6. Xander #4
Lucian catches my eye through the glass. The smile. The Lucian smile. The one he gave Adeena when the cops came to the bridge and pulled me from her arms. The one that says: “I always win.”
The cruiser pulls away. I watch the house shrink in the rear window—the glass and stone and sharp angles getting smaller, the imported stone and the architectural landscaping and the gravel where my mother’s rosebushes used to be.
Getting smaller and smaller until it’s nothing.
Just a shape. Just a building where terrible things happened to people who deserved better.
Intake is efficient.
They take my belongings—phone, wallet, the friendship bracelet they have to cut because it doesn’t have a clasp and I refuse to let them break the threads.
I watch them drop it into a plastic bag with my name on it and the sight of the teal and yellow threads sealed in police evidence packaging makes something in my chest collapse that I didn’t know was still standing.
Fingerprints. Mug shot. The holding cell—cold, small, the particular desolation of a room designed to contain you while the system decides what you’re worth.
I sit on the metal bench. Press my back to the concrete wall.
My eye is swollen shut. My ribs are screaming.
The pepper spray has faded to a persistent burn, like sunburn on the inside of my face.
One phone call. They give me one.
I think about calling Kaiden. Kaiden would come. Kaiden would organize. Kaiden would turn this into a plan with steps and contingencies and the particular forward momentum that Kaiden Monaghan brings to every crisis.
I think about calling Penny. The number I know by heart—the number I’ve known since before I had a phone, because Alice wrote it on a card in my lunchbox in second grade that said “call us if you need anything, Xander” and I memorized it and never forgot.
Instead I call Iz.
Because Iz has what I need right now. Not a plan. Not a girl. Two parents. A father who is the best lawyer in Edgewood and a mother who is a doctor who specializes in the kind of broken I am.
It rings three times. Four. I press my forehead against the wall and pray to a God I’m not sure I believe in that Issac Walsh picks up his phone.
“Hello?”
The relief is so enormous it makes my knees buckle. I slide down the wall. Sit on the cold floor of the holding cell with the phone pressed to my ear and my voice cracking open.
“Iz. It’s me. I, uh—” The words stall. The ones I’ve been choking on for months.
The ones that got stuck in the bathroom at Edgewood and the pool house and every other room where someone offered me a hand and I slapped it away.
“I got arrested. My dad—we fought. The real kind. There’s—there’s pepper spray and a taser and I can’t see out of my left eye and I think my ribs are—”
“Stop. Breathe.” Iz’s voice goes into the mode—the calm, the anchor, the particular steadiness of a boy who inherited his mother’s gift for finding the solid ground in a room full of shaking floor. “Are you hurt bad? Like, hospital bad?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Iz, I need—I need your dad. Arthur. The lawyer thing. And your mom. Darla. The—the other thing.”
Silence. Then: “The other thing. You mean…”
“The doctor thing, Iz. The—” My voice breaks.
Fully. The wall I’ve been maintaining since October—the wall built from pills and fists and cruelty and the architecture of a boy who learned from his father that showing emotion is the same as showing weakness—collapses.
“I need help. I need help and I can’t do this alone anymore.
I’m in a jail cell and my face is broken and my mother is dead and my father just told me the only useful thing she ever did was kill herself and I hit him, Iz.
I hit him the way he’s been hitting me my entire life and I felt nothing and that’s the part that scares me. I felt nothing.”
Iz is quiet for five seconds. Long enough for me to hear his breathing change—the catch in it, the sound of a boy who is processing something that hurts on behalf of someone he loves.
“I’m calling them both right now. Dad will be there within the hour. Mom will have a plan by morning. And X?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re all behind you. Every single one of us. You hear me? You are not alone. You have never been alone. You just couldn’t see us because you were too busy building walls.”
I press the phone against my forehead. The tears fall on the metal bench. They’re warm. The only warm thing in this cell.
“Thank you, Iz.”
“Always, brother. Sit tight. Help is coming.”
He hangs up. I put the phone down. Lean my head back against the wall. The cell is silent. Silence in a room with no windows and one door and a boy who has finally—after months of fighting and pills and cruelty and cages—stopped running.
My wrist feels naked without the bracelet. The skin where it lived for eleven years is lighter than the rest—a band of pale flesh, a tan line from a promise, the visible evidence of a thing I carried every day of my life and just lost.
Teal and yellow. The ocean and the sun. She said the ocean was stronger than anything. I said the sun never gives up.
In a plastic bag somewhere in this building, the threads are waiting. Faded. Frayed. Eleven years old.
Don’t give up, Penny. I know I’ve given you every reason to. But the sun never gives up. You told me that.
I close my eye. The one that still works. And in the dark behind it, I see the swings. The pink backpack. The crackers. The girl who tied a string on my wrist and said “forever” and meant it.
Forever is a long time. Exactly.