Chapter 14
Lennon
It’s late in the day by the time Anna is ready to leave. She and Connor were concerned by how empty my room looked, so they took everything off one of the shelving units in the hall, dragged it into my room, and placed it against the wall a few feet from the foot of my bed.
Now, not only do I have a very sparsely furnished room, but I have an empty shelving unit as well.
“Would you like to stay for dinner, Anna?” asks Connor.
“No, no,” she replies. “I’ll head off and let you boys spend some time getting to know each other.”
When she says it, she scrunches her nose at me in a supportive, fond way that suddenly reminds me of my mom. My mom at the start of the school year, taking photos of me holding up a board with my grade written on it in chalk. My mom watching and waving as I boarded the school bus.
For no reason at all, it gets me where my jaw and throat meet, delivering a shooting pain that makes it hard to swallow.
I hug Anna goodbye and thank her, and as I do it, a strange wave of something I can only describe as acute homesickness crashes into me.
I don’t want her to go. I don’t want to be here, in my own personalized version of hell, without her.
“I’ll message you later to check up on you,” she whispers. “And I’ll send you a list of things you need to buy for the shelves.”
She hugs Connor too. I don’t hear exactly what he says to her, but it’s something along the lines of, “Don’t worry…thrifting…tomorrow,” and that’s enough to jolt me back to my senses.
“Wow,” he says when Anna has gone, and the atmospheric pressure in the apartment has had a second to recover from the whirlwind. “She’s something, huh?” Something. Yeah, that about covers it. “You’re lucky to have a friend like her.”
“She’s…a colleague.” To my surprise, when I say it, it doesn’t ring completely true.
“At least, that’s what she was until today.
” Connor nods as though I’m an interesting person, making a lot of sense.
“My other coworker is this guy, Blake. He’s…
I dunno. I guess he’s an acquired taste.
He has these dead eyes that make me think he might be a sociopath.
Or a sadist.” Connor nods again, eyes widening with absolute conviction that I’m interesting now.
“Until today, I preferred him to Anna…but now…well, now, I think it’s probably a two-way tie. ”
Connor’s eyes slam shut, and his mouth drops open. I see teeth and tongue. His laugh, when it finds its way to the surface, is full-bodied and loud. So full-bodied and so loud that I don’t see it or hear it the way I usually see and hear things like this.
I feel it.
In my chest.
In my neck.
In my face.
It gradually climbs up my body and works its way out of me in a slow, machine gun rattle.
It’s a strange sound. Eerie and clanky, yet strangely familiar.
It takes me a while to place it.
When I do, the recognition lands with a hollow thud.
In another life, it was a sound I made all the time.