Chapter Eleven.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

↠ Etienne

"What and how much had I lost

by trying to do only what was expected of me

instead of what I myself had wished to do?"

― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

SMILES became our favourite form of currency. They became a bridge that we loved to cross. For the very first time, we smiled when we walked past each other in the corridors of Ridgeway, and despite how insignificant an act it might have been, it was revolutionary to me.

However, the most bewildering part of all was how no one seemed even to notice. It was all assignments due that day and inept boyfriends and upcoming football matches. And it was impossible for me not to dwell on the fact that, for years, I had made a home out of the silliest of fears.

“Please don’t overthink it.” I could still feel her lips on mine when she uttered those words. She had pulled away only seconds earlier because, unfortunately, a kiss cannot extend for all of eternity. Her knowing eyes scrutinised me with an attention to detail that people rarely ever thought me worthy of.

It was too late. My head had already run laps around the matter. But it never arrived anywhere. It just took me on an endless loop that left me dizzy and made me chuckle. I leaned back against the couch and tried not to drown in the surreality of the moment. But above us lingered the reminder that this singular moment in time had just changed the course of our lives in a way that was yet to be decided.

“You’re overthinking it.”

“Can you blame me?”

“Just look at it as if we were puppets and this was something that was always meant to happen. Something we have no control over. Call it destiny or whatever.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Cass. You’ve been dissociating your entire life.”

I took in the mechanisms of her body with a dutiful eye that felt strangely religious. Hungry for something to worship, something to blindly submit itself to. She stretched out her limbs while a small satisfied moan escaped through her parted lips, and then she lay down on the carpeted floor while an idle grin stretched her lips.

“Holy shit. I actually have, haven’t I? Hadn’t really thought about it before.”

I knew she cared, and I knew she was not indifferent to the whirlwind of emotions and circumstances we were subjecting ourselves to, but she took it in with such carelessness that it was impossible for me not to melt into the moment with her.

I still couldn’t completely shake off the feeling that we had rushed into things. That we had somehow gotten the timing wrong. Cassie and I were an infinite paradox that the universe had used as some sort of running joke.

But I’d made a lot of mistakes in my short life. I was fine letting this be one of them.

Cassie had been right in assuming I would be mocked for standing up for her. I knew that people at Ridgeway would judge me more harshly for defending her than they would Peter for physically assaulting her. But I’d been feeling burned out by then, overly aware that I did not have to carry the weight of their judgment.

We were just kids whose lives were not even that intertwined. We were not going to remember each other in twenty years, so what did it matter if I was in love with the one girl everyone so avidly disliked for no real reason? It would not be the end of the world. People would talk, but they did it regardless. And just like everything else, it would pass.

Molly was the first to approach me that morning but I knew the others would be arriving shortly. People there did not like having a sense of individuality. They either did everything together or not at all. “Heard you went to Louis’ party,” she said, feigning nonchalance whilst leaning against the locker next to mine.

I kept my gaze on the books I was rearranging inside the locker, trying to hide from the passive-aggressiveness that radiated off of her. “Did I?”

“Oh, you did. And caused a scene by punching Peter.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. He caused a scene. I ended it.”

Her fidgeting showed discontent. I didn’t even have to look her in the eye to know that bitterness prevailed over every other sentiment. “Yes. But all of that because of Cassie? Surely, there were other ways to handle it”

“Do fucking forgive me for not letting him physically assault a girl,” I muttered, shoving a book a little too brusquely, still refusing to acknowledge the small group that had congregated behind my back.

Oliver Hopkins chuckled, and for a moment I felt grateful his hideous face was out of view, for I had never wanted to punch it so badly. “Man, she probably did something to deserve it, you know how she is,” he boldly stated.

I closed the locker at once. Slammed it shut. “No, I don’t know how she is. Mind enlightening me?” I asked defiantly. Out of the few people observing this interaction, only River and James mirrored my disgust. I don’t know if everyone else was just pretending Peter’s assault on Cassie had been of little importance or if they were genuinely empty-headed, but their silence still spoke volumes.

These were the people whose opinions I had valued so very dearly, my thoughts bitterly reminded me. I had wasted years of my life hiding my truth out of fear of what they would think. But they were pitiful and vile, and I think that made me even worse somehow.

Oliver took a step forward to match my confrontational stance. “She’s a fucking junkie. She’s always up to no good. Why does it fucking surprise you that she’s getting assaulted at some stupid party? How is that out of character for her? She probably tried to steal money from Peter to buy drugs for all we know.”

My hand itched but River pulled me away before I got the chance to lunge at him. The two of us along with James thought it best to simply walk away and leave it at that. We were tired of the petty fights, of wasting our energy on people who did not deserve it. “If she’s a junkie, Oliver, then what does that make you?” James casually asked over his shoulder as we walked away. Because students at Ridgeway seemed to forget many of them were not strangers to casual drug use. Oliver certainly wasn’t.

The agenda around Ridgeway was that we were renouncing our popularity by turning our backs on the crowd we’d been known to frequent. It was all incredibly childish. James and River couldn’t have cared less. They were naturally charming. They didn’t need validation from their peers seeing. Their confidence came from within. But it would’ve been a blatant lie for me to say that I did not feel a strange discomfort as I stood in the middle of this absurd storm.

Unlike James and River, I had worked hard for that validation. And it meant a lot to me because I rarely received it elsewhere. I wasn’t good at anything. My support system could be reduced to about three or four people on a good day. And in all truthfulness, this entire spectacle was making me feel like there was a sudden shortage of oxygen in every room I walked into. I don’t think my heart ever stopped pounding. My hands were perpetually coated with a thin layer of stubborn sweat. Everything felt a little bit wrong.

A moment of truth came during lunchtime when the three of us walked in and were greeted by an arrangement of tables and a decision to be made. A cowardly part of me wanted us to sit at our usual spot with the usual people. Pretend none of this even happened. Return to a normality that had never made me happy but had made me feel blissfully ordinary.

Thankfully, River saved me from that moment of weakness by nodding in the direction of a table on the far left side of the room, where only Cassie and Ivy sat. “Should we sit with the girls?” he asked.

Instead of responding, James simply walked and we wordlessly followed. The two girls had been too busy chatting and only took notice of us once we had arrived by their side.

“Can we?” River asked, his face warmed by an amiable smile.

“Of course we can,” James remarked as he took a seat without a care in the world. His hardened gaze then fixed on Ivy. “Is that my scarf?”

Her disposition did not change from unamused. “Like you’d ever have the fashion sense to own a scarf.”

River and I sat down as well. He sat next to James while I wordlessly took the space next to Cassie, leaving only a small distance between us. Her perplexed eyes did not abandon me once. I had to resist the urge to have our hands meet under the table, but just the thought that it could happen, that we’d gotten to this point, made this feeling of vastness in my chest expand infinitely.

Her lips curved into an amused little grin. “Ivy and I were thinking—” she started.

“Well, that’s news.” The words had slipped from my tongue before I could stop them, and although our friends did find it funny, it caught Cassie and me entirely off guard.

That was the sort of comment that I would make while in the privacy of our homes. This type of banter had never taken place outside of that boring brick building we’d grown up in. We both fidgeted in our seats.

Cassie turned to me with a bewildered expression. She grabbed the thin book she’d been carrying with her all day and lightly smacked the back of the head with it. “—we were thinking about doing horror movie Fridays.”

James nodded and pointed at Ivy. “Nothing scarier than seeing that face.”

“And we’ll be using your place for our movie nights,” Ivy told James, doing a phenomenal job at remaining unbothered by his taunting. “Maeve’s TVs are all ancient.”

“Oh, good. I’ll buy us some popcorn.”

“Who said you were invited?”

“You’ll literally be staying at my place. I don’t need permission to be at my place.”

“You do need permission to be in my immediate vicinity.”

Our heads moved from one side to another as we followed James and Ivy’s scuffle. Without thinking twice, I moved my arm ever so slightly, a movement that was virtually imperceptible to even the most cautious eye, so that my fingers could rest over hers.

Maybe people noticed. Maybe they didn’t. But there was an unbounded beauty in thinking to myself: what do I care? That thought did not come to me often, but I held on to it with bloodied hands now that it was here, refusing to let it go.

I could feel myself becoming entirely consumed by the thought of Cassie as the day progressed. I messed up my lab work and thought of her. I improvised my way through an oral presentation I had not prepared for and thought of her. It did not help that it felt like she was crossing my path more often. Perhaps in my previous stubbornness that prohibited me from seeing her, I had erased her from my surroundings altogether, but now my eyes would dart towards her if she so much as entered the room I was in. I was losing this battle and I was losing it badly.

And even worse, I was losing it publicly. And although I do find great pleasure in insulting James’ intellectual competence, he was sensible enough to understand what was happening when he inevitably caught up with it.

“You did give her a ride last night, didn’t you?” he asked suggestively when he saw that not only had Cassie and I made prolonged eye contact when we passed each other in the corridor, but that I had turned so that my eyes could follow her a little bit longer.

River had to swallow back a laugh. “Knock it off,” he said humorously. “As if she would ever be into a tosser like this one.”

We smiled at each other when I walked past her desk for Lucile Reed’s class. It was the intensity of something so meaningless in essence that reminded me just how out of my control my feelings were.

“Sorry about what Peter did yesterday, by the way,” I could hear River telling her as he took the seat behind hers.

“Unless you sent him to do it you’ve got nothing to apologise for.”

“He didn’t come to school today, did he?” I asked, taking notice of his absence for the first time that day.

“Nah,” James replied as he took the seat in front of me, stretching his arms and then intertwining his fingers behind his head. “You probably hurt his feelings last night. Naughty Etienne.”

“I think I could get away with killing Peter if I really put my mind to it,” Ivy commented rather nonchalantly as she sat behind River.

“Please,” James scoffed. “You wouldn’t know how to be subtle even if your life depended on it.”

…

The cold winds crashed against my face in an unpleasant way that bordered on painful. But I kept on running and didn’t stop until I was by her side. She had left school nearly ten minutes before me because Mary McGregor had stopped me in the middle of the hallway on my way out to offer me the emptiest conversation known to mankind. It was her way of not-so-subtly assuring her friends that her stories were very much true and we had indeed been messing around behind everyone’s backs for the last couple of months.

Cassie laughed when she saw me, my face tinted slightly pink due to the cold. “I see Mary finally let you go.”

“She didn’t. I had to escape.”

We hadn’t kissed again. We were too shy to.

“Today was nice,” she said.

“And to think we could’ve been doing this a lot sooner,” I muttered, feeling surprisingly at ease by the fact we were walking side by side out in the open.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it. I want to be the one to do it. Anyway, I’ll be heading to the support group a bit earlier. There’s a birthday today so we’ll be celebrating it, I think. You’ll be going to that fundraiser thingy tonight, right?”

“Yeah, James bought the tickets two days ago. Don’t reckon it’s gonna be a lot of fun now that we’re not really on good terms with the rest of them.”

“Will I be seeing you tonight? It’s okay if you can’t come over. It’s Friday, after all. You can stay out with your friends, or with someone else if you want. Not that you need my permission.”

I smiled down at her. “You’ll be seeing me tonight.”

We were nearing our building when we came across the odd sight that was Dennis Perelman, Peter’s father, from across the street. He’d only just stepped out of his vehicle parked nearby and was inspecting some of the houses he walked past, presumably for a matter regarding his job as an electrician. He gave me a strained smile as a greeting but did not acknowledge me any further as he stopped outside one of the houses. I’d always considered Dennis to be quite a bizarre individual, and I found myself unable to look away from him until Cassie redirected my attention.

“Why is your dad’s car in the parking lot?”

My head snapped in the direction of the spot his vehicle usually occupied, and sure enough, there was my father’s silver Ford Fiesta when it was supposed to be at the bank where he worked. A dread quickly ran through my body. My father would never willingly choose to be home unless he had to, unless it was an emergency of the worst kind.

“He must be home,” I muttered under my breath. I shot her an apologetic look before I took off running, and she understood because these were the sort of circumstances that had bound us together in the first place.

I was taken aback by the stillness that greeted me at the apartment. I’d been expecting something hectic, something unimaginably awful. But there was only my father sitting in his usual armchair, his eyes following the words of a printed article on God-knows-what. My mother was not around, but my eyes were quick to catch sight of the blood-stained shirt resting on the armrest of one of the sofas. I walked towards it and held it in my closed fist.

“Deal with it. Quickly and preferably in silence,” my father instructed in that low and severe voice of his, his unwavering gaze making me feel small and insignificant, as If I was a constant burden.

I could feel my throat tightening and the back of my eyes burning with tears that would remain unshed. I had a desperate urge to check on my mother, as any sensible human being would, but it was conquered by the familiar fright of it all. I released a shaky breath and kept my gaze lowered, muttering a weak, “Yes, sir,” that to this day I haven’t been able to wrap my head around.

I don’t know why I was so frightened of him. I don’t know why his scorn felt so heavy on my conscience. It was the only thing he ever gave to me. I should’ve been used to the weight of it already. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t.

I headed over to the sink, but because the living room, dining room, and kitchen were all in the same space it meant that I was technically still in the same room as him. My shaky hands began to rinse what I knew to be my mother’s blood from her shirt, and although there was nothing to indicate it, I knew that she’d been locked in her bedroom. It was hardly that, though. It was more so a prison that my father would lock her in whenever she was being particularly difficult and he didn’t feel like dealing with her.

“Is she okay?” I asked in a small, weak voice.

Behind me, the turning of pages. “I advice that you ask wiser questions if you want useful answers.”

“Why is there blood in her shirt?”

“I received a call at the bank from our downstairs neighbours telling me your mother had been causing quite a commotion. I took the rest of the day off from work and arrived home shortly after, only to find her roaming the staircases. After bringing her back to the apartment, she tried cutting herself with a knife but only caused superficial wounds that indeed bled a lot but were unfortunately not life-threatening. She’s calmed down since and is now locked in her little chamber.”

My vision was blurry as my hands continued to mechanically move in a back-and-forth motion. “That’s odd. She had managed to be just fine when home alone, at least in the past couple of years.”

“I suggest you do not become accustomed to a single thing when it comes to your mother. That woman is physically unable to ever provide you with the faintest bit of stability.”