ghost

[shesepankh]

Kindergarten teacher Renée Higgenbotham Swan (36) was killed in a car crash one mile from her residence in Phoenix, AZ, January 9, 2005. She is survived by her daughter Isabella (16). Her service will be held at -

Bella has the entire obituary pasted into a page of one of her compilation notebooks but tends not to re-read past the first lines. It's repellent. The concept of obituaries is repellent. The funeral is over. Renée's vibrant brief life has been summed up over the course of a paragraph, and is also over.

Bella pretends to sleep on the plane. Her neighbor is talkative and she doesn't want to say shut up, my mom just died, because - what if it doesn't work? What if this news doesn't have the power to bludgeon everyone else into stunned silence the way it does Bella?

Charlie collects her. Charlie hugs her. Charlie doesn't make her talk. Good wonderful understanding quiet Charlie does not say a word. He takes her home. Her room's where she left it last August.

It's raining.

Bella stays home, moving in, moping, for a day, and then she shows up at school, gray-faced and withdrawn. First class is English. Okay, whatever.

The teacher wants her to introduce herself. Bella wants to yank on the skinny end of his tie until he regrets making her.

She stands at the front of the room and says that her name is Bella Swan and she's moved here to live with her dad. The teacher makes an impatient go on gesture and she stands there for a moment before robotically saying the same thing she produced at the beginning of the year in her old school in Phoenix when they were doing go-around-the-room-and-share-facts. "I'm one of those people who actually likes Shakespeare."

He lets her sit down.

She sits.

Comments

[shesepankh]

Bella giggles.

[castmyown]

Darren giggles, too. "It won't even be recognizable as a box when I'm done with it."

[shesepankh]

"It will look more like an entire apartment complex or something."

[castmyown]

"Yup. Nice little rooms for people to go to in case the apartment complex as a whole is too much for them. Then if they're ready, 'Oh look there's more to it than this room.'"

He realizes he should probably stop talking. His box isn't the same as other people's. He doubts it will come up and she'll directly ask him anything, but he's such a terrible liar that he should avoid it anyway. In a non-obvious way.

[shesepankh]

"Little restaurants on the ground floor. Lounge with pinball machines. Rooftop garden, or does that start to count as not being in the box-cum-complex anymore?"

[castmyown]

He snickers. "Yes, each room gets its own cool thing so everyone who ventures out of their room gets a pleasant surprise. I guess the rooftop garden would count as partially not in the box, but some people can take it, I think. That's probably a preparation to help anyone that would like to get out of the box but isn't quite ready, yet."

[shesepankh]

"And when they've gotten used to the garden they can stretch their metaphorical wings."

[castmyown]

"Yup! Then off they go, to decorate their own boxes, and my job is done," he laughs.

[shesepankh]

Bella laughs. "Well, that sounds pretty straightforward. Get on that, what are you waiting for?"

[castmyown]

Who says he wasn't, already? Not that he's going to volunteer that information.

"Figured I should graduate high school. Guess I can start early, though."

[shesepankh]

"What's a high school diploma going to do for you on the box decoration front?"

[castmyown]

"Mostly gets people to take me more seriously and not say 'Oh you are in high school, you are automatically wrong. About everything.'"

[shesepankh]

"Yeah, that's annoying, isn't it?"

[castmyown]

"Very. But I can be patient, so it's all right. Kind of."

[shesepankh]

"I'm not patient at all."

[castmyown]

"Can't blame you. It does get quite annoying, being patient."

[shesepankh]

"...If you're annoyed by being patient, by what definition are you patient?"

[castmyown]

"Not letting the annoyance get to me."

[shesepankh]

"Oh, then by that definition I'm patient too. I'm good at managing my annoyance whenever it would only be in the way."

[castmyown]

"See, there you go. That's the spirit."

[shesepankh]

"But I don't consider myself patient because when I'm making plans I heavily negatively weight having to wait a lot."

[castmyown]

He snorts with laughter. "I don't, if I get what I want in the end, I don't mind waiting a while for it."

[shesepankh]

"Well, no plan is a hundred percent guaranteed. Trying the ones that fail fast first is more efficient."

[castmyown]

"True. Still, some plans can only be implemented once and if you mess them up, you're just doomed. So I'll wait to improve the odds for those."

[shesepankh]

"Yeah, I'd make the same call in that case."