Liam: In the Garden, Creative Essay Example

Daisy is my name, a name of innocence and simple goodness.  It is a name that was my life, as well.  I grew up with thirty girls for six years, devoting myself to nothing but remaining worthy of the honors class. For me, boys were outsiders. There were teachers who were men, as there was my father, but they ruled over a world of girls. Until in high school, I was in a normal class mixed with boys and girls.In that situation, I was just like a country girl, thrown into the big city. Everything was so new to me. First time I heard the “F” word was on television,it was then that I heard the same word yelled out in my school. Somehow, though, I remained the Daisy I had been.  I studied hard and minded my own business, and the other boys and girls admired me, even as they pitied me a little. The naïve, innocent girl, the one with her nose always in the books; is she frightened of living?  If she was, life was to force her into facing realities beyond any garden wall.

In a winter night, the street was dusky and damp, the sky was getting dark, especially after the rain. In an alley without the streetlight, six people gathered and surrounded a guy.

I was making my way home as usual, after lessons with my tutor.  In my memory now, there was something in the air then, a suspended kind of calm, or tension. The wet pavements shimmered, as though the ground beneath me was shifting with every step. Then I turned my head to follow an odd sound, and knew that an actual fight was happening in a nearby alley. This kind of thing only heard from my classmate, I had never seen it in person before.There were no street lights, making the moment more fearful and less real, like stumbling blindly through a nightmare. People, I saw, were gathering around a body lying at the entrance to the alley; beyond this point, the fight raged on. I did not know where the courage came from, I could not believe I took out my whistle from the Girl Scout and yelled, “The police are coming!” In the darkness of the alley, someone cursed angrily, and ran away. After a while, no one was there. I carefully walked into the alley, I could not see anything except the blood. When I was ready to leave, a groan of pain caught my attention from the back of alley. I turned again and saw the victim of the attack. I believed I saw his groan hanging in the air around him like a mist, so painfully a part of him it took on a form of agony above him.

Months passed, and the bizarre evening receded in my mind.  Life went on exactly as it always did before. One day, a crowd of people lingered outside the classroom.  It was strange; only the oddness of this suddenly reminded me of that night in the alley. “What are they doing?” I asked my friend Jenny, a friend, educated me as to what was going on. “I heard Liam just got out of the hospital,” she whispered.  “He’s coming to our class to thank someone.”

“Who is Liam?” I asked, not yet putting the pieces together. Jenny gaped at my ignorance. “Liam, the head of senior class. And so hot!” I was, still, Daisy. I was not interested, and I had to study for the math quiz. I took out my textbook, and then noticed a man in a senior’s uniform at the door of my classroom. His face was bruised, his left arm was in a cast, and he slowly made his way in, walking directly to me. All around me, even as I could not turn away from this face nearing me, I felt the silence and the stares of everyone there circling us.

“Daisy. I owe you my life.” He did not lower his voice to say this. Carefully using his injured arm and hand, he removed his necklace and slipped it over my head. Only when the chain touched my skin was I aware that my heart was racing. The moment was suspended in the cool air of the room, just as time had ceased in that alleyway. Somewhere in the back of mind, a question stirred: when he and I are together, does time stop?

“Liam Wang! What the hell are you doing here?” The discipline master’s voice shattered the spell.

“Sir, I was just being thankful.  Isn’t that what you taught me to be?” He smiled disdainfully, turned around, and walked out the classroom.  The entire class then rushed around me. “Daisy! You saved the boss!” “Daisy! How did it happen?”  “Oh, God, Daisy, is he your man?” Daisy here, Daisy there; the questions danced around me, shrill and insistent, then flying off unanswered.  I kept my head down in modesty.  In doing so, my eyes fixed on the necklace.

Liam did not pursue me. Nonetheless, my status had changed. More months passed, but respect was still powerfully attached to me. Beneath all of this, and at odd moments in the most ordinary of days, I saw that bruised face again in my mind, approaching my own. The last day of the semester, a cohort surrounded me at the moment I walked out the campus. I was frightened, since when I became the victim as well?

“Daisy, boss wants to see you,” one of them said. I gathered what courage I had and asked who this boss was. “Liam Wang, the head of the school.” My hand went to touch the necklace, even as the voice suddenly gave shape to my memories.

“Daisy…” The voice was so familiar, far more familiar than it should have been.“Yes.  It’s me,” he said gently. “Let me take you home.” I should have said no to him, but I did not.I rode on the back of his motorcycle.  I know I let myself dare to imagine being cared for, like an ordinary girl in dream she knows is a dream.

I also let myself into a world with rules and ideas I could not understand at all. Word went around, everywhere, that I was Liam’s woman, yet nothing passed between us but warm silences. I found myself needing to lie to my parents, even as my conduct remained innocent. I was the good girl, with fine grades and a perfect reputation; Liam was the classic bad boy, the punk, the outlaw headed for trouble.

I never asked any questions about his life. I heard from other people in my class that he was expelled from most of the local schools due to bad behavior, getting into fights and causing trouble for teachers. As we were quiet most of the time, I could only guess what he was up to. On the way home on the back seat of his motorbike, I often saw people waving at him. Sometimes he was asked to go over to other people’s houses at night. He seemed to get on well with many people in the area, and I just could not imagine why those guys wanted to hurt him.

There seemed to be many girls waving him from the pavement, and even at school. As he was a good-looking guy – as long as I could tell – he was popular. However, – maybe just when I was around – he did not seem to be interested in any of them. He was friendly but nothing more.

He told me about his “meetings” at night, but not much. He only said that he belonged to a group trying to change the world and get rid of nasty people. I did not ask questions, but my classmates (they became friendlier every day, after I started leaving school with Liam) told me that he had a gang with him being the leader. I should have been looking up on him, and maybe I did indeed, but I felt that his life was so different from mine. I refused to miss after school classes for him, I still studied and he never asked me to join him. It was a silent agreement between us; we knew that we were opposites, but still attracted to each other on a mysterious level.

My friends also talked a lot about fights he was involved in, as well as warnings he received from the school support worker dealing with his behavior and meeting him after school every week. He was the real bad guy and I was the good girl. I had no idea what we were doing together, and never discussed future. For us, there was only the present; no past, either. We made no commitments; he turned up when he could and did not when he could not. I heard a story that he was going out of the town for a couple of days to “deal with” other gangs’ problems. I never asked him about it, even though he came back with cuts and bruises on his face and neck.

Yet Liam respected me because I was Daisy, the girl from the sheltered garden. It became bitterly ironic that he seemed to care for what I was wishing to discard. Even so, I would not date him. Liam would wait for me a few blocks from my house, even as his friends stood by for him, even further away. When I asked him why, he said that he never wanted to be the cause of my getting into trouble. We would ride away, the friends keeping a respectful distance behind, almost like a protective escort.

He lightly brushed my hair with his fingertips. I do not know where we were, except that it was safe. “Go out with me?” I shook my head, sadly. He gently lifted my chin with his hand, raising my face to his. “Please, Daisy? It’s my birthday.” The boyishness of this, so like my own innocence, nearly broke my heart.

“My father…my parents.  They’ll never permit it.”

Suddenly, he jumped onto his bike. “I’ll go talk to them,” he said. I grabbed at his t-shirt, telling him he was insane to think of such a thing. My fear stopped him.  Still, in the same, steady, touching way, he said, “Have dinner with me.” Somewhere in my mind just then, I understood how girls fall in love with the wrong boys. They do not let go until you belong to them, and maybe only a girl can know what that means.

What happened at home, I know now, had to happen.

“Sweetie, get over here.” Father was waiting, and he called to me as soon as I walked in the door. “I heard you are very close with a gangster lately, is that truth?“Something in me erupted violently. Something in me heard that gentle voice again, and then heard my own father as a liar. I protested, defending Liam. There could be no good from it. My father’s even tone changed.

“Let me tell you something. From now on, you do not go out, and I will take you to school and pick you up after.” He paused, and the effect was not lost on me. “You will stay away from that punk!” The entire house was hushed in an awful silence. I broke it, screaming my hatred at my father, screaming the same anger at my mother. “I hate you! I hate you all!”I ran to upstairs, locked myself in the room and cried my eyes out.

Liam knew something had happened, of course, when he and I had a chance to be alone on the campus. We sat in a secluded nook, and I would not at first answer his searching questions. There was little point, anyway.  He knew what had happened.

“Did he hit you?” The question nearly made me cry. I raised my face for the first time to his, shaking my head, stunned by this care. In the corner of my eye, I saw us being seen. I followed that witness with my own eyes, defiantly offering proof of whatever would be reported. Part of me wanted to jump up and shout, and throw my arms around Liam in front of the world. I wanted everyone to see me not being perfect Daisy. I wanted, more than anything, to be allowed to be human and weak.

We then talked, Liam and I, but very little was said. It was another suspension of time and space, the two of us caring for each other in a world apart from the real one. I felt like my soul was being torn in two. Just being with him was wonderful and safe, yet I was desperate for a recklessness at that moment he was not prepared to offer.

I felt that, if what we had was undefined, my father had drawn the lines around it. He had made it easier for us, in a strange way, to be closer. In fighting us, my father had made us one.

I felt his hand lightly touch my hair again, and I looked up to meet his eyes. He was not looking at me, though, but to a distance I could not see.  I remember thinking that he had never seemed so handsome, almost like a painting of an ancient warrior, but there was something in his face that frightened me as well.

“I’m taking you home,” he said. “No!” My reaction was violent and immediate. We had been seen. I wanted time, time for word to get out, time for my father to believe I had run away, and given myself completely to the boy he despised.  I wanted a scandal and shame because that would man I had left myself behind, a good girl in a garden whose time had passed. For that, I think I would have done anything. “Liam,” I said, “you said I’m yours. You can’t hand me back now.”

He smiled in a sad and strange way, but his words were true. I know they were true, and deeply meant. “I don’t want to, Daisy.” Then he gently brushed his lips on my cheek. It was that moment, I think, that decided me.

“You don’t have to. I want to be yours, Liam. I’m sure of it.” He said nothing, but he sighed deeply. “If not today…all right. Take me home. But I’m ready, and I want you to know that I’m not afraid.” We rode back in silence, my head resting on his shoulder, his boys following us from a respectful distance. It felt a little like a funeral procession, so I shut the thought out of my mind.

I walked a long block alone, Liam stopped away from my home. While I walked, I felt his eyes on me, even as I saw the window blind open from the house.  Every step felt exciting. I saw my own hand grip the doorknob and turn it, and I felt powerful enough to have torn the door off and flung it aside. I stepped into the cool dark of the room, prepared for another fight.

This was not to be. I was overwhelmed by the silence, and a sadness in the air I believed I could touch. My father, he looked so old, so suddenly, was sitting in his chair. There was no yelling, although he knew where I had been. His eyes, weighted by deep shadows, were stared at me, but in a pleading kind of way that broke my heart.