Someone I Used to Know - By Blakney Francis Page 0,67
persisted when Alfred was nowhere to be found. I sighed, chewing on my bottom lip in frustration. I’d hoped to start implementing my newest plan to win the bodyguard over, which involved me randomly spouting off sports information until I stumbled upon one he reacted to. Nothing bonded people together like a common team to root for. I was going to start with the NFL, although he was bigger than most of the players, so maybe it wasn’t as appealing to him as the average Joe.
Ms. Louna was coming out as I entered, and we had to awkwardly slide past each other in the narrow entrance, trading places in the glare of Madeline’s attention.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
With Ms. Louna finished with their routine morning session and gone, Madeline and I were alone. The lack of crowd didn’t make the impersonal trailer feel larger though. It was lifeless, nearly claustrophobic, without the personalities that inflated the space with something more than the natural droll of professionalism Madeline exuded.
The young redhead was attired in workout gear and her high ponytail flung back, the impressive length swinging nearly down to her bottom, as she guzzled down a bottle of water like she’d just ran a marathon, even though I knew it had been at least an hour since her personal trainer forced her through a grueling workout.
She snapped the lid closed, finally addressing my presence with her calculating stare.
“Alfred went to help Fran get the boxes of fan mail from her car,” she rushed through. I’d become familiar with her enough to understand the irritation didn’t come from the specifics of my actual question, but instead the general fact that I’d inquired about anything at all unrelated to myself, The Girl in the Yellow Dress, or her job.
I knew I’d pay for my (however) brief distraction, and Madeline didn’t disappoint.
“Why did you give away your baby?”
“I have to ask you, Adley, why do you want to give your daughter up for adoption?”
Madeline’s words rang out in my head alongside the question once asked of me by the adoption agent, both voices pricking me indiscriminately, like vengeful wasps whose nest had been destroyed.
They wanted to know why. But the why was simple, straightforward, predictable. What they should have been asking was the when. When did I decide to give up the baby that I’d given up my life to keep.
It was a single moment, seemingly insignificant, but immeasurable in scope.
To an outsider it wouldn’t have looked like anything special, just a young girl sitting in a park, observing the dizzying world around her.
It had been a rough day. I was living in Cam’s loft with him in Raleigh, while watching the strain of the life I’d inflicted on him take its toll. I was tired all the time, but sleep never came easily, always turbulent and filled with vivid nightmares.
The trees loomed at my back, a breeze ruffled my Maxi dress around my ankles, and for once, the summer hadn’t seemed quite so unforgiving.
I’d just bought a pretzel from a vendor with money I had to ask Cam for that morning. It had never bothered me asking my parents for money (and far more than the measly ten dollars Cam had scraped from his wallet), but each time I had to ask him, it felt a little more like I was giving up part of my soul in exchange.
A woman with a stroller approached down the paved path that circled the outline of the sunny park. She had one of those faces that was hard to tag with an age. Her chin-length mommy-cut could have hinted at mid-thirties, but her face was fresh and youthful even considering the dark circles lassoing her tired eyes.
Half of her face was distorted by a cellphone mashed between her cheek and shoulder. Both of her hands were tasked with separate activities; one busy in the bassinet facing her, while the other tried to wrangle a toddler in a fuchsia tutu that was wildly skipping just out of her mother’s grasp. I could only hear snippets of the woman’s phone conversation over the baby’s wails, but her voice sounded as exhausted as I felt.
She’d paused in front of my park bench lifting a heavy diaper bag to prop on the handlebar of the stroller as she ransacked it for some unknown item. So preoccupied, the mother didn’t seem to even notice me sitting there, but the same couldn’t be said for the precocious little girl who promptly took