Echoes

by Alice Reeds

  “Yes, that was supposed to be a compliment,” he said.

  “What’s the second question?” I couldn’t get over the fact that he wanted to know anything about me. After the way he’d treated me the past three years, this seemed like a miracle.

  He took a longer sip from his coconut and then asked: “Why do you have so many scars on your hands? What happened?” His expression changed from amusement to something that almost looked like worry. Was he worried that someone might have hurt me and that was why I had those scars? Was that something Miles Echo was capable of?

  “It’s kind of a fucked-up story.” He looked at me, equal parts confused, curious, and what I thought might’ve been concern. “I cannot believe I’m really going to tell you this.” I hesitated. I’d never told anybody about my past, at least, not much and not in any great detail.

  “Hey, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.” He smiled at me, a smile that said, “it’s okay.”

  I took a deep breath, a sip of my drink, and looked toward the horizon. “My family has never been wealthy, nothing compared to your family,” I began. “It wasn’t until about three years ago that my mother finally struck luck and scored a well-paying job. I grew up in New York City, in Chinatown actually. On my street, we were one of the only non-Asian families. Once it was time for me to attend kindergarten, my parents didn’t have the money to send me to a fancy one, so I went to the one only a couple of houses away from the building we lived in. It was led by a man in his early fifties and his much younger wife.”

  Every once in a while, I looked over at Miles to catch his reaction, to see if he found my story amusing, if he was about to laugh at me for being so far below him. But he didn’t. He listened attentively, like I was telling the most fascinating story he ever heard.

  “What made the kindergarten different than the one you surely went to is that instead of having playtime, finger painting, and other similar activities, we learned the basics of kickboxing,” I said and smiled at the thought and memory of little me trying to figure out the easiest of kicks or punches.

  “Wait, you started kickboxing in kindergarten?” he asked, surprised.

  “I did.” I nodded with a proud smile. Putting it that way, I realized just how many years had passed, and for just how long I’d been doing it. “Private schools were not really something my family could afford, so I went to a public school with my friends. I trained, learned, and grew up with them. At least until a certain point. My father actually has a past in kickboxing and Muay Thai himself, so once it became clear that I have an affinity for it, showed enough potential that people started to claim I could make it international one day, my father decided to take over my training.” That wasn’t entirely true. He’d taken over when he’d fired my previous trainer for not going hard enough on me. “Fun, right, being coached by someone who’s related to you, who knows and cares about you? In my case, not at all.”

  “I didn’t know your father was a kickboxer as well.”

  “Never made it big. Got some kind of career ending injury, and that was it. But I remember in our old apartment there was this wall basically dedicated to him with old competition pictures, the few titles and medals he did win, you know, that kind of stuff. As a kid, I found it amazing. I wanted to be like him. So, when he took over my coaching, I thought that maybe that would finally bring us closer, since I’d never really been close with him.”

  “Same,” Miles said with a huff and raised his hand.

  “My father has very strict methods of training, extremely high expectations, that sort of thing,” I continued and sighed a little. It was almost strange to talk with someone about this, even more so with someone outside my family. I’d barely even told Melany about any of it, just scratched the surface. Mom always just said that my father had the best intentions, that he was simply bad at expressing how much I meant to him, while my grandma claimed I was supposed to do as I was told. If my father said those were the right methods, I was to believe it and follow it. So I did. “So, wanting to please my father, become the sort of daughter he wanted me to be, the fighter he claimed to see within me, who’s probably just the fighter he wished he could’ve been but never got the chance to, my friends and I did some crazy shit, resulting in some of those scars.

  “One of them has a brother, Cong, about ten years older than us. He always used to tell us about the crazy things he and his kickboxing mates did while growing up. So, of course, we wanted to be tougher, more hardcore than our opponents. We decided that pain made us weak, just like my father had told me numerous times, and so we wanted to learn how to take as much pain as possible. Looking back at it now, I know we were utterly stupid beyond measure, but back then we thought we were amazing.”

  “Do I even want to know how you achieved that level of hardcore?” Miles asked, slightly unsure.

  “You asked, so now you have to live with the answer.” I pulled a smug face. “We did all sorts of crazy things. We tried walking on burning hot coals, punching walls—which, by the way, is where the scars on my knuckles come from—punching each other in the stomach, and even insane things like cutting each other. Everything just to learn to accept pain, to use it as strength and not as weakness, so we could beat our opponents.”

  While I told him about the wall punching, he reached out and carefully took my left hand into his and looked at it a little closer and let his thumb softly caress the skin and the scars. I never thought he had a gentle side at all.

  “And those cuts on your stomach? Are they also from the cutting?” he asked.

  “Cong and his friends created this system which basically consisted of literally cutting out tiny strips of your skin on your stomach to show how much pain you’re able to take,” I explained while I saw Miles pull a grimace and lightly wince at my words. “I know, it’s totally stupid and idiotic, and my father went berserk when he saw it. I’d seen him furious, but that had been something else. If I could go back in time, I would punch myself in the face for doing all of it, but back then I felt invincible, won competition after competition, the only thing that managed to get my father off my back again after pulling that number. Once he saw how much stronger it had made me, he didn’t seem so appalled anymore. Figures. I’d been sucked into this river, became part of it. It took me until we moved away to realize how dangerous some of the things we did were.”

  “What do five cuts mean?”

  “They don’t mean anything.” I sighed. “But, back when I got them, they meant a great deal to me. Most of my friends could only take three or four, but I managed five. It made me feel powerful, strong as a mountain, especially because I was the only girl in our group.”

  “If it wasn’t so crazy, and somewhat sick, I would say I’m deeply impressed,” Miles admitted. I looked at him and into his eyes. There was something about his eyes that drew me in. They say that eyes are the windows to our souls. I wondered what Miles saw when he looked into mine.

  “So, that’s where all my scars come from,” I said and looked away toward the setting sun. The sky stood in flames and reflected off of the infinite ocean, a perfect painting, a million-dollar photo. “How crazy do you think I am?”

  At first he didn’t say anything, just remained perfectly silent. I waited for him to get up and leave, but he didn’t.

  Finally he looked at me and said: “I don’t think you are crazy at all. I think you are extraordinary, passionate, and smart, smarter than any girl I’ve ever known. And you look beautiful, especially in that dress, with your hair that’s been every color of the rainbow.”

  His words took me by surprise. They were nothing like what I thought he’d say. I looked up into those eyes that seemed infinite, that told me his words were honest, true, not just part of a game he might’ve been playing. But could that be? Was that possible? Could Miles Echo really like me?

  We certainly had our differences in the past, a lot of them, but since we woke up on the island I’d gotten to know a completely different
side of him, the real him and not the arrogant snob he played at school. He wasn’t anything like what I thought; instead, he was genuinely nice, funny, and caring. Even if being stuck on the island sucked, and everything else sucked, being in this together wasn’t nearly as awful as I thought it would be.

  I enjoyed his company, and I actually liked him, a realization that took me by surprise, maybe even more than I wanted to admit to myself. There was something in the way he looked at me, showed genuine interest in the things I told him, the fact that he somehow wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable in front of me, that made me wonder what if. What if I gave him a chance, if I gave in to these feelings? I was pretty sure we weren’t the people we used to be before all of this happened, and maybe that didn’t erase the past, but maybe everything he’d done for me, for our survival, was enough to make me willing to give him a second chance.

  I gathered all the strength and courage I could find inside of me and said: “Kiss me.” The second the words passed my lips, doubt flooded my mind, and I wanted to run and hide. My heart raced like a wild horse.

  He put his coconut aside without breaking our stare. His hand found its way to my cheek while his eyes softened like liquid honey. Our faces came closer until our lips met in the most delicate kiss. His lips were soft, inviting. I’d been kissed before but never had a kiss that felt like this. A kiss as soft as the wings of a butterfly, so careful, gentle, sweet, and beautiful. Somewhere in the background I heard the splash of water—my coconut.

  The moment our lips parted, I longed for more; a hunger awoke that demanded to be satisfied. There was a smile on his face, a genuine one that brightened up his face and eyes.

  “You know, usually things like this born out of situations like ours don’t last,” I whispered once I found the ability to speak again.

  “Considering we might die tomorrow, I think that’s something we shouldn’t worry about right now,” he said, his voice husky. “I won’t let them hurt you.”

  His words seemed silly considering the pit of death, the beast, and our lack of weapons, but at the same time they warmed my heart and made it bleed in a joyful way.

  “Mr. Echo, is this the alcohol speaking?”

  “Do you want it to be the alcohol?” he asked and looked unsure. Seeing things like vulnerability, and even the briefest moment of doubt, on him was still strange.

  “No.” I meant it. I didn’t want these feelings to be caused by alcohol. I wanted them to be real, even though I was slightly afraid to feel them.

  “I promise this is not just some game,” Miles said and placed two fingers underneath my chin, tilted my head up, made me look up at him. “This is me kissing you because I want to. Besides, we promised each other to be honest.”

  I grabbed his collar and pulled him toward me. We kissed again, but this time the kiss wasn’t shy. It was a kiss worth dying for.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Island

  “You’ve hated me for three years. How come you suddenly changed your mind?”

  We still sat in the same place while the moon shone down its silver light and the fire crackled behind us. Miles had his arm around me and my head rested on his shoulder. This was definitely a position I never thought I would find myself in, never thought I would like, but I did.

  “I know I could give you some bullshit answer, but that wouldn’t be fair, especially after you were so honest with me about your past,” he said, and then placed a kiss on the side of my head. “But the truth is that I suck at feelings. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true.”

  “Guess that makes two of us,” I said.

  “Three years ago, when you joined our class, I knew you were different, and I don’t mean that to sound cheesy or to make you like me. But there was something about you that immediately caught my attention, like you just had this sort of commanding aura around you I’d never seen on a girl before.” A silly smile appeared on his face. “Then I heard about who you were—I mean, we all kind of did—and I was even more intrigued.”

  “And then you went on to become the president of the Fiona Sucks Club. How’s that fit into the story?” I asked, genuinely curious because I couldn’t really see how he could go from being intrigued to hating me just like that, especially since I’d never done anything to him until our enemy thing really started. “I mean, do you even remember what the first thing was you ever said to me?”

  “I called you pathetic,” he said, voice colored by shame that I didn’t expect to hear. I was surprised that he remembered this, that I wasn’t the only one, because I’d been the one that was hurt by his words. “I’m awfully sorry about that, by the way.”

  “And it took you three years to figure that out and tell me?”

  “No. I knew I’d said the entirely wrong thing the second I said it. I was so used to talking to my friends that way that it hadn’t even crossed my mind that you wouldn’t see it as just some stupid shit you say because everyone knows you’re not being serious, until I saw your face fall.” He sighed heavily. “I tried to fix the situation, but the longer I talked, the more I knew I’d fucked up. So I turned and walked away before I could do any more damage. Later that day I told my best friend about it, asked him for advice, and he said I should just leave it, that chances were you’d think I was weird, or you’d think I’m just the brooding type and that I’m hot like we were in some Twilight type book or whatever. Being fourteen and clueless, I believed him.”

  “I was convinced you were making fun of me,” I admitted. “You sounded almost amused as you spoke, so I assumed you thought I was an idiot, and that you were making fun of me because silly Fiona needed to be saved like some damsel in distress.”

  “We all know you’re anything but a damsel, let’s be real. You’re like the strongest person I’ve ever known.”

  “Yet you treated me like I was some kind of peasant unworthy of even talking to you. Remember that time I asked if you could help Melany with chemistry and you told me no then laughed at my reaction?”

  “It was meant as a joke, and it’s not like you were any better.”

  “So it’s my fault?”

  “What? No!” He shook his head and took my hand while I just looked at him doubtfully. “That’s not what I meant.”

  This entire conversation was all sorts of bizarre, and I hated the fact that maybe he wasn’t completely wrong. I hadn’t been much better than him, and to a certain degree the animosity that built between us was my fault. Partly. I’d been so hung up on the fact that he’d called me pathetic that everything else stopped mattering to me. If I’d listened and actually thought about what he said, stopped him from walking away to ask him about it, maybe all of it could’ve been avoided. But then again, he was just as much at fault as I was. He could’ve not listened to his friend’s obviously unqualified advice and apologized sooner.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry for having called you pathetic, that I know I shouldn’t have done it, that I should have apologized, but I let myself be influenced by my friends who only saw your family’s financial status instead of you as a person and concluded that you weren’t someone worth being friends with, and then…things turned out the way they did.” Even though I’d known that was exactly what most people in our school thought about me, the poor girl only there on a scholarship, and they looked down on me for it, actually hearing Miles confirm my thoughts still sucked. “I know my words can’t fix what I did in the past, but I hope that I can show you in the future that I’m not who I used to be at fourteen, and that I really do like you and don’t think you’re pathetic, not even for a second.”

  “Then I suppose I should apologize for writing ‘asshole’ on your locker, hmm?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said decisively. “I deserved that. And every other time you flipped me off or whatever.”

  For years I’d been convinced that he hated me for who I was, for just being some “pathetic” little thing with no money who had no place in our school,
that he looked down on me from that first interaction onward—and now it turned out that wasn’t true, at least not the way I thought it was. We’d disliked each other based on a misunderstanding, three years passing without either of us trying to get to the bottom of it. Instead, we just rolled with it. Melany always told me I was right for feeling upset and calling him out on his behavior, but we’d only known my side of the story.

  And now I laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Miles asked after a moment, sounding genuinely confused.

  “I just thought about how, if we’d gotten our shit together sooner, we could’ve been friends these past few years. Or, if you’d let your mind run a little further, I might’ve gotten to kiss you without having to end up on a deserted island first.”

  “You mean like this?” He kissed my cheek. I couldn’t help but smile.

  “More like this,” I said, and leaned in to kiss him properly. He pulled me a little closer and kissed me back.

  After the kiss he looked at me, his eyes hopeful. “Does that mean you forgive me?”

  I usually wasn’t the forgiving type, with others or myself, but seeing that hopefulness in his eyes, hearing that honesty and remorse in his apology, I could make an exception. Ever since we woke up on the island, he’d proven again and again that he wasn’t the person I’d thought. He helped me, was nice to me, and he even came up with the idea for this evening. He’d made a genuine effort to show me that he wasn’t a bad person, and that he cared. He’d even helped me before we landed on the island, but I didn’t know about that until he told me. And maybe all of that couldn’t erase the hurt I’d felt three years ago, but I could see he really was sorry, that he wouldn’t do it again, and just this once I was willing to forgive.

  “Yes, but if you ever say something like that to me again, I will punch you.”

  “I swear I won’t, never again,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. “Thank you.”

  I leaned against him, his arms around me, and just let myself breathe for a moment. I was happy to finally know his side of the story, that we finally talked about it, and I was glad that the things between us were the way they were right in that moment. I liked him and being able to act upon it, knowing we were on the same page and that if things had been a bit different we could’ve been here sooner, it felt…nice. Surprising, even.