CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD
· · ·
We end up back in my room after the movie.
The way we always end up back in my room.
It’s become its own kind of gravity.
This room, this window, this specific air between us that exists nowhere else.
I’m going through the pile on my desk — the one that’s been accumulating for weeks, envelopes and forms and things I’ve been too checked out to open — when I find them.
Four of them.
All thick.
The good kind of thick.
The kind that means yes instead of no.
· · ·
I stand there holding them.
Cassian is on my bed.
He sees my face.
“What.”
I look at the envelopes.
Columbia.
NYU.
University of Chicago.
Georgetown.
· · ·
All far.
All very, deliberately, specifically far.
I applied to them during the grey year.
During the worst of it.
When the whole plan was to get far enough away that maybe the distance would do what the medication couldn’t.
Far enough to stop dreaming about him.
I forgot.
I actually forgot I’d done it.
I didn’t apply anywhere else.
“College letters,” I say.
He goes still.
“All good ones,” I add. Like that helps.
Something moves across his face.
Fast.
Something he gets control of before I can name it.
“Open them,” he says.
“Cassian —”
“Open them, Ro.”
I open them.
All four say yes.
I stand there holding four yeses and feel absolutely nothing like I expected to feel.
“Congratulations,” he says.
Not cold.
Just —
Proud of me.
And that’s worse.
“Say something real,” I say.
“That is real. You worked hard for those. You should be happy.”
“Cassian.”
“What do you want me to say.”
“I want you to tell me not to go.”
The room goes quiet.
He looks at me for a long moment.
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you should go.”
“I’ll stay.” The words come out fast. “I’ll go to community college. I’ll defer. I don’t care. If you tell me to stay I’ll stay. Just —”
“Ro —”
“Tell me to stay, please. Just tell me to stay.”
“No.”
“Why not? Why won’t you just —” I stop. Something hot and old moving through me and suddenly I feel like a confused kid again.
“Is this what you do? You get close enough that I can feel you and then you decide what’s good for me and disappear? Is that what’s happening right now?”
“That’s not —”
“Because it feels familiar, Cassian. It feels exactly like how you used to be and I fucking hate it.”
He stands up.
Runs a hand through his hair.
The specific restless thing he does when he’s trying to hold himself together.
· · ·
“I want you to go,” he says. “I mean that. I want you to go and be everything you’re supposed to be and not —”
“Not what? Not be here with you?”
“Not break yourself into pieces for me anymore.” His voice cracks slightly on the last word. “You’ve been doing it since you were eight years old. You’ve been making yourself smaller, making yourself fit, making yourself into whatever shape I needed — and I let you. I kept letting you.”
“I wanted to.”
“I know. That’s the problem.”
“So you just get to decide —”
“Yes.” Hard. Final. “This one time, yes.”
I stare at him.
“I don’t understand you,” I say. “I have never understood you. You let me in just far enough and then there’s this wall and I’ve been climbing it my entire life and I’m tired, Cassian. I’m so tired of not knowing what’s actually in there.”
“Ro —”
“You know everything about me.” My voice is rising.
I can hear it. I can’t stop it. “Everything. You know about the panic attacks, the pills, the way I feel about you, every embarrassing piece of who I am — I handed it all over, I’ve always handed it all over — and you have given me nothing.
Nothing real. Just enough to keep me here. ”
“That’s not —”
· · ·
“Then tell me something true.” I step toward him. “Right now. Tell me one true thing that I don’t already know. Because I love you and I would stay for you and you won’t even give me a reason and that’s not fair. And I’m not letting it go this time.
I need you, Cassian. So please. Tell me.”
He looks at me.
And something —
something gives way.
· · ·
I see it happen.
Like a wall that’s been standing for so many years finally hitting the one crack it can’t hold.
He sits down on the edge of my bed.
Hard.
Like his legs stopped.
I wait.
“My mom,” he starts.
Stops.
I don’t move.
I don’t breathe.
“She was never sick.”
The words land slow.
I heard them.
I understood them.
Yet I don’t understand them.
· · ·
“Cassian —”
“She chose.” His jaw is tight. His eyes are somewhere else. “She chose to go. That’s — that’s what the sirens were. That’s what that night was.”
The room tilts slightly.
Eleven years old.
The lights through my curtains.
Red and blue.
The way he came through my window and sobbed into my chest and I held him and said nothing because I had no words.
I thought she was sick.
Everyone said she was sick.
She chose to go.
“Cassian —”
“I didn’t know how bad it was.” He says it fast. Like he’s been holding it for years and now it’s coming out whether he wants it to or not. “I knew things were bad at home. I knew she was getting— I knew. But I didn’t know she was going to —”
He stops.
His hands are pressed flat against his knees.
Holding something down.
· · ·
“She left me there,” he says. Quiet. “With him.”
I sit down.
Not next to him.
Across from him.
So I can see his face.
“Your dad,” I say carefully.
He nods.
Once.
And then he doesn’t say anything for a long time.
I wait.
I have waited for this my entire life.
I can wait a little longer.
“He blamed me,” Cassian says finally.
Still not looking at me.
“For her. For everything. I was eleven and he looked at me like — like it was my fault she couldn’t hang on.”
Something cold moves through me.
“And then there was so much blood—”
He stops again.
This stop is different.
Longer.
His hands press harder against his knees.
“Cassian.”
“I don’t —” He exhales. Unsteady. “I’ve never said this. Out loud. To anyone.”
“I know,” I say.
“He —”
The word doesn’t come.
But something does.
Something in the way his whole body changes.
The way he folds slightly inward.
The way the thing he’s always carried shifts into view for just a second —
· · ·
This.
This is what’s been behind the door.
It was nailed shut and padlocked and boarded up so tight for a reason.
And I’m so sorry I opened it.
“After she died,” he says. Very quiet.
“He started — coming into my room.”
· · ·
The air goes out of the room.
I feel it leave.
“He said I owed him. My mom wasn’t there anymore to protect me from his attention.” His voice is completely flat now.
The specific flatness of someone reciting something they survived by making it into just a sequence of events. Like it happened to someone else.
“That she killed herself because of me. That everything that went wrong was because of me. Because I wasn’t there. I was here. And so I —”
He stops.
He doesn’t finish the sentence.
He doesn’t have to.
I understand what he’s telling me.
I understand all of it.
Every midnight tap on the window.
Every time he went still when my parents hugged him.
Every time he hated going home.
Every time he showed up at my window at one in the morning, two in the morning, and I never asked why and he never said.
The driveway at midnight.
Twelve years old.
Sitting on the concrete in the dark.
What I thought was just sadness.
It wasn’t just sadness.
It was abuse.
“Cassian —”
“I’m not —” He shakes his head. “I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because you asked for something true. And you deserve to know.”
“I know.”
“And because —” He finally looks at me. His eyes red.
Holding it together by something very thin, very frail.
“You had this life. This perfect, full, loud, beautiful life. Your parents and this house and the way they loved each other and the way they loved you and just — you were so full of good things, Ro. You were full of everything I didn’t have and I couldn’t —”
His voice breaks.
“I couldn’t let that touch what was happening to me. I couldn’t let him —”
He stops.
“Your dad,” I say quietly. “You were protecting us from your dad.”
He doesn’t confirm it.
He doesn’t have to.
“I did it for my dad.”
What he said weeks ago in this room.
The sentence he closed a door on.
Now I have the whole thing.
· · ·
I sit with it.
All of it.
The boy next door who came through my window and let me love him in every way I knew how and never told me why he couldn’t love me back the right way.
Not because he didn’t want to.
Because he was protecting me.
Because loving me the way he wanted to meant bringing me close to the thing he’d been surviving.
And he would rather break both of us than let that happen.
So he pretended he didn’t love me.
Pretended he was with someone else.
Pretended he didn’t care.
· · ·
I understand it.
And I am so angry.
“You should have told me.”
“Ro —”
“I was there.” My voice is shaking now. “I was right there. You mean to tell me I was just next door while he was— I would have—”
“I know.”
“Don’t say I know. Stop saying I know like that’s an answer.
You let me think —” I stop. Breathe. Start again.
“You let me think for years that your mom got sick. You let me believe that. I cried for her. I held you while you cried for her. And you were carrying this entire other thing and you never —”
“I couldn’t.”
“You could have.” I am crying now. I don’t know when I started.
“You could have told me. I was eight years old and I would have held it. I was eleven. I was fourteen. I was sixteen. Every single age I was, I would have held it for you. Did you know that? Did you know I would have done that? Because I loved you so much, Cassian. I would have never let you hold that all alone.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Then why —”
“Because you would have,” he says. “Because you would have held it without hesitating and it would have crushed you and I couldn’t stand to watch that happen. I couldn’t stand to be the thing that did that to you.”
· · ·
“You did it anyway,” I say quietly. “Cassian. You broke me anyway.”
Silence.
He looks at me.
“I know,” he says.
This time I let it land.
Because this time it’s not deflection.
This time it’s the truest thing he knows how to say.
I look at him for a long moment.
This person I have known my entire life.
This person I don’t fully know at all.
“I love you,” I say. “I need you to hear that. Whatever else I say — I love you and I’m not going anywhere and none of what happened to you changes that. None of it.”
He nods.
Small.
Like he’s not sure he’s allowed to accept it.
“But I’m angry,” I say. “I’m allowed to be angry.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You are.”
“I was here. I was always right here. You could have trusted me. Like I trusted you with my entire world.
With the heart you kept breaking. You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“And I’m sorry.” My voice breaks on it. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. I’m so sorry you were just a kid and alone in that house and no one —”
I can’t finish.
He crosses the space between us.
· · ·
We hold each other in the middle of my room.
Not like last night.
Not like the roof or the bathroom or the bathroom or any of the times before.
Like two people who have finally stopped pretending.
Like the first honest thing.
I press my face into his shoulder and let myself cry for all of it — for him at eleven, for me at sixteen, for every window and every silence and every almost —
and he lets me.
His hand on the back of my head.
The way it always is.
· · ·
After a long time —
I pull back.
“Tell me to stay,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Ro —”
“Please. One more time. Tell me and I will.”
His jaw moves.
“I need you to go.” He says.
“Cassian —”
“I need you to go and find out who you really are when I’m not taking up all the space.
I need you to go and be okay without me.
Because you can be. You are so much more than what you’ve let yourself be in this —” He gestures between us.
“I have taken so much from you already, Ro. I’m not taking this too. ”
“You’re not taking anything. I’m giving it.”
“I know.” His eyes are wet. “I know you are. That’s the problem. You’ll give me everything and I —” He stops. “I’m not okay. I’m not — I have things I need to deal with. Things I can’t deal with while I’m here, in this house, next door to everything that —”
“So we both go,” I say. “You go somewhere. I go somewhere. We figure it out.”
“Maybe,” he says.
“Maybe isn’t good enough.”
“It’s all I have right now.”
· · ·
I look at him.
This boy.
This infuriating, beautiful, broken, brave boy.
“I hate you,” I say.
“I know.”
“I love you.”
“I know that too.”
He cups my face in both hands.
The way he does.
The way that means something.
“Go to Columbia,” he says. “Or Georgetown. Or wherever feels like you. Go and be everything and call your dad every week and take your actual medication at the actual dose —”
“Bossy until the end.”
“— and know that I —” He stops. “Know that I meant it. What I said in the garden. I meant every word of it.”
“I know,” I say.
“And that —” His voice is very quiet now. “That none of this was because I didn’t love you. Not a single moment of it.”
I lean my forehead against his.
We stay like that.
For as long as we can.
Neither of us wanting to be the one who moves.
Neither of us able to say the word.
Eventually —
I say it.
Because one of us has to.
Because that’s always been me.
The one who says the thing first.
The one who stays open.
“Move in with my dad,” I say.
He closes his eyes. But he’s thinking about it.
I hope.
“Goodbye, Ro.”
He kisses me.
Soft.
Slow.
Like the first real one and the last one all at once.
Like something he’s pressing into himself somewhere permanent.
And then he goes.
Through the window.
The way he always has.
I stand in the middle of my room and listen to his footsteps in the grass.
Getting quieter.
Gone.
I look at the window.
Still open.
· · ·
I leave it that way.
I always do.