i wonder what that looks like

Pat and I parked by the curb outside my house. We ate ice cream and listened to Eminem in the dark, and at 10 p.m. Pat exclaimed that he was supposed to be at Mark's already. He bounced his knee and stared at me over his chocolate chip cookie dough Blizzard, because there's no polite way to tell your girlfriend to leave.

I'm nobody's top priority anymore. Pat eagerly awaits the activities he and his friends will partake in later in the evening. Nick walked away mid sentence to talk to Di on my birthday. My mom tells me every night that no, we can't go out for coffee, she has to walk ten miles.

California was disappointing. I spent five days there as opposed to Pat's two weeks. He left a week before me so he could have "alone time" with friends and family. And, due to his mom's indecisiveness, my parents paid twice as much on plane tickets. Mornings and afternoons were spent making pancakes for breakfast, swimming, watching movies with a bowl of popcorn between us, and playing arcades. But every night at 10 p.m. Pat took off in the Camaro and returned at 4 a.m. so exhausted he fell asleep in his clothes and woke up at noon. It defeated the purpose of me arriving a week after him in the first place. I spent most of the trip angry and lonely.

Wednesday, I filled an empty Aquafina bottle with icy water, fished for my house keys under the jewelry and the crumpled dollar bills and the ticket stubs on my nightstand, and left to visit Pat at Pizza Hut. After walking a few blocks, I saw his little boxy red car hugging the street's winding curves. He pulled over and popped the door open for me and said I could tag along for a couple of hours. One place Pat delivered to, a cluster of boys poured out of the backyard and formed a semicircle around him. They emptied their pockets and gave him handfuls of quarters and dollar bills and probably buttons, or something.

On Thursday I woke up at 9 a.m. and showered (with grapefruit-scented body wash) and browsed random facts and made chocolate chip cookies. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that I had forgotten to mix the chocolate chips into the cookie dough until the first batch was halfway done. I frantically removed the cookie sheet from the oven with a yellow oven mit adorned with bunny ears and shiny black eyes and added chocolate chips to each cookie by hand. On the plus side, every cookie now has the perfect amount of chocolate chips - too many.

A school newsletter arrived in the mail a week or two ago announcing Mr. Dockin's death. Two weeks into my sophomore year, he was diagnosed with skin cancer for the second or third time. Everyone thought he would be fine, because people aren't supposed to die before they turn thirty. He died on July 8th. He was engaged to be married this fall. He was my favorite teacher in ninth grade.

Pat read in a book that if you drill a hole through the center of your chest, your ribs will pop open like a purse.