Chapter 14 #3
He repeats it more quietly, almost to himself first.
“Octavia.”
Something in the way he says it makes my own name sound softer, like he’s not just reading it off a file or hearing it shouted down a hallway by a sister with a clipboard. He says it like it belongs to a person, not a placement.
“That’s…” He stops, searching for the right word. For some reason that makes my heart beat harder.
“That’s a beautiful name.”
Heat creeps up my neck.
He doesn’t laugh at himself for saying it. He doesn’t cover it with a joke. He just keeps looking at me with that same strange light in his eyes, his mouth shifting slightly, not quite a smile, more like something gentler that he doesn’t know how to wear for long.
“It sounds like something you’d say quietly because you don’t want to ruin it,” he adds. “Like a song people only know if they’re listening close enough.”
For a second I forget what to do with my face.
Nobody has ever said anything like that to me. Not about my name. Not about anything, really.
My mother used to spit it like a curse when she was drunk and sweeten it into bait when she wanted something from me.
The sisters say it crisply, neatly, like checking a box.
The kids at Brightside use it the way girls in places like this use everything, carelessly, unless they’re trying to hurt you.
But he says it like it deserves tenderness.
“Thanks,” I murmur.
The word feels too small for what just passed between us.
He shrugs one shoulder like he didn’t mean to say anything that would matter, but the softness doesn’t leave his face completely. It stays there, flickering faintly, while the light from the window catches one side of him and leaves the other in shadow.
I want to ask his name then.
It’s right there on my tongue, ready. We have traded stories, laughter and pieces of ourselves all afternoon, and somehow I still don’t know what to call him except St. Augustine boy in the privacy of my own head.
The question never makes it out.
The door flies open so hard it slams into the wall with a crack that makes me jump.
Three boys crowd into the room at once, bringing the hallway noise in with them like filth on their shoes.
They’re older than him, older than me too, large boys who have learned how to use their size before they’ve learned anything worth knowing.
The one in front is already grinning before his eyes land on the boy sitting on my floor.
“There he is,” he sneers. There’s something viciously pleased in it. His gaze slides around my room, catches on me, then returns to him. “Trying to sneak in some private time to see if your pecker still works?”
The other two burst out laughing.
The whole room curdles.
The air changes so fast it almost hurts. Everything kind and stolen about the last few hours is gone in a second, replaced by their bodies, voices and the way they take up space like they think they own it.
“You can’t come in here,” I say, sliding off the bed before I fully register moving. My voice is sharper than I feel, but underneath it something colder is already rising. Fear.
I don’t even get close to the call button.
One of them shoves me hard enough that I stumble sideways into my desk. The corner catches me at the hip with a sharp jolt of pain. Before I can right myself, he’s already moving.
The boy from my floor is on his feet in a blur.
There’s no hesitation in him at all. No late-afternoon softness.
No light left in his eyes now. He hits the one who shoved me with the kind of force that comes from instinct, not thought, driving him backward into the doorframe hard enough to rattle it.
For one breathless second, he looks feral in the purest sense of the word.
Then the others hit him.
It happens too quickly to stop. One slams into his side.
Another catches him from behind. The shape of the fight collapses all at once, turning into a tangle of limbs, blows and bodies crashing into the floor.
They dogpile him with ugly efficiency, like this is familiar, like they have done it before and know exactly how to turn one furious boy into something pinned and overwhelmed.
“Stop!” I shout, trying to get to them.
The leader catches me before I make it halfway.
His arm snakes around my middle, yanking me backward into him, the world narrowing instantly. The smell of him. The grip. The body at my back. My pulse goes wild. The room starts slipping at the edges, old fear pouring through me too fast, the kind that makes my skin feel too small to contain it.
No.
Not this.
Not again.
I twist violently, spitting over my shoulder.
It lands.
He jerks back with a curse, his grip loosening for a second, just enough that I wrench forward out of it, breathing so hard it feels like my ribs might split. My whole body is shaking now. I can hear it in my own breath.
On the floor, the boy beneath them sees it happen.
“Leave her alone!”
The words come out mangled because one of them has a hand over his mouth now, pinning his head sideways into the rug while the others keep him down. His whole body bucks against them. He looks less like a person and more like rage in a body too outnumbered to do anything useful with it.
Then one of the boys at my dresser notices Rose.
“What’s this?” he says, picking up the jar.
My stomach drops so fast it makes me dizzy.
“No,” I say immediately, turning toward him. “Don’t touch that.”
He grins at my panic.
That’s what does it.
Not the moth. Not the jar. My panic.
He lifts Rose higher, away from me, while another one laughs from the floor. “She’s got a little pet.”
I lunge for it and almost make it.
Almost.
The boy who had grabbed me before catches my wrist, yanking me backward hard enough that my shoulder burns. The jar tips in the other boy’s hand as Rose flutters frantically against the glass.
“Please,” I gasp. I hate myself for how pleading it sounds. “Please don’t.”
They pass the jar between them like a toy after that.
Every time I get close, they move it.
Every time I reach, they laugh.
The room is full of their cruelty now, loud, stupid and delighted with itself. On the floor, the hand over his mouth keeps him from shouting, but his eyes stay on me the whole time.
In the middle of it, with Rose tapping frantically at the glass and my pulse hammering in my throat, the sweetness of the way he said my name only minutes ago becomes something sharp enough to hurt.
The jar slips from the brutes hand before I can stop it.
One second it is there, bright glass catching the late light with Rose safe inside it, the next, it is falling. I hear myself make a sound before it even hits the floor, some sharp, terrified noise torn straight out of my chest. Then the glass shatters.
The room seems to split with it.
Rose is gone in the same instant the jar breaks.
Green, pink, fuzz, and all the tiny softness of her disappear into glittering shards and color crushed into the floorboards.
For one impossible second my mind refuses to understand it.
I just stare, frozen, until my body finally catches up and I throw myself toward the floor.
Someone grabs me before I get there.
My knees slam down first, then my hands. A rough shove sends me sprawling hard enough that my breath leaves me. The leader is laughing when I look up, not because anything is funny, but because he has found the exact spot where hurting me feels easiest.
Across the room, the boy loses whatever was left of his control.
He thrashes under the pile of bodies on top of him so violently that one of them nearly slides off.
The hand over his mouth slips for a second as a furious, strangled sound tears out of him before they force it back down.
Every muscle in him is working. His whole body bucks against them with a kind of desperation that makes it obvious he isn’t trying to save himself.
He’s trying to get to me.
“You like your little friend that much?” the leader says.
My throat is too tight to answer. Tears are coming now, hot and useless. They blur everything. They blur the broken glass on the floor. They blur the smear of what used to be Rose. They blur the smile on his face when he bends and picks through the shattered pieces like he is handling trash.
I try to wrench myself free. Another hand shoves me down harder.
“Stop,” I choke out, but my voice sounds small.
The leader crouches in front of me, close enough that I can smell the sweat and hallway dust on him. His eyes flick toward the boy on the floor, still fighting so hard it looks like he might tear himself apart trying to get loose.
That is when his smile changes.
“You don’t get pretty things,” he says, looking not at me, but at the boy pinned beneath the others.
Then he reaches down, lifting a jagged piece of the jar from the floor.
The second I see the glass in his hand, something cold rushes through me. I twist hard, but the boy behind me tightens his grip. My shoulder strains. My pulse goes white-hot. I can’t get away.
The shard drags across my left cheek in one quick, vicious line.
The pain is immediately blinding.
It isn’t a sting at first. It is heat. White, shocking heat that cuts through everything else in the room. My cry breaks halfway out of me. My hand flies up without thinking. When my fingers touch my face they come away wet.
Blood.
For one second all sound drops away.
Then it all comes back at once.
The boy is still fighting.
Still trying to get free.
Still making those strangled, furious sounds behind the hand clamped over his mouth while they haul him up by both arms and start dragging him backward. His whole body strains toward me even while they force him toward the door. He looks wild. Horrified in a way that feels older than either of us.
“Serves you right for all the stunts you pulled,” one of them spits at him as they drag him out.
He doesn’t seem to hear it.
He only looks at me.
Just before they pull him through the doorway, our eyes lock.
It lasts no longer than a heartbeat, but it stays. Rage. Guilt. Helplessness. The awful fact of him seeing what they did and not being able to stop it.
Then he is gone.
The door slams.
Their footsteps fade down the hallway, taking him with them, and I am left on the floor with blood slipping through my fingers and tears blurring everything that remains of the room.
The glass sparkles around me.
Rose is still.
The place where my cheek burns tells me this memory is not going away, no matter how badly I want it to.