James 18
James
An arrow of nervous feeling shoots through me, finding its mark in my throat.
It feels so strange to be in this house alone, dust motes dancing all around, early-afternoon light painting the empty rooms in random strokes.
A slant of sun breaks off the walls, pointing directly to Rosabelle’s closed bedroom door.
I stare at it.
I cross the room unconsciously, electric apprehension coursing through my veins. When I reach her door I stare at it a moment, lifting my hand to the wood.
Last night, Nazeera never went home.
This is probably what Rosabelle comes back to, if she comes back here at all. A cold, lightless house. Creepy quiet.
This doorknob.
I never make a formal decision to open the door. I just turn the handle and give it a push, letting gravity do the rest. I stand there, frozen at the threshold, listening as the hinges whine a little, and my first thought is to fix the hinges. My second thought—
I can’t remember having a second thought.
I suddenly can’t think at all.
I take a measured step into the room, spellbound, the scene inside so hard to grasp I have to process it several times. I almost don’t trust my eyes. I don’t know what I was expecting. Something brutal, definitely. But nothing quite as brutal as this.
My jacket.
That’s my jacket.
There, in the middle of the floor. She’s made a small nest in the center of the room, my worn denim jacket laid out, arms open on the ground, its fleece collar winking in the weak light. My wool hat is set just above it like a punctuation mark.
Or a pillow.
The blood rushes from my head. My heart is suddenly jackhammering in my chest.
When she’d left the diner the night of the attacks, I’d chased after her into the freezing dark and found her wearing nothing but cheap hospital scrubs, trembling with cold.
I took the jacket off my back and gave it to her.
Pulled the beanie off my head and tugged it over her hair.
The last time I saw her in my clothes she was drenched in blood.
I can’t believe she kept them.
I push farther into the room, dropping slowly to one knee.
I’m strangled by unstable feelings, my hands unsteady as I pick up the jacket, searching the article for proof of that night, my fingers catching on bullet holes and ragged gashes.
The denim is wrinkled and stiff in places.
The hat is in a similar condition: a little shrunken and misshapen.
It’s clear she washed these. She must’ve scrubbed them by hand in the sink.
She probably let them dry out in the sun.
They smell like soap. They smell like her.
Breath gusts from my lungs.
The denim is badly discolored; darker where she couldn’t lift the bloodstains. The fleece collar is now matted and a little rough, spattered in places. The standard practice at the hospital is to incinerate damaged, bloodied articles of clothing.
She would’ve had to demand they let her keep these.
Warner’s voice rises in my head, his words piercing the fog of my mind—
I don’t know how to make this any clearer: she never wants to see you again.
Never.
I rock back, falling badly into a seated position on the floor. I close my eyes, my chest shaking with every breath. Something is wrong.
You have no future with her.
I don’t know what she’s planning.
She wants nothing to do with you.
Rosabelle is pushing me away for a reason. She’s trying to protect me from something. I can feel it. I can fucking feel it: she’s putting herself in danger.
I’ve never felt this kind of kinetic volatility.
If you’d asked my friends and family to describe me just two months ago, they probably would’ve used words like easygoing and friendly. Maybe they’d toss in some favorites like a little stupid and doesn’t take anything seriously. But overall, least likely to ruin someone’s day.
I feel miles away from that version of myself.
Right now, I’m ready to ruin everyone’s fucking day.
There’s so much unspent adrenaline in my body I feel like I could tear open these walls with my bare hands. I want to find Sebastian and rip him to pieces.
I want to find Rosabelle and make her dinner.
I exhale roughly, releasing the jacket.
My dreams about her are so small they’re terrifying. I could live off so little. I just want to turn on a light for her. I want to sit on a couch with her. I’d be thrilled to answer a question to her satisfaction.
No, smaller than that. So much smaller.
I just want to see her.
When I open my eyes, something glints in the light, a glimmer of something right in front of me. I lean forward and pick up the enamel pin off the floor, my breath catching in my chest.
It’s my kite.
It’s diamond-shaped; the orange sails set with a brass spine and cross spar. It has a short, serpentine golden tail, affixed at intervals with three tiny golden bows.
It had been pinned to the jacket.
I bought the jacket, the beanie, and this pin all from the same vintage shop.
I liked them all for different reasons. The kite reminded me of the only thing I liked about being a kid: the rare occasions I felt free.
Jumping out of a tree, or leaping from rooftop to rooftop, or running so fast I felt like the wind might catch me.
I swallow hard, closing my fist around the kite until its edges dig into my palm, sparking pain.
I’m imagining how she must’ve removed the pin from the ruined jacket. How she must’ve washed it and placed it on the ground next to her head, like it was a small treasure to be displayed.
I feel like my chest is caving in.
I set down the little kite where I found it, then rearrange my jacket and hat on the floor.
I was right.
I hate that I was right.
She’s sleeping on the cold, hard ground without even a proper pillow or blanket. I drag myself upright and cross the room to the closet, throwing it open.
Empty.
Not a single article of clothing. This is a coastal winter, but it’s still winter. She must be freezing. She must be so uncomfortable.
I walk blindly backward, feeling suddenly worse than unsteady. I feel useless. Powerless.
Gutted.
All the reasons I hated being a kid.
I grew up with the orphans and the abandoned, all of us starved for affection and protection.
The best days of my life were the few times a year Adam would get time off to visit me.
I did everything I could to keep him happy when he showed up, because my little-kid head thought that if I was a pleasure to be around—if I smiled enough, if I kept the apartment clean, if I learned as much as I could—maybe he’d stay for longer.
I couldn’t understand that it wasn’t a choice for him.
Adam did everything he could for me; he lived through his own hells; he tried to be my mother and my father when he had none of his own. I had it way better than the other kids who had no one at all.
I know all this.
I have nothing but love and respect for my brother, and I try, always, to focus on how lucky I am.
But it doesn’t help me fight my own demons to deny that, despite everything, I still grew up unprotected, vulnerable, and defenseless.
If I can’t admit it, I can’t learn from it.
And I learned a long time ago that if I could deescalate tension, I might be able to keep myself safe.
That I might be able to keep other people safe. That maybe they’d stick around.
It started as a survival tactic.
But it became my identity.
These days I’m not sure if that’s who I am anymore. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s who I ever really was.
I never had the chance to find out.
I keep trying to pull on the suit of the old James, the easier James, the version of me that was once a pleasure to be around. I don’t know how to find him anymore.
I think he might be dead.