Fear Itself

Avery never came back like he promised. I woke up early that morning, around seven, just minutes before my father left for work. We had agreed that Avery would wait for me at the edge of the woods where I could see him at seven-thirty, and we would leave to go back to the base then, but he never came back. I waited for about an hour, and when he didn’t show, I decided I would go myself, even if my disappointment was overwhelming. I didn’t want to believe that Avery had forgotten about me and left me to fend for myself, just like everyone else. He promised he would come back, and I believed it. Something must have happened, I thought. I really couldn’t bear to think that the only person I had met worth trusting had done exactly what everyone else did.

I followed a hint I got from Harley days earlier, and I took to the sewers instead of waiting for him. As much as I felt better having him with me, once I ducked down a nearby manhole, things were pretty straight forward. I made a habit of stuffing my kitten in my black backpack and tracing my path with a white stick of chalk, so I could remember which way I had come and knew which way to go. After a few days, it just became a force of habit. Plus, my chalk had worn out, so I just hoped that the lines wouldn’t fade before I could memorize my path.

Five days a week, I returned to the base to train with Harley, and eventually, I stopped waking up with sore, aching muscles. I started sleeping better at night, and waking up was easier, almost refreshing. I rose with the sun, brimming with a newfound energy. All around, I just felt a lot better; I was waking up happy instead of nonchalant. I looked forward to the day now. Instead of rolling out of bed and checking the clock, I was rolling out of bed and checking my new muscles in the mirror. There wasn’t much: just a small bit of definition. I wasn’t packing any bulging biceps or six-pack abs, but it was more than I was used to seeing. I was almost beginning to enjoy my new bootcamp regimen.

My strength and stamina had me feeling safe enough to wander the streets, and when my father had gone out of town for a business venture on October 20, I found it only appropriate to finally drop by and pay my aunt Sophie a visit. I searched through my dirty laundry (which I had yet to do, though I figured I should work on it soon, considering my father was bound to see that I was no longer doing laundry on a regular basis) and found the cardigan I was wearing the day she had stopped by in the beginning of the month. Fishing through the pockets, my hand eventually fell upon a scrap of paper, the one containing her address, and while I wasn’t quite sure of how to get there, I knew my father’s laptop would. He had conveniently left it in his locked (as if that was a problem) office for the evening.

Picking the lock was easy; cracking his computer password was, though more difficult than I assumed the average password was to decrypt, also easy (it was 654321, as if I wasn’t going to figure that out). Computers were always pretty straight forward, and I had spent enough time toying around on Avery’s phone that I figured out how to use the internet. It was fascinating. It kind of reminded me of a book or perhaps even having a vast personal library, except I never needed to open a single book. I just typed a few letters, and suddenly almost everything I wanted was right there at my finger tips. It gave me whatever I wanted, including walking directions to my aunt’s house. A quick search on how to delete an internet history gave me all the tools I needed to go undetected, and I left with the computer logged off; he would never even know.

I strolled through town with chipper smile on my face and a skip in my step. My backpack was strapped on tight, full of books just in case I got bored or if Aunt Sophie wanted to swap books. She seemed smart, so I assumed she was a fan of reading, and maybe she would like to talk about books with me, but when I found her home, I was too overwhelmed with excitement to think about books anymore. My eyes fell upon the house number situated beside the front door, and I looked at the slip of paper in my hands on which she had scrawled her address.

Without so much as a knock or a warning, I waltzed right on inside as I found the door to be unlocked. “Aunt Sophie!” I called out as I closed the door behind me. “I know I’m a couple weeks late, but I thought I would take you up on that ‘stop by whenever you like’ thing. Hope that means dinner because I’m here, and I’m hungry,” I continued with a chuckle as I waltzed down the main hall, following the smell of food straight into the kitchen, where I saw my aunt cooking at the stove, but I also saw a man seated a nearby table with his back turned to me, and my heart practically leapt out of my chest. He didn’t need to turn his head for me to recognize that dirty, brown hair.

“Well, Tali, what a surprise,” Sophie chuckled quietly in greeting. “I wasn’t expecting you, but you’re more than welcome to stay for dinner.” She must have caught me staring, because she tried to add, “Oh, this is my guest—“

“Mumbles!” I shrieked, just as he shot a glance over his shoulder at me, and I practically charged at him even though his eyes were as wide as golf balls. I threw my arms around him in a squeeze, and I heard him grunt, something sort of like an “oomph” sound, but it didn’t deter me until I pulled away and saw him grimace. My face fell blank, and my cheeks turned red with embarrassment. “Hmmm, sorry,” I laughed nervously.

“You know him?” my aunt asked softly, seemingly perplexed by the entire situation.

Avery rolled his eyes and muttered a biting, “Unfortunately.”

Ignoring him, I grinned. “He’s my best friend!” I exclaimed. “He helped me home a few days after I met you, and then he helped me home last week after I got kidnapped—“

“You got kidnapped?” Sophie interjected in so much shock that she gasped a little, dropped her spatula, and had to scramble for it on the floor.

“Oh, yeah, I did, but I’m okay,” I told her with a nod before I turned back to Avery. I looked him over, and I furrowed my brows. He looked beat to hell, like he’d really been through the wringer. His left eye was bruised a faded mix of black and blue, what I figured was an old bruise, and it was just slightly more swollen than his right. Minor scratches covered his skin, and while he looked unaffected by all this, I knew pain rested beneath his skin and lived in his bones, most likely in the rib cage I had just crushed in a hug. Suddenly, I felt a pang of remorse, but I shot him a grin. “You’ve seen better days,” I joked, and he merely huffed in response, turning back toward the table while my aunt stared on at this strange display. “You know, Mumbles, this isn’t the woods,” I told him. “You lied to me.” He nearly answered me, but I cut himself off with yet another sudden epiphany. Eyes wide with potential joy, I inquired, “Do you live here?” He shook his head slowly, but I gasped, and a serious look crossed my face. “Are you my uncle?”

“No—“ he replied quickly and bluntly, looking at me as though he wondered why I would even think such a thing, but I wasn’t about to be fooled. I knew Avery was a good liar, but why else would he be in my aunt’s home?

“You are!” I exclaimed, pointing at him, and he continued to shoot me the same perplexed look while I heard my aunt choke on her own breath behind me. “I can tell. You’re smiling,” I accused rather pleasantly, a wide grin spreading from ear to ear.

“I’m not smiling,” he murmured, averting his gaze back to the cool, smooth surface of then table.

“Yes, you are,” I replied in singsong. “You are smiling,” I told him, grinning wickedly, lightly pressing my index finger to his cheek. “You’re smiling with your eyes.”

“I’m not—“

“He’s not… your uncle, Tali,” my aunt finally spoke up after clearing her throat. “I don’t… you don’t… he just isn’t…”

She was nervous and awkward, that much I could tell. She was so different from my father who was almost never this inarticulate and certainly was never at a loss for words. He was always so charismatic and knew just what to say. She didn’t need to finish her sentence for me to decipher what she was trying to say. I sat down with a huff at the table across from Avery. “Aw, man,” I whined. “I was really looking forward to some cousins.” I thought I might have heard Avery’s breath catch in his throat; my aunt quickly turned her back to me and focused on her cooking. I felt a rumbling from my backpack, a muffled mew, and my eyes widened. “Oh goodness!” I exclaimed, quickly tearing off my backpack and unzipping it. “Sorry, Ralph,” I whispered when the kitten poked his head out of the bag. Avery merely stared down when Ralph took haven on his lap once again, and I grinned. “He likes you.”

“Wish he didn’t,” Avery mumbled, eyes still fixed on the kitten who seemed content enough to curl up in a ball and sleep there.

I chuckled softly and looked down at my legs for a moment. “You never came back,” I said quietly, hoping my aunt was too busy cooking to hear the conversation. Avery’s eyes traveled upward toward the ceiling for a moment, but he just as quickly lowered his forehead and gently rubbed his right temple. A sigh escaped his lips.

“I know,” he admitted in a rather unaffected tone. I couldn’t keep the slight frown off my face to see that he didn’t exactly as much as I though he would… or maybe he did, maybe I just couldn’t see it, but the longer I sat in front of him, the more he just seemed aggravated. While I could also attribute this to whatever pain he was in, I didn’t know what to think. “Sorry,” Avery told me in a gruff mumble.

“Why?” I asked him, lifting my eyes to his face. “I waited for you.”

I thought I spotted a twinge of sympathy in his eyes, or maybe just a fleeting look of regret before his eyes went back to my kitten. “I was a little busy, Princess,” he murmured. Silence surrounded for a brief moment before he spoke up again. “Ran into a few friends of your dad’s. Weren’t exactly happy to see me.” I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion. First of all, my dad didn’t have any friends, I knew that. Second, even if he did, why would they beat him up? My father wasn’t a cruel man, so I wasn’t grasping why Avery would have associated him with these awful men. He looked up at me and considered the vexed look on my face. “Never mind,” he added.

Just in time to break the tense, awkward silence hanging over the table, my aunt placed three plates down in front of us and joined us. We ate quietly for a bit, but I couldn’t help my eyes from drifting between them. Both Avery and Sophie were looking down, eating quietly. They weren’t paying much attention to me, so I found it only suitable to pipe up. “You know,” I began, drawing out my voice a little. “You two would make a cute couple.”

I was met with a deadpan stare from Avery, and I thought Sophie was going to choke on her food. I later got lectured on how some of what I said could be considered impolite, which was strange to hear, considering nobody had ever said such a thing to me. Not to mention, I really didn’t engage in social gatherings often. My idea of appropriate conversation wasn’t exactly the norm, but even so, I hung around for a little, chatting with my aunt and Mumbles and Ralph before the clock struck eight and forced me to head home for the evening.