Coming Home

Cassadee:

I saw Crystal doing her twirls again and again, and I remember feeling so proud of her. The kids around her moved slowly and brilliantly, like clouds on an aimless day. It was so perfect, so haunting. The crowd was silent, I could only hear the breathing from the performers, and my own. Then I felt a squeeze at my right hand, it was Derrick.

Looking at me like nothing had turned out wrong, like we were having our first date again. He leaned in to kiss me, and I felt a brush on my lip. Then when he drew away, he was gone. Aged, like a man with peppery grey hair, looking back at me. His warmth on my hand became cold, and I looked down. I could make out the metallic black exterior of a gun.

I felt its weight, pulling me upwards- like a magnet, drawing me towards Crystal. She didn’t know, her smile still imprinted on her face. I felt my insides steel calm, nothing.

“Shoot, shoot her. Isn’t this what you wanted?” Old-Derrick asked me. Then he smiled, and I realised that it wasn’t Derrick at all. It was the shadow of the man who attacked Caleb at my family’s restaurant 5 years ago.

Looking at the gun in my hand, my index finger twitched and pulled the trigger, without a doubt in my mind. One bullet, then two, then three. Rapid fire. There was blood everywhere on stage, people started screaming. Then I started screaming, from the panic of what I had done. Throwing the gun to the ground, I felt hands on me, screaming into my ear.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” repeated again and again until I felt my insides curdle.

“She’s dead, just like you. You killed her.”

Thrashing I felt sick, a cold feeling engulf me, the way the sea engulfs a person when you first immerse your body in it. I screamed, again and again until I was sure I couldn’t hear the voices again.

~

I woke up crying. Jerking away from the covers of my bed like it was fire. It was a horrible feeling that coursed through me, shuddering through me. Then I felt a warm hand on my back and this time I did scream- my mind just a fuzz away from mixing reality and nightmares.

“Cass, it’s me, it’s me,” he whispered. The tears were coming on fast and the sobs choked me. I felt hands on my face, a thumb gently mapping away the tears that had collected below my eyes.

“Calm down,” he whispered while guiding my face towards his. Guided by the pillars of warmth around my face, I looked at him. His eyes, so much like Clary’s, looking at me the way I always wanted.

I had forgotten that I let him spend the night at my place. I mean saying ‘I love you’ to your ex-boyfriend of 5 years didn’t leave me any other choice.

“What was it about?” he asked, hands pulling away from my face. In the dark of the night, it was hard to forget how ridiculously young he looked in my over-sized (extremely) college shirt and his boxers.

“I killed her, Crystal I mean.”

I heard him take a breath, then release it. Rubbing the back of hand clumsily against my face, I sighed and flipped back down onto the bed. We didn’t have sex mind you, in fact- he slept on the couch. It was all very PG-13, and for once in my young adult life, I was glad to have some space. I think that if I did have sex with him, I wouldn’t be able to function. It’s like something I’ve always wanted, kind of a forbidden fruit- I didn’t know if it would be poisonous or not.

“Stay, we can share more secrets.”

I said that because he looked really weird, crouching next to my side of the bed. I heard him chuckle and crawl next to me, a mountain of covers and sheets separating us.

“Are you serious? I just told you I loved you and you’re hiding behind my sheets?” Then, I shoved the mountain away from us and placed my head next to his, one hand supporting my head, another placed between us. I heard him laugh again.

“I think I like this version of you more,” he whispered, before placing his own hand on top of mine.

“Now we match. I’m as mysterious and sexy as you were,” I joked, looking at him while he laughed- a laugh that reached the corners of his face.

“Can I see them? You know, the scars?” He asked suddenly. Raising my brow at him, I saw him flush uncomfortably.

“Sorry, it’s okay if you don’t want to show me. I just, I don’t know, I’ve been afraid of the day when I would have to face them,” he said. I looked long and hard at him, trying to comprehend his thoughts. Why would you want to revisit the past and make everything hurt again?

“Maybe another day Derrick,” I smiled. I realised that he had let me see his scars, but I wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure if I would ever let anyone see them, because I couldn’t look at them myself without balking.

“How’s work?” I asked, suddenly uninterested in matters of the heart. I had waited so long for this moment, and the last I wanted was to enter a territory between us that could potentially ruin us again.

Derrick had that expression which suggested that work wasn’t going so well, and that he shouldn’t tell me anything.

“You forget that I am well-endowed to handle the truth now.”

Then he smiled, running a hand through his hair.

I watched him as he started talking, followed the way his eyes rose and fell to the momentum of his speech, let his emotions and frustration wash over me. I realised that I had missed listening to him, and that now, his voice was mine and mine alone. There was a fire in his tone that was never there before, like he had finally found his way in life. He spoke to me as an equal, no secrets like there used to be. There was no need to hide anything from him anymore, not in matters of profession.

“-sucks,” he finally ended. It wasn’t that I wasn’t listening, I think I heard him a little too clearly. He hated the way the government was run, hated the way something so sensitive was being dumbed down just because of his age. And I felt the same way. Perhaps it was a common notion of being 23.

“You’re not the only one Derrick. A lot of the younger political representatives feel the same way. I feel the same way. Like we are the entertainment for the older world, to laugh at, to judge. It’s hard to take yourself seriously when no one else does,” I said.

He sighed.

“I’m so tired of the adult world,” he laughed. For a boy who seemed to react to things like an adult, his statement struck a chord in me. He never had much of a childhood.

“Tell me something that you would tell me if we were kids again,” he said, and I forced a laugh. He wanted to know what happened to me. And I wasn’t afraid to tell him, I was just afraid of how he would treat me if I did.

“I lost 8 kilograms because there was a period where I just kept making myself throw up in college.”

He fell silent, eyes darting over me. I wasn’t sure what was going through his mind, and I felt so small and lousy. There was a time when I though being anorexic was a noble cause, to fend for myself- but now I realised how stupid it sounded.

“Why?” He asked, his voice stuck in his throat. I looked at our hands, afraid to look at him again. It was shame that was coursing through me, not discomfort. I was ashamed to tell him this, it was ugly, and it was weak.

“I got tired of believing that I was beautiful. I wanted to look different, I wanted my old self to go away.”

I felt his hand draw away from mine, and I felt small. Terrifyingly ugly and worthless.

“Was it worth it?” He asked quietly. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, but I felt that he deserved it, after all that happened between us. The least he could know was the truth, because we both knew there wasn’t anything he could do to stop me.

“Yeah.”

“I’m not going to get angry at you now. But in case you were wondering, I would be very pissed off at you if you were still anorexic.”

I smiled at the sheets. He was the first to know, and I didn’t plan to tell anyone else. I didn’t need help, and it was great that he didn’t seem to want to offer me his pity.

“Promise me you won’t be stupid again,” he said, hooking a finger under my chin and pushing my eyes to his.

“Define stupid.”

“Cass.”

“I did a lot of things to escape the past Derrick,” I said. His eyes fell from mine.

“So did I. I mean, you saw Sasha didn’t you?”

“Is that her name? She was such a charmer,” I commented sarcastically, rolling my eyes.

“Do you think we can forgive each other?” He asked, brushing pieces of my hair that hung around my face away from my eyes. I looked at him, and for once, I could be honest.

“I doubt so.”

He smiled sadly. I scooted myself nearer to him, pressing my ear to his chest to hear his heart, just like I used to. Just like last time. I felt his hands trace the outline of my skull, threading through my hair, as he exhaled and rested his chin on my head.

“We’ve just got to learn to live with it.”