Do you know those weird moments in life where you wish you had a portal to jump through to escape to a less awkward, less traumatizing place? Like the times when you're at a friend's house and you're starving and you don't want to raid their kitchen but you're so hungry so you do it and their mom walks into the dark kitchen and you scare her with your mouthful of Nutella? Brown stained teeth and all.

Or when your best friend leaves you in the suburbs of New Orleans to visit her dad in New York City for a week and you have to hang out with two girls who are already best friends and you feel so clingy and out of place even though you're sitting across from them, live-snapping to complain to your online friends who you like much more than most people but your parents make you hang out with people, like actual real people?

Well, this is the opposite of those types of times. This is one of the best times of my entire life and my best friend is shrieking in my face, celebrating the best time of both of our lives up to this point. We get to share a room next fall for college. 

I don't mind high school, but college will be so much better. Not because I have some misconstrued idea of crowded parties at Fraternity houses, or because I plan to meet a mysterious guy who pretends he hates college to be cool. The reason I'm excited is because I will live only minutes away from the French Quarter and I'll be sharing a room with my best friend in the entire world. I will trade those parties and that guy for my best friend and shorter lines at the coffee shop on campus. 

Only one more year until I never have to walk these halls again.

Raining on my parade, a janitor pushing a trash can runs over my foot and I move out of his way, bumping into a boy who shares a lab table with me during Bio. River Ridge High has the most crowded hallways and no system whatsoever but Crane isn't plagued by trash cans running over her or boys pushing her out of the way. Crane is the swan of this friendship. She's the blond with high cheekbones and perfect brows. This is why no one cares if she's jumping up and down in front of me, waving her phone in my face, they move out of her way. The words, "Housing Department" flash by my eyes when she shrieks again.

"I know, I know you're excited!" I grab ahold of her denim vest to try to hold her still. Her long legs bounce her higher and her laughter take over the shrieking. I let go of her and she puts her hands on my shoulders.

"Do you have any idea what this means?" Crane claps her hands together and rests them on top of her head, just above her ponytail. I shake my head, I'm just as excited as she is, I'm just not as fast to show it.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, it's a text from my mom, asking me to pick up graham crackers on the way home. Her and my dad are making impromptu S'mores tonight. It feel like Fall is slipping by so quickly this year. Everyone always told me that my senior year would go fast but I didn't have a clue just how fast.

I turn to my best friend, "Gotta go, parents want S'mores and I have to get the crackers," I start shoving my books into my backpack. I have two quizzes to study for and a paper due this week so I have to fill my bag to the top with notebooks and textbooks. I've been trying to use my mom's tablet but she uses it for her work, this season even more than usual.

She frowns, her lips dropping out in a dramatic pout. "Fine, this conversation isn't finished though," she points a blue sparkly nail at me, "'we can finish over coffee in the morning before school." She hugs me and reaches into her pocket for her phone. "I'll text you later. I have to pick my sister up from her soccer game anyway."

By the time I get to my car, go to the nearest grocery store, and get home it's past five. My mom is in the kitchen, her brown hair twisted into a creative nest on top of her head. My mom can pull off the messy bun look in a way that I can't. My version of a messy bun is an actual mess so I just let my hair dry and hope for the best every day.

"How was school?" My mom asks when I lay my bag on the table and sit down. She rips open a bag of marshmallows and pops one into her mouth. My dad walks into the kitchen and grabs one too. He sits down across from me and rests his elbows on my bag.

"It was good, same old, same old." I catch the marshmallow my mom tosses at me and take a bite of it. It's soft in my mouth and I'm suddenly really thankful for my mom's random S'more craving. Sometimes her cravings or random experiments don't go as well as having melted chocolate-marshmallow goodness for dinner. When I was twelve, she had an idea of filling my blow up furniture up with water. We had carpet back then, it didn't make it through that experiment.

I love my mom's free spirit though, it's inspiring and Melissa Toth has always been one to inspire. She was the muse to every successful painting my dad has sold in his lifelong hobby that sometimes brings in an income, and those times are always when he's selling a watercolor painting of my mom. He's the calm to her storm, the anchor that keeps her wildness from consuming us all and he loves her dearly.

"Crackers please," my mom hold her hand out and my dad rips the top off of the cardboard box of graham crackers. He hands her a sleeve and she winks at him. I look away. I love them and someday I want a life like this, so simple and full of laughter, but for now I'm seventeen and have no interest in seeing my parents flirt with one another in the kitchen.

"I'm going to go up to my room," I tell them. My dad smiles, the lines by his eyes have deepened over the years but something about the dimple in his cheek shaves off at least ten years. My parents were young when they had me, my dad has just finished his second year at college and my mom had just dropped out. She didn't want to become a statistic, she just didn't want to be there anymore. She kept her job at retail store and worked her entire pregnancy. They claim they were ready to be parents even at their young age even though I'm not sure my grandparents on either side would agree. A few months after they had me, my dad managed to get a small loan to rent a space close to downtown for my mom to open her own handmade jewelry shop. They've always been so creative and I have always loved that.

"Okay baby," my mom wipes her hands on the towel tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. "I'll bring your plate up when it's done." She says as if she's making a gourmet meal. I laugh because I'm glad she isn't. I tell them both I'll come back down later and grab my bag from the table.

"We are still on for Willow tomorrow night, right? I already got our tickets!" My mom shouts when I reach the top of the stairs. Weeping Willow is the name of our favorite coffee shop in the French Quarter. It's old and eclectic but has done a really good job of keeping up with the trends. It reminds me of a much cooler version of my grandma's house. Wood everywhere, men with trendy beards and metal furniture fill the space. Every Saturday night they have live spoken poetry and it's sort of our thing. I drive us there while my mom blasts Joni Mitchell through the speakers of my small Miata and my dad pretends that she has the best singing voice, which is far from true but he says his harmless lying is the key to why they have been married for so long.

"Yes!" I shout back and close my door. My room is a mess. Clothes are shoved places they shouldn't be and my notebooks are in a big, yet surprisingly tidy pile on my desk. I have so many notebooks, some completely full and some with only one piece written in them. I like to scribble down my thoughts and somehow they end up in jointed lines that when read aloud become poetry. They don't look or sound as pretty on the paper, the lines restrict the emotions from my words and I would feel so limited if I kept them in cages on these pads of paper. I lift up the newest notebook of mine and trace my finger over my name imprinted into the front cover. The edges of the book are stamped with the skyline of New York City. I turn the book over in my hands and smile. It was a gift from Crane that she brought home for me after her visit to her dad's house this past summer. She loves that city so much and sometimes I'm afraid she will leave this place for the lights there, but most of the time I hope she does.

I lick my forefinger and flip through the pages looking for the piece I didn't finish last night. When I find it, I pull a pen from the cup on my desk and let go. I love the way the pen draws out my words, I crave the freedom I feel as I shape the text.

I never thought that I liked poetry, or even understood it when my teachers would make me write four lines for an assignment. I hated it and always ended up just writing down random thoughts that rhymed. It wasn't until Mr. Geyser, my Language Arts teacher from sophomore year asked us to write a short essay about our favorite emotion. When I read mine to the class he said that it has a very poem-like structure and asked me if I had ever written any poetry. I told him no and that I wasn't interested in it at all. A few days later I took a notebook from my mom's old junk in her craft room and wrote another "essay". I found myself shaping the words on my tongue, letting my voice carry out their meaning the way the pen couldn't. I had an entire notebook full of thoughts and rants that felt too random and jumbled to be considered poetry of all things but I loved it. I finally found a hobby outside of stalking through my peers much cooler and much more interesting lives on social media. I always wonder if they really do have that much fun, or if they are just really good at faking it with captions and filters. I found myself on my phone less and with an actual pen in my hand. Another thing my parents happily noticed.

One month later when I forced myself to show Crane what I had been writing down in the book, she brought it back to me with tears in her eyes and begged me to show more people. I refused, told her how dramatic she was and thanked her. She has always been the type of friend to tell me everything I did was great. If I breathed, she would throw a party for me and create an award for "World's Best Breather". As the days went on and I was running out of room in the notebook, I left it on my parent's nightstand. They loved my work too, but even if they hadn't I would have filled up all these notebooks with messy blue and black ink, just the same.

Hey guys! I'm so excited to share a new short story called Weeping Willow with you! This is a branded story with a twist and I hope you enjoy reading. Let me know what you think! Brought to you by "It Can Wait".