18. Aeron
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AERON
June isn’t in Visual Studies today, and I can’t pretend I’m not insanely relieved.
She’s more aloof and actually giving me some space, but it’s not because she cares about how she treated me.
She just gets like this every year around October.
I don’t have the full story about the traumatic thing that happened to her because I was staying with Dad at the time.
Our parents were starting to go through the divorce and had separated, and I lived with Dad for about a year.
Once the divorce got finalized, he ghosted me and June, so neither of us have seen him in years (bastard).
Anyway, I was with Dad and he said something bad had happened with Dorien and June. And some other kid. I don’t know the details about how it happened, only that it did. Nobody talks about it, so I leave it in the past.
The way June and Dorien act this time of year suggests neither of them have left it in the past.
I have a heart, so I feel for my sister.
But whatever happened when she was eight doesn’t give her the right to lose her mind on me in the basement.
Dorien said it best. I’m an adult. I can make my own decisions.
June tried pot when she was fourteen. I know because I found the pipe in her desk drawer when I was thirteen, looking for batteries.
She doesn’t get to stand on a moral high ground she burned down years ago.
I push her out of my head and turn my focus to Cinna.
She’s four seats ahead, angled just enough that I can see her profile.
Her hair is different today. She has a loose, imperfect bun with curls spilling down the back of her neck.
The projector light traces the line of her jaw, the curve of her ear, and stops at her collarbone where her sweater begins.
Everything above the sweater is illuminated. Everything below…
I blush from thinking about how I know what she looks like nude, then I open my sketchbook.
It’s been over a week since the party. Over a week since we…
well, everything. I haven’t talked to her.
I thought about asking June for Cinna’s number, but that would mean explaining why, and June would turn it into a federal investigation.
I thought about unlocking June’s phone because of course her passcode is Mom’s birthday, but stealing a number felt desperate.
So I did what Dorien would do. I acted chill, like I hadn’t spent every night replaying the feel of her body against mine.
(I am not chill. I am falling apart.)
But today I’m asking her out. Enough time has passed, and I’m sure she’ll say yes because what we shared wasn’t just sex. She held my hand. She wore my hoodie. She let me see her cry. That was a real connection between us.
I sketch the cascade of curls. The soft graphite drags across the page and I build the shadow under each curl with short, layered strokes. Morrison is still talking. I don’t hear a single word for the rest of class. I’m lost in Cinna.
Chairs scrape, and I blink, just realizing the class has ended. Cinna is already shoving her laptop into her oversized bag and heading for the door. I snap my sketchbook closed and grab my stuff quickly.
She’s crazy fast today, rushing through the hallway and reaching the building exit before I can catch up. Outside, the air is cool and the sky flat. Cinna is ten paces ahead, so I jog to close the gap.
“Hey.”
She doesn’t stop.
I jog harder. “Hey. Cinna.”
She turns. For a half second her face comes close to alarm before she relaxes it. Her eyes focus somewhere past my left shoulder. “Uh, hey. What’s up?”
I thought I wouldn’t be nervous, but now my stomach is twisting in a way that feels like I’ll puke. “H-how have you been?”
(Chill. Be chill.)
She shrugs and angles away from me, clutching her bag against her side. “Fine.” I move my head to try to catch her gaze, but she won’t look at me directly.
I fumble in my jeans pocket and pull out a small Altoids tin.
Inside, resting on bare metal, is a single dried violet.
I plucked it from one of Mom’s potted plants.
The petals had this watercolor bleed of purple into blue, like someone painted them wet-on-wet, and I thought of Cinna immediately because she keeps dried flowers.
I’ve been pressing it between textbook pages to make it dry, checking on it carefully every night.
I hold it out without a word because my throat has closed. Luckily, my hand isn’t shaking.
She looks down at it, and a surprised softness flickers across her face, the start of a small smile. She takes the flower and turns it between her thumb and forefinger. The purple and blue catch the overcast light.
Then the softness drops. She stares at the flower like it’s a problem, her lips pinching.
I don’t know what that reaction means, but I press on. “There’s a film at the indie theater this weekend,” I say. “It’s, uh, German and won a bunch of awards. I was thinking we could see it. Maybe grab food.”
“Umm…”
The pause stretches. I wait for the yes that has to come because she cried in front of me and we made love and she fell asleep in my arms. I gave her my virginity. That has to mean what I think it means.
She fidgets with the strap of her bag. She returns the flower.
“Hey, Aeron, I don’t want to be rude but I also want to be clear about us, okay?
So… I had a nice time the other day, you’re very sweet, but it was just some fun.
Like, part of the college experience, you know?
You go to parties, get emotional about stupid shit, hook up with strangers. ”
Strangers.
I’m not a stranger.
Why is she calling me a stranger?
My mouth won’t work. I’m just standing here holding a dried violet. And I don’t know what’s happening.
Cinna chews her bottom lip and stares up at the sky.
When she looks down, it’s like she is looking at a stranger.
Her eyes have that polite, distant quality to them.
“I’ll be clear so there’s no confusion. I really don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I have to be honest. I think you’re a sweet guy and…
” A pause. “I’m… I’m just not interested.
I’m sorry. We had fun and that was what I needed that night but that’s all it was, you know?
I’m sorry. I hope this doesn’t make things weird.
” She nods slowly, encouraging me to agree.
I nod back. My head moves and I don’t tell it to.
She checks her phone. “I, um, I have to go. See you later, okay?”
She walks off, her bun bouncing with each step. The curls I spent an hour sketching are fading into the distance.
To her it was a party hookup? A stranger she used because she was sad.
All those years of being kind to me, noticing me, bringing cookies upstairs, telling me she saw how Mom treated me differently. That was…
I glance down at the tiny dried violet in my hand. I crush it in my fist, then rub the pieces between my fingers so they shred and flutter to the ground.
Everything Cinna did for me, every kindness she showed, wasn’t about me at all. It was all for my sister. She was being sweet to June’s little brother so June would feel happy.
I didn’t matter to Cinna except as an extension of my sister.
Always. It’s always about June.
The feelings fill my skull until it feels like my head will explode.
The pain then fills my chest until it’s crushed.
My limbs start tingling. The hurt is so total my body doesn’t know where to put it.
My knees buckle inward slightly. My skin feels suddenly dry and ready to crack. My jaw aches from clenching.
The pain propels me forward. I walk until I’m off campus. I walk across the street to the bus stop.
It takes three buses to reach the inner city, two hours of watching suburbs thin out and buildings grow tall.
Streets narrow and light becomes harsh. By the time I get off the last bus the afternoon is already fading into fall’s early embrace.
The neighborhood is concrete and rust-colored brick, dumpsters chained to fences, a bodega with half its sign burnt out.
I’m heading to a guy I found on Snapchat a few weeks ago. Before that frat party, I’d been thinking about trying something stronger than weed.
Then my night with Cinna happened and life felt amazing, so I decided I didn’t need other drugs.
I’d be okay as long as I had Cinna.
What a fucking joke.
I shiver as I walk. I forgot my jacket. The cold bites my forearms and cuts through my T-shirt. I don’t care.
The apartment building has six floors of stained concrete. I find the right unit and knock.
A guy opens the door with the chain lock on. He has orange-tinted skin, like he lays in tanning beds too long. One disinterested eye peers through the crack. “Yeah?”
“We were talking on Snapchat,” I say.
His expression doesn’t change. “I talk to a lot of people on Snapchat.”
Irritation cuts through my numbness. “I need to buy something, so do you want my money or not?”
He smirks. The chain rattles. The door opens.
I go inside.
Carter catches me in the hallway at home. He’s carrying a bowl of cereal, his nightly ritual he has with June (it’s always June), and stops when he sees me.
He gives me a curious look, not letting me move past. “Hey, man. You good?”
I push around him. “Yeah.”
“Hold on.” His voice drops and he glances toward the kitchen behind us.
I can hear Mom and June talking in the kitchen, their voices so loud I hear every detail about Mom’s “hilarious” run-in with Jerry, some guy at work.
(June. Always, always fucking June.)
“At the party,” Carter is saying, “You left with… her, didn’t you? I didn’t get to ask but…” He wiggles his brows in a suggestive way.
My body goes rigid. “I have homework.”
He raises one hand and smirks. “Just asking. I won’t tell anyone. Just curious how it went.”
“I have homework,” I say again, and leave.
Once I’m in my room, I lock the door. The overhead light stays off. The only light is the streetlamp outside my north-facing window, casting a thin stripe across my desk.
I pull the crumpled paper bag from my pocket. From that, I lift a small baggie of clear white powder. I pour a line onto the desk, right across the stripe of light, so the powder glows against the wood. I roll a scrap of sketchbook paper into a tight tube, just the way Snapchat Guy told me.
I lean down and inhale.
It burns. My left nostril lights up, my eyes water and I almost cough, but I hold it. Then there’s a chemical taste in the back of my throat, like I licked a battery. A slow drip slides down from my sinuses. I swallow it.
Within a few minutes my upper lip goes numb. Then my gums, then my front teeth, like lidocaine at the dentist but spreading outward in every direction. Suddenly, my face feels like it belongs to someone braver than me.
My brain finally gets relief.
The pain from Cinna is still there but it’s behind glass now, separate. My thoughts accelerate, but they’re focused and ordered, as if every synapse in my brain finally decided to fire in the same direction. I feel awake in a way I’ve never been before.
Happy and euphoric in a way I never dreamed possible.
I feel like I matter.
I feel like I could walk into any room and the light would find me first.
I grab my sketchbook and start drawing. The graphite moves with a certainty I usually have to fight for. I fill page after page after page. Faces. Bodies in motion. Lions pouncing on prey. It’s all better than everything I’ve drawn in weeks.
Forty minutes in, the high starts thinning. The glass between me and the pain develops a crack. The confidence drains like water from a tub and I can feel the hurt seeping back, and I think, already?
(I don’t want this feeling to end.)
I tap another line onto the desk. Lean down. Inhale.
The sparkling motivation returns. I’m drawing, I’m drawing, I’m alive and making things and the streetlamp light crawls across my desk as the hours pass, and every time the high fades I do another line, and every time I do another line the world becomes a place where I can exist without it hurting.
By 3 a.m. I’ve gone through one bag and opened the second.
My nose is raw and one nostril is completely clogged.
I’ve filled fourteen pages of my sketchbook, front and back, and the lines in the later drawings are wilder, less controlled, but there’s an energy in them I’ve never been able to access sober.
I don’t sleep.
I don’t want to.
I need more relief.