I held the computer. “Am I to write something?”
“Type what I say.”
He sat on the bed as I moved to the desk and opened the laptop. He started talking, not to me, just talking. I typed.
“The first night I arrived at their house, Mrs. Hoffman made a huge spaghetti dinner and told Brian to clean the kitchen. I was the guest that night. When he came up ’round midnight, I was still awake. He looked hard at me and said, ‘I’m sorry you’re here.’ I thought he was a jerk. It took me a couple days to get it . . .”
Kyle talked and I typed. Later that night, something he said struck me, and I shared a nugget from my past.
“Mr. Putman used to do that to me. He’d pull my hair to drag me across a room. It hurt, but never left a mark.”
“Lots of stuff don’t leave marks.”
“And did you know . . .” Soon there was no form or structure. We shared tidbits, whole horrors, and food Hannah brought from Grace House’s kitchen. She was wise enough to never say a word.
I kept typing and recorded almost every line of our two-day conversation. There was no hiding, no pretending. At the end, he looked at me exhausted and wide-eyed—we’d stopped only for a little sleep in over thirty hours.
“I’m done with that, Sam.”
“Me too. I can’t live there anymore. Where do we go now?”
“I don’t know.” Kyle looked so young. It was like his childhood came back to him. He’s just a fourteen-year-old kid and now he looked it.
Kyle didn’t know where to go next, but I did. I had the beginnings of an article that needed to be edited into my final project for Johnson: the 5,000-word feature due January 14.
Kyle and I had gotten all this out and, to start our road to freedom, we needed to fling it far. If Johnson wanted passion, this was it. If I wanted to stretch, here was my chance. If I wanted to live, here was my lifeline. And, without doubt, here was my voice.
“Can I use it? For school?”
“You want to hand this in for a grade?” Kyle’s eyes rounded with shock.
I understood. This is not what anyone would submit to a high school English teacher.
“Something like that. It’d be a newspaper article. Like the features we read in theTribuneon the weekends, but this won’t get published. It’s for my professor.”
“You need it?”
“I do.”
He was silent for a moment. Emotions played across his face. And rather than beg, I stayed silent too. It was a big decision. His decision. This was raw stuff—this was his life. Kyle took a deep breath and caught my eyes. “You can have it.”
Rather than think about it, and let fear stop us, Kyle and I committed. We started editing our lives and thoughts down to the essentials: what we survived, what we feared most and loved best, what we felt others needed to see, and what we knew we could no longer carry. It took us a week of nonstop work. I couldn’t even stop to write and tell you what we were doing. If I had left that place of purging, I might have quit.
Not Kyle. Once he committed, he was all in. He hounded me constantly. “No, Sam, that’s not how that feels and you know it. Tell it right or stop.”
The honesty he demanded scared me. I don’t know what drove him, but I think he did it for me. Maybe that’s what love is—sacrificing yourself to save another, taking the insult or taking the hit. Kyle did that. His story was so raw in places that I stopped typing. He heard the silence and glared at me. “Can’t take it, Sam? That’s why we’re here. Keep going.” And he was the same with my story. “Keep typing what happened. The Putmans locked you in a closet. You gotta feel something.”
“Of course I felt something. It was horrible. I felt subhuman, you know? I mattered less than their dog.”
“I know . . .”
I don’t think that either of us has ever cried so much in our lives. We gave up on day two trying to hide tears from each other. And eight days later we had it: our lives compressed and edited into 5,000 words that I prayed would push us forward. It wasn’t the Christmas break either of us anticipated, but maybe it was the best we’ve ever had.
And I’m proud of it. I’m proud of us. This is the first honest and powerful thing I’ve ever done. And to share that with Kyle was amazing. Neither of us could have done this without the other. I felt us change during the week. Kyle’s shadows drifted a bit, and his whole demeanor took on more boldness and confidence.
And me? I feel stronger and lighter. The tight dragon skin is thinner. Perhaps even peeled back in places. Peace is creeping into my thoughts. And I’m sleeping. The nightmares come with less urgency and force, and I’m able to wake myself up. I can’t tell you how good that feels.
I took the Metra north to the Muirs’ yesterday afternoon. They’d left for Florida before Christmas and didn’t know about my appendix. Mrs. Muir was devastated she hadn’t been here to help. She insisted I come to them for the weekend, and I knew it was time to come clean.
