It was none of his business! If he hadn’t butted in, everything would be all right now. No, not all right. Perfect. She’s angry. She’s angry with him, but angrier with herself. She hates herself. His name can’t seem to come to her lips, but his face is the only thing she sees. His smile with the slightly crooked front tooth. His shocked face in the last days when she swept by him in the hallways.
He’s the first person she’s ever shown her world. She let him come over and led him to stand under the person-sized rectangle in the ceiling. She jumped up and grabbed the screen, so the panel opened downward and a jagged ladder descended to them. She’d always liked that panel. It was a secret room, her secret.
She had to go first, turn on the electricity and see his reaction. She was apprehensive. This project of hers had become such a part of her that any judgment on it was a judgment on her. It turned out she didn’t have to worry.
The lights turned on in minute buildings that she’d carefully made herself. Realistic stoplights flicked from green to amber to red in front of cars that never moved. Electric trains whirred on tracks, through the little town, over minuscule bridges, around plastic trees and Lego people. He stood there, awed, his body still, but his eyes flickering, taking in everything. Then he raised his eyes to hers and smiled.
She never would have even done that much if she hadn’t seen him drawing a ninja in chemistry. He wrote neatly over the top “FUTURE JOB.” When she glanced back at his desk, the picture had vanished. In response to her quizzical look, he’d mouthed, “Ninjas don’t stay out in the open.”
And that was that.
Although they’d gone to the same school since kindergarten, they had never spoken before. They were completely different. Yet after his first time in her house, when he saw her attic, she was filled with him. His butterscotch hair, his eyes like the foggy San Francisco sky. And all he wanted was to be with her.
He was the one who taught her to play the guitar, patiently showing her over and over until his fingers bled. Then he bandaged them and continued with the lesson until she got bored and moved onto something else. He was always doing things like that, just for her.
She imagines she’s sitting in her attic, surrounded by her little world. In her mind’s eye she lifts a toy car and passes it between her palms. It was when she was in an airplane that she got the idea to make it – when she saw the sprawling city beneath her, aglow with the light of the setting sun. It’s comforting somehow to have a world that she can control. She’s the God of her own little world.
“Dancing Queen” was written for her, according to him, which has always been strange to her. She listened to artists like Radiohead, Avenged Sevenfold, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Queen. But then she also started listening to artists like ABBA and Taylor Swift, just to hear what he heard and to try and see herself through his eyes.
She was up for everything, afraid to try nothing. He doodled and read literature, inscribing notes into the margins. They complemented each other perfectly, but she wasn’t as wild as everyone saw her and he wasn’t as quiet, especially not when they were in each other’s arms. They could lie for hours just taking in each curve on each other’s faces and speck in each other’s eyes as their breathing synchronized perfectly, their chests rising and falling in rhythm.
He forced her to read the classics. She’d always had a sort of romantic notion about reading, but she was too lazy to do it and she got so easily bored. But he acted out scenes for her, brought in his favorite film reproductions. Her read to her in a British accent, a Scottish one, French, Australian. Or he read in his own voice and still she was mesmerized.
If only he’d kept his nose out her business. She could have dealt. It was just two more years. She’d have been free.
He was the one who had found her that day and driven her to the emergency room, face pale, eyes lit and frightened.
That had ruined everything.
How did it feel? Did you raise out your arms, begging to be carried away? Did you feel the wind sweep under your arms and lift you up? Did it hurt? Did the headlights blind you? Did you think of me?
He’d met her dad once and only once. He had seen what everyone else saw. A mild-mannered single dad who was involved just enough in his daughter’s life.
But then he’d seen the bruises on her back. She’d lied about them at first, the way she always had, but it didn’t take long for him to figure it out. When she was rammed into a table hard enough to break her ribs, his suspicions were confirmed.
“You need to get away from your dad,” he told her, although she could see behind his eyes that he couldn’t reconcile the polite man he’d met with the purveyor of the bluish-purple splotching her back or stretching across her chest.
Thrown into sharp relief in her mind is the expression when she had collided into him just two weeks ago. Disappointment. Disbelief. Despair. Two weeks ago he had been able to feel all those. Now he can’t feel anything at all.
He was just trying to help. Was it really possible to love someone and still feel a vicious, vindictive pleasure when her classmates snubbed him? He had deserved it at the time. He should never have interfered.
She didn’t need child protection services. She was sixteen, for god’s sake. She would be an adult in two years, go to college, and be free. She would have been able to put up with that bullshit until then. Her dad wanted her to go to Stanford. Every breath he breathed worked toward sending her to Stanford, but that was absolutely the last thing she wanted when she could see the lights of its football field out her window and hear the cheers. It was always more obvious when they were playing Berkeley, the air was more electrified.
He used to come over sometimes, during the football games and they used to try to guess from the yells which team it was that had just scored.
She isn’t in her attic right now. She’s in a foreign room in a foreign house, feeling out of place. She doesn’t belong here. It isn’t home. There’s no home anymore. And it’s all because of him. It’s his fault – not for calling child protection services, but for being gone.
She collapses backwards onto the bed, presses her palms against her eyes. She suddenly wonders if her dad smashed her world in the attic. The thought of that makes her finally begin to cry when she has been too numb to do so all this time.
There’s a story she read once in the news about how a man flew home, to be welcomed back by his wife and daughter meeting him on the runway. He swept his daughter into his arms and into the air, only to have her head sliced off by the airplane’s propeller. The story has haunted her ever since she heard it. It comes into her mind sometimes and sits there, an unwelcome squatter. She could never imagine how anyone could live with that guilt. All he’d wanted to do was celebrate being reunited with his beloved daughter and had inadvertently killed her. How do you move on from something like that?
She was pulled out of class by child protective services, so everyone knew. It happened to be chemistry, so she yanked her backpack and shot him the angriest glare she could muster. She hadn’t spoken to him after that, not once. She hadn’t returned his calls, had pretended he was invisible when he came to her in person.
She had warned him it would happen. He had promised not to tell anyone and she hated broken promises more than almost anything else in the world.
Since she’d been pulled out of chemistry class in front of classmates, it wasn’t exactly a secret – everyone knew. Everyone also believed her adamant claims that he was wrong, everything was good at home. It was easier for them to ignore her injuries in favor the illusion of perfection. They hissed at him, tripped him, or booed him completely. At least in front of her they did.
She didn’t lift a finger to stop them, didn’t even look his way.
He stopped calling after awhile and she found herself lonely. She had been irked that he dared to call after what he’d done. Now that he’d stopped, she found herself missing his voice, even in the form of firmly non-apologetic voicemails.
She didn’t know what bothered her more – that he had the nerve to confront something that many others had probably known about but had averted their eyes from, or that he had loved her enough to risk alienating her completely.
And then – and then the call. He had been hit by train, the conductor had called the paramedics, they were there, it was too late, he was pronounced dead at the scene, taken straight to the morgue instead of the emergency room. His blood alcohol level was precariously high, probably to dull the pain. Which indicated, of course, that he had committed suicide.
Suicide, they said, but she knows she might as well have pushed him herself. When the numbness goes away, how can she live with herself? His mother says he didn’t seem suicidal, but his mother wasn’t with him at school. She should have seen it in those eyes instead of looking down and away.
It makes no sense to her anymore. Why was she so angry with him? It made sense at first, but then again, he’s the only thing that has ever made sense in her life.
She is so fucking mad. She’s mad at herself for treating him like she did. She’s mad at him for thinking she’d never forgive him.
She stands up beside a bare desk beneath the window. Other than her textbooks, there’s one thing on it – a frame, tipped over so the picture can’t be seen. She lifts it up and lets her finger slide down the reproduction of a face that she will never see or touch or kiss again.
She was wrong all along. This whole time she’s been thinking she lost her home once she was placed in the foster one. The truth was, she truly lost her home the moment he jumped in front of that train.