With a Lack of Wanderlust

Louis gave me a small smile as he heard my answer and began walking forward in an attempt to lead me wherever he was headed. However, my feet refused to move and all of a sudden I felt like I had no energy at all.

I watched him continue a few paces forward and look back at me, “I promise nothing is going to happen.”

Wincing at the way he sounded as if he was speaking to a juvenile, I breathed in and held it. I moved the couple of feet toward him for what felt like a decade. When we made it onto the street, I still hadn’t breathed out.

After a short moment of being past my comfort zone, my legs seemed to stop working as they skidded on the pavement. Blindly, I reached in front of me, but grabbed nothing, feeling myself about to fall face-first. However, I soon felt Louis’ hand in mine and vaguely saw him smile in the dark. Warm feelings flooded my body as we continued forward.

A moment of silence passed, but it was comfortable, aside from the butterflies in my stomach. Things felt okay, our arms swinging back and forth, back and forth, as one. I was about to open my mouth and speak, but Louis spoke up before me.

“So what kind of music do you like?” He said awkwardly, making it evident that the silence was less comfortable for him than it was for me.

I only looked at him in response, a small grin on my face. Even though we seemed close, I had just realized we didn’t know that much about each other.

He laughed at me, “Oh, I see. Swapping not going places with not talking. I get it. That’s fine.” I saw him look down at the ground for a moment before speaking again, “I like the Fray.”

“I like them too.” I replied, the first sound to come out of me since we’d left. It was quiet again following my response, the only sound being the echoing of our footsteps. “What’s your favorite color?” I mocked his use of cliché questions.

“Red. Yours?”

“Red reminds me of blood.” I countered with a shudder. “I like purple.”

“Blood’s cool. Purple reminds me of Justin Bieber.” He bumped his hip with mine and turned his head toward me. I imagined he was sticking his tongue out at me.

“Justin Bieber’s cool.”

“Go tell Niall that. He’ll love you forever.”

“He already loves me.” I joked.

“Not as much as Leeeummm,” Louis sing-songed and followed it up with a chuckle.

I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath, ready to finally say what I had been trying to before. Gripping his hand a little tighter, I murmured, “Would you like to know now?”

Immediately, I regretted my choice of wording, as the way I sounded may have seemed off-putting.

He looked down on me, “What?”

“About why I don’t go out.” I said, “I told Niall. Kind of. But not the whole thing.”

I saw the movement of him nodding and thought it would be best to start off with the easy parts. The parts that I had told people time and time again. “Okay,” I sighed, “I’m different, obviously. When I was in California, I didn’t like to talk to people much. They annoyed me and I was nothing to them anyway. However, I did have acquaintances and also a friend named Valerie. We weren’t very close, but she was someone to talk to when class ended early and to spend weekends with.”

Pausing, I thought more about our friendship for a moment before verbalizing my past once again, “Actually, Valerie wasn’t that much of a friend at all. She got jealous easily and never took my feelings seriously when I would vent to her. She would often overlook them and continue to brag or complain about her own life.

“But anyway, last year there was a new girl in our school, Caitlyn. We had the same gym class and I’d spoken to her on the first day because she didn’t seem to know where to go. We became good friends shortly after, something that I really thought was an accomplishment because I always fucked my friendships up from the beginning. But Valerie wasn’t really pleased.

“It turned out that Caitlyn had actually started going out with Valerie’s ex-boyfriend who cheated on her a few times, but she still ‘loved.’ How terrible of me to be friends with such a person was her thought process in all of it. So she tried to make me choose between being friends with her or Caitlyn.”

“Fuckin’ hell,” Louis interrupted, shaking his head. “Sorry, continue.”

“Now naturally, I ’chose’ Caitlyn because first of all, like I said, Valerie wasn’t that good of a friend. And second, why would I choose the person who was being so ignorant to make me decide? Anyway, Val and I were sort of enemies after that. But it was nothing too tragic.”

I could tell Louis was waiting for the climax, the part that would explain it all, but I needed to let the whole story out, or it wouldn’t make sense.

“Valerie would just say stuff about me to her other friends and it would get back to me somehow. Most of the time through Caitlyn. I wouldn’t really respond verbally, but I had a journal…” I looked up at Louis and noticed him start to understand, but at the same time, not really.

“I wrote notes to her. Obviously without the intention that she would see them. One of my notes included the fact that in her time of being my friend she had contributed to me being,” I cleared my throat, “…um, suicidal.”

I lead Louis under a street light and pulled up the sleeve of the sweatshirt he had given me, revealing the deep gash down my arm, along with various other fading scars. Tearing up by then, I tried to continue my story without paying attention to him looking at me in concern.

“Well she found it, and claimed that I had been the one bullying her for all of that time, along with additional rude comments in response to the other pages she had read, and numerous threats. I still stayed silent and tried not to show any sign of weakness when she found it. But one day…” I trailed off, cringing at the memory.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to say,” Louis said, still looking at my arm. I shook my head and began talking quicker in an effort not to cry.

“One day, I went out to go to In N Out…it’s a food place, kind of like Nando’s but with burgers. Um, on my way there Valerie and a couple of her friends sort of…jumped me.”

The memory was clear in my mind and I almost felt like I was on my back once again, Val and the rest of them hovering over me, kicking me and holding me down. I was surprised my mind hadn’t tried to let me forget it.

“After beating me, Valerie looked down on me and took out a blade,” Louis sucked in his breathe and was still looking at my scar, so I pulled my arm back inside my sleeve, “And she said ‘Now you can really say I caused you to harm yourself’ or something like that, before inflicting a long, deep scar on my forearm. So…that’s why I don’t like going out anymore.”

“No one saw her do that?” Louis asked. We were still standing under the street light, and he looked like he wanted to cry himself.

“I’m sure they did. But no one had the nerve to do anything about it until after she left.” I wiped my eyes with my hand.

It was quiet for a moment and I really didn’t know what to do. Louis had just been staring at me, probably trying to figure out what to say. After a moment, he embraced me in a warm hug.

“Well you’re here, safe now. And I won’t let that happen to you again.”

I smiled into his shoulder, attempting to keep my tears in.

“Let’s get back.” He said before grabbing my hand once again and leading me in the direction we had come from.