13. Ophelia
OPHELIA
I pull him over to my bed to sit down. He takes up so much space, sitting beside me. What is he now? Six-two? Six-three?
I clear my throat and answer his question. “Would you believe to study?”
His hands are huge in mine, and, despite myself, I can’t help comparing them to the hands of his dark-haired friend.
How strange that I’ve never touched a man so intimately before, and yet here I am, holding two different men’s hands in one day.
I gaze over at him, drinking in the waves in his thick, light brown hair.
His blue eyes are the same, but his face is that much older.
It’s strange seeing eyes I once knew as keenly as my own in a grown man’s face.
He cocks his head. “Only study?”
“And get used to being around people again.”
I’m worried this line of questions is going to skirt too close to the subject of why I need to get used to being around people again, and I gently release his hands and tuck mine behind my back.
“You haven’t been around many people?”
I shrug and glance away. “My parents were really protective of me when I came home. They kept me sheltered and…well…it didn’t help.”
I pray he doesn’t ask me where I came home from, but thankfully, he doesn’t.
“Didn’t help in what way?”
I shrug.
“It fed into my belief that the world is a dangerous place.” I can’t look at him, and I change the subject, too nervous to carry on down this path, knowing where it will lead. “Tell me what happened to you after I…left. You definitely don’t look the same.”
He throws me a grin. “I got pumped, right?”
I find myself smiling back. “You certainly did. When you were a kid, I used to be able to almost wrap my fingers around your bicep, you were so skinny.”
His expression darkens. “Yeah, well, being skinny wasn’t exactly working out for me.”
I grimace. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that other people have had tough lives, too.
It’s as though my own experiences have eclipsed everyone else’s.
For a long time, I struggled to understand my parents’ need to smother me when I returned.
In my mind, I was grown already, and had been living without parents for many years, but to them I was still the little girl who’d gotten lost outside an ice cream parlor.
They wanted to revel in me being back, but I needed space.
Even my own parents could be scary to me if they’d given me too much attention and focus.
It felt suffocating and overwhelming. We’d banged heads for a long time, trying figure out how to be around each other.
I’m still not sure we know how to treat one another or if we ever will.
“Is your dad still around?” I ask.
“Yeah, he’s still alive, more’s the pity.”
I bite my lower lip. “Things didn’t get any better with him, then?”
“Once a son-of-a-bitch, always a son-of-a-bitch.”
I flinch at the ferocity of his words, and he must notice.
“Sorry,” he says.
“You’ve escaped now, though, right?” I cringe at my own choice of words.
He glances around. “If you can call this an escape. He still pays the bills, which I hate. It won’t be for much longer, though…”
“What do you mean?”
He shakes his head. “Never mind.”
It’s clearly something he doesn’t want to talk about, just like I don’t want to talk about my time in the commune. I guess we both have boundaries.
A silence falls between us.
Cain stares down at his hands in his lap. “I missed you, you know.”
I jerk my head up. “You did?”
“Yeah, every day. I used to go over to your parents’ and ask when you were coming home.
I think I went most days. In part, it was to escape my house, but mainly it was because being at your place made me feel close to you.
It was like, if I was at your house, you still existed.
But one day, your mom lost it with me. She screamed at me that you weren’t coming home.
She was crying so hard. And your dad came rushing out, yelling, too.
I think he was just being protective of your mom, but it frightened me, and I ran away. I never went back.”
I don’t know what to say. I want to apologize, but I’m not really sure what for.
It’s not as if any of what happened was my fault, and I certainly couldn’t control my parents’ reaction.
They’d have been grieving, and constantly having the neighbor’s kid come over and ask when I was coming home must have pushed my poor mother over the edge.
Cain offers me a half-smile.
“I didn’t stop thinking about you, though. Even after we moved away, I still wondered about you.”
A fresh wave of guilt washes through me.
I don’t want to tell him how I never really thought about him.
I don’t want to make him feel bad. How can I ever explain that the only way I could survive in that place was to tell myself the life I’d had before I was taken no longer existed.
It hurt too much to think about my family and my best friend.
It was as though I’d taken all those memories, put them in a box, and tucked them away in the back of my mind.
I’d become the person I needed to be to survive.
The girl who the man who had taken me wanted me to be.
I’d convinced myself—at least in part—that I’d been born into that life.
It was easier that way than constantly missing what I once had.
After a while, it became real. Instead of having to force myself not to think about the past, the past became a strange place.
Not only just another time, but another plane of existence.
It felt unreal, like a foggy dream. I’d try to recall memories sometimes, only for them to slip away, out of my hold, and, in the end, it just got easier to give up trying altogether.
Wanting to change the subject again, I say, “I think I met one of your friends earlier.”
My cheeks warm as I remember the encounter.
Actually, I’ve met both of his friends, but I don’t really want to bring up the weird confrontation I had with one of them in the cafeteria.
I’m trying to put that out of my mind, and deep down I know Cain won’t like that the guy essentially told me to stay away from him.
Not if he’s missed me and thought about me, and the last thing I want to do is cause trouble between them and end up getting blamed for it.
“Which one?” He seems interested. “Roman or Malachi?”
I bite my lower lip and wrinkle my nose. “Umm…I’m not sure. Dark hair, leather jacket, black nail polish.” The memory of kneeling on the floor with him comes rushing back to me, and my body suffuses with heat. I wonder if his friend already told him what happened.
Cain chuckles. “That’ll be Malachi. Roman’s the tall blond. I’m sure you’ll see him around, too.”
I force a smile. “Yeah, I’m sure I will.
” I hope I don’t, though. Roman clearly dislikes me after the scary encounter I had with him, although I’ve no idea what I’ve ever done to offend him.
Not wanting to linger on that, I push the thought out of my mind.
I’ve become something of a master at doing that.
Then I think of something else. “So, what’s with the name everyone calls you and your friends?
Preachers? Why do you call yourselves that? ”
The first time I heard that name it made me feel queasy and scared, and I still get a chill when I think of Cain being in a group of friends named that. Anything to do with preaching and proselytizing scares me now.
He laughs again, a low rumble in his chest. “We don’t call ourselves that…well, I suppose we do now, but we didn’t at the start. Someone else started the nickname for us, and I guess it just stuck.”
I still don’t fully understand, and I feel the urge to find out why they got this name. “Why would someone give you guys that nickname?”
He angles his head slightly, thinking. “If I remember right, Roman was trying to tell a group of students about his beliefs—how he thinks we can become stronger if we’re closer to nature—and he has this old cross that he wears.
I think he might have been holding it around his neck while he was talking, and someone yelled the name at him—preacher.
Because we’re his best friends, I guess we got tarred with the same brush, and that’s just what everyone calls us now. ”
I’m curious, and my fear abates a little when he mentions nature. A belief in Mother Nature making you strong, and in her being healing, doesn’t sound too frightening.
“Do you all believe the same things?”
He shrugs. “Some of it, yeah. I think we’re too caught up in materialistic shit these days, and we place too much importance on it.
I think the modern man misses a lot. We were never designed to spend most of our hours staring at screens or worrying about some arbitrary number the government has made up and placed on a piece of paper that’s supposed to give us our worth.
We’ve been taught to be nothing more than cogs in the machine. It’s no wonder we’re all so fucked up.”
He’s right, we are all so messed up, but I don’t think any of my issues come from the pursuit of wealth or staring too much at a screen.
In fact, it wasn’t until I returned home that I’d ever even owned my own phone.
My parents had believed I was too young before I went missing, and the use of anything like phones or computers in the commune was strictly forbidden.
I can’t exactly say that my enforced distance from technology has done me any favors.