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Verbal Confirmation
Tessa
My eyes are heavy, but they’re open.
The sun is coming up over the roofs across the street, and there’s a bird in the tree above me doing something cheerful with its sweet chirp. Somewhere down the street, a car door shuts. A sprinkler starts up in a yard I can’t see, ticking and ticking and then the long hiss of it swinging back around. The world is going on at a slight distance from me, the way a party goes on in the next room. I can hear it. I know that it’s happening. None of it has anything to do with me.
Someone put a blanket around my shoulders. It’s grey and coarse at the edges, and it smells like a dryer sheet. I don’t know whose hands did it, or how long ago, and I don’t turn to look. Turning would mean moving. Moving would mean I’m still a person that things happen to, and I would like, for a little while longer, not to be.
Behind me, someone is talking quietly, and a second voice answers, smaller and flattened, coming out of a phone. They’re using the low, even tone people use when they’re deciding which parts to say out loud. What happened? the small one asks, and the near one says, I don’t know. Just give her a minute.
I look at the crack in the pavement between my shoes instead. I look at it until it stops being a crack and becomes a dark line, and then not even a line, just a place for my eyes to rest.
This too shall pass.
Those four words are on a loop. Those four words are tattooed on the inside of my left wrist in letters so small that people have to take my hand and turn it toward the light to read them, which is the only reason I ever let anyone that close.
I got it at seventeen because I needed proof. Not comfort. People had tried to give me comfort before, and I’d learned it was mostly a way of asking me to feel better faster so they could stop having to watch. I wanted proof. Something permanent that said the worst hour of my life would eventually be an hour I used to have. That the girl sitting in it would not be the girl thinking about it later. That somewhere ahead of me, there was a version of me who had come out the other side and could look back at a moment with something close to tenderness.
It’s never once worked when I needed it to. It didn’t work in the stairwell. It didn’t work in the parking lot outside my mom’s apartment. It isn’t working now on a curb while the sun is shining.
But I run my thumb over it anyway. Back and forth. Back and forth.
A moment doesn’t ask your permission to end. It doesn’t care whether you were ready. You don’t get to keep the good ones, and you don’t get to keep the bad ones, and you never get any of them twice. You just get the one you’re in, all the way through, every second of it, until it’s finished with you.
And I’m in this one.
And in a moment, everything can change.
One year earlier
Nobody looks at me the way Rafferty Waleska does.
Most people don’t look at me at all, which I’ve made my peace with. I’m the girl at the end of the long table under the windows with the same brown bag every day and a paperback flattened open beside it, and if you asked anyone in this school to describe me, they’d have to think about it first.
Rafferty doesn’t have to think about it. Rafferty looks at me like someone told him I’m the villain of every story he’s ever known.
He has green eyes that go dark when he’s angry, which is most of the time. A mouth that has never once in four years curved into a smile—not in a hallway, not during hockey, not in a single photo anyone’s ever posted of him, and people post a lot of photos of him. I’ve seen most of them. I’m not proud of that.
Beautiful is the wrong word for a boy like him. Beautiful is soft. Beautiful is something you can look at for a while and walk away feeling better.
Rafferty Waleska is devastating.
He walks into a room, and the room reorganizes itself around him. Nobody decides to do it. It just happens. Chairs turn a few degrees. Voices climb half a note. The center tables lean. I’ve watched it happen in this cafeteria a hundred times, and I’ve never once seen him notice, which is the part I find hardest to forgive. Not that the world bends for him. That he thinks bent is just the shape the world comes in. It’s not.
He strolls past my table, and I look up at exactly the wrong second.
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
My heart does something stupid. My stomach pulls tight and low, like it’s bracing for a drop.
The last time he said those exact words to me, he spent the next twenty minutes explaining how he was going to take my life apart, calmly and in order, like a boy reading a list of chores off the fridge. And then he did it. Every single thing. So I know better than to look at him. I’ve known better for years.
I looked anyway. Only for a second. His eyes landed on mine, and I forgot how to do the basic breathing thing, and by the time I remembered, I’d already been caught. That’s all it ever takes with him. One second. And somehow he’s always standing right there when it happens, as if he were waiting for it.
I swallow and go back to my lunch. A peanut butter sandwich I cut into triangles this morning because squares felt sad. I have half an apple going brown at the edges.
