Jessica Sorensen - Saving Quinton

Lea reads the screen for a few minutes longer, while I mess around with my long brown hair, braiding it to the side, trying not to think about the many places Quinton could be, how much harm he has to be doing to his body and mind, but it’s all I can think about. I can feel myself drifting to that place where I don’t have control, just like I didn’t with my dad and Landon. Everything is just happening and I’m lying here, unable to know how to stop it.

“Please tell me why you’re so sad,” I whisper as I watch Landon flip through the pages of his sketchbook, desperately searching for a specific drawing.

He shakes his head as he tilts it to the side, observing a sketch. “I’m not sad, Nova, so stop asking.”

I pull my knees to my chest and lean back against the wall. “You look sad, though.”

He glances up at me and the anguish in his eyes makes it hard to breathe. “Nova, seriously. I’m okay. I just need to figure out a few things about…with this project I’m working on.” He roughly flips another page and then another.

I sigh, then get up from the floor and walk over to him, sitting down on the bed beside him. I can smell the pungent scent of weed and his eyes are a little red. “You know, you can always talk to me about stuff, if you’re like having a bad day or something.” I want to reach out and touch him, but I’m afraid. Afraid he’ll get mad at me. Afraid he’ll ask me to go. Afraid he’ll break down and cry, tell me what’s wrong, and it might be something really bad.

He keeps sifting through his pages and tugging his fingers through his inky black hair. When he finally looks up at me again, his honey-brown eyes are not full of anguish, but irritation. “Would you mind giving me some time alone for a little while?”

“You want me to go?” I ask, hurt.

He nods and I catch him glancing at the glass bong on his desk. “Just for a little while…I’ll call you when I’m ready for you to come back.”

I don’t want to leave at all, yet I don’t want to argue with him either, so I get up and go home, feeling like I’ve done everything wrong.

Feeling like I shouldn’t have walked out on him.

“You know what?” Lea shuts the laptop, then gets to her feet, interrupting my thoughts. She’s wearing a torn black T-shirt and cutoffs and when she rubs her fingers under her eyes to eliminate any smudged eyeliner, I can see the tattoo on her wrist: Live life with no regrets . It’s the one she got with me and it’s pretty much her life motto, at least from what she tells me. “I think you need to go turn in your final project for film class.”

I secure my braid with an elastic band I had around my wrist and then sit up on the bed. “Lea, I need to find out where he is…I need to talk to him and see if he’s okay.” I stand up, tugging on the bottoms of my shorts. “Besides, I don’t have a final project to turn in.”

She puts her hands on her hips and gives me a firm look. “That’s not true. You have a nice project put together, just not with Quinton’s clip in it.”

I dither, unsure I want to turn in the video without Quinton’s recording on it, the one from last summer when he told me a coded, brief part of his life. It’s so raw and emotional, which is what my final project is supposed to be, and the project feels incomplete without it, but my professor won’t let me include it without Quinton’s signing a permission form. “But…it’s…”

“But nothing.” She strides up to me and shoos me toward the door. “Go turn what you have in so you don’t fail, then get some coffee because I know you didn’t sleep last night and you look really tired.”

“But what about Quinton?” It’s been over nine months since I’ve seen him and I know it seems absurd to be panicking about waiting a few more hours to find him, but after I found out from Delilah about the accident and that he’s been doing crystal meth, it seems really urgent to find him.

“I’ll see what else I can find out and see if I can track him down,” she says, continuing to usher me out of the room. “And leave that Delilah chick’s number. I’ll try calling her and see if I can get her to fess up where they’re all living. ”

“Fine.” I trudge out of the room and into the small living room that’s attached to the moderate-size kitchen and small dining area. I collect my laptop and bag from the sofa, feeling frustration along with a thousand other emotions: sadness, guilt, pain, hopelessness. Yet I also feel a little hopeful thanks to Lea, so I turn around and give her a hug. “Thank you for being such a good friend.”

“No problem,” she says and hugs me back.

We exchange this awkward yet simply real silent moment, before we step away from each other and part ways. Tears sting my eyes as I head out the door and into the bright sunlight. I know that Lea will go back to her computer and look for more stuff that will hopefully lead me to Quinton, but it still hurts my heart not knowing where he is.

It’s a strange feeling and I’ve only felt this sort of ache over one person before. Landon. But I’m not comparing Quinton to him. I refuse to do that again. Landon was Landon, the beautiful artist who bore the weight of the world on his shoulders, who suffered in ways I couldn’t understand, but wish I could, but probably never will. And Quinton is Quinton, the beautiful artist, who carries guilt on his shoulders, who, even in his darkest times made me smile when no one else could, who showed me a dark world that made me want to see the light again.

And I want to make him see the light, too. I just need to find him.

Nova

After I turn my project in to the professor, I get a coffee from the coffee stand in the quad yard, then rush back toward the apartment that’s only about half a mile away from the university, so that I rarely ever drive my dad’s old 1967 Chevy Nova. It’s a bright day and warm, the sun beaming down as I hurry up the sidewalk with my bag on my shoulder and my laptop tucked under my arm. I sort of feel like I failed, turning in the documentary without Quinton’s clip. But I try to look past it and focus on the fact that at least I won’t fail my class. Besides, there’s always next year and hopefully by then I’ll have at least talked to Quinton. At least I hope we’ll still be talking. I hope I’ll have the chance to take many video clips of him that I can add to my Novamentary, as he called it.

It hurts just thinking about it, because it reminds me how much I want to help him, but at the same time, I know from experience that I can’t make things happen my way. I can’t make Quinton get better, just like I couldn’t make Landon tell me what was wrong, just like I couldn’t make my dad hold on just a little bit longer.

It’s hurting my heart and I need to get my emotions out, so I halt at the final street I have to cross, downing the last of the coffee. Then I set my bag and laptop on the grass along with the empty coffee cup and take my phone from my back pocket. I click it on, then rotate slightly to get the sun in the right position so it’s not blinding the screen, then hit record.

The red light blinks on and an image of me pops up on the screen. I look so different from how I looked in all the clips I made last summer. My skin looks healthier, my cheeks fuller, and my brown hair cleaner, braided to the side of my head, wisps framing my face. My blue eyes are bloodshot and full of sadness. Actually my eyes only appear blue but if you really observe them, then you can see that they’re blue with specks of green. Quinton was actually one of the few people who noticed this and it was a genuinely sweet thing, I just couldn’t see it at the time because I was blinded by Landon’s death. But it’s not just my outer appearance that’s different. It’s also what’s inside me and radiates through my expression—the light in my eyes that I thought had died, but that had only briefly dimmed.