…like it just happened.
Malyn Reed
Nashville, TN; 1999
I hated that mommy was sick. She never played with me anymore and was always in her bed. Daddy tried to play with me when he was home, but he didn’t play the way mommy did. The only one who played with me like mommy did was Grandmama. She sang to me, too. I loved to hear her sing.
And then there was D.
“Who are you?” I asked as I looked at the man who always seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“I am yours,” the strange man said.
“Mine?”
“Yes, my sweet Malyn. I am here for you. I am yours now, and one day you’ll be mine.” He smiled at me, but instead of making me feel good like smiles were supposed to, it scared me.
“I don’t want to be yours,” I said as a tear ran down my cheek. “I want my mommy.”
“So do I, sweet Malyn. So do I.”
I got up and ran out of my room and into my mommy’s and daddy’s room and jumped up on their bed.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” Mommy asked.
“D scares me.”
She rubbed my hair and hugged me tight. “You won’t have to worry about him much longer, sweetie. I promise.”
That was the last time I got to lay with Mommy in her bed. I miss her. I miss her so much.
Nashville, TN; 2001
“She just doesn’t understand,” I heard Grandmama say into the phone. “She thinks he’s still gone on a business trip and that he’s still comin’ back.” When I walked into the room and sat down on her lap, she told whoever she was talking to bye and hung up the phone. “Well, hey, honey. I thought ya were still sleepin’.”
“No, I had a bad dream and it woke me up,” I whined as I lay against her chest. “When is Daddy coming home?”
She took a deep breath, making my head rise and fall, and I thought my question had made her mad. But when she squeezed me tight and kissed the top of my head, I knew she wasn’t mad.
“Malyn, honey.” She turned me toward her in her lap. “Ya know how your mommy’s been gone for a few years now?” I nodded. “Well, your daddy’s with her now.”
I hated that I was making her sad. I reached up and wiped away her tears. “He’s with Mommy?” She nodded. “Forever?”
“He was in... an accident that took him to be with your mommy. But I know for a fact that he didn’t wanna go. He loves ya so, so much, just like your mommy. They both still love ya, honey.” She kissed my forehead. “They just have to love ya from far away.”
“I wanna go far away, too,” I cried.
She wiped my tears like I had hers. “But then I’d be alone. I need ya here with me, Malyn. And when the time comes, you’ll see ‘em again.”
I felt a small glimmer of hope. “I will?”
“Yes, ya sure will. But until then, it’s gonna be you and me, okay?”
Even though I still didn’t completely understand why they both left me, I still nodded. “Okay.”
“I love ya, Malyn.”
“I love you, too, Grandmama.”
Nashville, TN; 2011
I hate when the anniversary of 9-11 rolls around. I wonder how long there will be 9-11 anniversaries. I understand the importance of remembrance, but I don’t like remembering. And this was big number ten. Ten years. It didn’t seem like my dad had been gone that long. But then again, it also seemed like he’d been gone forever.
I wish he’d just died of natural causes or in a car wreck. At least those don’t have anniversaries and sad videos all over the news. But something so public and as tragic as the World Trade Center attacks puts his death to the forefront year after year.
I remember the first time I saw the towers fall on TV. I started not to watch, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away, knowing he had been in one of them. Maybe it was masochistic, but I had to watch. I was only able to watch it that one time, but once was all it took to have the image burnt into my mind. Yes, watching it had been very masochistic.
I had always wondered which one he’d been in. I hope he was in the first one, right where the plane hit, not knowing what hit him. Unlike my mom’s death, I hope his was quick and fast.
I miss them. I miss them both so much. I’m so glad I’ve got Grandmama. I don’t know what I would’ve done without her. She’s made the anniversaries, and all the days in between, much easier to live through.
Nashville, TN; 2013
I hate school. Well, it’s not school that I hate as much as the students who attend it. I’ve been with the same, mean kids since kindergarten and they have only gotten more insufferable with each passing year.
When we were younger, they made fun of me because I had ‘imaginary friends’. At first, I didn’t understand what they were talking about; that they couldn’t see the people I saw. But once I started seeing—and talking to—these ‘imaginary’ people in public, Grandmama finally sat me down and explained to me that I had a special gift that no one else had—I could see ghosts. I didn’t understand at first, especially since I’d never believed in ghosts; I guess seeing is believing.
I soon learned to tell the difference between the living and the dead, which made my ‘gift’ much easier to deal with. It also saved me great embarrassment, no longer associating myself with ‘imaginary friends’. I made it a point to avoid them when possible and to never make eye contact with them. Ever.
Once I had my elementary years behind me, I was blindsided by middle school. If it hadn’t been for my best friend, Melissa, who I affectionately call LeLe, I don’t know how I ever would’ve survived it. Being in the biggest middle school in Nashville didn’t help much, either. My sixth grade year was pretty unmemorable, but my seventh and eighth grade years made up for it, and not in a good way.
I somehow turned into a woman over the course of one summer, which I didn’t really notice until the first day of seventh grade. The same girls who I had went to school with my entire life ridiculed me to the point of tears and shame. Some accused me of stuffing my bra and even going as far as to say that I had on padded underwear to get boys’ attention. Padded underwear? Really?
The boys stared and whispered to their friends, which I tried my best to ignore. However, that’s easier said than done when someone is verbalizing what they assume I’d look like naked... or how good I’d feel naked... and many other things that involve me being naked.
“They’re just jealous,” LeLe would say, trying to console me when the not-so-developed girls in our class would tease me. “They’re just jealous that you won’t give them the time of day,” she’d tell me when the boys would hump the air around me. Those had to be the two worst years of my life... until ninth grade.
High school. You would think that students would mature as they get older, but high school proves that that is just a myth. The boys were not only more vulgar than the year before, but they had also become touchy-feely. At one point, I had to go to the office and talk to the principal about a certain boy who thought, even though we’d never dated or even been friends, for that matter, that I was his property. If he groped me once he groped me a thousand times, and with me being all of five feet, he towered over me. Luckily, it was his umpteenth offense and he got expelled. One down, twenty-something to go.
Then we have the girls. Girls are much worse than boys in many ways. Boys are just... boys. But girls—they are many things. They’re either your friend or they’re not; there’s rarely an in between. And the ones who aren’t your friend... well, they’re your enemies. There’s usually no reason behind their utter despise; they just don’t like you. Either you don’t look the way they think you should, or you don’t look at them the way they think you should, or you get attention from boys that they wish they could. I don’t know if all schools are like this, but mine is.
I almost got in a fight with this one girl because her boyfriend was staring at me in the lunch line—like I had control over his eyes. She tried to knock my tray out of my hands as I
turned around, and being caught off guard, I flipped it back toward her, raining my spaghetti all over her too-tight pink sweater. I involuntarily—well, sort of involuntarily—laughed, which set her off.
“Yeah, come at her again, you twit,” LeLe yelled at her like I had done it on purpose, as she stood there with her mouth gaped open. She glared at me so hard that I could literally feel it until the lunch lady came and broke up our glaring/smiling contest. We were bitter enemies after that day. And when her boyfriend asked me out the following week, it took all I had not to tell him yes just to spite her. But I knew if he’d ask me out while dating her that he would more than likely ask someone else out while dating me. I really didn’t want to associate myself with that kind of guy or the drama that would follow.
To be quite honest, I didn’t date much, period. When I did go out with someone, it was on a double date with LeLe; there was safety in numbers. I just didn’t trust most of the boys at my school, which was more my fault than theirs. But I could usually tell how they acted on a double date how they would act when we were alone. My instincts were usually right, and if I was ever in doubt, I would just introduce them to Grandmama.
Grandmama is my father’s mom who became my guardian when I was five. My parents both died when I was young and she gladly took over their role—took over, but not replaced; she always made that very clear. She is the one person in this world who I rely on the most, even more than LeLe, and she understands me, since she has gifts of her own. Not only is she my hippy-loving, country-singing, moo-moo-wearing grandmother, but she’s also my best friend.
She had talked about moving for a while, wanting to get away from the city. It surprised me at first, since she loved Nashville, but I could totally see where she was coming from. As much fun as me and LeLe always had, with there always be something to do, I still think it would be nice to get away; new scenery, new school, new people. The thought of moving didn’t sound so bad.
It’s now my junior year, which has surprisingly not licked too badly. Now that I wear clothes that look like they came out of one of our football players’ closets, the other girls seem to be fine with me. Or maybe it was also because I was older and had moved up the pecking order. Or maybe they just got tired of wasting their time, seeing that they weren’t gonna get a rise out of me; either way, I wasn't complaining. Being able to come to school and just feel normal was refreshing. The boys hadn’t changed much, though, but like I always say, boys will be boys. No matter how baggie my clothes are, they still remember what’s under them.
“I don’t know why you dress like that,” LeLe said as she inspected my baggy clothes one day as we were getting ready for school. “It’s not like you dressed like a slut before. I surely wouldn’t let what someone said change how I dress.”
“It’s not what they say,” I admitted, “it’s how I’m treated in general. It’s like my body is speaking for me and I don’t like what it has to say.”
She sprayed her hair and squinted at me through the fog. “Honey, I’d love to have your body. I surely wouldn’t be hiding it under those clothes if I did, no matter what people think.”
I love LeLe, but she just doesn’t understand. It’s like when people with straight hair tell people with curly hair how much they’d like to have curly hair, but if they actually had to live with it day in and day out, they’d most likely hate it and wish it were straight again.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ashamed of my body,” I admitted. “That’s not why I cover it up. What I’m ashamed of is how people react to it.”
***
Grandmama finally went through with it and decided to move us to the other side of Tennessee. I was sad at first, not wanting to leave LeLe, but the thought of getting away from Nashville, at least for my senior year, seemed to intrigue me. Dandridge was a small—very small—town; one of those that you see in movies where everyone knows everyone. But one of the things that I looked forward to the most was the fact that no one would know me.
I didn’t want to switch schools right at the end of the year, so I stayed with Margaret, Grandmama’s sister, until school was out. LeLe spent most of our time together crying, which made me feel terrible.
“You better come visit me... and invite me to come visit you... a lot,” she whined. I assured her that I would, which didn’t make her stop whining. “I’m gonna miss you. Why don’t you just live with me until after senior year? You’re gonna make me have to go to all the senior parties and crap by myself. You’re gonna miss all the cool senior stuff.”
“I hate leaving you, too, so don’t make it worse,” I whined back. “And we’ll still do all that senior stuff, just distantly. We’re gonna have to come to terms with a long distant relationship. And you know what they say—absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“Well my heart is gonna be as fond as crap, then.”
We laughed through our tears. I hated goodbyes, even though I knew it was only temporary. So we laughed and cried until the final bell rang; our last bell together.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving me!” she cried.
“I know, but I’ll talk to you every day. And once we get settled in, you can come stay with us for a while.”
“Maybe I can go to college out there, too. We could go together! We can be sorority sisters. UT does have an awesome forensics course—and the body farm,” she added creepily. And then she stopped and hugged me tight. “I love you, Malyn. You’re my sister, no matter how far away you are.”
That’s all it took. The tears poured and we stood there in the school parking lot hugging and crying. I was leaving my sidekick, my sister, and moving four hours away. Even though we were like sisters, I’d never told her about my ability to see spirits. Not that I didn’t trust her, I just thought it would be easier if she didn’t know; if anybody knew.
I told her I had to go or I’d miss my bus and she reluctantly let me go. As I headed to Margaret’s, I couldn’t help but feel anxious. This was it. I was leaving the only place I’d ever known and moving into the unknown. Grandmama assured me I’d love it, so I had to trust her. She was usually right, so I wasn’t too worried. But who knew just how right she’d be.
Who knew that moving to Dandridge would be the best, worst, and most life-changing thing that would ever happen to me?
To read more about Beau & Malyn,
you can find them in the FOR ALWAYS series.
For Always
For Now
For Eternity
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