A More Deserving Blackness

by Wolbert, Angela

  His hands are shoved in the pockets of his jeans and he’s looking at me somberly. I have to crane my neck to see his face.

  “I didn’t know,” he tells me. “What they were gonna do. I swear.”

  I believe him, so I nod.

  “Did you get hurt?”

  It’s a lie, but I shake my head.

  Hurt? No. Hurt wasn’t the word for it. Eviscerated, maybe. But not hurt.

  Erik nods awkwardly. “Good, I’m – that’s good.” Then he’s just standing there in my way and he tips his head toward the door. “I gotta get going.”

  He leaves and I follow, but before he slips down the hall he looks back at me and gives me a sad smile, just the faintest trace of those not-really-quarterback dimples on his cheeks. It makes me ache.

  I hadn’t even realized I’d missed them.

  I take a step and skid to a stop when a massive chest covered in a black zip jacket steps in front of me. Lurching back, I tilt my head up and instantly recognize one of the guys who’d been holding Logan’s arms that night they’d nearly beaten him to death. He’d been smiling. I remember, while Dylan had bloodied Logan with his fists, this guy had been smiling.

  The rage is so powerful I feel sick with it.

  Short brown hair, round, flat nose, a thick tuft of dark hair on his chin, he’s staring down at me with exaggerated, pursed lips.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?” he asks in a purposefully slimy voice, edging closer. “Too scared to come back?”

  I readjust my bag on my shoulder, glaring at him, but my hands are shaking.

  “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

  He just grins at me, his lips curling up to show his teeth and then he’s laughing and walking away and I’m still standing there, paralyzed, thinking of all the things I should’ve done, should’ve said, should’ve shouted at him. Anything but just stand there, the victim again.

  Dylan isn’t in pre-calc later, which is good, because I don’t know if screaming at him would be enough.

  I’m pulling my bag over the unfamiliar bulk of my hoodie after my last class has finally dragged to an end when I realize I’d never asked Trish for a ride home. And since I’d never actually explained what had happened and I’d never asked and it’s Trish, she probably didn’t even realize of the need for it.

  I’m already reaching for my pocket before I remember my phone isn’t there. It’s still at Logan’s. I had no one to drive me home and no way to text anyone to ask.

  Shit.

  Abruptly, I feel someone standing behind me and my heart sputters and my stomach dives for the floor. But when I turn it’s only Erik, tall and skinny with his messenger bag already slung over his chest, aviator sunglasses hooked over the collar of his shirt.

  He smiles, like my world hadn’t just swollen and popped at his feet.

  “Hey, can I drive you home?”

  I wait too long to answer and he shrugs. “You don’t have to, I just thought, you know, since Logan’s not here -”

  “Okay.”

  “Holy -!” Erik glances around the emptying hallway like we’re evil spies in a James Bond movie and then lowers his voice to a stage whisper. “You just talked.”

  “Yeah. I guess I did.”

  Erik nods smoothly. “I like it,” he says approvingly, like he’s reviewing a new outfit I’m trying on just for him. It almost makes me smile and he motions with his spiky head toward the student lot. “Come on.”

  This time Erik helps me up into the cab of his massive truck with a hand at my elbow. He doesn’t expect me to talk to him on the ride home, and I’m grateful for it. I feel wrung out. It’s unnatural, speaking to people after so long, and I feel raw and exposed.

  When he passes Logan’s house there isn’t much to see – empty driveway, garage closed – but I stare at it anyway. Behind the brown lenses of his glasses, Erik notices but doesn’t comment. We pull into Trish’s driveway behind her Honda which is parked next to what can only be my mother’s beige SUV, and I shouldn’t even be surprised. Trish would’ve told them I’d spoken the second she was able.

  They’re probably here to celebrate how marvelously healed and improved I am now. Instant normal daughter. Just add insufferable anguish.

  Which isn’t fair, really, because they love me and worry about me and they only want the best for me. It’s me who can’t handle any of that – the burden of it, the hooks of expectation pulling at me. I couldn’t handle it then and I can’t handle it now. Not without Logan.

  And I’d shoved him away.

  My mother is there walking toward us from the porch, like she’d been watching, waiting for me to come home. In the sun her short, wavy brown hair is streaked with a little more grey than I remember from when I’d lived with them, but her eyes are just the same; loving and heartbroken.

  “Bree!” She hurries the last of the way to me after I slip down from Erik’s huge truck and collects me in a tight hug. “Oh, Sweetie. Trish called us. We came right away.”

  She holds my shoulders when she pulls away and she’s just looking at me, drinking me in tearfully when Erik is suddenly there at my side. He hands me my bag, which I must’ve forgotten on the floor of his truck at the shock of seeing my mom here waiting for me.

  “Oh!” She wipes at her lashes with her knuckle and holds out a hand, a warm smile on her lips. “You must be Logan.”

  I flinch.

  “Uh – Erik, actually,” he says, shaking her hand anyway and flashing those handsome blue eyes and adorable dimples. “I’m . . . a friend.”

  “Oh.” She looks at me, than back at him. “Well. Thank you for driving her home, Erik.”

  “No problem,” he says to her easily, but he can tell he’s interrupting something so he touches my arm, just briefly as he eases back to his truck. “See you tomorrow.”

  My mom waves at him as he backs down the driveway, but I don’t even look. Not when Logan’s house is right behind him, hugely silent.

  “Honey.” She squeezes me in a hug again and I let her, knowing she needs it. “How are you?”

  I shrug and the smile on her face falters, just a little. Disappointing her, as always.

  So I take a breath and tell her the lie she’s powerfully hoping to hear. “I’m okay, Mom.”

  Her hands flutter over her chest at the sound of my voice. “Really?”

  Out of habit I nod, but then, “Yeah.”

  She has tears in her eyes again as she loops her arm through mine, guiding me back to the house painted the color of sunshine where I can see my Dad standing in the doorway, watching and waiting. “I’m so proud of you, Sweetie.”

  “Hey, Pumpkin,” my Dad murmurs as he clasps me in a hug, ducking to get his arms around my much shorter frame. He smells like the aftershave he’d been using since I was a little girl. When he pulls back his joyful smile is a little wobbly, and I can see Trish behind him, beaming contentedly. Like my compulsion to speak has righted some devastating wrong in their lives. Like everything in their worlds is now somehow the way it is supposed to be.

  They can’t even tell that mine is in jagged shards at my feet.

  My mom and dad lead me into the living room, seating me between them on the couch. Trish hovers near the door as they take turns asking me questions.

  “So when did this start?” my mom asks eagerly, fixing a chunk of my hair over my shoulder, obviously unable to not touch me.

  When the guy I loved was being beaten to death in front of me.

  But that isn’t true, not really. It started before that, much before. It started when Logan had kissed me, or when he’d held my hand, or when he’d first placed my palms over his chest to help me breathe. It started when I began needing him more than I needed absolutely anything else; including all the walls, the barriers, the shields I’d built to keep from feeling this kind of pain.

  “I just . . . thought it was time,” I tell her lamely, and she smiles tearfully, accepting my extraordinary recovery without question. She
wants it for me so badly.

  “So you’re doing better then?” she asks, her graying brown curls bouncing as she nods at me.

  No. This is so much worse. “Yeah.”

  “Good, Honey, that’s so good. We just want you to be happy.”

  “Is it easier, being here?”

  This from my dad and I automatically nod before remembering and forcing myself to speak. “Yeah.” Not anymore.

  “Because if you want,” my mom says cautiously, “you could come home now. You could move back in with us.”

  “We’d love to have you back,” my dad adds, the skin at the corners of his eyes wrinkling as he smiles at me, and I’m gripped with a fist of remorse at how much I’d hurt them. How much I’m still required to hurt them.

  “I – I can’t Dad. At least . . . not yet.”

  My mom pats my knee. “Okay, Honey. That’s okay. We understand.”

  But they don’t understand. They think it’s that town, where it happened, or those people, who all knew. But it isn’t. It isn’t even them, their eager faces, so ready to hear about how whole and normal I am now, how the horror of two years ago is completely forgotten. How I’ll inevitably disappoint them, wound them even further when they see how broken I still really am. How broken I’ll always be.

  It isn’t any of that, not anymore. Today I’d had a taste of this place without Logan in it, and it was bitter. Almost unbearable. A nightmare in my string of nightmares. But a world without Logan entirely, without even the glimpses of things sill haunted by his presence, without knowing that he’s there, seeing the smallest hints of evidence that he existed. . . that would be excruciating.

  “So tell us about school,” Mom prompts brightly, and I blink at her.

  School? School is harsh and empty.

  “It’s fine.”

  “How are your classes?”

  “They’re fine, Mom. It’s high school.”

  She laughs. “So Erik’s a friend from school?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “What about this Logan we’ve been hearing so much about?”

  I flinch, looking up at Trish, silently pleading. I can’t talk about Logan.

  “He lives just down the road, Mom,” my sister pipes up buoyantly, moving further into the room. She’d obviously only told them about me speaking, not anything else.

  “Hey, anybody hungry?” she asks. “I was gonna order take-out.”

  I flash her a grateful look and we debate options for dinner, my parents delighted just to hear my voice again, no matter what I’m discussing. They don’t mention Logan again, too preoccupied with the miracle that is me. But after they’d eaten and I’d pushed some vegetable lo-mien around my plate convincingly enough, Trish pulls me aside as I scrape the cold, tangled remains into the trash.

  “Here,” she murmurs gently, slipping me a plain, unmarked white envelope.

  It’s heavy as I accept it and I glance down, ripping along the adhesive edge to open it. Inside is my phone. Nothing else.

  “I found it by the front door when I came home,” she tells me quietly, and then, seeing the desolate look I can’t keep from my face, she adds, “I’m sorry.”

  I nod, crumpling the envelope and dropping it into the trash on top of the gooey knot of lo-mien, slipping my phone into my pocket.

  As quickly as I can I excuse myself, citing exhaustion, and they believe me because they want so badly for me to be okay.

  “I love you,” my mom whispers as she hugs me. I can hear the tears in her voice again and it makes me want to crawl out of my skin. So much disappointment. So much hurt.

  I pat her back, the familiar smell of her wrapping around me. “I love you too.”

  Then my dad, kissing my head. “Night, Pumpkin.”

  “Night, Dad.”

  “We’ll see you soon,” my mom says, and I just nod, slipping down the hall to my room, feeling their eyes cradling me until I disappear from sight.

  I close my bedroom door behind me and lean back against it, the tears I won’t let them see dripping down my face. I’m shaking with them as I pull out my phone and flick it on, scrolling to find Logan’s old texts and bringing them up onto the screen. There’s surprisingly few that he’d sent to me, just a handful really, as he’d mostly just responded out loud while I’d typed messages to him.

  I curl my fingers around it and slide down to my butt on the floor, pressing the phone against my chest where there should be a bloody, gory hole but there isn’t. I should be bleeding all over the floor but I just hug the thing to me and cry, pulling my knees up and sobbing into them.

  Logan had dropped the phone off when he knew I wouldn’t be home. He’d gone out of his way to avoid seeing me, and it isn’t fair that that hurts so much, I have no right for that to hurt this much when it’s my fault, when I’m the one who’d cut him away.

  But it does and I can’t make it stop. I’m gasping with the pain of it, the brittle rattling of days like this, days without Logan, looming out in front of me. I’d ruined us like I’d ruined myself and I can’t make it right. Any of it. I can’t go back to the way I was before him, safe and numb in silence, in that dulled, familiar fog of fear, and I can’t go on without needing him in every part of my life.

  The skin of my wrist is tight with blistering pain before I even realize I’m doing it; the scrape of my nail, over and over, scouring over that delicate skin that had healed in all the time Logan had drawn me away from needing it. The flesh softens and reddens under my nail, becoming a wet, oozing welt that shoots pain up my arm with every pass. But it’s not enough.

  I’d lost him.

  There’s something squeezing me, cracking my ribs, crushing my chest and I can’t stand this pain, I can’t feel like this, anything would be better than feeling like this.

  I’m suffocating again, my lungs burning for air. The room is hot and pressing on me and I want to run, I want to burst out into the night air and scream curses at the stars. I want to smash the last, clinging bits of me into sand beneath my heel, want to destroy myself.

  I want pain.

  I’m heaving for breath and my head snaps up and it’s right there, sitting on the shelf where Trish had placed it just before I’d moved in. The photograph of my parents, Trish, and me, our arms around each other and laughing. It was some day Trish had come home to visit and we’d all gone to the park by the house, our noses red from the last reaches of cold as winter bowed to spring.

  It was taken only a few months before the rape.

  Frantic now, I push shakily from the floor and cross the room, grabbing the metal frame from the shelf and flipping it in my cold hands, using my thumbs to push back the tabs holding it together. It falls apart with a small chinking sound in my hands and I let everything drop carelessly to the carpet at my feet save the small square of glass.

  I press my thumb against the edge but it’s too wide, too smooth, so I slide it against the corner and feel the answering sting.

  When I drop down to my knees, gripping the square and hunching over, lightheaded, I’m already panting for it. My hands are shaking and I can’t think of anything else; the need for relief consumes me. I’m trembling as I tear my sweatshirt over my head, gulping for air that won’t come until I can make this terrible anguish stop.

  I just need it to stop.

  The bite of the glass cutting into my skin is like a drug, spreading through my body. The pain is wonderful, beloved, rushing over me, through me, blocking out everything else. All I can feel is the unforgiving slice of glass through flesh, the hot dribble of blood. I do it again, again, slashing at my forearm until I’m doubled over, hollowed from pain, the glass all but forgotten in my hand.

  I was wrong. It didn’t help.

  Lying on the floor, my arm wet with my own blood and my muscles shaking, sick and pale, I still ache for Logan. The pain didn’t make it better, like it used to. And it can’t take his place. I still want Logan. Even knowing what I know, that loving him means the loss of my walls,
all the defenses I’d built to keep me cold and unfeeling and dead inside, that it means putting myself out in the world like a live wire, raw and terrified, I still want him.

  Broken and bleeding and wrecked to hell, all I want is Logan.

  Chapter 16

  “So, is it true?”

  I look up, startled that the girl – Andrea, I dredge up from the dusty reaches of my memory - would be talking to me after so long pretending that I don’t exist. Though, I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m news again. Plus, I’d taken off the offending jacket and, for the second day in a row, replaced it with my gray hooded sweatshirt, so I guess that means I’ll no longer be shunned on principle.

  Erik looks up as well, his jaws pausing over a hefty bite of hot dog barely large enough to hold the massive moat of mustard he’d squirted on top of it.

  He’d found me on my bench earlier - the bench that I’d claimed in one of the halls branching off the cafeteria after it had gotten too cold for me to wait it out outside. He’d just walked right up to me, standing there until I was forced to lift my gaze up his substantial height.

  “You should try solid food sometime, I hear it’s a real scream,” he’d said with a crooked smile.

  When I hadn’t answered, hadn’t returned the smile, he’d just motioned with his head. “Come on.”

  I hadn’t argued. He’d grabbed my bag for me off the floor and led me to that same table I used to sit at with his friends, pulling the chair out for me. As I sat I’d noticed a loud but indecipherable look pass between him and his girlfriend, and I wondered about all the words prior to him coming to get me, all the things I hadn’t been privy to hear.

  But then Andrea had spoken up, black hair pulled back into that same thin, sleek ponytail; the same girl that had remarked so tactfully weeks ago that even though Logan was hot, she didn’t “do” psycho.