Nine

My mother used to say that a person’s name was a reflection of their heart. It seeps down into their very core from its inception at the time of their birth and branches out over the years, making its host uniquely altered in their own quirky little ways.

To be honest, I never fully understood that. I believed that if the purpose of a name was to conform someone into a unique set of traits, names weren’t doing a very good job. Everyone I met seemed the same whether they were a John or a Nancy or a Maria. But I confessed that the theory worked with my mother's name:



Before she passed, I remember kneeling at her bedside and taking her hand when she whispered that she had something to say. I was quick to ask what it was because I just wanted to hear her speak. From my infancy onwards, I always loved to hear my mother speak. Her voice was that song of happiness.

“I named you Avariella for a reason,” she said softly to me. Her voice was raspy with the cancer, but she still sounded lovely to me. “Do you know what that reason is?”

“It was a part of yours and Dad’s plot to get me to be made fun of for the rest of my life.”

My answer dripped with sarcasm, but she knew I was joking.

“Avariella means strong,” she told me, “It means you are capable of anything, even and especially the things you think you’re incapable of.”

I would have laughed at the irony if her words didn’t strike such a fragile place within me. I knew I was far from strong. I had neither willpower nor independence. I don’t even think I fully wanted it at the time.

“You picked the wrong name, Mom.”

I added a laugh to my statement to let her infer that I was kidding, but I wasn’t.

As abnormal as the name sounded to me, Avariella was still a warrior’s name. I didn’t deserve it. I wasn’t strong enough to develop into the person that my mother hoped for me to become. Not yet, at least. And I certainly wasn’t strong enough to lose her.

After the funeral, I missed her voice filling the walls of our now vacant apartment. It wasn’t a home to me without my song. She had a soft-spoken one that I could listen to for hours, no matter what words it formed.

It felt as though there was a constant void after her departure to wherever we go when it’s all over. It never felt right. I never even cried, as heartless as that may sound. I always expected to turn the corner in the living room and find her there. At night when I would sit on the floor of her bedroom, clutching her pillow in my arms even years after it all happened, I became even more convinced that I was born into the wrong name. That kind of denial coupled with endless mourning definitely wasn’t strong. A strong person would accept their loss and move on, not sulk without end.

People at school were supportive when the wounds were freshest. My teachers excused me from homework, kids sometimes let me cut in front of the lunch line, and those who would usually bully me bullied me a bit less.

But no one put their day on pause to actually speak to me. They only ever spoke in passing, throwing a hand on my shoulder and saying they were sorry about what happened. No one ever sat down and asked me if I was okay, even if it was a redundant question considering my mother had just died. After a week passed, no one even seemed to care anymore. She and I became old news, and I didn’t understand that. Real, concrete human suffering became a trend that people only chose to be involved in when it was obligatory. In fact, I noticed that it was even considered cool for people to be sad at my loss and express their condolences just for the time being. Maybe it was my fault for expecting so much from fifteen-year-olds. But when the pain began to numb a bit, the sympathy and apologies disappeared from everyone’s lips, and I felt more alone than ever.

But what happened next was the first step in changing that.

I still don’t know what drove him to come over to me. At more times than I’d like to admit even now, I found myself trying to imagine what he saw in me that day that propelled him to approach my table during lunch. I never found out the real answer.

“Hello, Ava,” were the first words spoken to me by him, the first of many.

His smile was blinding.

“Hello,” I answered.

“I’m Logan.”

I knew who he was. He was that mysterious type who smoldered and sat in the back of the art room, enthralled in oil pastels and watercolor paints. He would wear fancy clothing and shiny boots to school each day as if he felt pressured to constantly look his best. I knew him, but up until that moment I had never heard him speak.

He sat down without asking or being invited to. In fact, he did everything in that manner and frankly I didn’t mind. He rifled through my papers, asking me all about my classes and anything else he thought I would respond to. He was odd. Very odd. There was no denying it.

He spent lunch with me that day and every day following it. I never found out the cause of his sudden interest in me. I resisted asking him directly out of fear that I would scare him off. As strange as he was, I didn’t want him to leave.

I accepted that he was odd because I had to admit that so was I. All I needed at that time was for someone to talk to me and he gave me that.

Logan was the first friend I’d had in years.

He and I became inseparable after we had lunch a few dozen times. It’s peculiar to me how the longer the span of time you spend with someone is, the more you begin to notice the little things about them you had never seen before. I would find myself paying more attention to his face when he spoke rather than the words being said, evaluating him.

The more I memorized Logan’s face, the more I came to realize that he was just as flawed as I was.

His eyes were a deep shade of brown, just like mine. But whenever they looked at anything other than the art he worked on, even me, they were dark. His hair was jet black and average like most of his other features, but the symmetry of his face had me drawn to him. The seemingly perfect alignment of his nose, cheekbones, and lips was offset only by the tiny scratches here and there along his skin.

I didn’t ask him about those.

The day he first kissed me was a Wednesday. He did it roughly out of the blue, smack dab in the middle of my sentence. I didn’t know what a real kiss was supposed to feel like. Not then. But it felt plain. In fact, I think I carried on with the rest of my sentence afterwards, unfazed by the fact that he had just done what he did.

I’m assuming he thought my reaction was acceptable because he kissed me often after that day, usually randomly and in the middle of something I was saying. I would kiss back because he told me to, although I didn’t really know how. But after the first few times, I tried to match him and realized the mechanics of it weren’t that difficult. If I’m being honest, I failed to see the reason for kissing. It didn’t quite feel like anything. Just skin against skin, pretty unhygienic and rather boring after the first few minutes. But I didn’t let Logan know that because I didn’t think that was what he wanted to hear.

Actually, now that I think about it, Logan usually didn’t want to hear anything if he didn’t ask for it beforehand.

We were together in this sense for half of our high school lives. We never went to homecomings or proms or dances like the others. I never had to buy a dress or style my hair or await him and the mother I no longer had at the foot of the stairs to take my photograph. But I didn’t mind much. It spared me the pain, and I didn’t assume that was what our relationship was for in the first place.

Instead, we spent most of our time in the art room. Logan would lose himself in his work, painting elaborate pieces of darkened sunset skies and elegant flowers. I was never that good at it all. I only ever drew one thing and tried not to let him see. I used one utensil each day, a black calligraphy pen, to outline the length of the wings and the curvature of the beak. The sixth time I drew it, Logan glanced up briefly from his sketchbook and asked what it was. I told him.

It was a swallow. A love bird. My mother’s favorite.

He said I shaded in the tail feather wrong.

We spent enough time together for me to get properly attached to him. I liked having someone to follow around. I liked knowing that every day after the fourth period bell, I could retreat to the art room and there he’d be. I liked that I had at least some level of certainty in my life, and for Logan to have given me that meant a great deal to me, no matter how we spent our time together.

But it took me until now to realize something I should have seen long before. Something that would have saved me at the very beginning. Something that was practically screaming a warning at me that I had failed to see before it was too late.