Chapter 14 #2
I settle down beside him, close enough to keep an eye on her if she starts to flutter too hard.
For a moment neither of us says anything.
The silence shifts from awkward to almost peaceful, interrupted only by the noise of distant voices in the hallway and the faint tap of Rose’s tiny legs against his skin.
To fill it, because I don’t know what else to do with a quiet boy, a moth and a room that suddenly feels too small for all the things we’re not saying, I clear my throat.
“Moths can remember things,” I tell him.
He glances sideways at me, one brow lifting just slightly.
“Not like people do,” I add quickly. “Not memories exactly. But they remember routes, smells…things that kept them alive. They’re better at finding their way than people think.”
He looks back at Rose, the corner of his mouth tugging in the faintest smirk.
“Full of facts?” he asks.
I feel my face warm immediately. “I have more if you want them.”
His smirk deepens, but only a little.
“I figured you did.”
There’s something about the expression that unsettles me in a way I don’t hate. It changes his whole face. Makes him look less like someone escaping a fight and more like someone who might actually be my age if life had let him.
Rose flutters once, both of us instinctively leaning in, our shoulders brushing for the briefest second.
Neither of us comments on it.
The room stays quiet after that, but not empty.
For the first time all day, I don’t mind the silence sitting beside me.
At some point, the room stops feeling like a place I’m hiding in and starts feeling like a place we’ve stolen.
It happens so quietly I don’t catch the exact moment.
One minute he is still half-wound tight from whatever fury carried him into my room, glancing at the door every few breaths like he expects someone to come drag him back out by the collar.
The next, the hallway noise has faded into the background.
Rose is resting again in her jar on the dresser. He is no longer standing near the exit.
He’s on my floor.
His back is braced against the side of my bed, one knee bent up, one arm draped loosely over it.
He doesn’t look comfortable in the lazy, spoiled way some kids do.
He looks comfortable the way feral things do once they’ve decided, for a few minutes at least, that no one in the room is going to hurt them.
The tension hasn’t vanished completely. It never really does with kids like us.
But some of it has loosened. Enough that there’s actual light in his eyes now when he looks up at me, enough that he’s let himself laugh more than once.
That laugh keeps startling me.
It’s not loud, and it doesn’t make him softer in some magical way. It just feels real. Like something that belongs to him and not the Warden, not St. Augustine, not whatever file follows him around from office to office.
My paintings are spread all over the bed now because I made the mistake of showing him one and then another and then another after that.
I tell myself I only did it to prove that I’m not scared of him.
That I’m not one of the Brightside girls who freezes up whenever a St. Augustine kid looks too serious.
But the truth is simpler and far more embarrassing.
He asked.
And I wanted him to see them.
So now he’s sitting on my floor holding a painting of Sister Pauline with six fingers, a veil like swamp moss, and teeth where teeth definitely shouldn’t be. It’s hard not to grin too hard while he studies it with way more seriousness than the thing deserves.
“She definitely smells like old peppermints and judgment,” he says, finally lifting his eyes from the painting.
The laugh that escapes me is immediate. “That one’s Pauline.”
He points to the other one I painted, the taller creature in a black habit with a rosary looped through clawed hands, eyes hidden under dripping strokes of dark paint. “Sister Agnes looks like she’d accuse God of stealing from her.”
I laugh harder at that, enough that I have to lower the painting in my hand before I crease it.
The room feels lighter for a second, almost easy.
It’s a dangerous feeling, ease, because it makes me forget where we both came from and what places like ours usually teach us about other people.
For a few stolen hours, though, it feels possible that this is just a boy on my floor, a girl on her bed and a jar with a moth in it and not two damaged kids carrying whole haunted houses around inside their ribs.
He smiles after I do. Not a full smile, not the kind that would make him look harmless, but enough to change his face. Enough that I catch myself staring.
He notices, of course. He notices everything.
“What?” he asks.
It isn’t defensive, just curious. That almost makes it worse.
I shake my head quickly, looking back down at the painting on my lap, trying and failing to wipe the smile off my face. “Nothing. You laugh weird.”
That gets another one out of him, quieter this time. He scrubs a hand down over his face like maybe he can hide it, and then, without really thinking, he lifts the hem of his shirt and uses it to wipe at his mouth and chin.
The motion is quick.
But it’s enough.
The shirt rises, and I see the scars.
They aren’t little accidents. They aren’t the kind of scrapes kids get from climbing fences or fighting over stupid things in common rooms. They are pale…
old…cut across his stomach and ribs in lines that look intentional, in patterns that don’t belong on a body this young.
I don’t know if there are more than what I can see.
Somehow that makes it worse. The glimpse alone is enough to knock the laughter straight out of me.
He drops the shirt back down almost as quickly as he lifted it, but it’s too late.
The room has changed again. Not sharply, not all at once, but enough that we both feel it.
The warmth drains out of his face first. The ease goes second.
He looks down at the painting still in his hands, thumb rubbing at the edge of the paper so slowly I know he’s buying himself time.
When he finally speaks, his voice is flatter than before.
“I won’t ever escape my past.”
The sentence settles between us without any ceremony. I realize almost immediately that this isn’t one of those things he says to provoke. It isn’t sharpened for effect. It sounds exhausted. Like truth does when somebody has had to carry it for too long.
Then he adds, even more quietly, “I’m damaged.”
That word lands in me harder than I expect.
Not because I haven’t thought it about people before.
I have. Not because I don’t know kids who use it about themselves like it’s easier to call the wound by name than to let anyone else get close enough to see it.
But the way he says it strips all drama out of it.
He doesn’t sound like he wants pity. He sounds like he’s reporting a fact the way someone might tell you the weather turned.
I look at him for a long second.
At the too-thin frame stretched out on my floor. At the used clothes that don’t fit him right. At the hands that held Rose like she was made of paper. At the boy who ran into my room cursing everyone in charge and then sat there laughing at my monstrous nuns until light came back into his eyes.
“You don’t look broken to me,” I say.
The words come out before I have time to measure them. Once they’re there, I can’t take them back.
He lifts his head slowly.
The room goes very still. Not in a frightening way. In a listening way. He’s looking at me like he’s trying to decide whether I’m mocking him or whether I’m stupid or whether I’ve said something nobody’s ever bothered to say before.
So I keep going, because if I stop now, it’ll sound like I didn’t mean it.
“You look angry sometimes,” I tell him. “And tired. And kind of mean, honestly. But not broken.”
The last word feels different the second time. Fuller somehow.
My fingers smooth uselessly over the edge of the painting in my lap. Rose taps lightly against the glass of her jar once, then settles again. The hallway outside stays quiet. It’s just the two of us and too many things neither of us knows what to do with.
His jaw shifts. His eyes flick away, then back again. He doesn’t laugh at me. He doesn’t throw the words back. He just sits there on my floor with late sunlight touching one side of his face and something in his expression loosening so slightly most people would miss it.
But I don’t.
Because for one terrible, tender second, he looks less like a St. Augustine boy and more like exactly what he is.
A kid somebody hurt enough times that he started calling himself damaged before anyone else could.
And maybe that is why I say the next part softer.
“Broken things don’t usually laugh at bad paintings and hold moths like they matter.”
That finally gets something to move in his face. Not a smile. Not yet. Just the smallest flicker of disbelief, like he doesn’t know what to do with the idea that maybe he isn’t the worst things that ever happened to him.
Because I don’t know what to do with that look either, I reach for another painting before the silence can swallow us both and hold it out.
“This one,” I say, trying to sound more casual than I feel, “is Sister Agnes if she ever got exorcised wrong.”
He takes it from me.
A minute later, he laughs again.
His thumb drifts over the edge of the paper without bending it, almost absentmindedly, while he stares at it like he’s trying to decide whether to laugh again or say something that matters more.
Then he glances up at me.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
The question catches me off guard for how simple it is. We have been sitting here for what feels like hours, talking about everything and nothing, and somehow neither of us bothered with the first thing normal people usually ask.
I look down at the painting in my lap before answering, as if the color there can steady me.
“Octavia.”