#julia dalavia | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

westerlyroleplay · 2 years

Photo

NAME: Helena Campos-Teixeira GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis woman / She/Her AGE & DATE OF BIRTH: 28 years old / March 3rd HOMETOWN: Westerly, RI TIME IN WESTERLY: Returned 9 years ago RESIDENCE: Downtown OCCUPATION: Manager at Captain’s Lobster Shack

I COULD NEVER GIVE YOU —— peace.

Trigger Warnings: alcohol, drug mention, pregnancy scare

Helena Campos-Teixeira never did believe in karma – but maybe that was because karma didn’t believe in her, either. Or maybe it did, but it had spent the past 28 years being a real bitch about it.

Helena came into the world screaming on the shoulder of I-95 while her father attempted to change a flat. In the dark and in the rain, and at the possible time. That, her father always said, was how he knew she’d always be trouble. But at least she made for a good story. He said the words with the deep set laugh lines of a life led with an eternal smile. Her mother was the same – tears streaming from the corners of her eyes through breathless laughter as she tried to work her way through some harrowing tale of misfortune. What they were teaching their only daughter, intentionally or not, was tenacity – something they spent most of her life intermittently regretting and rejoicing.

She was a good kid. Good grades, good humor, a good head on her shoulders. She wasn’t someone they needed to worry about – at least not in Westerly. When she was 15, her parents told her they were leaving Rhode Island. The only home she’d ever known – the only place she wanted to know – and they were leaving it behind. She would like pretend she handled the news with any sort of dignity – instead, she barricaded herself in the bathroom and cried for no less than the full duration of Fiona Apple’s Tidal album. Her parents, to their credit, let her have her 51 minutes and 13 second temper tantrum without much interference. Or maybe they just realized that making her pack up her life her sophomore year of high school and start all over in Cleveland, fucking Ohio was punishment enough for any indiscretions – past, present and future.

But her mother received a better job offer, and they quite literally couldn’t afford to turn it down. As the U-Haul pulled out of their Misquamicut driveway, Helena pressed up against the window like a forlorn Dickensian orphan, she made the silent promise to herself to come back, one day. Maybe when she was old and grey and could be one of the women walking along the beach at dawn, weather be damned. Or, the far better possibility, that her parents would cross the three state lines separating the old home from the new, and realize they’d made a terrible mistake that they could still rectify. She held to the latter possibility so firmly that she didn’t unpack more than the bare necessities for the first three months. The end to her quiet protest was just as unspoken – she came home from her third day of school to find her room unpacked and organized.

She hated Cleveland for none of the reasons it could’ve earned on it’s own – it was just never going to be Westerly. She was making new friends, but they weren’t the same friends she’d made pinky promises and playground blood oaths with. Her teachers weren’t the same ones that taught her dad two decades before. There was red mud where there should be sand, and Lake Erie would never be the Atlantic. It was hard to measure up to something she’d loved for a lifetime, no matter how short that lifetime was. A reason her parents would come to hate Cleveland was the first reason Helena thought she could come to something like an understanding with it. Jay Lowry was a boy two years older and two houses down, and the first person in Ohio to reach into her adolescent brain and pull out the ‘I understand you,’ card. He dealt weed from a shoebox, played bass in a local band that got to drink in the diviest of local bars without being carded, and still held a 3.9 GPA. The most important thing, the first thing, was that he had a 1999 Firebird that happened to be in the right place at the right time. That bright red Firebird came to a stop across from the corner where she was waiting for the bus, bouncing up on her heels and rubbing her hands together to fight against the late October cold that felt nothing like the cold she was used to. Her breath was visible as it rode the sigh of her impatience when she heard the laugh come from the loudly idling car. “You missed the bus,” he said, the wry amusement in his tone sparking all the indignance Helena had to offer before 7 a.m. “I did not,” she protested. Had she? She had taken her time getting out the door, using every second in the central heat she could realistically take to bolster herself against the frost. Maybe she had. When Jay pushed his passenger door open, the only thing louder than the hinges was his, “let me give you a ride.”

Helena considered it, but not for nearly long enough. She’d seen him around school – heard him, even when she hadn’t. She knew of him in that way that school kids get to latch onto and pretend that they actually know a person. More importantly, she had a history midterm that she couldn’t, under any circumstances – Mr. Bell’s words, not hers – afford to miss. It was the thought of failing her first class in her first semester at a new school that led to her climbing into the Firebird. The dying smell of the end of autumn was immediately replaced by a pine tree air freshener that did next to nothing to cover the smell of Marlboro Reds, and she crushed a combination of discarded water bottles and Monster cans under her feet as she settled in.

He let her pick the music on the radio, but he didn’t apologize for the mess. Helena liked that, she decided. And when he sang along to every song she picked, she decided she liked him, too. When they got to the school, bus 274 wasn’t far behind them. “Huh, guess you didn’t miss it after all,” was all he said.

She couldn’t say when they settled into their routine. Most days, Jay was at the bus stop before she was. And one day they stopped pretending he wasn’t getting up early just to give her a ride. She liked that, too – how easy they let those polite little dances drop. She heard herself say, “If you want to give me a ride, all you have to do is say so.” Just as quickly, he said so. When winter settled in, he started parking directly outside her house. By the spring, she’d taught him the quietest way to sneak in through her bedroom window. By summer, she told her parents she had a boyfriend, and she loved him. Before school started again, they decided they hated him. There was, of course, no greater catalyst to desperate young love than the staunch parental disapproval.

By the end of that year though, they were fighting more than they weren’t. Arguments that skyrocketed phone bills and spanned for days, stretching so thin that they were entirely transparent by the time either of them worked up to an apology. Every fight, no matter its mask, was about the fact that Jay was graduating in the spring, and they were going to go their separate ways. And when the weight of that unspoken truth was too heavy for either of them to continue to carry, they said it aloud. They would stay together until the end of the summer, and it would be the best of their lives.

Of course, it wasn’t. It was a summer of trying. A summer of sneaking her and her friends into downtown dive bars his band was playing where they all got too drunk on Jager bombs and Miller lights, then piling into motel rooms hidden under carefully constructed alibis. It was pretending she was still having fun, even though she’d scuffed her knee on the sidewalk when Jagerbomb four proved to be one too many, and the room was vacillating between spinning and doubling. It was roadtrips to whatever city half a tank of gas got them to, half the car ride cloaked in the heavy silence of trying to live in the moment while being too aware that it’s already passed. It was the summer where she first felt like she was a real adult making real decisions.

Then came the fall where she would have to deal with them. Jay was away at state, sharing a dorm suite with three other boys – none of whom he liked. They didn’t plan to stay in touch, not really. In a move they both deemed mature and responsible, they decided they weren’t capable of being in each other’s orbit without setting themselves on a collision course. They both planned to live their lives, and if they came back together, it was kismet. Her parents were so relieved at the seemingly clean break from Jay Lowry that she was almost sure they were going to throw a block party in celebration. But, as is the way, the universe decided all that was bullshit, and Helena was late. They’d been careful – as careful as they were with anything that summer.

She didn’t call Jay. She drove to State in the car her parents gifted her for her sixteenth birthday with half-joking agreement that she would no longer get into cars with boys to see him instead. Jay seemed relieved to see her – excited, even as he ushered her into his currently empty suite. She wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, or if she still smelled those goddamn pine air fresheners. Helena didn’t speak softly or gently when she told him her suspicions. She didn’t cry when the test he walked to the corner store and bought said ‘pregnant.’ It wasn’t until he dropped to one knee that she finally felt herself re-enter her body. Like the gesture finally set free an elastic band that had been pulled tight between her home and his. She was shaking her head, and she was saying no. Even as his hands were in hers and promising to take care of them. She could wrap her hands around his promises – could hold them tight and so impossibly close. Promises made tangible by the weight he put behind them, the careful consideration he built them on. Helena was just too young – too naive, too sincere herself – to know that honest people rarely spend so much of their time insisting they’re telling you the truth.

She thought, inexplicably, of the bus that October morning. Thought of his blind assurances that she’d missed it, and how easily he’d said it. The whole drive back to her house, she thought of that goddamn bus. For the next two days, she thought of nothing else. As she scheduled a doctor’s appointment in Akron, she thought of nothing else. It was only when she stopped to get gas between the two cities that she got to return to mental clarity. She started her period. In her strange, unbridled excitement, she hugged the confused gas station attendant and bought forty bucks in scratch off tickets. Defying the odds, every single one of the tickets was a loser, but that didn’t matter. She called Jay to tell him the news, issued her own gleaming retraction, and she paid no mind to his tone when he said ‘that’s good.’

That was the first real clarity she’d had since the Summer of Jay. The first time she felt like Westerly Helena again, the Cleveland Helena breaking loose like she’d only ever been made of air. Their calls started to taper off, dwindling down to the occasional Friday night drunk dial or those terrible 2 a.m. ‘I miss you’ texts. She stopped replying, letting the last little green bubble sit unanswered in her scroll. She didn’t miss him, she realized. Maybe there was an idea of Jay she missed, but when she looked through old pictures or revisited hazy memories, she wasn’t sure she recognized herself in them. She had been, she thought, someone lost, and he’d been the first to find her.

By the time she was nearing the end of her senior year, the two had all but become strangers. Maybe that’s all they ever were, really. It was hard to be anything else at that age – in a time when you still don’t know yourself, how are you meant to truly love anyone else? When she saw him in the grocery store the summer after her own graduation, they barely nodded in acknowledgment of each other. She heard he’d gotten engaged, and while she wasn’t sure she believed it, she hoped it was true. This was, she decided, the Summer of Helena, and there was no room for anyone else. She’d made the decision she promised herself she would three years ago – she was going back home. Her parents suspected it was coming, and she hoped they understood. Her friends were already starting to scatter like bugs in the light, all of them bound for different cities and different lives. Helena just wanted the one she used to have.

They asked if she was going to go to college in the northeast. She shrugged. They asked if she had a place to live, or a job lined up. She lied – unconvincingly. Most importantly, she laughed when her dad told her homing pigeons had better laid plans, and dutifully ignored her mom’s eye roll when she insisted that she was going on an adventure. With her Bronco packed so full that she was violating at least two traffic laws, she hugged them goodbye, and she set off to make the ten hour drive back home.

She got a flat somewhere in the Poconos, but she didn’t care. It felt serendipitous, in its way. Or maybe she was too busy chasing her own bliss to believe in signs from the universe or whatever. On the other side of it was home, and four years away had felt damn near like a lifetime. It could wait another day.

With no plan and dumb luck, she found an apartment after only one night in a motel. It was downtown and above an Italian place that meant her room always smelled a little bit like garlic between the hours of 7 p.m. and midnight, but that was okay. She got a job at Captain Lobsters – the only place with a line out the door and a hiring sign in the window. A job she told herself was temporary – but almost a decade and a promotion to management later, she still hadn’t quite worked out what temporary meant.

Pessimism demanded that she wait for the charm of being back to wear off. Optimism insisted it never would. The truth fell somewhere in the middle, nestled between the empty promise to ‘make a plan’ and the assuredness that she was going to go where life carried her. She found the real kind of love somewhere in that ten years, and she made a proper mess of it. Jay Lowry, as it turned out, wasn’t a proper barometer for what love should look like in herself. He’d instilled in her a need for things to be frenetic and messy and young. Demanded that she rock the boat when the tide was still, to white-knuckle a storm instead of seeking shelter. Maybe she’d grow out of it one day. She doubted it.

Portrayed by JULIA DALAVIA, written by SHAY.

#t.#f.#fl.#julia dalavia #helena campos teixeira #shay #peace

0 notes