"Before" [1]

(Malory)

“Do you always travel home?” Kyle asks, stepping through the front door and taking a slow three-sixty surveillance scan of the house. He shoves his hand into his jeans’ pockets and sighs, pressing his lips together.

“I do,” I say. I chip my way over to the living room and drop my bag onto the couch before collapsing onto it myself.

Kyle doesn’t sit. At first, he seems reserved and quiet as he observes my house –but he’d done exactly the same thing the last time.

“What?” I ask, smirking up at him, tiredly. “Is my house too small compared to yours? I’m sorry I don’t have a filthy rich uncle.”

He shakes his head with a pout, “Nope. It actually feels pretty cozy.”

“I…guess,” I say, suspicious.

“But it’s really quiet,” he comments in a lower tone. “Just like home.”

He continues to scan the room and I observe him as he walks past the couch.

His eyes hurry across the words of a quote painted onto a canvas that’s been framed and hung against a wall. They travel to the floral arrangement that’s slightly off the centre of the coffee table. He walks over to the bookshelf and skims through the titles of my mom’s science books.

“I knew your mom was a vet,” he says, reaching out to take a book that has intrigued him, “But I didn’t know she was such a highly regarded one.”

“She worked her ass off to get to a position like that,” I smile. “She deserves it, too.”

“After everything that’s happened, she probably does,” he says.

There’s another moment of silence as he skims through the pages of the book now in his hands.

“That’s why you took control of the animal rights group at school, isn’t it?” He asks, “Because of your mom?”

Truthfully, it is. It’s not just because I love and care about animals that I took up the position of president for the group. It’s because my mom was always so smart and I just wanted to have this one thing in common with her. Genius as I am, I’m not like her. She’s a lot like Kyle –she can sit at a desk and geek out over math equations all day, list all the scientific properties of a human and animal body, solve a problem in less time than the average person takes to do it.

Though my capacity to retain information is incredibly large and I can memorise any concept or idea fairly well, I’m still nothing like my mother.

Mom influenced me to like animals ever since I was young –but that didn’t mean I was ever going to be good at telling the causes of death of two dead fish found floating upside down in the ocean.

“I did it because even though my mom and I are close, I’m more like my dad was. She was always this smart science kid with a passion for helping animals... and my dad and I would always be the ones beaming over literature books and languages. If I tell people I’m a lot like my dad, they’ll think I was close to him –but that’s just not true. Far from it. I decided to take up the whole group ‘presidential thing’ because I just wanted to have something in common with my mom. I wanted her to be able to talk to me. I wanted to see her eyes light up when I came home to talk about it,” I say. “It made a difference, you wouldn’t believe.”

It did –because my dad caused an excessive amount of trouble in this house –all the time- and it took my mom bare strength to get through each day. The least I could have done was attempt to follow in her footsteps –even if slightly. Her smile means the world to me.

Kyle closes the book and rests it back on the shelf like it was never even removed.

“So about this whole play thing,” I say. “You do know that I’m not letting you touch me, right?”

“You say that like I implied that I want to touch you at all,” he says, scoffing. “I can’t believe they’re actually making us do this.”

“Get over it. We have to. If you didn’t miss so many rehearsals then maybe we could have gotten away with the production. They might’ve eventually thought that we were getting along and given our parts to other people, but we weren’t getting along at rehearsals the few times you were there,” I pause for a beat. “I wouldn’t doubt it if our records haven’t even been halfway cleared yet.” I roll my eyes.

“If you brought me over to your house to argue, Lloyd, I’ll be leaving,” he says, frankly. He shoves his hands into his pockets again, and it’s only now that I realise how much the white shirt hugging his fit body has crumpled from activities throughout the day. It’s not neatly pressed anymore, but it’s also not a complete disaster.

“Shirts suit you,” I say, before I could stop myself. “In general.”

Malory!

What the hell are you saying?

“When you’re wearing those enormous T shirts it’s impossible to know that you’re this fit,” I say.

That wasn’t the nicest save, either.

He looks at me. I sit up straighter on the couch. “You think? It still feels weird wearing these,” he says, shrugging his shoulders to refer to the shirts.

“I think they look great on you,” I tell him.

“I still feel slightly depressed wearing a dead man’s clothes,” he says to me, smirking.

“Hey!” I say, though I’m smiling, “It’s not like they would have done any good just sitting around in a drawer all day here in my house. My mom didn’t know what to do with them anyway. I don’t even think she remembers them. We packed them away so long ago… we might have just burnt them or given them away, otherwise.”

“I still feel like you’re implying that this is some sort of foreshadowing to my death,” Kyle says, squinting at me in suspicion.

“If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it right away when you stepped on my dress and ripped it straight up to my ass in freshman year and embarrassed me. I would have done it when you purposely spilled fake blood on my track pants so I wouldn’t be able to use it during gym –and I lost marks because of that. I would have killed you when you told everyone I was pregnant. Did I kill you? No. I may have beaten you up but I didn’t kill you,” I tell him. “Should I go on? I’ve got a list, you see.”

He scratches the back of his neck, nervously. “Yea, okay, Lloyd. I already apologized for those things the last time I was here. How many times do I need to tell you I’m sorry?”

“As many times as you did me wrong,” I say. I’m only joking, though.

“Are we even going to practice today?” he asks, raising his brows.

“Yea. Depends. Do you have your script?” I ask, reaching into my bag to grab my own.

He pulls his bag off his shoulders and unzips it to find his, saying, “I still think the play is utterly ridiculous.”

“Let’s talk about what we have to do and what we don’t have to do, then,” I say, crossing my legs on the couch and patting the seat beside me aggressively to make him sit. He comes over, dropping beside me. I pull two pencils out from my blue pencil case.

“We’re not doing the kiss scene,” I say, “We’ve already established that. I was thinking maybe we could just run through the entire script first to get a feel of how the lines are supposed to be said and what’s supposed to be done or props that need to be held in certain scenes. That’s usually what we do in class.”

He nods, looking down at his own script as I hand him a pencil. “Okay, no problem.”

“We won’t actually act out the parts for real yet,” I tell him. “So we don’t have to worry about actually holding hands or...” I shudder, “All that other romantic shit. If I could help it, I’d save it for the actual Friday school rehearsals.”

He nods again. “Right. But I’m still shit at acting. How are you going to help with that?”

“You may be shit at acting but Olivia, Ron and I are not. You have three people to come to if there’s ever something you don’t understand. Got it? Don’t be an arrogant ass. Ask the questions if you need the answers,” I tell him.

“Fine,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“Wanna start reading the script now?” I ask. “We’ll make notes as we go along. As you can see –I’ve already done that,” I say, referring to all the horribly highlighted sections of my own script. “Now it’s just for me to make adjustments –new notes- based on what we do here and what we do at Friday rehearsals.”