Chapter 33 #2
The jacket swallowed me up, swallowing my arms and puffing out around my neck like a life vest. It was warm, though, and after two breaths the world started to thaw back into color.
Caiden hesitated on the porch, then glanced behind him, like there might be a trap ready to spring. “Why’da you come here?” he whispered, like it wasn’t allowed.
I shrugged and tried to think of a reason that didn’t sound stupid. “I just needed to walk. I didn’t mean to come to your house. I was just walking.” My voice was still all shivery, like it was coming from an underwater tunnel. “The guy in our house locked me out. He said I was bad.”
Caiden’s face went tight, and for a second I thought he might yell at me the way the man had, but he just nodded once and said, “He’s the bad one. Not you.”
It was quiet for a minute. The sky had just started to spit snow again, whispery flakes that camouflaged the old ones and erased everything behind us. I liked the feeling of being erased, of having all the bad stuff get covered up in white.
“Can I come in?” I asked. The words surprised me. I never asked to go in anywhere, not even to Larchmont’s. I don’t know what I expected. Probably a no, or a maybe, or a weird look.
Caiden shook his head, hard. “My dad’s inside. He’ll freak out if he sees you. In fact, you should probably go.”
He wouldn’t look right at me. His face did this thing where his mouth went flat, and his eyes got all small and mean, except I knew by now that sometimes looking mean was just a trick for not crying.
He jammed his hands into his armpits and stamped his feet hard, like he could punch the cold out of the ground.
“I mean it. Just go away, okay? If my dad sees you, he’ll…He’ll…” His voice cracked, and he mashed his lips so tight they vanished. “He’ll just make it bad. You don’t want that.”
I blinked a couple of times. I guess I’d thought he’d let me come in and play with his dinosaurs, or at least sit in the garage and drink the weird fruit punch his mom left behind in the freezer.
The sudden not-friend feeling hit me behind the ribs, stupid and heavy, like being the last one picked or maybe not being picked at all. I tried to say something, but my tongue felt stuck to the roof of my mouth.
He saw it, I think.
He got this look, like he wanted to take it back but didn’t know how, so instead he scuffed at the ice with his heel, watching it shatter into tiny splinters. Under his breath, so low I almost missed it, he said, “I can’t let him see you. He’s a psycho today.”
I didn’t really know what “psycho” meant except from movies where people got locked up or screamed a lot, but I knew enough to be scared. I nodded, even though that made my head hurt.
I didn’t want to go. The idea of walking all the way home in the snow with my toes thawing into stumps and my shame hot under my cheeks was worse than the cold, worse than being locked out in the first place.
For a second, I just stood there, clutching the sleeve of his coat and watching him pretend not to see me.
Then he whipped the shovel up and started hacking at the snowbank with huge, angry chops.
He was so loud I thought maybe he was trying to cover up the sound of us being out here, like if he made enough noise nobody inside would notice anything else. Around the third or fourth swing, the shovel blade hit the curb with a clang, and he dropped it on purpose.
From inside the house, a voice started yelling, not real words, just a kind of howl that made my insides crumple.
Caiden’s face went white, then red. “You have to go, or he’ll see.”
I turned away, boots crunching, but I didn’t go home right away. Instead, I walked until I reached the end of his street, then sat down on the curb, hugging my knees and letting the jacket swallow me whole.
The world looked different from there. The wind died down, and in the lull, I could hear his dad shouting from inside the house. A roar that echoed even through the walls.
My brain kept playing back the walk to his house, the way he’d looked at me, and then looked away. The way he’d said go away, but also the way he’d sprinted out in pajamas, just to give me boots.
It made no sense, which meant it made perfect sense. Nobody in Pathosbury ever said what they meant, not the first time.
I sat there until I couldn’t feel my fingers, then I stood up, dusted the ice off my knees, and started the long walk back to the house.
Every step felt softer, the snow muffling my feet and the world at the same time. I liked how it made the street sound empty, like I was the last kid left in the world. Like I could go anywhere, or nowhere, and nobody would notice the difference.
I walked until I couldn’t see Caiden’s house anymore, but I kept glancing back, hoping to see him running after me, yelling wait, forget what I said.
I wanted him to take it back more than anything. But the street behind me was empty, and only my own dumb footprints showed I’d ever been there.
The whole walk back to my house, I kept thinking, maybe I don’t belong anywhere. I felt as if I would walk back into my house, and nobody would see me, as if I were a ghost.
The porch light was on when I made it back, the glow pooling in a splatter across the snow like Mom’s spilled vodka.
I didn’t want to go inside. I thought about just sitting on the steps, letting my hair freeze and my lips go blue, but I knew that was the sort of thing that made grown-ups mad instead of sorry.
I sat anyway. The boots Caiden gave me were stiff and too big, but they made me feel heavier, more real, like a kid that couldn’t be blown away by the wind.
I curled up in the jacket, tucked my knees to my chest, and tried to make myself as small as possible. I could see my own breath, white and slow, like I was making a new ghost for every second that passed.
Sometimes I wished I were a bug, or a bird, or even one of the crows that always lined the telephone wires and watched the world like it was a show just for them. I wondered if they had families, if crows ever missed the ones that didn’t come back.
I sat out there until the moon became the only thing in the sky, and realized nobody would come for me.
I was alone and lost, floating like something dead in the sea.