Chapter 2 The Song of a Heavy Chest #2
For a moment, the second floor felt like home.
Four familiar doors lined the right side of the hallway.
The second one, the one to my sister Mila’s old room, stood open.
Sunlight streamed through it, spilling into the hallway and bathing the dried flower arrangement Mom still kept on the sideboard to my left in a warm yellow glow.
The door to my room was closed, just as it used to be.
My room.
Except it wasn’t mine anymore. It was no longer the place where I hid from one of Dad’s lectures. No longer the harbor for my stupid teenage dreams of becoming the most famous singer in the world—or at least someone who could make a living off the ridiculous act of expressing myself.
Why did I even come up here in the first place? I couldn’t just walk into my room—or rather Alex’s room, fuck—to change. I wouldn’t be sleeping there. I wouldn’t sneak back into it later. I wouldn’t watch the others slip away one by one as I ducked beneath the window so they wouldn’t see me.
Maybe that was why my gut told me not to come back to Seastone all these years. Deep down, I must have known that this place wasn’t my home anymore. Still, I never imagined they would give my room to someone else.
Silence filled the hallway. Only my footsteps echoed as I moved forward, as if I still had a reason to be up here.
I should have turned around and used the downstairs bathroom.
After all, the pants and shirt I wanted to wear were in the backpack slung over my shoulder.
But my feet kept going, carrying me to the room I shouldn’t enter.
My hand closed around the doorknob. The metal felt cool against my palm.
I knew I shouldn’t do this, but I opened the door anyway.
A thin strip of light cut across the bed.
The blinds were halfway down, making the room darker than the rest of the house.
The yellowed woodchip wallpaper looked the same as I remembered, but the bed had new blue bedding—and it was made, for once.
My desk, which used to stand on the left side of the room, was gone.
In its place sat a keyboard piano on the floor, hooked up to an audio interface and connected to a laptop.
A guitar leaned against the back wall, and a stack of notebooks rested on an amplifier.
Something tightened in my chest—like I wanted to breathe, but my lungs forgot how. What was this? Why were there instruments that looked exactly like mine when they couldn’t be? I had taken mine with me when I moved out. And why did that hit so hard?
The thought lingered as I stepped farther inside, taking in the wrinkled shirts draped over my old dresser on the right, the box of tissues on the nightstand, and the palm tree in the corner by the window. Just as I was about to move deeper into the room, a creak from the staircase made me turn.
That guy, Alex, stood at the end of the hallway, one foot still on the last step, staring at me. His wavy, brown hair fell into his face, partially covering his eyes.
“Um, I—” I stammered, suddenly aware of how this must look. I stepped back until my backpack bumped against the wall. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the room was taken.”
“If you want to,” he said, his voice so quiet I had to focus to catch it, “you can stay there for the night. I…” He pointed downstairs. “I, um…” He lowered his head, his face tightening as if in pain. “I’m sorry. I kind of… overheard…”
“Overheard the conversation I had with my parents?” I finished for him. I could have snapped at him, dumped everything on him, but that wouldn’t have changed anything. For all I knew, he was just another guy who had somehow ended up stuck in this stupid town. Why else would he choose to live here?
“I didn’t mean to,” he said.
I glanced back into the room. “Me neither. I was just curious. I shouldn’t have been. Sorry for barging in.”
“It was your room before it was mine. You should have it tonight. I’ve got friends nearby. I can crash at their place.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
We held each other’s gaze a second longer than necessary.
There was something honest in his expression, like he genuinely wanted to solve a problem that wasn’t even his.
This only made my chest feel heavier. As much as I wanted to believe that the fight between my dad and me was ours alone, it wasn’t.
It affected my mom, too. And, from the looks of it, even strangers like him.
“I don’t know why there’s so much tension between you and your dad,” he said, finally taking that last step, “but I know what it’s like to fight with someone. I don’t want to be the reason you can’t enjoy tonight.”
“You would only be, if you left. As much as I appreciate the offer, my dad would never believe you came up with that on your own. He’d just get angrier and say I drove you out.
” I glanced at the bed in my old room and noticed that the black metal frame was different from the one I’d had when I lived there.
“And it’s not my room anymore. The house is big enough. I’ll figure something out.”
“Not to make things more awkward,” Alex said, hesitating again. His eyes dropped to the floor. “But the air mattress Dany mentioned… it would fit next to the bed…” He glanced up. “…if you don’t mind sharing the room.”