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The silence is slashed with heavy breaths.
A second later, I hear rapidly moving footsteps, followed by the loud bang of the door closing.
I’m glad it was loud. Otherwise I would’ve given myself away. My broken, loud sob would’ve told everyone that I was here.
Listening and hiding.
The girl who ruined Mr. Edwards’s life. The girl with poison lips and stupid teenage dreams.
He was right the other night. I took away his peace. I am a nightmare. A nightmare he can’t forget or outrun or out-sleep.
Not when he’s reminded of it at every turn. Not when he has to live with it.
Tears are streaming down my face, too quick for me to wipe them off. But I do. I do wipe them off because I didn’t come here to cry.
I came here to face him. To face his wrath, to face what I did to him.
I came here for him.
And he needs me now. I have to go to him.
In a daze, I come away from the wall I’ve been hiding behind. I climb up the steps in a trance. I walk down the creaking hallway that he took not ten minutes ago.
I reach the living room just as I hear another sound. Louder than the bang of the door. Shriller, higher. It’s the sound of something being smashed and wrecked into countless pieces.
It’s the sound of Mr. Edwards throwing his liquor bottle on the floor.
He’s standing at the kitchen island. The island that’s buried under tens and tens of liquor bottles. They are littered almost everywhere. On the counters, by the trashcan. The smell of alcohol hangs thick and heavy in the air.
When I look back at Mr. Edwards, I see he’s watching me. His chest is heaving and that burly body of his has somehow grown in a matter of minutes.
“Are you an alcoholic?” I ask in a small voice, knowing the answer already.
Each time I’ve seen him, he’s been with a bottle. He drank so much whiskey just now but hardly anything happened to him.
He looks sober. Except for the tangy, addictive smell and the dilation of his pupils, I can’t see any more effects.
Actually, no.
I’m wrong.
There are effects. He’s lost weight. That’s why his cheekbones look sharper now. There are even little pits under his eyes.
Now that I understand this, I can see him clearly.
I can see how he’s let himself go. How long his hair is, messy and dark. How untamed his beard is. How angular his jaw looks. How his collarbone juts out, how his entire body has been reduced to sharp bones and muscles. No room for any softness.
He looks savage. Beautiful but uncivilized.
My hobo slides down my shoulder and thuds down on the floor, beside the broken glass. “I heard everything.”
At this, he widens his stance, his mouth parting as he drags in a charged-up breath.
“You are an alcoholic, aren’t you? I mean, ever since everything happened. I gave up drinking and you’ve taken it up. And you hate schools too, don’t you? That’s why you don’t show up.”
I have to take a pause because I see his chest vibrating.
“I hate schools too,” I continue because I want him to know that he’s not alone. “I hate corridors and students and teachers. Everyone with their judgement and their gossiping. I went there once after… everything happened, to see the principal, and I hated every second of it. I hated the smell, the air, the lockers. Everything.”
I went back to school to tell Principal Jacobs that it was me who did the wrong thing. The building was empty, save for a few people. I didn’t meet anyone on my way to the principal’s office, but I could still feel my skin crawling. As if they were all watching me.
“That’s not it, though, is it? You don’t only hate schools, you hate everything. You hate your roses too. Is it because I was trying to steal them that night? Is that why you don’t take care of them anymore?”
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, feeling so small and so vulnerable.
“They remind me of you,” he rasps at last, jolting the breath out of me.
“Your roses?”
“Yeah.”
It’s a hoarse sound, his yeah. It’s both sad and angry. It’s tortured. Anguished.
It squeezes my heart so much that I think it will explode. The veins will burst. The chambers will collapse. My heart will self-destruct.
“And that’s why you hate them now, because you hate me,” I conclude on a whisper, wondering how many girls dream of being someone’s rose and how many of them cry when they really become it.
He flinches; it’s a big flinch.
As if I slapped him. As if I smacked his chest or kicked him in the gut.
As if I sliced his skin by uttering those words and I don’t understand.
Isn’t that the truth?
