Hazelthorn
He stands by the window for hours each summer, pressing his cheek to the humid condensation beading on the glass as he watches the garden below. After a while, his legs ache, but there’s nowhere to sit. He must stand if he wants to see.
He watches the boy in the garden, hungrily, furiously.
They are thirteen now, both of them, and it has been three years since Laurence Lennox-Hall tried to kill him.
Last week, there was a scheduled surgery to open up Evander’s old stomach wound, parting the ropey, pink scar so they could dip inside and drain the pervasive infection that keeps threatening to send him into septic shock. Soon, he will be better. He has been promised this.
He doesn’t feel it yet. Old vomit taints his mouth, and standing pulls at the new stitches, so he is in agony right now. Still, he doesn’t crawl back to bed.
He watches Laurie for hours.
Laurie, lying in the overgrown grass listening to loud music.
Laurie, beheading roses with a willow switch.
Laurie, climbing the plum trees and dangling languidly in the branches as he bites into luscious plums with his beautiful, bored mouth.
When he glances up at the window, Evander ducks behind the curtains and then smolders there like a stoked coal ready to flicker into a blaze of fury at how unfair this is.
At how the person who ruined his life can be so lovely and lazy and free all summer while he swelters in his stifling room with nothing to do but pick at the soft green shoots coming up through the carpet.
When his guardian visits after a long business trip—bringing a gold-and-rosewood chess set as a treat—he catches the hungry way Evander stares through the window. He, too, stands there for a minute and watches Laurie’s mindless antics.
“He’s doing it for attention,” his guardian says gruffly. “I’ll make him stop bothering you.”
Panic kneads Evander’s stomach and he is terrified of losing these moments with Laurie, even if they are strewn through with resentment and jealousy and want want want.
“It’s not bothering me.” But he says it too softly.
The next day, his fever is monstrous, volcanic, unmanageable.
He is dizzy as he looks through the window and watches his guardian storm out to the garden and take rough hold of Laurie to yell at him.
It filters through the closed window in muffled cadences and it’s easy for Evander to cover his ears and pretend he doesn’t hear the crack of palm to flesh. Again, and then again.
Laurie doesn’t fight back. He doesn’t make a sound.
Evander crawls back into bed and ignores the tiny redcap mushrooms growing in the grooves of his headboard. When his next dose of medicine comes, he is grateful for how it upends his memories and leaves them like scattered marbles rolling away on the floor.