her after months of pretending that she wasn’t there, that she had gone somewhere else much more luxurious than six feet down. The leaves that had fallen from the canopy of trees crunched underneath the soles of my shoes as I ambled toward the pale gray gravestone, oranges and reds like fire in the bottom of my gaze, and I could see a bouquet of wilted, red roses laying against the stone, the earth still fresh around the edges of the gravestone, and I stuffed my hands into my pockets. Roxanne Jones was carved into the rectangular stone, glazed so it gleamed underneath the rays of the setting sun, and I crouched down in front it, and traced my finger around her name, a smile softly creeping against my lips as I ran my finger around the engraving of the R until my index finger touched the tail of the S. The anger I felt toward her slowly began to slip away from my grasp as I sat there with my legs crossed on the ground in front of the stone, with the moisture from the dirt dampening my jeans, with one hand stuffed into the pocket of my pea coat, and the other resting on the sleek, cool surface of her gravestone, and I felt something blooming within me that felt soft and gradual, something like that felt like peace after a moment of staring at her name in a place I never expected to find it a few months ago. I didn’t felt as if I were trapped in this forever that she left me in anymore, drawing her hand away from mine and leaving me in the dark, fumbling around and pressing hands against the walls in search of some kind of light. Some things, as I realized, weren’t about me or even us, but only her. And as I looked down at her gravestone, finally united with her after months of trying to learn to live without her, I realized that her death was one of those things—it was about her. But I didn’t need to learn how to live without her anymore, struggling to forget who she was or what she meant to me, how she had changed me from this shy and docile girl into something that actually felt beautiful and strong, something that could survive on her own but chose not to, and that was because of her, even if she wasn’t here to see it. I wished that she hadn’t left, that she had told someone how terrible things really were for her or that her mother had found her but a few minutes earlier before her heart stopped and she slipped away into the early hours of the morning, closing her eyes to this world, maybe wondering about Annie—I want to know if Annie is okay, she had murmured into the phone that night, and I now realized that Annie was her, just as she always said it was, and now she was waiting to see if she could really ever truly be okay—but I was grateful for the few moments of her life that she gave me, extending her friendship toward this lonely girl who needed her more than she ever thought she would and missed her more than she thought she would ever have to. I slipped my hand out of the pocket of my pea coat, the October chill cooling my fingers white as I reached for one of the stones that were scattered in the freshly upturned dirt around the gravestone, and I grasped the cold pebble in my fingers, and I leaned forward, pressing the edge of it against the gleaming and slanted surface of the headstone, just below her name and above the date she was born, and I carved the answer to her last question, the last thing she would ever ask me, and I smiled with a bittersweet lump growing in my throat as I gazed at what I had messily scratched into her headstone, and knew it was true—for both of us. Annie is okay.