Chapter 35 Simon
Simon
Simon dreams of Melissa, and it is always that day. That never-ending day.
Her walking into the school gates ahead of him: her brunette spiraled hair caught in the breeze, her hand going up to push it away, out of her bright hazel eyes, as she talks to her friends.
That smile, the conspiratorial narrowing of the eyes, her soft burst of laughter. It is how a class of twenty-nine kids, and a year of sixty, remember her still, though Simon sees none of them now.
This vision of her will play out in their minds, and his, on and off for a lifetime: when their own children head out to school, then their grandchildren, Melissa will appear like a phantom in their thoughts—a reminder to hold things close in case they are taken.
In his dreams Simon is back there in that day and the day that followed, always.
—
A large fire splutters and spits in front of him. He is tired, so very tired. The drive was long and filled with silence, only his thoughts for company, frantic, panicked thoughts and a weight of unearthly sadness.
On the drive, he tried not to think of her, back there in the boot, the once-soft give of her skin hardened and cool to the touch. She was a thing now. Merely a thing tying him to another thing.
The fire crackles in front of him.
He looks up as the smoke coils and tumbles up through the tree canopy.
He’s had to travel a long way to find somewhere this isolated. Ten hours in the secondhand car his grandparents passed on to him last year so he could go to his summer job.
Ten hours to think, and then the overnight hike.
More thinking time, planning time.
In the fire, the outline of her rucksack, the structure still intact, though now no more than ash.
This hadn’t been his plan this morning.
He’d loved her, even though they say first love isn’t real love. She didn’t want anyone to know about them until after exams; her parents were against relationships. They were a distraction, apparently, although Melissa could have taken the exams while playing video games and got straight As.
They had met outside a bar. Melissa was at a friend’s seventeenth. He never met the friend. Thank God. He’d been working in the bar’s kitchen when, on a break outside, she’d bumped into him.
He’d noticed her before, at school, of course. She was considered, contained, perfect. Her laugh, her smile, the way she looked right into people when she talked to them—it was all a lot to take in for him.
And she had looked right into Simon that night and seen something in him, too; she must have, he reasoned, because she’d given him her number. He let himself fall in love with her.
For two months, his world was magical. They would meet after school, or on study days when they should have been revising, instead talking, touching, laughing, telling no one their secret.
She was fun, she was beautiful, she listened to him when he talked, she liked the things he said.
They shared everything. He told her his fears, his hopes, his dreams for the future; he gave her his entire self.
For a couple of bright, intense, electric months it had been real and alive, true, incontrovertible love, the kind they wrote songs about, the kind people died for—and Simon would have died for her, for the idea of her.
Everything had seemed so real, until out of the blue she told him it was over.
He listened to her excuses: she was worried about falling behind in her coursework and they would be going to separate universities soon.
At first, he thought it was a joke, but her features didn’t burst into joy—they slackened, telling him it wasn’t a joke, it was real.
A sickening humiliation bedded down inside him, as if the feeling were him, that he was only “something being left.”
He headed to the bathroom, the roaring rush of noise in his head threatening to topple him, as he began to wonder if maybe there was something wrong with him, deep down inside, deeper than even he could see, somehow, but she had seen it.
He braced himself over the toilet bowl, quivering, spittle stringing from his mouth into the porcelain as the sickness left him.
But the feeling would not go away; whatever he did, wherever he was, that sickly, sticky dread went with him. He thought of their phones: full of texts, full of photos, that he could not will back into nonexistence. He had loved her and she had ended it and everyone might find out.
Admissions, secrets, proclamations, images achingly full of desire before were now veiled in horror. Each one evidence of how easily he had given himself away, each one a nail in the coffin of his future, each sentiment gone rotten, like bruised and leaking fruit.
And that was before he considered the evenings they had spent together in his car, the windows fogged, how the thought of her beneath him had stayed with him through every waking hour since, her warm skin on his, the things she had said and done burnt into his brain, impossible to remove.
He would have to trust that she would not tell anyone; she alone now had that power.
He had done a stupid thing, trusting someone, loving someone, giving himself over to someone, and she had betrayed that, he concluded. He would need to fix his mistake; he would need to make her delete it all.
The love he’d felt so sharply had morphed into its equal and opposite: fear.
—
He asked her to meet him to talk—he wanted to give her back the book she had lent him.
And then, after he picked her up, the day had not gone the way that he had hoped.
He had not planned on arguing with her, or crying and begging her to give him her phone. He had not anticipated her walking away, his chasing her and hitting her back when she struck him.
And when she had started screaming, he had not planned to hit her again and again to make her stop. He had only meant for her to be quiet, but she stopped fighting back, stopped doing anything.
He had not planned on bundling her up in the boot and driving for ten hours, or to buy supplies from a hardware store and hike for miles with a full load and start a fire—but one thing followed on from another, and he had.
—
He watches the last of the objects in the flames glow white-hot—everything in there was just a shape now. All abstract, nonthreatening, easily forgotten shapes.
Terrifying that no one has stopped him, he thinks, that no one has come to check on the dark smoke tumbling up and up.
Where are all the grown-ups? he wonders.
And while he traveled hundreds of miles not to get caught, part of him is certain he will at any moment. If the wind changes direction, if some part of it all goes slightly differently.
But the vast, rolling woodland around him remains quiet, only the breeze jostling the forest canopy high above and the crackle and pop of the warm fire.
It is almost nice. If only it were slightly different.
The firelight dances across his features, a large red scratch nicked into one cheek, a smear of mud across the other. He’s already decided he’ll need to buy concealer, then smash a glass when he is back at work, so it can be explained—he’ll have to make sure someone sees him doing it.
Simon wipes his wet eyes with a sleeve, recalling her expression as she turned to walk away, and then when he ran to stop her, and she’d spun around, and struck him.
The rest a blur until he raised the stone to hit her—that moment, that realization in her eyes. That look would be forever in his mind.
If it weren’t for her parents, he knows, they would have stayed together forever, they would have married, had kids of their own, lived an entire life together.
“I’m sorry,” he tells the flames, but they crackle on, unmoved.
There is no way for Simon to go back and change things, no way to go back to their old school, his old life, even though he must. And he will.
He needs to go back, he tells himself, and live a better life, try harder, for Melissa. Simon decides he must pay for what he has done.
He promises the fire, the forest, the objects in the flames, that he will never, ever hurt anyone ever again.