The disturbance to the routine didn’t seem to bother anyone else on the bus, and before Elizabeth’s death, it wouldn’t have disturbed me either, but I relied on this routine. The people at the back kept on laughing, squealing and shouting. The people at the front had their heads down as they studied the open textbooks in their laps. And everyone in the middle carried on with their business, mindless to the fact that the door had released a heavy sigh on its opening, and someone new was stepping on board.
As soon as I lifted my head, the first thing I saw was the sun shining brightly from behind him.
Alex.
Our eyes met instantly, but only briefly. There was enough time for me to register the hazel that rivalled my old favourite, purple. There was enough time for me to slowly blink a couple of times, too, but before either one of us had a chance to bring even a hint of a smile to our faces, I turned away to stare back out into nothing. I didn’t want to see him trying to hide the pity that I had no doubt would be there when I looked at him again. I didn’t want him to see the sadness I was holding back, either.
It was better to turn away from everything the world had to offer than to risk seeing anything that would break my heart all over again. So I raised my chin and squinted against the bright blue sky, tilting my head to one side as I pretended to focus on something imaginary that had caught my attention until he passed.
The same thing happened every day after that for what felt like weeks but was actually months. Before I registered the calendar on our kitchen wall, it was drawing close to Christmas, and everything we’d once looked forward to was now tainted with a darkness that Elizabeth would have cursed us all for had she still been around.
I tried to be enthusiastic when asked what I’d like as gifts. I even helped decorate the house the way I knew she would have liked it to be, but as with everything, the biggest part of me was still stuck in that tunnel, and everything around me was nothing more than echoes and hallucinations.
We had two weeks left of school when my father burst into the house heavily laden with gifts, trying to shake off the rain that had soaked him through. His old, navy, worn trilby hat sat tilted to one side as he held the door open with his foot and dropped several wrapped boxes to the floor with a thud. The sheer noise had me jumping on the spot as I made my way down the hall towards him, my blonde hair up in a messy bun as my cream, oversized jumper fell off one shoulder with no grace at all.
“Christ, it’s getting cold out there,” he huffed out as a shudder ran through him.
“That’s why we prefer to keep all the doors closed. It helps keep the ice out,” I reminded him quietly, circling a spoon in the hot chocolate I’d had to remake four times already. My father looked up before he glanced behind him and rolled his eyes.
“Just a minute.”
“Hypothermia can happen in a minute, Pops.”
“Anything can happen in a minute, baby girl,” he replied quietly.
Then I heard the heavy footsteps outside. Dad’s focus stayed behind him, while I adopted my usual look of confusion and waited to see who he’d brought along. When Alex jogged through the door, practically hidden behind a heavy load of parcels, I froze completely.
“I think this is everything, Mr. Vincent.” Alex dropped the gifts next to the others, shaking his hair out carefully before he bounced on his toes to fight off the obvious cold. “I shut the boot of your car, so you just need to lock up now. Saves you from going back out in the rain again.”
“You’re a good lad, son. Thank you.”
The cup in my hand suddenly felt like it was lined with grease. I tried desperately to cling on to it while my eyes stayed unblinking, completely lost in the movements Alex Law was making next to my father, as though he hadn’t even registered I was there.
When he did… when he eventually turned and our eyes locked the same way they did twice a day, he froze, too. He froze and stared. I stared and froze. We were two statues, suddenly mute and lost. It was like he’d somehow found a way into the tunnel I’d been stuck in for so long, and it was having the same haunting effect on him that it had always had on me.
“Natalie,” he whispered.
“Alex.” I nodded slowly, unable to look away.
Then there was the silence again – that same silence that always sucked all the moisture out of my mouth and left my throat feeling like it was being starved of life. I wanted to swallow so badly, but I couldn’t.
“Alex was just jogging by the house when he saw me getting all this stuff out of the car. He offered a helping hand, like the good lad that he is.” My dad spoke beside Alex, slapping him on the back while laughing a small, nervous laugh that I’d never heard my father use before. There was a possibility that Alex being here was bringing back the same memories for my father as it did for me.
The sudden contact made Alex’s body roll forward, but he caught himself and corrected his stance in just one step, blinking rapidly before he eventually looked away from me and back to my dad. The moment our stare was broken, I sucked in a sharp, painful breath.
“It was nothing,” Alex said, bringing a hand up to the back of his wet hair and scratching it awkwardly.
“You were jogging?” I blurted out.
“Yeah,” he answered, raising his brows as he looked back at me. “I was.”
“In the rain?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you do that often?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said do you do that often?”
“Run?”
“Yes.”
“Every day.”
“Past our house?” I asked quietly, my frown deepening even though I had no idea why.
“Yeah,” he answered, his voice so quiet he had to clear his throat and try again. “Yes, I run the same route every night.”
I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t. I was searching every bit of his face and trying to remember all his features. I was trying to remember if I’d ever noticed his small spattering of freckles before, or if this was the first time I’d seen them with any clarity. I was trying to remember if he’d blushed this way before, too, or if he’d always looked as handsome as he did right then.
“I didn’t know that,” I eventually whispered back.
Alex’s mouth pressed into a line before he smiled softly. I could see he was doing his own inspection of me, but what for, I wasn’t sure. I also didn’t care. I knew what I must have looked like to him. A broken shell of what was already a broken shell the first time he met me. “Well, now you do.”
“Now I do.”
Silence. Silence again. The awkwardness I brought to most situations was ever-present, tugging at me to move backwards, while also pushing at me to go forwards. That was why I always stayed in place the way I was doing. I was never entirely sure of where I was actually meant to go.
“I should get going.”
“Okay.” I nodded again, swallowing before I looked down into my cup and continued to stir at nothing in particular.
I could see Dad in my peripheral vision, shuffling out of his coat, and it wasn’t long before I heard Alex spin around and begin to walk back outside into the cold and rain. There was a part of me that knew I should thank him in some way, but then my father followed him to the threshold, and before I had a reason to go anywhere or do anything, he’d already done it for me.
“Thanks, Alex, son,” he shouted as Alex ran down the path away from our home. “Feel free to stop by any time.”
The open invitation he’d just offered had me pausing once again, and it was only when the door slapped shut against the frame and my father walked over to me that I finally allowed myself to look up. My dad was a simple man with simple interests. I had the same traits. He had ashy blonde hair and dark blue eyes that had obviously lived. His face never gave much away and he wasn’t big on words or speeches, but when I looked up into his gaze and saw a bizarre, never-before-seen twinkle in his eye, I couldn’t help but stare back and wait for him t
o say something. Pushing both hands into his trouser pockets, he rubbed his lips together carefully and tilted his head to one side.
“You’re smiling,” he said softly.
I wasn’t. Or at least, it didn’t feel like I was.
“So are you.”
He studied me some more, eventually lifting a hand out of his pocket to brush back some loose strands of my hair. It was a sign of affection I hadn’t come to expect from him for so long, but one that took me straight back to being the four-year-old girl he used to pick up from the ground whenever she fell and cradle in his arms.
“I guess I am.”
“What's going on, Dad?”
“Just... New beginnings,” he mouthed quietly.
“What does that mean?
“Nothing.” He smiled. “Nothing at all.”
Then he walked away, without any explanation as to what he meant.
But I knew. All of me knew. It was why I stayed in place, my eyes trained on the door. Who knows how long I stirred that hot chocolate for or when I allowed myself to turn away?
All I did know was this: The sun had just shone again and my skin had tingled for the first time since Elizabeth had gone.
And it had had nothing to do with the cold.
FOUR
Despite the open invitation, Alex didn’t stop by the house on a whim again, but I still saw him every day. The eye contact was always the same – short, sweet but something I looked forward to anyway. No words were ever spoken. It was just a collection of sly glances, and sometimes, if the sun was shining and neither one of us was still sleepy from the early morning rise, there would be a soft smile involved, too.
For some reason, I found myself enjoying those soft smiles of his more and more as time slipped on by.
Before long, winter had disappeared to another part of the world and England was being graced with the delights of spring. Almost a full year had passed and somehow I was still surviving, even though, every day, Elizabeth got that little bit further away from me.
“I can’t believe it’s almost April.” Sammy sighed, pulling her two folders closer to her chest as we walked side by side down the school corridors. We were in the sixth form now, here by choice, or rather, lack of other options. None of us were ready to go out into the big, wide world alone. We were barely able to make it in the one in which we already existed.
“I know,” I muttered quietly.
“Time just goes by so fucking fast.”
“Sometimes.”
“Shit. Sorry, Nat. I didn’t think.”
“About what?”
“You know what. I’m an idiot.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head, trying to fake breeziness, when in reality, just the mention of April made the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. “It’s no different to any other time of year.”
“That’s what you said at Christmas.”
“Did I?”
“And in June.”
“June?”
“Your birthday, Natalie.”
Looking away from her, I clung on to both straps of my backpack and shrugged lazily. The lockers we were passing suddenly seemed very interesting, and if I just squinted a little bit and pretended to study them, I could trick myself into believing that what I was about to say wasn't another lie.
“Just another day. Every day is just another day. It doesn’t make them any harder or any less painful than the next one.”
Sammy grabbed the top of my arm, and I spun around to face her, looking between the hold she had on me and her face as my frown began to take over again.
“Listen,” she began, pausing only to make sure no one was around us before she lowered her voice and leaned in closer. “I’m not in the business of telling people how to live their lives, especially not you. You know more than anyone how much I love and respect you.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming on…”
“Damn right you do. I can’t go on like this, walking beside this hollow version of you that I don’t know how to talk to anymore.”
Her face creased up as she struggled to hide her own pain. There was nothing I could say to her because I was too lost in that look she was wearing. I was too busy listening to the pounding of my own heart as it began to gallop harder and harder against my ribs.
“I’m not asking to understand what you’re going through. If you want my honest to God opinion, I think you’re phenomenal. How you’ve carried on, coped, dealt with this last twelve months. Phenomenal,” she repeated, nodding slowly before the up and down motion turned into a shake of the head as her thoughts steered her from approval to disapproval. “But it’s been twelve months now and I need you back. We all need you back. I’m not asking you to be bright and breezy. I’m not asking you to get over anything.”
“Then what are you asking me, Sam?”
“I’m asking you to feel again, Nat. I don’t care what the emotion is; just show something. Anything. Be a teenager! I’d rather you be a raging bitch to everyone that even dares to look at you than for you to carry on as this empty shell of what you really are.”
I sighed softly, but it had the weight of the world behind it as I looked down to the end of the corridor where the large, glass-panelled doors to escape stood, tempting me to run. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt my friends, but I didn’t know how else to be now. I’d been out of their way of life for too long.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I whispered back, chewing on the corner of my bottom lip as I turned to face her again. My shrug was nothing more than a gap filler, something to eat away at the time until she decided which part of me to tear off first.
Reaching up, her hand smoothed one side of my hair away and her expression changed from awkward to serene all at once. “It isn’t words I want from you. I just want to see some fire back in this body of yours, babe. Anything. When was the last time you laughed?”
“Last night.”
“Were you watching Friends again and doing that half-arsed, huffy snort thing that you do? That isn’t laughing. That’s just exaggerated breathing. You haven’t laughed properly in months. In almost a year.”
“I hate that you know this shit,” I mumbled, looking up at the ceiling one last time.
“Well I do, and you can’t escape it, or me, so don’t even try. Do you even know what you enjoy now? Do you know what makes sixteen-year-old Natalie Vincent tick anymore?”
The way it happened was like something out of one of those fantasy movies Elizabeth used to like. If I could have described it to anyone, I would have imagined the world fading out until there was just me standing on a single plinth surrounded by absolute darkness. It happened the second I was forced to think of something that made me happy. Then there was a flash of light to my left that seemed like the sun, growing bigger, walking closer, casting shadows on everything else so that all I was left to look at was the blinding, fascinating yellow beside me.
Yellow soon turned to cream, cream turning quickly to white until the rest of the world came back into focus. Then all I could see were two hazel eyes walking my way, and all I could feel was Sammy’s hand as it dropped to my shoulder and squeezed ever so tightly.
“I believe that answers that,” she whispered so only I could hear. At least, I hoped I was the only one that could hear.
Alex was getting closer, and even though I knew I should look away, I couldn’t seem to find the strength to. It was always the same with him.
My skin prickled and I waited for him to walk past us, but he didn’t get the chance. Sammy stepped out to the side to block his path, bouncing on her toes enthusiastically as she grabbed a hold of his forearm and tugged him closer.
“Alex, come on over here. Me and Nat were just talking about you!” she enthused, avoiding my glare as she looked up at him while he struggled to keep the surprise from his face.
“About me?” he asked, leaning slightly away from her before stealing a glance at me.
The
moment our eyes locked, I felt it. Not some bullshit tingle or anything like that. I’d been searching for a way to describe it for months, but I got it then. I got it. I knew that Alex felt like peace to me. When I was near him, the noise in my head fell quiet. I didn’t find myself thinking so much. I was too busy staring, analysing, and daydreaming.
Sammy was speaking in the background. I could hear the words pouring out of her in a rush, but between subtle blinks and twitches of my mouth, I’d shut her out.
Alex was beautiful. A beautiful artwork of tanned skin, brown and copper hair, finished off with those perfect eyes. He was a whole new bubble entirely.
“Nat?”
I could barely breathe being so close to him.
“Nat?”
I definitely couldn’t move.
“Natalie!”
“What?” I said suddenly, snapping my head to look back at Sammy, who was now staring at me with a look of amusement on her face.
“I said what do you think?” She grinned.
My heartbeat got faster as the panic set in. I didn’t want to look like a moron in front of anyone, let alone him, but I hadn’t a clue what she was asking my opinion of.
“I…”
Alex took a step closer, standing taller as he breathed down on me and gifted me with that soft smile of his. “I wasn’t listening to her either.”
“Really?”
“You're not alone.”
“Glad it wasn’t just me,” I answered quietly as I inhaled and looked up at him, certain there was a dual meaning to what he’d just said. “She talks too much.”
“Is that a common occurrence?”
“All the time.” I smiled genuinely, lost in a cloud of our faint voices and close proximity. Had I been a normal kind of girl, I’d have panicked about all the little things I probably should have been concerned over. I’d have worried if my hair was a mess, or if I had last night’s mascara still smudged beneath my eyes. I’d have been obsessing over the food I’d eaten for lunch still lingering on my breath or if I’d used the nice deodorant that morning. I’d have cared about the clothes I was wearing, or the way I looked like I wanted to be anywhere but there, when in fact, right there was suddenly the only place I’d ever wanted to be. But I wasn’t obsessing about anything. I was just being, feeling, and enjoying the way the pressure in my mind seemed to ease whenever he was nearby. “You get used to it after a while.”
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