Nerve #2
“Yes,” I said, glad to be back on territory I could at least name.
“We had our monthly dinner last week. It was fine. Better than fine. He hugged me before I left. And the entire drive home, all I could think was okay, that was the peak. It’s only downhill from here.
I am keeping him at arm’s reach because if I start counting on him to be my dad, I’m giving him the power to break me all over again. ”
Lucy bobbed her head slowly, her reading glasses sliding a fraction of an inch down her nose.
“You’re trying to protect yourself from a future loss by denying yourself the connection right now.
That is a very lonely way to stay safe, Seren.
He is trying to reach you. What happens if you just let him? ”
Before the words could fully settle into the space between us, a sharp, sudden buzz cut through the quiet of my bedroom.
My phone, lying flat on the mattress right beside my thigh, lit up.
Instinctively, my eyes darted down to the screen.
It was a text from my dad. There were no words.
No Thought of you. No How is school? It was just an image, slightly grainy and overly bright with afternoon sunlight.
A single hummingbird, its wings a blurred halo of green and silver, suspended mid-air right at the edge of the feeder on his back porch.
I stared at the glowing rectangle. It was so entirely out of character for him, a man who usually communicated in brief, functional logistics about oil changes or grocery lists, that it sat completely wrong in my chest. Coming right on the heels of what I had just confessed about the permanency of things, the silent image felt like a strange, clumsy echo.
Like a hand reaching out in the dark, poking me.
“Seren?” Lucy’s voice pulled me back to the monitor. “What is it?”
Slowly, I picked up the phone, turning the screen toward the laptop camera so she could see the glowing rectangle. “My dad just sent me this,” I said, my voice sounding smaller than it had a minute ago. “Just the picture. No caption. Just… a hummingbird.”
Lucy peered through her glasses at the screen, her expression turning thoughtful as she took in the image. “A hummingbird,” she repeated.
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” I finally said, my eyes dropping back to the tiny, blurred bird on my screen. I didn’t have the context.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything right now,” Lucy told me. “Sometimes things are just what they present as, and there doesn’t have to be something behind it.”
I nodded, and silence filled my room again as Lucy wrote in her notebook. She took longer than she usually did, this time, so my mind had time to spot a small hole in the blanket in front of me. I picked at it, each time my finger moved, the hole became a little bigger.
“Seren,” Lucy said, and my head snapped back up to the laptop. My finger kept moving, though, kept making the hole grow. “I have a question for you.”
“Sure,” I said, though it sounded more hesitant than sure. Lucy did not usually soften her blows.
“Do you have anyone in your life that is not connected to the rape? Any interpersonal relationships that formed outside of what Jax did to you?” she asked, her head was turned down, and she was peering at me.
“Um…” I barely had to think. I knew the answer. “No.” Zane, Austin, Cassidy, Gavin, O… Hell, even my friendship with Blair was formed as a result.
“No,” Lucy repeated, writing something down again. Then she looked back up, and this time, she looked hesitant. “Have you ever? Had any kind of relationship that did not connect to the rape?”
I blinked. I heard the question, but I was reluctant to grant it access to my brain. I did, after a few more blinks. Olivia, Trinity… all the people who I thought were my friends, even the boys I used to kiss when I was drunk. They all co-existed with Jax.
“My mom,” I said dryly, after the look into my memory was bleak. “If she counts.”
Lucy didn’t say no, but her head shook back and forth slightly. “No one else?”
“Nope,” I said louder than before. But then—well, maybe. “Wait,” I said, stopping my own finality. “Alex.”
Lucy’s pen paused. “Alex?” she repeated, her voice neutral, careful not to scare the name back into whatever corner of my brain it had been hiding in. Like I said, Lucy knew me. She knew the people in my life, past and present. She knew I had never mentioned this name. “Who is Alex?”
“Just a boy,” I said, already regretting the way my mouth had run ahead of my filter. I shifted my weight, trying to find a comfortable position on the mattress that didn’t feel so exposed. “It wasn’t a relationship. We weren’t even friends. Not really. I haven’t thought about him in years.”
“That’s okay,” Lucy said. “Tell me anyway.”
I looked at the small green light of the webcam, letting my mind drift backward, away from North Haven, all the way to a memory when the air was thick and my skin felt constantly damp.
“It was sophomore year, before the stuff with Jax got really bad,” I said, my voice dropping into a flat, storytelling cadence.
“I couldn’t sleep. I used to walk around at night because the house felt…
off, I don’t know. I would end up in the old cemetery.
Where my mom is. It was quiet there.” I paused, my thumb tracing the blue beads of the bracelet on my wrist. “He was just there one night. We just started talking.”
“What did you talk about?” Lucy asked.
“Nothing important,” I muttered my lie, though the memory felt surprisingly sharp under the surface.
“Just regular things. He didn’t ask me my last name, and I didn’t ask his.
He didn’t know anything about me, and I didn’t know anything about him.
It was the only time in my life I felt like I was completely anonymous, but somehow…
seen. Like we were just two ghosts hanging out in the grass. ”
Lucy jotted something down, a quick, precise movement of her wrist. “How long did this go on?”
“Three nights,” I said. “Just three nights in a row. We would sit out there until the sky started to turn gray, and then we would go home. On the fourth night, I went back, but he wasn’t there.”
“Did he tell you he wasn’t coming back?”
“No,” I said, a small, involuntary sigh escaping my lips. “He just disappeared.”
I looked back at the screen, trying to shrug it off, trying to make it sound as incidental as I wanted it to be.
“I built this whole theory in my head one night. I figured he finally found whatever he was looking for, packed up his stuff, and left town. It was a nice thought. It made the graveyard feel less like a place where things ended. The alternative was realizing I wasn’t interesting enough to come back for. ”
Lucy watched me through the monitor, her eyes scanning my face over the top of her reading glasses.
The hesitation I had seen in her expression a minute ago had deepened into something heavy, something almost sorrowful.
“Did you ever try to find him, Seren?” she asked. “Did you ever find out who he was?”
“No,” I said, popping the word out quickly, defensive without knowing why. “Why would I? Like I said, it wasn’t a big deal. It was just a loose thread.”
“Maybe,” Lucy said. “But you did say he made you feel seen. That is important.”
“Or maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything right now,” I said, parroting her words back to her. “Maybe things are just what they present as, and there doesn’t have to be something behind it.”
Lucy’s eyes narrowed, just the slightest movement, as she recognized her own thought. But not in a way that seemed mad, or annoyed. She had a knowing smile on her lips, too.
“Maybe,” she said simply. “Our time today is almost done, Seren.”
I glanced at the clock: 4:55 PM. How time flies when you are having fun, or having your darkest thoughts laid bare to examine.