Rose flutters once, both of us instinctively leaning in, our shoulders brushing for the briefest second.
Neither of us comments on it.
The room stays quiet after that, but not empty.
For the first time all day, I don’t mind the silence sitting beside me.
At some point, the room stops feeling like a place I’m hiding in and starts feeling like a place we’ve stolen.
It happens so quietly I don’t catch the exact moment. One minute he is still half-wound tight from whatever fury carried him into my room, glancing at the door every few breaths like he expects someone to come drag him back out by the collar. The next, the hallway noise has faded into the background. Rose is resting again in her jar on the dresser. He is no longer standing near the exit.
He’s on my floor.
His back is braced against the side of my bed, one knee bent up, one arm draped loosely over it. He doesn’t look comfortable in the lazy, spoiled way some kids do. He looks comfortable the way feral things do once they’ve decided, for a few minutes at least, that no one in the room is going to hurt them. The tension hasn’t vanished completely. It never really does with kids like us. But some of it has loosened. Enough that there’s actual light in his eyes now when he looks up at me, enough that he’s let himself laugh more than once.
That laugh keeps startling me.
It’s not loud, and it doesn’t make him softer in some magical way. It just feels real. Like something that belongs to him andnot the Warden, not St. Augustine, not whatever file follows him around from office to office.
My paintings are spread all over the bed now because I made the mistake of showing him one and then another and then another after that. I tell myself I only did it to prove that I’m not scared of him. That I’m not one of the Brightside girls who freezes up whenever a St. Augustine kid looks too serious. But the truth is simpler and far more embarrassing.
He asked.
And I wanted him to see them.
So now he’s sitting on my floor holding a painting of Sister Pauline with six fingers, a veil like swamp moss, and teeth where teeth definitely shouldn’t be. It’s hard not to grin too hard while he studies it with way more seriousness than the thing deserves.
“She definitely smells like old peppermints and judgment,” he says, finally lifting his eyes from the painting.
The laugh that escapes me is immediate. “That one’s Pauline.”
He points to the other one I painted, the taller creature in a black habit with a rosary looped through clawed hands, eyes hidden under dripping strokes of dark paint. “Sister Agnes looks like she’d accuse God of stealing from her.”
I laugh harder at that, enough that I have to lower the painting in my hand before I crease it. The room feels lighter for a second, almost easy. It’s a dangerous feeling, ease, because it makes me forget where we both came from and what places like ours usually teach us about other people. For a few stolen hours, though, it feels possible that this is just a boy on my floor, a girl on her bed and a jar with a moth in it and not two damaged kids carrying whole haunted houses around inside their ribs.
He smiles after I do. Not a full smile, not the kind that would make him look harmless, but enough to change his face. Enough that I catch myself staring.
He notices, of course. He notices everything.
“What?” he asks.
It isn’t defensive, just curious. That almost makes it worse.
I shake my head quickly, looking back down at the painting on my lap, trying and failing to wipe the smile off my face. “Nothing. You laugh weird.”
That gets another one out of him, quieter this time. He scrubs a hand down over his face like maybe he can hide it, and then, without really thinking, he lifts the hem of his shirt and uses it to wipe at his mouth and chin.
The motion is quick.
But it’s enough.
The shirt rises, and I see the scars.
They aren’t little accidents. They aren’t the kind of scrapes kids get from climbing fences or fighting over stupid things in common rooms. They are pale…old…cut across his stomach and ribs in lines that look intentional, in patterns that don’t belong on a body this young. I don’t know if there are more than what I can see. Somehow that makes it worse. The glimpse alone is enough to knock the laughter straight out of me.
He drops the shirt back down almost as quickly as he lifted it, but it’s too late. The room has changed again. Not sharply, not all at once, but enough that we both feel it. The warmth drains out of his face first. The ease goes second. He looks down at the painting still in his hands, thumb rubbing at the edge of the paper so slowly I know he’s buying himself time.
When he finally speaks, his voice is flatter than before.
