Chapter 5 #2
Her name fills my missed call log from top to bottom, reaching all the way back to noon. A little red 1 glares accusingly from my messages. Of course. Figures. She couldn’t be bothered to send more than a single text:
Mom 12:05 p.m.: Persephone. Where are you?
Bas leans close, hooking his chin over my shoulder, eavesdropping on my screen. Historically, I’d have elbowed anyone else in the face, but his quiet, unquestioning acceptance drives back the stinging in my eyes, the tingling fight-or-flight numbness seeping into my hands.
“The cops onto us already?” he asks.
“My mother. The school must have called her.” I dig the sharp edge of my tooth into the corner of my lip, dry skin threatening to bleed. “God, why couldn’t she just leave it alone? It’s not like she cares. What does it matter to her where the hell I am?”
Bas nods, his chin dipping into my shoulder.
“All right. Do you want to head back, then?”
“No.” It snarls out before I can think, spat like a challenge on the pine needles and rot. Laughing, Bas holds up his hands.
“Hey, it’s okay, we don’t have to,” he says. “I’m glad you don’t. I’d do it if you wanted, Jenny, but man, getting back over that fence from the outside would be a bitch.”
My ears ring. Something about the way he says it, the ease, the name, slaps me sideways.
Jenny with the green ribbon. Jenny, who lived her whole life with her head one pretty bow away from falling. Jenny—and that look in Bas’s eyes, calm confidence absorbing me like my presence at his side is a given, a force of nature, rain in a drought and wanted.
Glaring down at my phone, the name Persephone chafes me so bad I bite my lip until copper swells onto my tongue, staining my teeth.
God, I’m so sick of Persephone. This perfect child my mother keeps trying to build from scratch and garbage and constant demands.
I’m so sick of living that girl’s life that I could puke right here in the bracken, poisoned sick by years of her whims, her impossible standards, her disappointments, her new jobs and endless series of “important” projects, her fake goddamned apologies—“I’m sorry, Persephone, but I can’t pass up this opportunity.
I’ll be helping people, really helping people. ”
Screw that. I’ll help my own self.
If you’re texting me about it, you clearly already know, I type back in angry jabs, chipped nail polish clicking on the screen. I left. I’m safe. Don’t worry about it.
Mom 12:07 p.m.: Front office. ASAP.
Mom 12:07 p.m.: ETA
Really? I stare at the screen, disgusted.
No questions? No are you okay when I’m clearly not okay, when I haven’t been okay for the last three states, six houses, and almost four years?
Hell, even before that, I was clearly not okay when we were only moving once a year and every friend I made, I lost, until I stopped even bothering.
When I’ve maybe never been okay?
Distantly, I kind of think I should feel anxious. I’m in so much trouble. But I don’t know, I guess Jenny isn’t the kind of girl who cares. I stare at the screen, watching it scroll, fuming with a grievance so old it’s worn threadbare down to its warp and weft.
Mom 12:08 p.m.: ETA
Mom 12:08 p.m.: Did someone drive you? You better not have hitchhiked.
Mom 12:09 p.m.: Where are you?
Mom 12:09 p.m.: PERSEPHONE PRIMAVERA GREEN
“Ooh, full name.” Bas winces. “Ouch.”
I shrug. “It’s whatever,” I say, and set my phone to silent. “What about you? Are you going to get into a lot of shit for this?”
“Nah.” He shrugs, holding out his hand for me to take, my MP3 cradled like a promise in his palm. “Babynapper won’t care.”
Stepping close, I take the dangling earbud, slot it into my ear.
Music floods into my aching head, soothing away the pain, the frustration, filling up my empty places.
By the time the chorus hits, I feel like I’m kicking off the bottom of the deep end, from the ocean floor, from the riverbank.
My head breaks water, my lungs feel clean.
Temple to temple with Bas, I lean over the screen, finger outstretched to select the next song but stop.
My eyes catch on the needle-strewn ground, the base of the log where we’d just been sitting.
There, poking up through the dead leaves and needles, stretches a single, spindly weed—bright green when it should be brown, a tight white flower bud when it should be dying.
My mouth tastes like blood, ozone, soil; like… stars—a sky so full it tumbles into the river and crawls up the banks as flowers, blanketing my bare feet in endless white, spidery fingers catching at my hem.
I’ve never seen this flower before in my life. So why do I know exactly what that bud will look like?
“Was that there before?” I whisper, throat tight.
Bas hums, looking up, a question in his arched brows.
“That flower,” I insist, pointing. “Was that there before we sat down?”
Grinning, Bas hands me his earbud.
“Nah, I think it grew just for you,” he says.
Bending down, he breaks off the stem with the flat of his thumbnail.
When he stands up, his breath whispering summer promises against my frozen cheek, his fingers brushing the shell of my ear to tuck the spray into my hair, I forget to breathe.
I forget to worry. I forget to think of anything at all but the intensity in his black eyes, his fingers trailing my arm, my fingers, plucking the earbud from my hand like a pomegranate seed.
“Your turn to choose,” he murmurs, lips curling, thumb doubling over mine on the selector wheel. “Pick a song, any song.”
My not-heart roars like a storm at sea, drowning out anxiety.
A wildness seizes me, the wind running warm fingers through my hair, freedom singing in my blood.
I squeeze his hand, our fingers tangled.
I’m not sure when they got there, but I don’t care.
Music courses between us, a shared breath, and in that moment everything is possible.
I can choose any song. I can choose any name. Any life.
It’s my turn.
I push the button, pick my poison.
Beneath the music, I tell him, “Let’s get out of here.”