I’m hyperventilating.
Ihatebugs.
“It’s gone,” he says calmly. “Hold still.”
“What if there are more?”
“That’s why I said hold still.” Bowen checks my hair with gentle but firm fingers, going through my whole head twice. “There’s no more.”
“Are you sure?”
He ends his search with a little ruffle. “Yep.”
I sag back against his chest, and he snorts. Brett is still laughing as Tucker reenacts my freak out.
Bowen wraps an arm around my waist and reaches over for the bag of carrots that got knocked off my lap when I scrambled.
“So, you and Pat lost the battle with the raccoon?” Bowen calls over to Brett. Brett’s eyes light up, remembering the story he was telling before.
“Lose? Come on!”
My heart is still racing, but Bowen shoves a carrot in my mouth and sits with me while his brother starts his story back from the beginning.
Dear B,
Dr. Martin said there are stages of grief. I don’t remember them all now, because there isn’t a textbook in the world that could so easily describe what I feel. They can’t understand. I wanted to smash her pile of self-help books against the glass coffee table until it exploded at our feet.
I wanted to scream and scream at her audacity. Trying to file away my feelings as a textbook case of grief. How dare they? Think that they can analyze people and type up generic explanations for stages of this awful, poisonous feeling inside me. There are no stages to this, B. It’s all of it. All of it at the same time.
It’s been four months since you left me. My mom forces me out in the sun once a week for my sessions. I hate it. Fucking. Hate. It.
I haven’t seen him. I haven’t seen him in four months.
I can’t look.
I hear him almost every day. I think he tries to keep his voice down, but I hear it coming from downstairs with Tucker. It’s the only time my heartbeats in a different rhythm. It’s not a happy tune; it’s just as painful. I hear my mom trying to soothe him the way she’s been trying to soothe me for months. If I could feel happy, I would be happy that he’s not trapped in his room across the driveway like I’m trapped in mine.
When he leaves, he takes the painful tune of my heart with him.
Until he comes back.
He comes back, and he sneaks up the dark staircase. He comes to my door, and I hold my breath until it creaks, breaking up the silence of the night. He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t either.
He’s not afraid of the monsters in my room.
Probably because the same ones follow him around.
He climbs into bed behind me. The first night he came, he didn’t touch me at all. He just lay there until I fell asleep, hugging Red to my chest. Now, he climbs in and immediately wraps his arm around my waist, tugging me back against his hard chest. And it’s our new thing, to save all our tears until he buries his face into the side of my neck. We don’t make a sound, but as soon as I feel the hot wetness hit my skin, the dam breaks inside of me and I cry. I cry in the darkness of my room with the boy I can’t look at.
For those moments, our monster's retreat. They let us purge just a sliver of the endless agony.
His fingers gently claw into my stomach, and I hug Red tighter. It’s like he wants to break me open to let it all out. Like he wants to be able to reach inside me and pull out the decay of my soul so I can finally breathe again.
Kit
Age 13
It clicks.
