Chapter 38 #2
For a second, I thought she would see me and get mad, but her eyes just floated right through me, like I was a ghost or a bug on the wall. She reached for the pack of cigarettes on the shelf, fumbled it, then caught it on the third try.
She shook one out, stuck it between her lips, but her hands were shaking too much to work the lighter. She tried three times before she slammed the lighter down, hard enough that it skittered across the counter and landed in the sink.
Then she slumped over, arms hugging herself, and started to sob for real, the kind that comes from somewhere so deep it sounds like it’s not even part of the human body.
That’s when I went back to bed, feeling as if I had intruded on something I wasn’t supposed to see.
The next morning, Mom was gone.
Lillian was quiet. When I asked if Mom would be okay, Lillian just shook her head.
We walked to school together.
Lillian’s hand was ice in mine, and I squeezed it until my fingers cramped. We made our way through the crusted blue-gray world, and for once the cold didn’t even hurt, because somewhere inside me something else had frozen up first.
At the bottom of the hill, a murder of crows was picking at the carcass of a rabbit. Its fur was all dirty and packed with ice, eyes dry and black as glass.
The birds tore into it, not even pretending to wait their turn. Lillian stopped to watch.
For a minute, I thought maybe she was going to shoo the crows away, but she just stared, face blank, and I stared too, because I didn’t know what else to do.
Sometimes I thought the whole world was just a big empty field, and the only things in it were scavengers.
Not the crows or the possums or even the rats, but people like me and Lillian, picking over what was left behind, hoping for something soft or warm but never finding it.
When we got to school, Lillian drifted away. She was three years older, so her class was in a different section.
I got nervous when I saw Caiden waiting by the door to class, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of a jacket that looked too small on him now, wrists already sticking out from the cuffs.
I wondered if he’d say hi or just look through me, like what would happen in the hallways when you were a nobody or worse. A memory.
I gave him a little wave, the kind you do when you’re not sure if the other person wants it. He barely nodded, and then his eyes skipped over me, looking at the wall behind my head or the ceiling tiles or the gum stuck under the heater.
He looked different from before. Jaw all set, mouth twisted like he’d bitten something sour and was too proud to spit it out.
I tried again when we lined up for class. “Is your hand feeling better?” I asked, pointing at the bruise I’d noticed last week.
The words tumbled out. I wanted to show him I remembered, that I cared, even if it didn’t matter.
He jerked his hand away, shoving it in his armpit, and glared at me. “You don’t have to ask me stuff,” he said, real quiet. “Just shut up about it.”
I shrank back, my whole body folding up small. I wanted to disappear into the floor, or maybe just turn into air and float away so he could never see me again.
We were given a spelling list and told to “work in pairs,” which meant Caiden and I got stuck together at a table by the window.
He didn’t look at me once.
He wrote all the words in blocky, stuttering letters, pressing the pencil so hard you could see the indent on the next page.
I copied them down, careful to spell each one neat, not making any mistakes.
When we finished, I tried to hand the sheet to him first, but he just shoved it back at me and said, “You’re supposed to turn it in, stupid.” He didn’t even say thank you. He didn’t even say my name.
The whole morning, I felt the blank spot between us get bigger and bigger.
I kept thinking about last year in the beginning of the school semester, about the dinosaur bandaid and how he’d carried my backpack, about the time he gave me boots in the winter, or the few times we met at the park, and I wondered if I had only imagined it.
Maybe I’d made up the whole thing because I wanted it to be true. Maybe my brain did that. Filled in the empty with stories, so it wouldn’t hurt so much when people went away.
During break, I watched him from down the hall.
He was with other boys now, ones who laughed at things that weren’t even funny and high-fived each other after every sentence.
Caiden acted like he was the general of an army, giving orders in a whisper and then marching them around the corners like he owned the whole school.
When he caught me staring, his mouth twitched, and then he turned away, like I was a bug crawling on the window and he was deciding whether or not to squash me.
That’s when I started to believe what they said about him. That he was mean, and colder than anyone.
That if you ever got close, he would either disappear or turn on you, and there was nothing in between.
I felt it settling into my bones, the way winter does when you first realize it’s going to last forever and I wondered how much of Caiden’s meanness was real, and how much was just armor he wore so the world couldn’t see the place where he was soft.
That afternoon, I saw Caiden in the hallway, hunched at his locker and clutching a fistful of crumpled paper like he meant to strangle it.
He was talking to another boy I didn’t know, a big kid with a neck that looked like it had grown around his t-shirt. Their laughter was mean and too loud, meant for hurting and not for fun.
When they noticed me, the big kid flicked his chin at Caiden, and Caiden made a face.
I thought about not walking past, but the only other way to my classroom was the long way, and I didn’t want to be late.
So I curved my shoulders in and drifted close to the lockers, barely brushing the wall.
“Hey, Langston,” Caiden called out, voice carrying. “You forget how to walk or are you just standing there to make the hallway uglier?” The big kid wheezed a laugh.
I kept my eyes on the cracks in the floor tiles and tried to move faster, but my boots caught on something and I tripped a little, arms windmilling. The sound of their laughter chased me all the way down the hall.
I kept my head down for the rest of the day, but every time I looked up, I saw Caiden looking right through me.
I learned the shape of being alone: it was the empty seat next to you, the echo of your own voice in the bathroom mirror, the way the world kept happening when you weren’t even looking.
I started to think maybe I was made of glass, like Mom said, only all the cracks were on the inside, and no one could see them unless I broke.
I wouldn’t break, I told myself, not ever.
But little did I know that breaking had a way of sneaking up on you like a slow burn simmer, or like a long overdue dam pushing through a crackling wall.