There's More To Life Than This, You Know
an excerpt

His hands are unfaithful, slick around his pencil as he writes out his name in letters so careful he can barely recognize them, each one tall and straight black in its individual box. E-L-I-O-T J-A-M-E-S __________, a name that is a living testament to his father, whose name was James, whose well-worn copy of The Wasteland was left on the foot of Eliot's bed two years ago, the night he ran away.
That is what Eliot is thinking of as he pencils in bubble after bubble, heavy and dark, not listening to the drone of the Testing Administrator as she instructs everyone to give up their addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, etc, in a light tone referencing kindergarten. In some number of minutes, he will be tested on everything he has learned in sixteen years, but all he can think about is how his mother's smile still doesn't seem real, and how he'll probably never put The Wasteland up on his bookshelf, and how absolutely none of this is fair, and still. When he gets to those probing personal questions about ethnicity and religion (Caucasian, unsure?), he falters for a moment before marking ‘prefer not to respond’ on each and closing his eyes.
Behind his eyelids, he can see red and gold, framed in black, all composing a little street map out of skin and veins. He tries to follow it, wishes he could follow it, hoping it might lead to some place new. He traces a path until he reaches the edge if his vision and hears footsteps from somewhere behind him, and, suddenly, everything is light again.
“Please open your books, turn to page two, and begin.” the Test Administrator coos, a few feet away from him. He glances over his shoulder for a moment to get his first real look at her. She is a just past middle age woman with a pleasant face and gray streaked hair falling in wisps from her ponytail. There are lines on her face, but he thinks they are laugh lines, and she sort of reminds him of his grandmother, back when she was still around. She raises an eyebrow at him now, not unkindly, and gestures vaguely. He’s supposed to have started by now. Beside him, a girl he only knows by sight is already on the next page, filling in each bubble with a certain ferocity that looks out of place on her.
Eliot opens his book, sets pencil to paper to follow along with the passage, and begins to read.

***

At a state specified amount of time later, he has come to the conclusion that, though he very well can read, he doesn’t enjoy having to answer ambiguous questions pertaining to articles he didn’t particularly care to read to begin with. There is something expressively wrong about having to read about someone else’s family car trip this early on a Saturday morning.
They are taking a break before starting the math section, and he and the girl beside him are the only people who haven’t escaped to the haven of the bathrooms.
“Did you think you did well?” she asks, then continues before he has time to answer. “I think I did incredibly well. Don’t you?”
“I’m, uh, sure you did.” he says, hesitantly. She stares at him for a long moment in which he wonders whether he said the wrong thing, then smiles, looking satisfied. They don’t say anything else while people begin to drift back in, looking paler than before as they pull out their calculators and check casually for the programs they had frenziedly shared with each other this morning.
He has his mother’s old calculator, and it barely turns on, nevertheless indiscreetly give him answers while he looks like he is in intense thought.
“Sit down, everyone!” the woman’s voice rang through the cafeteria, a bit more desperately than it had before. “Please! Open your books to the math section and begin!”
The room falls silent except for the sound of shuffling paper and the click of calculator keys. Eliot takes a long breath before opening his book, staring down the first problem.

***
Once more, they are instructed to put their pencils down and stop writing, informed they are not allowed to go back to any of the previous test, and released to contemplate their fate for five more minutes. Eliot is still shell-shocked from realizing what only half paying attention for 11 years of math classes will leave you with, and can only watch as the girl beside him assures herself by assuring him.
She has blond hair that she has parted carefully in the center, framing a soft face and sharp brown eyes. Looking at them for even this long has given him the impression that she could, and would, if she saw fit, see straight into his soul. The idea was at first frightening, but also, as he thought about it more, comforting. She says something about the mean test scores to get into some very prestigious university, and he nods like he’s already thought about all this. She is playing with her pencil compulsively as she speaks, small fingers lacing around and around it.
“So where are you going?” she asks, leaning her head to the side, the universal sign that you are either a dog or just trying to look acutely interested in what the other person is saying.
“Going?” He’s fairly certain that she’s aware of the fact that he hasn’t been listening, but she’s smiling anyway, and that must be a good sign.
“To college.”
“Oh. I don’t really know.” The look on her face that this brings up is abject horror, and the pencil falls from her hand and hits the table with a clatter.
“You don’t know?” she cries, just as the last person sits down and they are forced into silence again to begin the section that will test their abilities to discern exactly where a comma should and a semicolon should not go.

***
Three hours later, it is finally over, and Eliot is about to gather his thing to leave when the girl steps in his path.
“How can you not know where you want to go? This-this is your future?” she demands, hands placed firmly on her hips as she glares up at him. He frowns in response, too disconcerted to reply right away. Her eyes widen impatiently, and that isn’t helping matters.
“I just don’t know.” When he starts to walk away, she stumbles forward to walk beside him, clutching a notebook firmly to her chest. As they walk out the double doors, he turns to squint at her in the sudden burst of sunlight.
“I’m only sixteen.”
She makes an angry sort of noise in her throat, half laugh and half scoff, then turns on her heel and disappears down the sidewalk in a whirl of hair and floral perfume. He is sure that this will not be the last time they meet, but he waits until he is absolutely certain that she is gone before he blinks, curiously, and sets off in the opposite direction.

***

The leaves are starting to fall on Main Street and, at any point in the day, at least three shop owners can be seen attacking the sidewalk with their brooms. Eliot dodges the owner of the local bookstore, nodding a greeting and quickening his pace. If he hurries, he’ll beat his mother home, which is the ideal situation for both of them. By the time she arrives, he might be hiding in his room or asleep, and they won’t. He’s noticed that doing that with her has been getting progressively more difficult, and it’s better for both of them if they just avoid the act altogether.
Their house is six blocks from the school, and he walks them every day, two miles each way. This has been the routine since he was six years old, when the idea had given him a feeling of ultimate independence. Now, though, he just wants to sleep when he gets home, and that doesn’t bode well for the state of his geometry homework.
Relief floods him as he sees his stoop from the end of their street, the house with the bright red door, and his legs unconsciously speed up until he collapses on the steps. There is mail sticking out of the mailbox and even more leaves sticking underneath him, but he takes one long moment to breathe in the cold air and sunlight before moving on. The leaves he will leave for later; he gets out the mail and lets himself in.
It is colder inside the house than it is outside, but it’s normally like that, except in the summer. He slips a jacket on with one hand as he sorts through the mail. Bill, bill, you could already be a winner!, a credit card offer for his grandfather, and letter from him, as well. He drops the rest on the coffee table as he passes it and takes the letter into his room. Every time he steps inside his room, he locks the door, even though he doesn’t know why. The sound of the lock helps him to calm down, sometimes, like he’s truly safe.
He sits down on his floor and opens the letter with one finger, a long tear at the very top of the envelope. Inside, through the paper, he can see that the writing is messy and dark, bleeding through to black. His grandfather’s handwriting has been getting worse ever since he moved away, and that’s almost worse than not seeing him. The Assisted Living Center (they call it an Assisted Living Center, even though it’s a nursing home and everyone knows that it’s a nursing home) is four hours away, and they can almost never find the time to get down there, so they are stuck living alone in his house while he’s all alone there, and sometimes Eliot can’t even look at his mother, knowing that she did that to him. The letter sticks to the sweat on his fingers, smearing ink beneath them as he carefully unfolds it.

Dear Hannah and Eliot,

I miss you both, accordingly, and I cannot wait until you can come and visit again. I just needed to ask a favor of you, for when that time comes. In the attic, there is an old chest that used to belong to me back in school. I stored a few photo albums there when we first moved in. If you could, please bring that to me. It will help to have those old memories, too, as well as these new ones.

Please make sure that you are treating yourselves well, and Eliot, good luck on the testing you were telling me about in your last letter. You are a brilliant boy, and you will be able to do anything you want when you grow up. Never forget that.

One of his grandfather’s many skills (along with actually being able to cook and base jumping, back in the day) was making Eliot feel better about himself in the worst of condition. Even though they might not admit it, even teenagers sometimes enjoy being told that they can still be astronauts or cowboys if they want to. He sets the letter aside and stands on his bed so he can reach the string. Narrowly missing getting hit in the head by the ladder, he manages to catch it and get a precarious footing. The bottom of it presses firmly into his carpet, and he realizes that he hasn’t gone up there since Christmas. As he climbs up, he can already see the light from the single bulb reflecting broken ornaments and silver tinsel, the sort they always complain about having to hang around the windows. The thin glass shatters quietly beneath his sneakers when he steps into the attic, ducking to avoid the low ceiling.
A long time ago, his grandfather had taken him up here and shown him the chest, pulling out memories and explaining them intently. They had looked through the albums for hours while Eliot learned the faces of family members he had never met and will never be able to meet. He remembers dark hair and eyes that look like his, even in black and white, and how he felt different for days afterwards, bigger, somehow.
The chest is still in the same place, almost hidden in a corner behind a black trash bag filled with his old stuffed animals, and he drags it out into full view. It’s made of a dark wood he can’t recall the name of, and his grandfather’s initials are burned into the front of it in block letters. His father, Eliot’s great grandfather (who to him is just another face in a picture), made it for him when he went off to college, and he has kept it ever since.
The latch catches when he goes to undo it, and he spends an inordinate amount of time fumbling with it until it finally swings open, revealing a small cloud of dust and insects. Beneath it, though, there are a stack of albums for him to pull out, and beneath that are old clothes and school books and letters. Eliot considers reading them, knowing that his grandfather wouldn’t mind, but he knows that he should wait. After slipping them gently inside one of the albums, he puts the trunk back in its spot and makes his way back down into his room.
More dust flies up when he drops the albums onto his bed, and one photographs falls out and slides across his floor. It makes him feel guilty, the look of disuse, the edges of photographs and pages showing from beneath the binding, torn and yellow with age. His eyes move to the fallen photograph, curiously, spotting his grandfather’s old handwriting on the back of it in neat, self-assured lines. The edges of it crumble in his hand when he picks it up, and he lays it delicately on his palm to read.

Lily, only. 1950.

In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.

On the other side is a picture of a girl, maybe a woman, smiling with teeth at the camera. Only one of her arms is shown, bent at a strange angle as she rakes a long hand through a sweep of pale hair. There is something in her eyes that shows she isn’t as confident as she seems, that maybe the happiness there is just a show for whoever’s taking the picture. He doesn’t know why, but when he looks at her, he’s reminded of himself.
Instead of putting the picture back into the album, he stares at it for a few more moments before opening a desk drawer at random and carefully pressing it inside one of his notebooks. When he goes to visit, he can ask his grandfather about her.

***
“Eliot?” His mother is knocking on his door, loudly now, like she had been doing it for a long time. At some point, he must have fallen asleep, leaning with his head back against the edge of his bed. His neck makes an uncomfortable click noise when he starts to rise, and he winces.
“Yeah?” he calls back, stumbling closer to the door.
“Have you eaten yet?”
His stomach provides an answer before he can deny it, and he sighs, moving to unlock the door. It takes them a few moments to get it open, because she is holding onto the knob at the other side while he is tugging on it from his, but eventually he falls out and straightens himself out.
“Food?” she asks, smiling awkwardly.
“Please.” They walk out together to the kitchen, where a plastic bag is waiting on the counter.
“. . .chicken?” he ventures, politely.
“Burgers.” She pulls out the individually wrapped hamburgers and tosses him one. The grease makes his palm slick before he even opens it, and he makes an effort not to let her notice. It’s quite possible that he should have stayed in his room today.
In a few long minutes, they are sitting side by side at the table and pretending to be enjoying their meal. Eliot is waiting for her to casually mention the test, like she’s supposed to, but she seems to be pointedly silent. She might’ve forgotten, of course, it’s not like it would be the first time, but this was one of those things she was interested in. It’s one of her goals in life, he knows, to make him better than his father was, so anything that could ensure him a Brighter Future is generally her idea.
“Good day?” she asks, not looking up. She pokes at her food with a finger but hasn’t eaten any of it. He tears the last of his in halves, then fourths, leaving it in a pile on the paper.
“Yeah.” he replies, folding the paper up at the sides and throwing it into the trash can. Her eyes flicker up to meet his, but she doesn’t say anything, and he didn’t really expect her to. Once she looks back down, he walks away.

***

The sound of his mother leaving for work is what Eliot wakes up to on Monday morning, the headlights from her car hitting his eyes before he even has a chance to open them. A quick check of his alarm clock tells him it’s 6:00, too early to be awake and too late to go back to sleep. Before he can stop himself, he is struggling out of the sheets and padding across his bedroom floor. It takes him fifteen minutes to get ready and an hour to walk to school, and he is in the shower before he can even contemplate waiting any longer.
At 7:15, he stops in front of the school, rubbing his nose to regain feeling in it. He used to enjoy autumn more when he was a kid. There was more chances to enjoy it, though, leaf piles and apple cider and everything smelling like the time right before it snows. It’s strange that it isn’t even remotely similar, now that’s he older and he’s learned that autumn is just the sudden chill that leads to an even colder winter, that eventually leads to allergies in the fall and skin cancer in the summer. He thinks that it must have something to do with watching the news, and that to lose his innocence by way of Katie Couric, however indirectly, is rather sad.
Inside, the combined body heat of an overpopulated high school is enough to warm him up, and he is ironically grateful for the sea of peers that push him towards his locker. It is a difficult evasive maneuver to actually get to his locker, nevertheless keep out of the way for long enough to actually enter his combination, but three years of it have trained him well. He manages to abuse the door in exactly the right way (jiggle lock, shake twice, kick, knee, kick) to get it to open for him, grab his English book, and pitch himself back into the hallway without being injured. He has almost made it to his English class when he hears a familiar voice from somewhere further off.
“Eliot! It’s Eliot, right? As in T.S.?” The girl from Saturday shows up at his side, breathing heavily. “That’s you?”
“Yes. That would be me.” He shifts his backpack on his shoulders, self-consciously, and she smiles at him.
“I wanted to give you these!” she shouts, over the slowly increasing din of the hallway. A handful of pamphlets are thrust at him before she walks away, around the corner. He stares at them, nonplused.
A few seconds later, she comes back, looking sheepish. “My name is Charlotte, by the way.”
“As in the spider?” he asks.
“As in Brontë.” she replies, laughing softly. “Have fun with the literature. You can keep them when you’re done, you need them more than I do.” With that, she disappeared one last time, and Eliot decided it would be best if he did the same.
Once he’s sitting safely in his desk, he spreads out the pamphlets over the desktop and grimaces. There are college advertisements with grinning students on the covers, studying under trees, studying by a lake, studying in a very well-lit and expensive looking library, but somehow always looking absurdly happy about the fact that they’re studying. There are lists printed with tips for planning his academic future, brochures with titles like “Five Steps To Getting The Financial Aid YOU Deserve”, what he assumes is its sequel: “The Fun Side Of Student Loans”, and a frankly disturbing one entitled: “The Choice: College or Death?”.
Apparently, he was correct in assuming that this girl would be coming into his life again. In fact, she has evidently decided to take it over.

***
If Charlotte is not trying to take over his life, she is making a very good impression of it. A plastic, environmentally friendly tray is dropped next to Eliot at the cafeteria table, and, a second later, she is sitting there, looking at him expectantly.
“Did you read them?” she asks. He raises his eyebrows at her. He had read them, during English, when he should have been attempting to read The Red Badge of Courage. Some of them had been oddly informative, but most seemed to have the goal of scaring people into higher education.
“I’m halfway through ‘The Choice’. I’m, uhm, thinking I prefer college over death. Just, as is.” he ventures, cautiously. She nods in his general direction, eyes moving over the food shaped products in her tray and finally choosing the carton of 2% milk as the safest bet.
“Most people say that.” she muses, pressing in the sides and tugging it open neatly. Back in primary school, a day didn’t go by that he didn’t end up mutilating his milk carton beyond use, and he’s possibly more impressed that he should be. “Did they help you, though? I really thought they might.” He’s not actually sure that they did help him. In fact, it’s more than possible that they just confused him more, but somehow he knows that this is not the right answer.
“Of course.” he replies, giving her a small smile when she breathes out relief.
“Really? I’m so glad. I couldn’t believe that you hadn’t already thought about it. I mean, we start filling out college applications next year!” She gestures violently with her hands at the end of the sentence, startling her tray to move dangerously close to the edge of the table. A piece of lettuce floats off onto the floor, light as paper.
“I never really thought of it as important.” he murmurs. She gives him a strange look, something along the lines of ‘I’m not even going to try to comprehend what you’re trying to say’, and attacks a bit of her salad with a plastic spork. They lapse into silence, while Charlotte continues to quietly eat and Eliot tends to a can of the most caffeinated drink he could buy with his last dollar and twenty-five cents. It’s strange, really, because to him silence between two people almost always seems awkward, but somehow this doesn’t. It’s as if they sit beside each other, still and with absolutely nothing to say, but are perfectly content to just stay that way. She tosses her carton across the aisle, towards the trash can, but it jolts off the edge and bounces to a stop on the linoleum.
“Oh.” she whispers, and there is something so sad about her voice that it makes him look down at her, makes him see the look in her eyes without even meaning to. Someone walks by and steps on it before she can pick it up, heavy black boots crushing it so the last of the milk pools out around its bones. White teeth bite down into the skin of her lip as she bends down to pick it up between thumb and forefinger, like something dead, like something she has been afraid of all along, and drop it into the trash.
They don’t say anything more until the bell rings from above them, shrill in their ears, and she gives him a parting smile before gathering up her books in the crook of her arms and gingerly placing herself in the midst of the crowd. He watches her go until all she appears as is a blur, a pale spot of girl in the middle of a room full of everyone else.

***
In geometry, Eliot was theoretically supposed to have already known everything about the triangle, how to tell depth or dimensions, isosceles or scalene. Somehow, though, he has managed to absorb nothing in the last two months he has been sitting in the classroom, watching the seasons change, and all of that comes crashing down around him now as he stares at the test paper on his desk. Black and white triangles stare back at him, silently, telling him that they have no sympathy for his plight, that everyone around him has taken the time to pay attention to them and perhaps he should think about that next time. With shaky hands and ballpoint pen, he traces each of the lines, willing something to make sense.
It didn’t use to be like this, math. There was once a time, some years ago, where he almost enjoyed it. There was something soothing about adding rows of numbers and learning how to multiply, something wonderfully innate in those recitations: two times two equals four, two times three equals six, two times four equals eight, two times six equals twelve. There were no formulas involved, no variables that may or may not actually exist, no trains meeting in Boston at X o’clock at Y miles per hour. It was a simpler time.
He spends ten minutes writing his name, class period, and the date in the right hand corner of the paper, then fills in numbers at random for answers. The teacher, one Mrs. NAME, lingers in front of his desk as she is picking up the papers, but she doesn’t say anything. Sometimes, he thinks that nothing is worse, that someone should make a big deal about everything or the things that should really mean something won’t at all.
The rest of the class, he copies down every word she says and hopes that he will be able to understand it later.
***
People run from the classrooms when the last bell rings at the end of the day, leaving behind an empty shell of a room with stray pens and scraps of paper littering the floor. Eliot is the last one out, this time. He is not particularly eager to stay, but he’s not particularly eager to go home, either.
He glances at Mrs. NAME as he leaves and is startled to see something familiar there. It takes him a few moments to realize it, but something in the way she looks at him reminds him of the pictures, reminds him of Lily.
“Bye.” he says, oddly. Something changes in her face, making it brighter as she sits down her paperback novel and smiles at him, genuinely.
“Have a good day. . .” She falters at his name, panic crossing her features.
“Eliot.” he supplies, to her obvious relief.
“Of course. Have a good day, Eliot.” They stare at each other for one long second before he nods, decisively, and walks out the door with his bag slung higher on his back. By now, the halls have almost cleared out except for couples saying goodbye in every corner, making vague wet noises as he passes them.
Outside, it isn’t any warmer than it was in the morning, but he sets off through the parking lot anyway and has almost made his way to the sidewalk outside the gates when he hears someone yelling his name. A small car pulls up beside of him, and the passenger side window rolls down to reveal Charlotte, laughing.
“Want a ride?”
He stopped to consider what it would mean to accept a ride from her. The positive sides would be not freezing to death and maybe having the energy to concentrate on his homework before collapsing. He doesn’t quite know what a downside of it is, though, but he can feel that there is one. He has never had someone so suddenly and thoroughly thrust into his life before, and he’s not sure what he thinks of it.
“Come on, it’s freezing.” she says, voice starting to carry a hint of doubt. There’s no way he couldn’t get it now, not with what he’d seen earlier and the way she just sounded, like she was so afraid of making a mistake. He smiles at her, opening the door and ducking inside. As he fumbles to lock in his seatbelt, she nudges the heat a little higher than before, and he sighs gratefully.
“Thanks.” He pushes himself further into the seat, feeling the heat spread through him slowly. “I live on NAME Street.” Both of her hands are resting on the wheel in perfect, Driver’s Ed position as she turns the corner.
“I hope you don’t think I’m being. . .forward, or something.” she says, looking over at him. “For doing this, I mean.” Forward. He’s secretly amused by her, sounding like she’s come from a Jane Austen novel, but he knows better than to show it. It might be that she is being forward, or whatever the modernized version of that is, but he thinks that he likes her. It’s been awhile since he’s had a real friend.
“I’m okay with it.” he says, honestly, smiling at the dashboard and feeling a strange thrill when he looks over later to see she is smiling as well. They are at his house in fifteen minutes, and he points it out to her, expecting her to laugh at their door. As she pulls over, she makes a thoughtful noise, a quiet hmm.
“I like your door.” She turns in her seat towards him. “Did you paint it?”
“My grandfather did. Well, I helped, but it was his idea.” It was a long time ago. He remembers being five years old and covered in red paint, and it had never come out of his clothes. His mother had been furious, but he and his grandfather had exchanged secret sorts of smiles for days. “That. . .that was a long time ago.”
“I wish I had gotten to spend time like that with my grandparents. They both died before I was born.” she replies, honestly. “Is it nice?”
“It was. He lives in a nurs-uhm, an assisted living center, and we don’t really get to see him. He used to live with us, but not. . .” He frowns, looking away. He’s never spoken to anyone about this, not even his mother, and he’s too afraid that he might say too much. He doesn’t even know this girl, and he shouldn’t be saying this much, not yet, not ever. It’s for him to deal with. Before he can stop himself, he is out of his seatbelt and opening the door. “Thanks for the ride. It was. . .just, thanks. Really.”
He is onto his stoop and with his key in the door in record time, slipping inside without waiting to see what her reaction was. He knows that he is not starting out this friendship, or whatever else it might be, on a good foot, but there are some points he can’t let himself cross. If he goes letting other people see everything he feels, then there won’t be anything left for him to feel anymore. It will belong to them, or her, or the world, and he doesn’t want that to happen.
The house is quiet, like it normally is, and every step he takes to calm his nerves, every nervous pace fills it with the sound of his feet against old, protesting wood.

***

It is dark when Eliot wakes up on the sofa to the sound of a car door slamming outside and a Gilligan’s Island rerun on in the background. Scrambling for the remote, he turns off the television and buries himself up to his eyes that the afghan he had dragged out of the closet. He can just see the VCR clock flashing 1:00 over the wool when keys jingle from outside and the door suddenly pushes open.
The sound of his mother’s shoes is something he has known since he was small, without even having to look. As they near him, he shuts his eyes tight.
“Eliot.” she murmurs, and it is the most affectionate thing she has said to him in as long as he can remember. One of her hands drops to smooth out the hair on his forehead, and he can’t even help himself now. He fake stirs, stretching out and opening his eyes slowly. It must look something like a home video from too many years before, just missing two. She smiles down at him, but she moves her hand away.
“Where were you?” he asks, quietly, playing his part of the concerned son who had stayed up waiting for her, worried sick. It must be what she assumes he is doing, and he suddenly can’t bear it to be any other way. He wishes he were that person.
“Had to work late.” she replies, after a short skip of a beat. “You need to go to bed, honey. You’ve got school in the morning.”
His mother works at an office that has never stayed open past nine o’clock in its existence. He throws the blanket over his shoulders and walks steadily to his room, wondering exactly what she is trying to hide from him this time.

***

The hallway ahead of him is long and almost black, all but for one fluorescent light shining from the ceiling no more than twenty feet away from where he is standing now. It shadows one small figure, a girl with her face bent down to the floor, swinging her arms aimlessly at her sides. Somehow, he knows that he is supposed to go to her, that he is supposed to reach out and take her into his arms, and it pulls him further, one step at a time, further and further until he can see that he isn’t any closer than before.
When he stretches his hand out, the girl raises her head, and all of a sudden she is Charlotte, Mrs. NAME, his mother, but under everything, irrevocably her real form, she is Lily. White skin and grey eyes and hair that he knows without question is yellow, not blonde but yellow, even though all he can see is a pale vestige of the colour.
One by one, square lights pop on in the ceiling until they reach her (Lily, Lily, Lily), then the last one goes out, covering her in black. He wakes up for the second time that night with a shuddering start, eyes wide and hand reaching out towards nothing. His fingers close around thin air as he shakes his head, trying to clear his vision of spots of light and long limbs. His whole body is still shaking, helplessly, as he throws his legs over the edge of the bed and surges forward quickly. He pulls out his desk drawer, too frightened to be careful, and tosses it onto his bed. It takes too long to find the picture, shaking out papers from wire bound notebooks and forgetting that they are lying all about him when he sees the very corner of her. Slowly this time, he pulls it out, holding it in front of him.
It is just a picture. It doesn’t look at him directly, eyes holding a firm glance right over his left shoulder. It doesn’t smile, or shift, or laugh at him, taking it so seriously. He can’t even see them in her face, anymore, can only see a girl he has never met, even though she looks like everything he has been waiting for (even though he didn’t know he was waiting for it). Maybe she has Charlotte’s nose, or Mrs. NAME’s awkward smile, or the look in his mother’s eyes when they don’t know what to say to each other, but she isn’t them, they aren’t Lily. Whoever she might be.

Tomorrow, he’ll ask his mother about going to see his grandfather over the weekend. For now, he pushes the rest of the papers off his bed and curls up on top of the blankets, knowing for sure that he won’t be able to go back to sleep tonight.
***
When he hears his mother getting ready, just before daylight, he walks quietly across his room and stops at his door, leaning into it. In the bathroom, he can hear her plugging up the curling iron and starting the shower, the perpetually weak pressure bouncing weakly against the scattered bottles of shampoo. It will take ten minutes to the second for the shower to warm up to a point a normal human can stand, but, when he steps out into the hallway, the door is already shut. From underneath it, a thin band of light spreads out across the dark floor, and he steps over it as he makes his way to the kitchen.
The automatic night light flips on as he passes it, pooling his ankles in soft yellow light, and he tries not to look at it as he pushes the light switch up to make it disappear. It is different when the entire room is flooded, safer. The room is filled with even more light when he opens the refrigerator, and he’s not surprised to find it relatively empty. A quick search produces a carton of milk one day past the expiration date, a pack of peanut butter crackers, and a banana which has started to blacken, but just on the edges. The search for a clean glass is significantly more difficult, but he manages to find a souvenir Disney World cup that he had been given once the actual plans to go to Disney World fell through. He finishes off the milk, resting the carton on top of the full trash can.
Distantly, he can hear his mother singing an old country song she used to sing to him when he was a baby, voice loud over the spray. He boosts himself up onto the counter to wait, picks up the banana, and is disturbed to feel is collapsing around itself where his fingers are. Once peeled, he can see that it is practically inedible, and one taste proves just that. He abandons it on the counter top next to him and seeks solace with the crackers. By the time he has eaten the last one, balling up the wrapper and shooting it only to have it bounce, ironically, off the milk, the shower has stopped and the hair dryer has started. By the time he reaches the bottom of his cup, he’s almost certain that she is curling her hair, something he used to watch her do with interest. It was always amazing how her hair could go from sticking up at strange angles to curled like an art form, cascading down her shoulders. Now, the process is less than fascinating, and all he can do is wonder why she bothers. The office hired her before she started dressing up, when she was just a kid, really. It seems like a waste of time, especially since his dad his gone.
Finally, the door opens and she strides out, already dressed, high heels dangling from her fingertips. One of them drops when she notices him, clattering to the wood floor.
“Eliot! You scared me.” A hand presses to her heart momentarily, a vestige of a freshman drama class. “You’re up early.”
“I know.” he replies, easily, sliding off onto the floor. She is reaching up to the top of the refrigerator for the loaf of bread and the fabric of her outdated dress is stretching slightly tighter over her stomach. He politely chooses not to comment.
“. . .for what occasion?” she asks, not looking up at him as she smears the last of the butter from the package onto a slice of bread. It is a messier process that she had obviously anticipated, the butter make her fingers slick and glossy, but she doesn’t seem to realize as she quickly shoves it inside their ancient toaster.
“Nothing, really. I just wanted to ask you whether you were off this weekend. . .” he draws off, hopefully.
“Why?” She finally looks straight at him when she turns around, leaning her shoulders back into the edge of the counter.
“I thought we could maybe visit Grandfather. We haven’t been in awhile.”
“That would be nice, honey, but I’ve to work overtime this weekend. One of the other girls is sick.” The toaster makes an uncomfortable popping noise, wheezing with age, and she goes to attend to that as his heart begins to sink. “Do you, er, have someone who could give you a ride?”
Charlotte, he thinks, but probably not. The way he left her yesterday, he wouldn’t expect her to be willing to do anything for him, and he’s not sure he would blame her. He doesn’t want her to know so much about him, either, doesn’t want anyone to, and if she asks to meet him, he’ll have to tell her, and then she’ll probably want to talk about how he’s feeling.
“No.” he murmurs, running a hand through his hair and turning his back to her. “It doesn’t matter.” (it does).

***
Eliot is sitting in English class, two hours later, before he realizes that he forgot his backpack at home and all he had with him was Lily, folded over like he found her and hiding in his back pocket, and a brochure that has somehow ended up in the opposite one. His hair is decidedly awkward in the back, as well, from where he didn’t wash it yesterday and didn’t brush it this morning.
“Show me your books, people.” Mr. NAME, the standard English teacher, stands up from his desks for one of the first times in weeks and gestured at them, wildly. Everyone but Eliot raises their battered library copies of The Red Badge of Courage and he can feel himself physically sinking down into his seat.
“Mr. ______?” Mr. NAME swoops don on him, a frightening sort of excitement lighting up his face. Everyone around him is on the edge of their seats. “Where is your copy of Stephen Crane’s classic work on the human psyche during wartime?” It’s almost a rhetorical question, really, but he is still standing there, looking menacing.
“At home. In my bag.” He pauses. “Which is at home.”
“And what should you do about this?” Mr. NAME has reached a point where he is officially enjoying this too much. Eliot looks out blindly at his classmates, but they just shake their heads sympathetically. They don’t know the answer, either, and it is too late for him. He glances up innocently.
“Repent?” A few people in the class giggle from behind their hands, but most of them stay decidedly silence, not sure if he’s actually kidding. He’s not so sure himself. Mr. NAME looks like he is either prepared to give up or kill him mercilessly with a copy of The Red Badge of Courage. The vein in his neck, almost imperceptibly beginning to throb, gives more evidence to the latter.
“I suppose you’ll just have to take a 0 for the day, then.” Everyone is still quiet. Eliot can’t help but wonder whether they are waiting for him to say ‘repent that!’, like he is. “Class, page 30. Answer the questions on your worksheet. Eliot, please see me outside.”
He has never been asked outside by a teacher before. They have always been blissfully unaware of his existence, and that is the way he prefers it. All eyes are following him now as he makes his way through the rows of desks and past Mr. NAME, holding the door open for him without a trace of sincerity. Outside, the door shuts behind him and he moves forwards towards Eliot, who unconsciously takes a long step back.
“Do you think you’re funny, Mr. ____?” Eliot starts to answer, but he continues, sharply. “The classroom is not the place for this sort of behavior. You are expected to bring not only your supplies and your mind, but your respect, too. Are you understanding me? Are we on the same page?”
Last week, they had a vacation day so all of the teachers could go to a Seminar in the next town over. Apparently, these are the kind of phrases they were taught to mimic in high-stress situations. Eliot wants to tell him that no, they are not on the same page, that he all did was forget a book at home, not kill a man just to watch him die. He doesn’t, though, just nods and says, “Yes, sir.” and for some reason that makes everything better, that sort of validation. Without another word, he goes inside and Eliot follows, dumbstruck, a few seconds afterwards. The class has resumed its usual dull roar, not even bothering to quiet as Mr. NAME sits down at his computer, strictly turned away from the desks, and starts to type. There is an unwritten poll going around about what he’s doing, and the highest rank guesses are either a dating service or something pornographic that no one really wants to know about. Eliot takes his own seat, ignoring a group of people behind him who stop talking to crane their heads and stare. Apparently, with the way his day is going, he should be getting used to it.

***
The next period is his study hall, the blessed right that he earned when he accidentally signed up to take two science credits as a sophomore and didn’t quite fail either of them. There isn’t actually a study hall classroom, though, so the students are instructed to either leave campus for a period or sit in the library/theatre/class of their choice and with a consenting teacher. Normally, Eliot hides in a misfit carrel near the back of the library, but today he gets his coat from his locker and slips outside. It is still cold, like it will be for several more months, but he remembers hearing from someone about a grave of trees somewhere outside the football field that students sued to smoke under before it got too overgrown, and he has set himself to finding it.
On the field, the freshmen team is practicing away their lives, wearing uniforms that are noticeably too big for them because their mothers want them to grow into them so they don’t have to buy new ones for four years. They apparently did not expect freshman football to be so violent. Eliot stops and watches in horror as a little boy elbows another, smaller, boy so he falls, head bouncing off a patch of ice so hard that he swears it echoed, just for a moment. Slightly frightened, he increases his pace, heading for the hole in the fence that most people use to skip classes. When he looks over his shoulder, the coach is looking back at him, but they both know he won’t do anything. Twenty years of teaching trigonometry, a subject that he is sure to have failed when he was in high school (just like all of his students are now), have left him jaded. Some people say that the only reason he’s still here is because he’s on clinical amounts of anti-depressants; others claim that he just hangs out with the stoners behind the dumpsters after school.
The hole becomes progressively bigger with each act of truancy, chain links cut with safety scissors or pocket knives, and this time he doesn’t even have to bend down to get through it. There are several paths trodden out, and he chooses the one less traveled, avoiding the briars and vines covering it. It is something of a jungle back here, and this is apparently the reason that no one uses it anymore. It is a good twenty minutes later before he can break his way through to the end of the path, stumbling helplessly into a neat pile of leaves. All he can do is struggle to get up and pray to whatever he needs to pray to that there are no snakes hiding here. He must look completely insane, thrashing about and choking on leaves, which is exactly why he’s glad there isn’t anyone here to see him.
“Uhm. Eliot?” He opens his eyes wide, blinking to avoid being blinded, and sees Charlotte above him.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” he deadpans, feeling the blush start in his cheeks and spread to his neck, and she starts to giggle, just a little hysterically.
“What are you doing here?” she asks. He is waiting for her to offer to help him up, because he can’t really do so himself, but he doesn’t say anything.
“It’s my study hall.” he replies, casually. “What about you? You don’t seem to be the sort to skip class, what with the whole college thing.”
“It’s my study hall, too. I come out here to think. . .” she draws off, then gasps, softly. “Oh, my god, let me help you!” A small, mittened hand encloses around his, and she helps him to his feet, steadying him when he stumbles into her. He is vaguely aware of the leaves clinging to most of his clothes, and he is still blushing, which makes it worse. She start to laugh again, looking him over, and he frowns in reply, but he’s mostly joking. With her help, he gets most of the leaves off and finds a clear patch of grass to sit on.
“Did you make the leaf pile?”
“Yes.” She smiles, shyly. “I was going to jump in it, too, before you came and ruined it.”
“That sounds nice.” he says, leaning up against a tree trunk, tilting his head back to watch the winter sunlight stream cold through the branches. “And I’m sorry-for the leaves and for, well, yesterday.”
“Don’t worry. I understand.” When she says that, he knows that she is telling the truth, that when she says things like that or wishes someone well, it’s not just common courtesy. It’s the truth. Gingerly, she sits next to him, stretching her legs out so that her ankles show from beneath the hem of her jeans. They sit like that, sometimes taking about nothing in particular, until an alarm rings on her phone, and they walk side by side back towards the school.

***

Third period is US History, a class that is one decisive black or white, though mostly white, area, because if the teacher says anything that resembles an opinion, he could be punishes to the full extent of the school board’s authority. Mr. NAME#2 therefore refused to do anything but state direct facts and discourages all forms of class discussion. He’s a perpetually frightened looking man, pale and shaky, and today he looks especially so.
“It’s time for the yearly teacher evaluation, children.” he says, on the edge of begging. “If you could. . .if you would. . .please behave yourselves.” The back row exchange smiles, evidently already formulating plans. Mr. NAME#2 looks as if he is trying to sink into his tweed, almost crying out when the door opens and Lisa, the office assistant, strolls in. Lisa has the educational equivalent of a substitute teacher, the kind that pops in a Disney movie and talks on their cell phone, but, nevertheless, she has the ability to make any teacher in the school break into a cold sweat, especially around evaluation time.
“Don’t mind me.” she says, smiling in a way that could only be described as evil and folding herself neatly in the only open desk in the back row. They look giddy with excitement, working amongst themselves to decide between the physical assault story or, the old fashioned stand by, the sexual predator story. Mr. NAME#2 takes an enormously long time shuffling his lesson notes before starting to recite them, verbatim, staring straight at the wall ahead of him. Lisa begins to write things on her clipboard of shattered dreams, the back row attempts to not be too obvious but fails magnificently, and Eliot gives up listening in favor of watching a very patient squirrel outside doing what he can only assume is attempting to knock nuts of a tree with its mind.
When the bell rings for him to leave for geometry, there are stains under the arms of Mr. NAME#2's blazer and a boy is fake sobbing about just where MR. NAME#2 had touched him during their ‘private tutoring sessions’. Eliot makes a quick exit before a fight can break out.

***
Mrs. NAME apparently decided to take a sick day while she still had the health to enjoy it, and they have a substitute teacher who smiles at each of them individually as they walk in. She is young, probably just out of college, and she looks like she is eagerly prepared to teach them all that she knows. It is something about the clothes she is wearing and they way she stands, though (soft blue sweater, wool pants, little diamond pins holding back her hair, good posture, bouncy), that suggests this is her first time in front of a real classroom and that this will not be an enjoyable experience for any of them if they don’t do something about it. Eliot purposefully takes a seat in the back, hoping to avoid any bloodshed.
“Hey, guys.” she says, in a lilting high voice that seems to register a pitch above everyone’s normal hearing. “I’m Amanda, and I’ll be teaching for. . .” a quick search through her pile of post it notes produces her answer, not a second too soon, “Mrs. MISPRONUNCIATION for the day. Can any of you tell me about how your class usually works?” That is probably her first and biggest mistake. Oscar Dover, a boy who has had a class with Eliot every year since kindergarten, raises his hand and gives her a very helpful smile.
“Normally, Mrs. MISPRONUNCIATION has us take a thirty minute walk outside, to clear our minds and let the geometry have a better access to us.” he says. Oscar has tried this trick which every substitute teacher that they have ever had, but none of them has ever been this young, this susceptible to believing anything they tell her as long as they have their innocent faces on. There is a pause as she stares around the room.
“What, seriously?” she asks, of no one in particular. Everyone makes varying noises of affirmation, and she melts instantly. “That sounds really intelligent. I wish my teachers had thought of that.” She gets to her feet and ushers them into the hallway, not seeming to even suspect that she has in any way been tricked. People whisper back and forth between themselves as they head for the double doors, words like ‘completely gullible’ and other less tame ones floating around. Eliot is the last person out, and before they go outside, Amanda stops him with a hand on his arm.
“Do you really do this?” she asks, quietly, and there is a new vulnerability in her voice, making it rough and barely loud enough to hear. He blinks, disconcerted, feeling like he has heard her voice somewhere before. Eventually he recovers, though, and knows that he should say what she needs him to say.
“Yeah.” he replies, turning away to walk outside, holding the door open for her with one hand. “Every day.”

***

After school, Charlotte meets him under the awning outside the school, and they walk to her car as if they do it every day, as if they have been like this forever. It is quiet inside except for the dull grind of the heater and the Smiths playing low from the CD player, Morrissey singing happily about how miserable his life has become. In the next few minutes, as they struggle out of the parking lot, he learns something new about her: she is the only person in the entire school, parents and teachers included, that doesn’t use their entire repertoire of obscenities when attempting to make it out of here and onto the highway alive. When it’s their turn, she turns smoothly into the line of cars and continues on. She is quietly singing along as he unconsciously drums out the beat, off beat, on the dashboard, when the song dies down and switches to the next one with a mechanical whit. It’s one he has never heard before, a girl screaming her way through a Bob Dylan song, and Charlotte reaches over to turn it down without taking her eyes off the road.
“Do you have a rake?” she asks, out of the blue, eyes flicking over to meet his own confused ones.
“Somewhere, yes. Any particular reason?” They pull up at a red light, trapped in the middle of three lanes of cars, and she rolls her eyes at him.
“I think that we should fix up the grove.” she retorts. “Actually, I think we should do it this weekend.”
“You want to trespass on school grounds to rake leaves?” he asks. The cars ahead of them have started to move, and she accelerates gradually, taking her time to reply to him.
“Yes.” It’s as simple as that, the strange determination in her voice. “And plant flowers, maybe.” she adds, as an afterthought. He has a sudden mental image of the two of them dressed all in black with their knees pressing into the dirt, planting pansies, and he starts to laugh. It bubbles up out of nowhere, a noise that he is not used to, or at least not lately, and she laughs a bit awkwardly with him.
“I was being serious, you know.” He can tell that she isn’t really hurt, but he nods, politely, as she pulls over next to his house. “We really should. Not the path to it, though, because I don’t want to come across people hooking up there all the time.” She wrinkles her nose, delicately. On the CD, Frank Sinatra sets out to Learn To Croon, and Eliot unlocks his door.
“Okay.” he says, amiably. “I’m in if you are.”
“Saturday morning?” she asks. “You bring the rake?” He steps out of the car and into the street, watching carefully for cars.
“You bring the flowers.” he replies, and she beams at him before he shuts the door and circles the back of the car. This time, he waits until she has driven away to walk inside, watching her car speed up until it disappears around a curve. Smiling wonderingly, not entirely sure what he’s agreed to and what stage of friendship planting a garden is, he picks up the mail and goes inside. There isn’t anything for him but a letter from a university he has never heard of, somewhere in Nevada. Upon further inspection, it turns out that they got his information from the SAT and were ‘interested in him for their highly competitive and yet openly nurturing school’. He folds the letter up and shoves it back into the envelope, sort of wishing that it was a real offer, or at least a real chance to plan something past the pile of brochures now sitting on his desktop. It would be nice if there was something more definite, but it doesn’t really matter yet. He goes to his room to add it to the brochures, making sure to take Lily out of his pocket and slip her back into the drawer before doing anything else.
He sits down on his bed and shuts his eyes, feeling something entirely new. Maybe he can ask Charlotte to take him to see his grandfather. Maybe she would understand.

***
Lily is sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, looking out of place in Charlotte’s jeans, her ankles showing slim and lovely from where the edges have just barely moved up. She is rocking back and forth, just slightly, but the constant motion makes him feel so ill that he can’t look at her for long. Words slip quietly from her lips, and he averts his eyes, leaning forward to try to catch them before they fall away.
“Oh honey, Oh Eliot. No time. I was happy, I was happy, I was happy. . .but heaven knows.” she whispers, and they look at each other, eyes meeting in the same thrill of a second. He tries to say something, but she puts a cool finger to his lips.
“Do you really do this every day?” she asks, and he knows her voice now, knows that it is Amanda’s when she isn’t trying to be happy, and when he wakes up there are tears in his eyes for the first time in years, and he knows exactly what he has to do, and now.
His grandfather hates telephones, his mother says that he is afraid of them, but there is one in his room that he told Eliot he could call if he ever needed to talk to him. This can’t wait. He steals the cordless phone from the hallway and hides in his closet, sitting curled up behind the rows of winter coats and dress clothes he has never worn, feeling suddenly more confident in himself than he has in awhile. The number itself comes out naturally, but his fingers slip and stumble, and it is only after he stops himself and is able to breathe again that he finally manages to dial it. It rings once, twice, five times before somebody answers it.
“Hello?” His grandfather’s voice is confused, and it doesn’t sound like him so much anymore. Suddenly, Eliot can do nothing but listen to the silence, breathing against the mouth piece. He isn’t the same, and he’s known since his letter, but he hasn’t been able to admit it until now. “Eliot. . .is this. . .Eliot?” He always speaks too loudly into the phone, because he’s afraid that the other person won’t be able to hear him.
“Yes. It’s me.” Eliot says, and he raises his voice more than he had intended, just to make him, both of them, really, feel normal.
“What brings you to call, El?” his grandfather asks.
“I got your letter.”
“My letter. . .?” Eliot is beginning to think that the confusion he had heard before had nothing to do with getting an out of place phone call, and that isn’t helping.
“The one you sent me. Asking me to get out the albums for you, from the attic.” he continues, gingerly. “Don’t you remember?” It’s hard to think that somehow that isn’t the hardest question he will ask tonight.
“Oh. Of course I remember. I wrote it, didn’t I?” He says it like it’s true, and, to anybody else, it would be, but Eliot knows better. He knows him too well to be able to ignore that.
“Yes. I was just. . .I’m going to bring them to you, whenever I can get there, but I needed. . .I needed to ask you a question.” He rushes the last few words, shutting his eyes. When he keeps them shut, hands reaching forward blindly to dig into the sleeves of a suede coat, all he can see is Lily, standing in front of him, bathed in a light that really isn’t there. He has never seen light like that before.
“Whatever you want.” his grandfather says, earnestly, breaking him out of it so that when he opens his eyes, she is gone just as quickly as she came.
“. . .who is Lily?” he asks, like breathing, like singing a song he has known since childhood, like leaf piles in the middle of October with someone that might be saving him from himself. There is a long silence where his grandfather sighs, long and full of meaning, and Eliot feels like there has been something extremely heavy lifted from his shoulder. There will be, there has to be, an answer to what has been happening. He has to know.
“Lily.” he whispers, all of his age pushing itself into that one name. “How do you know about Lily?”
“There was a picture of her, in one of the albums.” Eliot bites his lip, not entirely noticing when he starts to taste blood well up, tongue darting out to wipe it away. “Grandfather, who is she?”
“In the confusion we stay with each other,” his grandfather replies, laughing hoarsely, “happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.” The words on the back of the picture. Eliot thinks about how that doesn’t apply at all, about how Lily spoke to him just a few minutes ago, but he can understand the confusion part more than he would like.
“Who is she?” he repeats, more desperately this time, hands falling to the carpet below him to thread his fingers through it, tugging sharply.
“Whitman. That was her favorite poet. She was. . .oh, Eliot, she was around before I ever met your grandmother. The most amazing woman alive. No one could have had her, not even me.” They breathe out, at the same time. “I wanted her more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life, though.”
“And she. . .she didn’t love you?”
“I don’t know. She might have.” There are noises in the background, and he can tell that he is getting to his feet, grunting softly as he pads in slippered feet across the room. Eliot can see almost see the view from his window, where he must be standing now. It comes out over the parking lot, where, in the daylight, cars sparkle like hundreds of scattered pieces of jewelry beneath them. He remembers the day his grandmother’s favorite necklace broke, back when he was two or maybe three, and they all spent hours on the floor of her bedroom trying to find all of the beads so they could string it back together. Maybe they never even loved each other, that whole time. He doesn’t want to think about it.
“Do you still think about her?” he whispers, as if he couldn’t. His grandfather is silent and the sound of his curtains rustling to a close muffles his hesitation. He sighs again.
“Every day.”
Eliot nods, even though he can’t see him doing it, and draws his legs up closer to his chest.
“Tell me more.”

***

Lily was just eighteen when his grandfather met her, out of school and working as a waitress in the café below his apartment, and she already had a following of young soldiers who hung on her every word. There were all back home from the war, suddenly years older than they were before, and none of them knew what to do with themselves, but they all knew that Lily was something else. The day started out at seven o’clock, when she served them black coffee (they added cream and sugar in later, when they thought she wasn’t looking) and wished them a good day when they left for their respective jobs. By the time they came back for dinner, she had another cup of coffee waiting for them, this time with a shot from the bottle of whiskey she kept hidden under the counter, just to get them through until the next day.
Lily could relate to anyone, in any situation. For every anecdote you told her, she had one to match, but she never tried to tell a better one. Everyone thought she was unbreakable, and that helped them, knowing that there was something so steady in their lives again.
His grandfather had learned better, though, one night when the diner was short a waiter and he won the bet to stay late and help Lily close up. They were wiping down the tables when she stopped, suddenly, and sat down in the booth in front of him.
“Tell me about the war.” she had said, just softly, pretty hands folded over each other on the wet tabletop, and, without thinking, he did just that. He had never spoken to anyone about it before, not even the other soldiers, the ones he had known since they were boys together. They were the ones who had gone through everything with him, but all they ever talked about was baseball.
By the time he was finished, they were both crying, and Lily took a picture from the pocket of her apron and slid it across to him. A young man in a uniform, a kid, pale but smiling broadly at whoever was taking the picture.
“That’s Tommy.” she said, proudly, voice breaking as she spoke for the first time in what must have been hours, pale eyes rimmed bright red, blood red. “He. . .he never came back, but I told him I would wait for him. I told him forever.” She had stood up then, looking younger than he was sure anyone had ever seen her, leaning forward to kiss his cheek and go back to work, and he knew it didn’t mean anything, but he didn’t clean the mark off until the next morning.
A few months later, knowing that Lily was too lost to ever love anyone else, nevertheless a soldier, he met Eliot’s grandmother and swore that she made him feel entirely different than Lily did, but in the best way possible. They were two different people, and he loved them both with all his heart, but Eliot thinks he knows better, because Lily was the one with the yellow hair and the gray eyes and the red lipstick, the only real vanity she allowed herself to have. His grandmother was funny and dependable, and he knows she was pretty in her day, but he also knows that she wasn’t anything like Lily.
His grandfather asked him to bring the picture to him, but he doesn’t know whether he can give it up yet or not. If the dreams stop, which he knows, without really knowing, that they won’t, then he might be able to move past it, but he doesn’t know.

***
“Were you on the phone last night?” his mother asks, the next morning. He is awake too early again, this time for no actual reason, and was sitting with his feet up on the couch when she woke up. Suddenly, he wants to tell her everything, wants her to know because this is her father and she should know this, but then he stops himself. He shakes his head instead. She probably shouldn’t know.
“No. Why?”
“I just thought I heard voices. It must have been the TV, though.” She is drinking instant coffee with sweetener she stole from the restaurant down the street, out of a party cup from a birthday he can’t really remember anymore. When she finishes it, she leaves the cup on the end table and grabs her shoes, doing an awkward ritual dance towards the doorway to get them on her feet while leaving at the same time.
“See you tonight!” she calls, as the door slams behind her. He moves quietly to the other end of the couch, getting to his knees and leaning over the back to watch out the window as she drives away, just like she used to. This isn’t just like those times, though. It only takes a second for him to realize that something is entirely wrong. She went the opposite direction of where she normally goes, away from her office. She isn’t going to work, and apparently that isn’t something she thinks is necessary for him to know. Shaken, he gets to his feet and picks up the cup as he passes. It is still half full and warm on his hands, and he drinks the rest of it before throwing it away.
While he systematically gathers everything together, The Red Badge of Courage tucked safely in his bag with Lily in its pages, he tries to consider the possibilities but comes up with nothing but a rush of worries. Maybe she was fired, has been for months, and they’ve been living off his grandfather’s money this entire time. Maybe she’s been arrested for something, and is doing community service. Maybe, and this one seems to be the worst of all, she has fallen in love again. He can’t even wrap his head around that. If she’s stayed like this, not exactly content but never doing anything about it, either, for two years, why would she decide to change now?
He can’t think about it. He won’t. If she doesn’t think he needs to know about what’s happening to her life, or, more likely, their lives, than he’ll just ignore it, and she can deal with it all alone. When everything falls in around her, she won’t have anyone to blame, not even his father, like she usually does.

***
Eliot makes sure to have The Red Badge of Courage in his hand when he walks into the English classroom, holding it obviously above the rest of his things, and, from behind his desk, Mr. NAME nods grudgingly. He is safe from his wrath for another day, it seems. In his seat, the boy behind him sits up a little to see over his shoulder.
“Got your book?” he asks. Eliot points to it.
“Cool. We thought he was going to eat you yesterday, man. We’ve never even seen Mr. NAME move before, nevertheless attack someone.” The boy leans backwards into his seat, long brown hair falling in front of his horn rimmed glasses. He gestures over behind him as Eliot turns around in his seat.
“This is Trace, don’t call her Tracy or she will eat you.” A girl two seats back with long red hair waves at him, hitting the boy in the shoulder.
“I don’t eat people.” she says, leaning forward so he can see her better. Her eyes are lined thickly in kohl black, and, when she smiles, he can see the lipstick on her teeth.“I promise.” He smiles at her, a little more frightened than he probably should be. Beside her, another boy stands up and introduces himself.
“Calvin.” he says, extending his hand, which Eliot shakes, albeit hesitantly. Calvin is tall, over six foot, and he has “I think NAME is seriously uncool for pointing you out like that. It’s not like anyone actually did that paper, anyway. We might as well have all left our books at home.”
“Thanks.” Eliot replies, surprised and somewhat touched by the sudden show of camaraderie. Before, he didn’t even know the name of anyone in his English class aside from Oscar, who sat in the back corner, occasionally throwing balls of paper in the air at random but not doing much else noteworthy. From behind him, the first boy coughs, and he looks at him expectantly.
“I’m Matthew.” he says, blowing the hair out of his face to show green eyes shining beneath the glint of his glasses. Eliot smiles at him, then glances down at his desk. Beneath his own copy of the book, there is a notebook with his name written in capital letters, careful and tall across the very top. Beneath it, there is a quote copied out in lines of neat cursive. In the confusion we stay with each other. . .
“Whitman?” he asks, pointing it out once he remembers what his grandfather had said last night. Whitman. That was her favorite poet. Matthew looks surprised.
“Yeah, it is. Do you read him?” Something like excitement passes across his face, and he leans forward just slightly, sharp elbows pressing into his desk. From the corner of his eye, he can see Calvin rolling his eyes and slumping backwards, glancing at Trace. She shakes her head at him.
“Sort of.” He blinks, smiling down at the floor. “A, ah, friend of a friend got me into him.” There is a poetry section in the school library, he knows. He makes a note to himself to look for some Whitman after school, so he won’t be technically lying.
“A teacher gave me a copy of Leaves of Grass, once.” Matthew agrees, but his voice is different now, a note sadder. He looks away momentarily, eyes staring off somewhere that none of them can see, and Calvin looks like he is about to say something before he starts to talk again. “But. . .it’s cool, that you like him. Not a lot of people our age can understand it, like really understand it.” The sound of Mr. NAME’s computer chair grating against the linoleum turns their attention back to the front of the classroom.
A few minutes later, while Mr. NAME is lecturing, Eliot can hear Matthew and Calvin whispering behind him, violently. He can’t tell what they’re saying, but eventually Calvin stumbles out of his desk and leaves the room, grabbing the hall pass as he goes. The lecture continues, completely unmoved. Eliot glances backward to see Matthew looking straight again, face drawn and white. Their eyes meet, and Eliot is the first to look away.

***
Today on the football field, the sophomores are practicing, a few inches taller and significantly more war scarred than their freshman counterparts. They seem to be less needlessly violent, though, probably out of a sense of self preservation. If they don’t hurt each other, then they won’t get hurt in turn, or something like that. It looks more like football than full out war.
When he reaches the hole in his fence, something catches his eye, caught in the wires. Upon closer inspection, he finds a little piece of pink fabric, hanging from a loose thread. He slowly untangles it, moving it through his fingers as he starts through the hole and carefully goes down the path. He makes it a point not to step on any of the branches or vines, hoping to make it look as terrifying and forgotten as possible. He manages to make it to the clearing without killing himself, and Charlotte applauds when she sees him.
“My leaf pile is safe.” she says, grinning up at him from where she is lying on her back. There is a slightly smaller pile of leaves than yesterday, sitting innocently at his feet, and she raises an eyebrow at him. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Fine.” he says, kicking at one, listlessly, then walking over to sit at her side and pull his knees towards his chest. She turns to face him a little, stretching her arms higher above her head, and he starts to laugh when he sees a hole in the side of her pink t-shirt.
“What?” she asks, frowning at him.
“Did you have a hard time?” He drops the piece of cloth on her stomach, and she moves to sit up, grabbing it before it gets lost in the high grass. Her mouth twists, and it’s not a smile, and he is suddenly aware that this means to her that she has made another mistake.
“Yes.” she murmurs, laughing but not really, and he remembers when she spilled the milk and the way she looked so ashamed. Leaning in, he takes the fabric and presses it gently back to her side.
“All better.” he says, looking at her meaningfully, and this time, when she smiles, it is real.

***
“Hey, Repentance!”
The shout rings out from somewhere across the cafeteria, and Eliot looks up from where Charlotte is quietly relating the plans for the garden to him. Through the stream of people drifting through the aisle, Matthew appears, bearing a paper sack and a bottle of off brand soda in front of him to break a path through the barricade of lunch trays. Eliot waves at him, but looks further behind him for his friends from earlier. They aren’t anywhere in sight.
“May I sit?” he asks Charlotte, politely, nodding to the seat next to her.
“Sure.” she says, looking confused but moving forward in her seat to give him room to get behind her. When he sits down, he offers her a smile and a sip of his soda, and she returns the former and declines the latter. He shrugs, dropping the bag and looking over at Eliot.
“I don’t think I actually know your name. Unless you’d like me to call you Repentance.” He withdraws a burrito wrapped in wax paper from one of the Mexican restaurants in town, and slowly begins to peel it away.
“Eliot.” Eliot says.
“As in T.S.?” Charlotte and he are the first two people to get the ridiculous nature of his name in his entire life. He has very early memories of teachers asking him whether he was named after a relative of some sort. He grins at Matthew.
“Exactly that, actually.”
“Parents have an awkward poetry obsession?” Charlotte look up, interested. They haven’t talked about his parents yet.
“My dad did.” Eliot jabs a plate of red dye #2 flavored gelatin, but isn’t really feeling up to eating it. They all fall silent until Charlotte speaks up, hesitantly.
“Did?”
“Oh, he’s not dead. Or, well, he might be.” His voice sounds far too cheerful, even to him. This is usually a sign of hysteria, he thinks, but he feels calm, almost like he’s out of himself. “We just haven’t seen him in two years. Or so.”
“Oh.” whispers Charlotte.
“God.” says Matthew, wincing. “That sucks.”
“I’m sort of used to it.” he replies, but he is lying, and he feels himself blush again for the second time in two days. It’s disconcerting. It never used to happen like this before. In front of him, Charlotte looks like she is trying to decide what to do, one hand lifted from the table like she wants to touch him, like she can’t decide whether that is the right form of emotional comfort in this sort of situation, and across from him Matthew is tearing open his burrito with contemplative fingers.
“I’m Charlotte.” she blurts out, finally, turning to Matthew. He smiles at her, indulgently.
“Matthew. ‘s a pleasure.”
“Right.” she says, nodding at him for an awkwardly long amount of time before she focuses back on her food, intently not looking at either of them. Eliot wants to laugh, but he eventually decides against it.
“I’m really okay.” he says. “I’m, yeah. I’m okay.”
“If you say so.” Matthew replies. “But I doubt it. I’ve been through some. . .let’s say some things. And you don’t ever get over it. Not really.” He gives Eliot a look, glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, and he thinks he must understand, too. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before, and he can feel something grow inside of him, warm and strong.
“Maybe not. . .hey, what happened to, uh. . .” he pauses, not entirely sure why he is trying to change the subject, but goes with it, anyway, “Calvin. He seemed angry.” Matthew rolls his eyes at him.
“Calvin is overly concerned about issues that don’t really involve him.” he says, tritely. “Trace went off to go talk him off a ledge or something. I can’t really go into details.” He looks dark, momentarily, breathing deeply and letting it out as an angry sigh.
“Are they together?”
“Calvin and. . .and Trace?” he asks, laughing. “Christ, no. They’d kill each other if sex was involved. Also, they know that I would personally never speak to them again, and they could never live without my charming presence in their life.” As he draws off, cheerfully, the bell rings steadily from above them. Without a question, they all stay in their seats as the physical contents of the cafeteria slowly begin to empty out into the hallways, compressing far too many people into four spaces, each slightly less than five feet. Each of them is looking off in separate directions, like they are each expecting to see the same person, but they just don’t know where he is going to come from.
In a corner, an assistant principal begins to eye them suspiciously, and Charlotte sighs. Getting to her feet and slinging her bag over one thin shoulder, she looks over at them and wrinkles her nose in distaste.
“I’ll see you guys later.” she says, pained, and strides off down the empty aisle, looking mostly lost. Calvin shifts in his seat, then drops his bottle into the bag and gets to his feet in turn.
“To economics!” he murmurs, looking mostly as if he is making his way to a slow and untimely death, and walks away without another word. Eliot throws away his trash as well as their’s, runs a hand through his hair, and avoids the principal’s death stare as he walks towards the American history room.

***

It turns out that Mr. NAME#2 had managed to intercept and disprove the story of his illicit sexual relations with several different students before the school board caught wind of it, and his face is an odd mix of triumph and unadulterated relief when he sits down at his desk at the beginning of class. A few people share disappointed looks, but most don’t even look up until he clears his throat, exaggeratedly.
“I am aware of the blatantly manipulative actions of some of your peers,” he says the word like he is swearing and coughs directly after, “and I would just like them to know that I do not appreciate it. My position here is very important to my family and to me, and to many student here, too. If I hear anything like this has happened, to another teacher or to me, again, then believe me. . .I will. . .I will do something about it.” He finishes with a dramatic flurry of enthusiasm, one hand moving swiftly to slam down on his desk so his cup of decaf coffee with French vanilla creamer and five artificial sweeteners rocks dangerously at the edge.
The back row does not look as appropriately ashamed as they should be looking, but they, and everyone else, have heard this speech at least five times since the beginning of the year. Eventually, even the most impassioned of speeches begins to lose its luster.
Instead of talking about history, they play rounds of the Quiet Game and Heads Up, Seven Up to honor this memorable day. Everyone is too impatient to win the Quiet Game, though, and they’ve all had the art of cheating at Heads Up, Seven Up perfected since they were in fourth grade. Foot steps were analyzed, the sounds of soles against linoleum memorized. You never chose a friend unless they expect you to choose a friend, and you always smile when you know you’re not guilty, just to throw them off. There was, at one point, a manual made of construction paper and magic markers, but by now it has become something of a myth.
The lesson plan on the board was set for ‘an in depth study of the Industrial Revolution, with special footnotes’, though, and anything would have been preferable to that, the most boring subject in all of American history.
Eliot sort of enjoys it, anyway, this sudden foray into his formative years. From behind him, he hears flip flops walking carefully so as not to flip nor flop, and through the circle of his arms he can see a girl’s foot, pedicured and sparkling. Janet LASTNAME, the second to the almost head cheerleader, was the only girl at the front. A thin finger prods his shoulder, and he puts down his head, smiling into his arm.

***
There is another substitute in geometry today, an older type man who looks as if he has gone through several wars and still enjoys hunting for pleasure. He comes in ten minutes late, almost kicking the door down, and positions himself in front of the classroom, leaning his heavy body into the white board and gazing out at them. A few seconds of that turns everyone silent, looking expressively uncomfortable as a lone paper ball flies through the air. Eliot thinks it might have come from Oscar’s direction, and all likely observations point to that, but he thinks that it is best if he looks straight ahead so as not to arouse suspicion. Someone whispers, and the man makes a noise in his throat, something between a bark and a guttural growl, and everyone’s eyes get slightly larger, hands folded innocently in their laps.
“Geometry.” he says, voice low and dangerous, fingers groping backwards to wrap around a marker. There are twenty six identical winces, the entire class feeling sorry for it while also being extremely glad it isn’t them.
“Yes.” says Oscar, the picture of bravery and juvenile heroics. A few people look to him, sympathetically. They will mourn him after he is gone. All that happens, though, is that he receives a glare so piercing that it forces him backwards into his seat, staring at the desktop graffiti as if he is trying to memorize it.
“Geometry,” the man continues, voice somehow even lower than before, “will get you nowhere in life.” People look around, confused, and there is a sudden spark of scattered applause, which he acknowledges with a brief nod of his head. “All you need. . .now, get this, because it’s important. . .” he barks out a laugh, “it’ll be on the test. . .all you need to survive is a bed to sleep in at night, some food, and a love for this goddamn country. That’s what will get you through life–not math or higher education. No! The next time your teacher or whoever is in charge around here tries to sell that crap to you, remember that it’s nothing but a lie! A goddamn lie!”
The man is speaking in italics and exclamation points. Eliot raises his eyebrows, and the rest of the class stares in fascination. A teacher has never sworn in class before, nevertheless twice in one dramatic anti-education rant. It’s all very new to them. It’s almost like being on TV, expect not really at all.
By the end of the class, he has had them stack up all of their books in a shape vaguely resembling the Eiffel Tower and it talking in a very loud voice about how, sometimes, burning books is for the betterment of society. Anything that is evil, like those goddamn Harry Potter books, deserve it.
Eliot thinks about The Wasteland, and Leaves of Grass, and Charlotte calling her pamphlets ‘literature’. He closes his eyes for the last few minutes, leaving his seat as soon as the bell rings and almost sprinting out of the door.
A second later, he turns on his heel and walks back in, grabs his geometry book from the top of the tower, and leaves again.

***
The library is, as the inspirational posters plastering the walls say, a magical place (the posters are old, of course, and have more than likely been there since the school was opened however many years ago, add ten and carry the three, and their edges have begun to peel off, but occasionally, Mrs. Name3 glances up at them fondly, so nobody questions it). It is the largest room in the school, save the gym and the theatre, and each of the expansive walls are lined with donated bookshelves of every shape, size, and color imaginable. New books and old books share space on all of them, all of them given by families or local bookstores, because there isn’t room in the budget for more books.
All in all, it looks very much like a primary school library, but with less brightly colored furniture and stuffed animals and more unread Tolstoy. Also, it is significantly lacking in the laughter and smiles of young children discovering the joys of reading. Eliot thinks he might like it, all the same.
Mrs. Name3 looks up and smiles at him, almost ecstatically, when he walks in. Quickly, she moves from where she had previously been mourning the old card catalog system while randomly hitting keys on her computer, hoping that the new automatic system will decide to work for her, and comes around the desk to approach him. They apparently do not get visitors much around here anymore.
“Hello!” she says, brightly, in a voice that says she has not even considered becoming cynical about the youth of today, that she is a librarian, gosh darn it, and it is her duty as such to bring the joy of literature to those able minded enough to accept it. “Can I help you today? We just got a cart of new books in. You can look through it if you like.”
“Uhm, no, I was just. . .” He is almost willing to look through the books, just if it will keep her this happy. It’s oddly comforting. “Poetry?”
“Poetry?” she repeats. “Far wall, dear, and all the way to your left. Are you looking for anything in particular?” He glances over his shoulder at her as he wanders in the general direction of where she instructed.
“Leaves of Grass!” he calls back.
“Oh! I remember the first time I read Whitman.” Nostalgically, she leans back onto the desk with her elbows, scattered papers to the floor. “I was around your age. It changed my life, I’ll have you know.” He nods, mostly to himself, as he scans the lines, kneeling down as the authors get farther and farther into the alphabet, from A (Angelou, Atwood. . .) all the way to W (out of place Wilde, White. . .). Leaves of Grass is a battered old book that calls out to him with gold leaving on the spine, and he picks it up delicately. Upon further inspection, it opens easily in his hands, but he can see where the pages have slowly begun to rip away from their seams. The print itself is small and dark, the edges of the letters smeared with years of passionate fingertips, the kind of book that seems to slowly push your vision to the edge of what it could possibly allow and then somehow be worth it all in the end. He doesn’t even have to actually smell it to know exactly what is smells like: age and attics and libraries you hid in when you were a kid. Other people. Good paper.
“You can check that out, you know.” Mrs. Name3 says, kindly. “If you’ve got your ID card, that is.” Eliot realizes that he has been staring at the book for far too long without actually reading it, and he begins to rummage in the his pockets to find his ID card. When he produces it, he remembers how he has trained himself to only wince a little bit when he sees his picture. They are allowed only one of these pictures, unless they want to pay ten dollars for a completely new card, and it is taken at the very beginning of freshman year, the most awkward of all the awkward high school years. He is wearing new clothes that are too stiff to properly move in, he has what must be the worst haircut in the history of the world, and his eyes are shut. He looks vaguely ill to match how he inevitably felt that day.
When he hands it and the book over to her, she glances down at it and smirks, just barely. It is only a minor struggle with the electric scanner and a few more well placed frantic assaults of the keyboard before she sighs, sliding them over the desk to him.
“I remember when we used to be able to just write these things down.” she says, sadly. Behind her, the computer makes a noise like a dying animal and goes suddenly black. She glares at it. “I swear, it does that on purpose! . . .oh, enjoy your book, dear. It’s due in two weeks.” She turns her back on him to reach hesitantly towards the computer, one thin finger pressing in what she thinks is the power button, and he takes this as his cue to exit.

***

In Charlotte’s car, they are listening to John Lennon when she pulls over by his house, moving carefully to avoid brushing the car in front of her.
“Who’s that?” she asks, and Eliot is suddenly, inadvertently frightened. His mother is sitting on the porch, legs hooked over the side of the hanging swing, staring at them in shock. With suddenly numb fingers, he gathers his things, purposefully slipping Leaves of Grass into his backpack.
“My mother.” he replies, pushing open his door. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?” She nods as he gets out, quickly stepping onto the sidewalk to give her room to pull off and half waving as she does. His mother gets to her feet when he starts up the steps, steadying herself on the rusting metal porch railing.
“Who was that?” she asks, smiling like there isn’t anything wrong her, like she’s always home from work this early, like she’s even going to work anymore. He looks at her for a long moment before shaking his head and opening the front door.
“Just a friend.” he says, shortly. “She was giving me a ride.”
“I think that’s. . .” she begins, but the door slams behind him before he can hear what she has to say. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t need to hear how lovely it is that he has made a new friend, a friend who’s a girl, at that. Awkward pause and a laugh. Does that make her your girlfriend, then? She looked so pretty, El. I think that’s lovely.
He doesn’t need that.
In the kitchen, he takes out the half empty jar of peanut butter and the fresh loaf of bread that she must have bought while she wasn’t at work with money they don’t have and begins to make a sandwich. He has just gotten out a butter knife to slice it in half when he hears the door slam for a second time and his mother comes into the room, heels clicking with the purpose to kill.
“Don’t ever leave when I am trying to talk to you.” she says, angrily. Her voice, almost never raises to a level this high, reverberates off the walls and comes back to him doubled and louder than before. His head aches, and he wants to go back to the library, to hide somewhere between the Dickinson and the Wilde until the lights go off and he can sleep in the dark and the silence.
“I didn’t want to talk to you.” he murmurs, through his teeth, slicing through the bread with more ferocity than he had previously intended.
“I don’t care. You should have at least let me finish my sentence before you just slammed inside.” She kicks off her shoes into a corner and sits on a stool, resolutely, glowering up at him. “I was just going to say that I thought it was lovely that you were making friends. That’s all.”
“Lovely.” he murmurs, putting everything away with deliberately violent movements. The knife clatters into the sink, and she shuts her eyes tight, lips pursing. He has almost grabbed his sandwich and left when she starts to speak again.
“You don’t know what I’m going through right now, El.” she says, every word practiced and slow, as if she has been repeating them to herself for days and days. Her hands are bunched up in the folds of her skirt, nails digging into her legs. “I just need you to work with me. To try to work with me.”
“Something you haven’t been telling me?” he spits out, whirling around to face her better. “Something you’re keeping from me? Why should I work with you, about anything? You can’t even tell me the truth!” He hasn’t yelled like this is a long time, not since his grandfather moved away and left them alone together, and it doesn’t feel right. He doesn’t like the way he is right now. He leaves his good, leaves his mother sitting there with her mouth hanging open in surprise, and he runs. He runs until he can’t even feel himself running anymore, runs until he doesn’t even remember why he was running in the first place. His feet pound out a rhythm on the concrete, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, and he can only stop himself when he sees that the sun is starting to set. The sky above him has started to bruise, brilliant yellow just at the bottom of the horizon, purple and grey scribbled in for the rest. Blue just below it all.
The rest of the surroundings are more familiar to him. He has managed to lead himself to the city park without realizing it. As he wanders across an empty soccer field, he lets himself remember spending time here, just for a little while. There was a school field trip, back in the third grade, maybe, and all the boys had gather on the field to play soccer. He had been appointed as the official goalie for life because his lack of kicking skills, aiming skills, and general athletic skills had been discovered early on, and third grade boys didn’t understand at that time that a goalie who couldn’t play was even more destructive to the team than having the clumsy kid on the actual field. He can’t say that the scorn and derision of all of his male classmates, and the quiet pity and offerings of juice boxes of his female ones, didn’t cause some kind of scar, but he has mostly gotten over it. He doesn’t linger there, though.
Past the main parking lot, empty except for the abandoned cars of a few executive joggers getting their exercise in after work, ties hanging limply from their mirrors like a flag of great physical achievement, there is a dirty creek that leads to a polluted river that leads, he supposes, to the possibly even more polluted ocean. There is always mud and sand to walk barefoot through, though, and shards of glass and pottery to collect. He thinks that he probably still has a shoe box under his bed, a veritable treasure trove of broken bear bottles and interestingly shaped rocks.
This time, as he climbs down the embankment, it is almost too dark to see. He grabs at a tree root that he knows is there, that has always been there, and ends up falling backwards to the sand in a terrifying, arm flailing second. His heart is somewhere in the vicinity of his heart as he groans, quietly, shifting his body with ginger movements to find himself sinking slowly into the sand. Above him, with his eyes wide open, he can see through layers and layers of branches, black and grey like they were sketched out with pencil beforehand then traced again later with smooth black in, all the way to the blank void of sky.
He pulls himself up, ignoring the discomforting noise his body makes as it leaves the hole he made, and huddles up against one of the trees. His clothes are wet now, and his hair, and it has started to get cold. He shivers and pulls out Lily from where she was hiding in his pocket and squints to see her through his darkness. He knows that he will not be going home tonight, and his eyes shut mostly without his consent, and he almost feels, with the wind whistle whispering its way around his head, like someone is drawing him into their arms.

***

The next morning, he wakes to sunlight, birds of unidentifiable origin singing at the very tops of the trees, and his limbs feel stiff and slack at the same time when he rises. Blinking around him, he sees that there isn’t anyone around, and, after he gets his bearings as best he can, he strips off the shirt to attempt to clean it off. Most of the sand falls to the ground, but it is still damp and sticky with mud when he pulls it back on. He makes sure Lily is safe in his pocket once more, though a little wet and curling inwards at the edges, and climbs back up and onto the dew soaked grass. A passing jogger slows down and surveys him with interest.
“Time?” Eliot calls to him. The man checks his watch, obligingly.
“7:30!” he call back.
“Thank you!” He continues on, nodding unaffectedly. Eliot still has time to make it to school, if he wants. The park is only five minutes from it. Of course, he is still covered in mud from head to toe, and he could really use a shower, but he can’t go home. Not yet, at least.
The walk to school is longer than he had expected in jeans that press and slide against his cold legs uncomfortably, but he makes it there before he normally does leaving from home, and he is standing underneath the covered walkway outside when someone says his name.
“Eliot. Dude.” Matthew approaches, looking him over with an almost amusing look of shock plastered on his pale face. “What happened to you?”
“I think I might have ran away from home last night.” he says, truthfully, a little surprised himself when he hears the words coming out of his mouth.
“Oh.” Matthew seems to take this information in stride. “Where did you sleep, a dumpster?” He prods him in the stomach, just gently, feeling the mud and sand start to harden patchily there as the sun gets warmer.
“The park.” he replies, and only blushes slightly. “I sort of. . .fell. . .”
“I see. Well, come on.” Fingers circle his wrist, and he is being tugged towards the parking lot before he realizes it.
“Where are we going?” he asks, later, not really protesting because he is sore and exhausted and also because he doesn’t feel like he needs to be protesting.
“My place. There’s no way you can go into school like that, the principals, I mean all of them, would have you in their offices before you even got inside.” His wrist is released, and, acquiescing, Eliot climbs into the passenger seat of a small, beat up truck, repainted rusty red with the old black paint showing through from scratches. Matthew turns a little to stare at him. “My parents aren’t going to be home, so you don’t need to worry about them turning you into your mom or anything.”
“Thanks.” Eliot murmurs, appreciatively leaning backwards into the old seat until his head is resting somewhere below the head rest. There isn’t any music, just the sound of the truck sputtering and the heat turned up to high, and he can almost feel himself going to sleep again.
“Why’d you run away?” Matthew asks, waking him. He thinks about it and almost feels disappointed with himself because he didn’t have a better story for such a dramatic response.
“She was lying to me. She wasn’t going to work, like she said that she was. . .” he draws off, then whispers, tentatively, “I think I probably overreacted, but I just couldn’t stay in the same house with her for any longer. It was too much. I don’t know what even came over me, but. . .I couldn’t stop running.” Matthew doesn’t say anything, but he nods, like he knows Eliot doesn’t know what to say anymore and doesn’t even want to say it, anyway. They drive in silence until Matthew pulls into a subdivision, Meadow Heights, the wealthiest one in the entire county.
“You live here?” he asks, only noticing after that what he said might be considered rude and beginning to apologize, frantically, when Matthew cuts him off, laughing.
“It’s okay.” he promises, grinning down at the steering wheel as he carefully pulls into the garage of a two story white home, perfect and elegant, like a blown up dollhouse without the dolls. “I don’t really give off the air of the pompously rich, I’ve very aware. No Abercrombie and Fitch for me. But, alas, my father is a doctor and my mother is a lawyer. What can you do?” He chatters on about how he was more than likely switched at birth with someone like Liam LASTNAME, the Boy of Many Polos, but how he had learned to deal with it since he had come to the conclusion at a very early age that he could get anything he wanted if he pretended to be normal around the people his parents termed as ‘polite society’. Eliot is more than happy to listen as they step into the house, through a back hallway. He is reminded of pictures he saw once of servant hallways, but he notices the lack of Disney Cinderella type bells on the wall, and just smiles to himself. In the main part of the house, the apparently real wood floors cover everything, waxed and shining, and he wonders how many forests had to die for it as his sneakers make wet noises on the runner laid out over the steps.
On the landing, Eliot waits hesitantly as Matthew disappears through an open door, coming out later with a towel and a small stack of clothes.
“The shower’s through there.” He gestures over his shoulder at a door at the very end of the hall. “If you don’t shower, my mother will smell you when she steps foot on the property. She’s like a bloodhound.”
“Right.” They stand there for a significant amount of time, while Eliot shifts from foot to foot, and Matthew plays with the fraying hem of his t-shirt.
“Well!” he says, ripping off the thread caught around his finger. “I suppose I’ll go think up an excuse as to why I didn’t make it to school today. I’m thinking something more inspired than the usual. . .like lupus.” Ducking his head to hide a laugh, hair falling in his eyes, he turns on a heel and goes back into what Eliot can only assume is his bedroom, shutting the door with a quiet click behind him.
In the shower, Eliot stares at the ceiling and lets everything wash off of him, feeling completely new.
***
It’s maybe half an hour or more before he manages to get all of the sand off of him, and he pads out with bare feet. Matthew’s clothes are a little too big, the jeans dragging the floor, the Radiohead t-shirt just slightly too long on both ends. As he nears his door, he stops, suddenly feeling more shy than he’s ever felt in his entire life.
This is a strange situation, anyway, having just taken a shower at the house of someone he’s known for barely a day and changed into a set of his clothes that smell sort of like fabric softener and sweat, and he is almost tempted to leave. That, apparently, is his fallback plan for everything. Run away. Biting his lip, hating who he is for the second time in less than twenty four hours, he knocks on the door quickly, three times with his knuckles.
“Come in!” Matthew calls. When Eliot does so, he finds him siting cross-legged at the foot of his bed, a laptop resting in his lap, fingers frantically moving across the keyboard.
“You look angry.” Eliot observes.
“Have you ever had someone claim that they’re in love with you, hate the very next minute, and then send you a long and decidedly cheesy email begging you for forgiveness and quite possibly your hand in marriage, even though they technically didn’t do anything that needs to be forgiven to begin with and you’re only sixteen, so you can’t get married, anyway?” Matthew asks, in one long breath, pausing from his work to look up through a messy storm cloud of hair.
“No.”
“Good. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” He looks back at the computer darkly. “Please, have a seat. This might take a few minutes.” There isn’t anywhere actually designated for sitting, but Eliot carefully lowers himself onto a patch of open floor that is mostly clear of the books, papers, and CD cases that otherwise grow there. The furious typing has began again, growing angrier as the seconds pass by.
“So who is she?” Eliot asks, curiously, and for lack of anything better to say. Matthew falters, hand slipping and bashing into his keyboard.
“Ow! Uhm. . .” he laughs, and it sounds nervous, but he seems to be the type of person who has never been nervous in his life. “She’s just a girl. You wouldn’t know her if you saw her.” Now he just sounds mysterious, and Eliot nods, like he understands.
“Okay. Proceed.” He leans his head back against the wall, watching the ceiling fan spin around on the ceiling until he feels nauseous and has to focus on something else to stop the room from spinning. There is a beta fish on his desk, drifting carelessly around its bowl, and he stands up to look at it closer. Sparks of purple and blue and just a few red scales glittering around its neck, shining in the sunlight slating in through the blinds. It looks perfectly serene, and Eliot is disturbed the fact that he is finding himself envious of a fish.
“That’s Skippy.” Matthew says, without looking up. “He’s ancient. And immortal, I think, though it’s never been proven. I’ve had him since I was twelve.”
“I’ve never had a fish live more than a week.” Eliot muses. He discovers a desk chair buried beneath a stack of clothes, and he moves them, quietly, and takes a seat. Skippy stops his swim to survey him, then seems to find him unworthy of his attention and move on. Eliot frowns, but Matthew makes a small triumphant noise.
“There!” he says, tapping the enter key enthusiastically. “That was cathartic, let me tell you.” He shuts his laptop and pushes it away from him, falling backwards onto his bed with a long sigh. Eliot isn’t really listening, though, and he doesn’t hear how cathartic it is. His eyes fall on a book with the cover ripped off, jagged at the spine. It is half covered with other books on his desk, Leaves of Grass spelled out in faded script on the tile page and Matthew’s name signed in someone else’s handwriting in the space below it. Below that, there is a small paragraph, written in neat black lines.
Matthew sees him looking at it, one hand resting on the desk as in preparation to pick it up, and panic flashes across his face. He moves forward, abruptly, and grabs it up himself, with no excess of gentleness considering the state of the book itself. He thumbs the page, looking down at if before sitting it down on top of his bed, near the laptop. He looks at Eliot, oddly.
“It’s strange. . .I really want to tell you about things. Just. . .a lot of things.” he says, sounding embarrassed. “It’s stupid, I know, because I just met you and you probably don’t even want to hear about how messed up my life is anymore than anyone else does. Which they don’t. Most of the time, anyway.”
“I don’t mind.” Eliot says, and he is telling the truth, can feel it somewhere deep within him, whispering through him like a secret that he doesn’t need to keep. Matthew blinks at him. “Honestly. I’d like someone to tell things to, sometimes. Things I really wouldn’t tell anyone else.” He doesn’t know what he is doing but he doesn’t care, for once.
“What about. . .what was her name. . .Charlotte?”
“I don’t know.” Now that Eliot thinks about it, it seems that he does really want to tell Charlotte everything, but he doesn’t think that he can, or, at least, he doesn’t know how. “I can’t really imagine that.”
“You really like her, though, don’t you?” There is no question what Matthew means by this. The system of ‘like’ and ‘like like’ sprang up from years of previous tradition sometime after sixth grade, when the hormones began to kick in full time and valentines were no longer sent out of personal regard for all your classmates, but with the purpose of wooing and wooing well. He likes Charlotte. He doesn’t know whether he like likes her, though. That is one of the more difficult things to ascertain in this world, that fine line between friendship and going steady (or whatever it is people who had friend other than their grandparents growing up called it).
“I like her.” he says, simply, sure that Matthew is mature enough not to ask him to elaborate on the nature of the like. He doesn’t, but he does look extremely tempted.
“How’s this, then?” he starts, crossing his legs again as he sits closer to the edge of the bed. “You tell me one shocking and or tragic thing about your life, and I’ll you one equally or more shocking and or tragic thing about mine.” Eliot thinks this sounds too much like the games he used to be forced to play with the therapist that the health insurance paid for after his father left, so he decides to start with that. It’s better than explaining Lily, because at least Matthew already knows about it.
“The only thing that we have left of my father is a copy of The Wasteland that he left on my bed the night he left, the one that had all of his notes in it.” he says, quickly, like ripping off a band-aid. A few seconds later, when Matthew hasn’t said anything, he adds: “and I’ve sort of memorized all of the notes. . .”
“Oh, harsh. But hence the Eliot, I suppose.” Matthew chews on a strand of hair, thoughtfully. “My mother had her first cosmetic surgery done when I was five, and she made me stay in the observation room and watch while they did it. I didn’t sleep for days.”
“That’s disgusting.” Eliot says, laughing. “What was she having done?”
“Liposuction.” he replies, wrinkling his nose distastefully. “She finally gave up losing the pregnancy weight on her own and decided to get professional help. I think she wanted me to see all of the pain that I had caused her, so I would feel bad for being born, or being born at a normal, healthy weight, at the very least. And I did.”
The next few hours goes like that, the two of them trading secrets like some dareless game of Truth and Dare, some of them mild, some of them of the sort that you lock away until you are on your deathbed. Eliot tells about taking money from his mother’s purse and letting his father get blamed for it, and about the fight that lasted until the next morning because of it, and about how they both went to work angry and he still didn’t tell. Matthew tells about the first time he shoplifted, when he was eight, and how he had just picked up the book he wanted from the shelf and walked out, and what so afraid of what he had done afterwards that he left it sitting on the street corner and had run all the way home to figure out a way to punish himself.
When they have run out of lost library books and hidden parking tickets, Eliot can’t stop himself from talking about his grandfather, the word tumbling from his lips like diamonds from a fairy tale he remember being read, soft murmurs when he woke up sick in the middle of the night. He tells about them being best friends, and that he never knew that it wasn’t completely normal, and that he was the only person he would speak to for weeks after his father left. He does an impression of his school counselor: “this silence is only hurting you, Eliot”. His voice starts to skip like a broken record when he starts on how his mother sent his grandfather away just because he couldn’t make money anymore, because his legs were bad, and how they are living now off of his money and his house.
His eyes feel like they’re burning, but he knows he’s not crying. It’s anger, forcing itself out of him, locked away for too long and more than happy for this escape.
“It only makes it worse. . .” he starts, shakily, then draws off. By now, he has moved to the end of Matthew’s bed, feet curled in around him, and his fist clench in the sheets. “It only makes it worse that she apparently isn’t even trying to make a living, or whatever is happening to her that she thinks I don’t need to know about. She just threw him out of his own house, when he was completely sane and competent and didn’t need to go away. He just couldn’t work as a builder, anymore. I think. . .I just, I’m almost sure that she must have done it so she wouldn’t have to work. If he was gone, and the insurance could pay for him being in the nursing home, then we could at least live off of his savings until I left.” This is the most he has ever allowed himself to think about it at one time, he has been so used to avoiding it whenever he could manage, and it is the first time he has ever spoken these thoughts out loud.
“Do you go and see him a lot?” Matthew asks, face clouded.
“Not as much as I wish we did. My mother doesn’t like to go, I guess, and she’s my only way of getting there.”
“I could take you.” he offers, suddenly brightening as if fit with a purpose. “In fact, we can go right now. No one will question a boy coming into see his sick grandfather, even in the middle of a school day.”
“I wouldn’t. . .want to inconvenience you, or anything. . .” Eliot does not know the proper etiquette for politely but unenthusiastically turning an offer down that he really, really does not want to turn down. Matthew is already grabbing his car keys off the window sill, though, so the prospect looks good.
“Nonsense.” he says, now fumbling to open a drawer and looking through it with extreme purpose. “Besides, this gives me a perfect to chance to utilize my fake moustache. You can tell them I’m your uncle or some such, if they need a parental figure to let you in.” He pulls out a strip of fake black hair, looking as if it might have come from some small, dead animal had it not been obviously made of plastic. Eliot stares at him with concern.
“My uncle is dead. And how long have you been waiting to wear that thing?”
“For way too long.” Matthew peels back the strop of wax paper and lets it drop to the floor as he carefully presses the moustache beneath his nose. Smiling wickedly, eyes raised to a point, he curls and smooths the ends with two fingers. “Can I be Juan Carlos, your father’s half Latino brother?”
“If you really want to.” Eliot replies, trying not to laugh as he starts for the door. Matthew laughs for him.
“Oh, I do.”
***
In front of the nursing home, parked neatly across from a row of half dead rose bushes, Matthew kills the gas.
“Should I stay out here and look like an uncle, or should I go in and seduce a nurse for you or something?” he asks, looking excited. Eliot unlocks his door and seatbelt before answering.
“I’d really like to do this alone if you don’t mind.” he says, earnestly.
“No, dude, I understand. Go on.” He sighs, slipping down in his seat and donning a fake accent, not entirely Spanish but an interesting mix between that and his already slightly southern accent. “If I am meant for nurse seduction, then one will inevitably come to me. That is what I like to call fate.” Nodding, Eliot pulls himself out of the car, then stops. He moves halfway back in.
“You never told me anything to match this.” he says. Matthew eyes him from above sunglasses he had found in the glove compartment on the way here. His eyes flash nervously, but nothing else betrays it, and his overall demeanor is too absurd for Eliot to even think anything about it.
“We’ll see.” he says, off handedly, and Eliot takes it at face value and steps out again. He shuts the door instead of slamming it and steps up, one foot at a time, onto the sidewalk. He doesn’t like this place.
The building stares down at him, as if to concur, to say it doesn’t like him, either, or anyone else either. Its walls used to be white, he suspects, when it was first built, but now they are yellowed with age like those who occupy it. It seems to slump, almost, slightly to the left, and none of the windows are ever clean except for his grandfather’s, who cleans it himself. He always used to say that a dirty window was like walking around without his glasses, and he couldn’t bear to miss out on the world outside if he had to stay in. The very least he could do was wipe away the dust.
He doesn’t even glance over his shoulder as he takes calm, fake assured steps up the concrete walkway and towards the automatic the doors. They grind and whir and only open when he is a second away from them, as if hesitating over whether they should allow him to enter or not. Inside, there is a small antechamber that seems completely useless before you get to another set of revolving doors, which act the same as the first.
“Hello.” a nurse says, when he reaches the front desk of the lobby. Her voices hold no enthusiasm, and her eyes tell him generally the same. She is a short woman with red hair, permed to a point so it looks dead, burnt at the ends. When he has stared for too long, she makes an exasperated noise. “Hello?” she repeats.
“Hello.” he says, not really sure why he is here anymore. His grandfather will want Lily and he doesn’t want to give her away yet, and how can he talk to his grandfather knowing that she is in his pocket and he used to be, still is in love with her? It wouldn’t be fair to either of them.
“Can I help you?” She doesn’t add sir, like a lot of nurses do, and he sort of likes it, because they always say it in those ‘oh, aren’t you growing up’ tones that relatives use when they haven’t seen you since last Christmas.
“No, I’m just going to see my grandfather. Robert NAMENAMEDIF?”
“And you are?”
“Eliot NAMENAME. His, erm, grandson.” She doesn’t say ‘obviously’, which is commendable since he was thinking it himself, and types his name into the severely out dated computer on her desk. It makes what sounds to him like an approving beeping noise, and she looks up at him.
“You’ve not been here in a while.” she says, not entirely without accusation in her voice, and he begins to wonder whether they have adopted guilt tripping as part of their job description since he was here last. He nods.
“How is he doing?” he asks, feeling guilty even though he knows that it’s not his fault, that he has been trying and his grandfather will understand that. He has the urge to explain this to this woman, who is judging him without saying anything at all, but she is typing something else into the computer and doing something fancy with the mouse so his grandfather’s report comes onto the screen. She scans it quickly.
“There’s nothing unusual here. Same medication, same scheduling. One visitor in the last month.”
“One visitor. . .who was it? My mother?”
“A Mr. James NAMENAME. Son-in-law.” The screen goes black, a universal sign that their conversation is now over, and probably should have been over five minutes ago. Her eyes go back to being unresponsive, and Eliot’s heart has stopped. “You can go up now.”
He can’t. Everything is suddenly so still and quiet around him, and he is acutely aware of his legs shaking, barely holding him up, as he turns around and walks out the door. From behind him, there is a scornful noise, but he barely hears it. All he can hear is his heartbeat, covering everything, and he feels like he must be dying, he must be. Outside, Matthew looks up when he sees him, but Eliot keeps walking, down the sidewalk.
He knows where he is going. Behind the building, there is a garden with a broken gate that they used to walk through when he visited last year. They would talk about fixing it up someday, bringing the dead plants back to life and filling it with color again, like they know it must have been, once.
Behind him, Matthew’s footsteps quicken as he quickens, and he hadn’t even heard him get out of the truck, but he doesn’t stop until he can feel himself sinking down onto the familiar, vine covered bench. His breath comes out in short, frightened bursts. A warm body sits down beside him, not saying anything at first, waiting for him to calm down and look up. Green eyes meet his wit