Page 127 of Slashed Bonds

A flame that wants to be seen. Noticed. Loved. A thing that hasn’t given up, whatever the rest of her has decided, and I know it, I recognize it the way you’d recognize your own handwriting on a page you don’t remember writing.

Because I had one.

For years. A flame in the pit of me, desperate to be noticed, loved, adored, with every shadow in my life doing its level best to keep it in the dark, under the portrait my father commissioned, behind the grades and the posture and the perfect son.

Music was the only thing that ever reached it.

The only thing that got down past the shadows and put a hand on that flame and said I see you. That’s why I’ve had headphones around my neck since I was fourteen. Not for the sound. For the door.

And that’s why the song screaming in the cushions over her ears is the song it is.

Love Psychosis. Jutes. A track I found at sixteen in a bad month, raw enough to hurt, about a want so total it stops being a feeling and starts being a diagnosis.

It reached my flame then. I’m betting it reaches hers now.

I’ve heard it through her wall. Twice. Low, at two in the morning, on a phone with a cracked screen, a woman in the room next to Niko’s pretending to be asleep. The first time I stood in the hallway with my hand on the doorframe and didn’t knock. The second time I went back to my room and put it on my own phone and lay there in the dark and listened to both of us listening.

That’s not surveillance. That’s recognizing your own handwriting.

I don’t say a word.

My face is neutral. As neutral as it’s ever been on a dot with the puck in the air. No judgment. No flicker of doubt. Nothing she could read as pity, because pity is a door I’ve watched people slam on her, and I’m not going to be one of them.

All I do is keep my eyes on hers.

Because that’s the thread. In a drowning like this one, there’s one line down through the black, and it’s not the song, and it’s not my hand on the headphones. It’s that somebody is looking at her and not looking away.

I’m the thread. That’s the job. Don’t blink.

I know how to do this. That’s the part I’d never say out loud. I sat in a hospital corridor at seventeen across from a girl who’d stopped talking, and I learned that the only thing that works is not leaving. Not words. Not touch. Presence, held past the point where it’s comfortable, until the person on the other end understands you aren’t going anywhere and stops spending energy on waiting for you to.

Evie taught me. She never knew she was teaching. That’s how the best lessons go.

I don’t know how long we stay like that.

Long enough for the frost to soak through my knee. Long enough for the sky to go from bruise to ash. Long enough for her breathing, which was gone when I got here, to come back in pieces.

Then her eyes fill again.

And there’s warmth in her cheeks now, under the wet, the flush of something getting ready to come up. Her lips part. They’re trembling.

“I did everything right.”

Four words. In a whisper.

And they go into me like a blade goes into a bag of grain, quiet and all the way through.

I don’t say anything.

I want her to let it out. I want the words to come, whatever they are, however they come, because they’ve been in there for five years pressing on the inside of her, and if I speak now I’ll put a hand on the door she’s trying to open.

“Every practice.” Her voice is barely voice. “Every chance to be perfect. I did all the tests. I starved…to make weight. I passed on the foods I loved. I drank the energy drinks so I’d have the strength to stay awake and be at my best. I…”

A breath. It hitches.

“I’d be their tool if it meant they got relief. Even when I was fucking tired. Even when I wasn’t in the mood. My future was bright. My future…”

Her face does something. The wall goes, all at once, and what’s under it is nineteen years old.