by Ali Merci
06.
Art Journal
Asa had a spring in his steps as he walked out of his last class for the day.
Time to meet Carmen.
The name sounded so foreign even when he said it in his head. Like it didn’t belong there, not with him. It was just so out-of-sorts.
Carmen. Carmen.
Asa was driving himself crazy, that was for sure.
“Asa,” Hunter greeted with that usual disdain in his voice as Asa walked past him.
“Asshole,” Asa greeted back, not even sparing him a glance.
“You know…” Hunter’s voice was right behind him, falling into step beside Asa deliberately. “You seem pretty chipper today,” he remarked, that typical sneer ever-present in his tone. “What? Mum said she’d make you tacos once you got home?”
Oh, lovely. The stereotypical Mexican jokes now. Hunter’s ability to sink lower and lower never ceased to amaze Asa.
“I don’t even like tacos, you prick.” Asa threw him a dirty look.
His reply seemed to only earn a smirk from Hunter. “Right,” he drawled with the same old vicious glint in his eyes. “I forgot. You need to feel like one of us, to pretend you belong.”
Asa froze, his back going rigid as the words found their way into his skin and crawled up his bones, leaving their imprint on his insides. Just like those words always did. Like a seal had stamped across his heart, his head and on everything that made him Asa.
And he hated it—absolutely hated it—that Hunter knew his way around him, that he knew which buttons to push, which bandage to rip open, and which wound to pour more salt on.
What Asa hated even more, however, was that he always let the poison in. And it sat there inside him, brewing in the pits of his stomach until it slipped into his bloodstream and flowed throughout his entire being.
He just wanted to stop letting Hunter win. To stop letting the part of this world that Hunter represented win.
Asa felt Hunter step closer, put a hand on his shoulder and dig his nails into the flesh. It had no effect on Asa, the pain just fading away and giving into the simmering of his blood in his veins.
And then he heard Hunter’s voice next, quietly saying into his ear with so much loathing and disgust, “You’ll never belong here, Asa. Not with us.”
The hand on his shoulder tightened for a split second, trying to hurt him further—as if physical pain was still necessary after the cruel utterance of those words—and then it fell away and Hunter walked past him, knocking into his shoulder on purpose.
Asa could feel the blood pounding in his ears, his breath faltering, as he let the words build a home inside his head. As he let the words poison him yet again.
Because Asa knew, despite all his efforts and tears and pain, he was still an outsider.
And as long as he was an outsider, there was no finish line for him. There was no end in his efforts to prove himself to others.
He would always be under at least one scrutinising eye, and he’d have to prove their mindset regarding him wrong, or he might rather not be there at all.
•••
With the wheels in his head spinning endlessly, Asa walked out the school doors.
“What, no hi this time?”
Asa paused in his tracks at the sound of the familiar voice, shocked that she was the one initiating the conversation this time. He smirked as he turned to face her, the sag in his shoulders dissipating as he straightened himself into that confident and devil-may-care posture, remembering that he couldn’t let his exhaustion show. Not here. Not anywhere that wasn’t home. And especially not around somebody else who thought he didn’t belong and to whom he needed to prove otherwise.
“Did I hurt your feelings, Carmen?” He cocked his head to the side, narrowing his eyes at her. “Thought I hadn’t noticed you?”
At the mention of her name, the girl’s eyes widened with surprise and she scoffed. “Wow.” She shook her head in incredulity. “And here I thought you only mixed up the names of the girls you rolled around in the sheets with.”
She stormed away, looking like he’d wounded her pride somehow, and there was nothing he could do but stare at her fading figure as she put more distance between them.
Confused as hell, he pulled out the journal from his backpack and flipped to the front page.
No, Asa hadn’t misread anything. It still had the name Carmen West printed on the smooth off-white paper.
Had she been playing him, then? Maybe she was just caught off guard at the fact that he discovered her name—
“Oh, there it is!” a serene and steady female voice called out behind him. The vaguely familiar voice held such immense relief that Asa would’ve thought the girl had stumbled across her long-lost child or something along those lines. “My journal, hello! Asa!”
Asa whipped around, a bewildered expression on his face as his eyes landed on the girl that had been sitting next to hazel-eyed one during AP Lit, the one that had looked startled when she was dragged into their argument. “What?” he asked, blinking like an idiot.
She reached for the book in his hands, and he reflexively took a few steps back. What the hell was she doing?
The girl frowned. “That’s my journal,” she said slowly as if talking to a person mentally incapable of understanding her words. “Please hand it over. Now.”
“No, it isn’t,” he blurted out.
Her frown deepened. “Yes, it is,” she replied, her stupid voice still as stupidly calm as ever. “My name’s written on the first page.”
“It says Carmen on the first page.”
“Yeah.”
“Carmen isn’t your name.”
She raised her eyebrows at his, looking truly surprised and worried for Asa’s mental state. “I think I’d know what my name is,” she said even slower, eyeing him wearily. “Pretty positive it’s Carmen West. So, my journal. Give it to me, please.”
Asa’s mind was a goddamn jumbled mess.
“But—but she—that girl you were with—her name—”
“Is Willa Bonham,” the girl who claimed to be Carmen said. “New student, joined only yesterday, I think.” He thought of her wavy chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Yes, Willa seemed like a more appropriate fit. It sort of made sense, the way he had first thought the name “Carmen” didn’t suit her.
Asa’s eyes took in the girl standing in front of him. This one, on the other hand, he decided, definitely looked like a Carmen.
Pretty wasn’t the first word that entered his mind—not the way it did when he had run into Willa.
Carmen had long, flowing black hair—or was it the darkest shade of indigo?—almost like the endless night sky. Definitely not his type; she was someone he would not call pretty without batting an eye.
Her eyes reminded him of the sky just before it was about to rain, grey clouds bleeding into the white ones. That stretch of calm before the sky poured down in torrents. Also not his type; not what he’d call pretty.
And then there was her name.
Carmen, Carmen, Carmen.
Definitely not his kind of name either.
“My journal,” her voice floated to him and he bit the inside of his cheek. Even her voice wasn’t his type; like the autumn breeze that played with his hair before letting it fall back, or the gust that brushed past his ears in a whisper and then faded away, it starts off claiming his attention before lingering in the air and vanishing into nothing.
Carmen was out-of-sorts, a mismatch of everything that fitted together. If that even made sense.
“Asa?” His name tumbled out her mouth in exasperation. “Asa, my journal. I want it.”
“No,” he said, acting on impulse. Like he always did.
“What do you mean no?”
“I—she’s your friend, yes?” He tucked the journal into his backpack, watching her as her eyes followed his movements. “Willa? You’re friends with her?” he urged.
“Yes.” Her tone was cautious, as if preparing hersel
f.
Something inside Asa coiled in discomfort but he disregarded it; he wanted this. “Help me,” he found himself saying, his mouth working and forming the words before his mind could catch up to them. “Help me with—with Willa. I just, I need…”
What did he need? But Hunter’s words were there, pumping in his veins along with his blood, blending with the oxygen in his lungs and fuelling the fire that was burning in the pits of his stomach.
Asa could belong. He will belong.
And so he steeled his resolve, fortifying it and leaving no room for empathy for this Carmen.
“Just help me out,” he looked her in the eye, knowing she was his last way to get through to Willa, “and you’ll have your journal. So what’d ya say, Carmen?” Asa cocked his head to the side. “Do we have a deal?”
07.
Blackmail
Carmen should say no, she really should. She knew that what Asa was doing was uncalled for, that he had no right whatsoever to be bargaining with her, using something so intimately personal as leverage.
But Carmen’s sense of self-preservation far outweighed any sense of logic or reason in her.
He did not realize that he was holding her everything—her lifeline—in that backpack of his. He was dangling her chance to reclaim the very thing that held souvenirs of her soul in front of her face, and Carmen would sooner die than let the chance slip away.
“Fine,” she bit out, her voice trembling with restrained fury. She wanted to say more, say something that would send a dagger through his heart, but there was that hint of desperation in his eyes she’d seen in others before.
Seen before on Asa himself. On the overweight girls, on the queer boys. The kind she’d seen in her own eyes a few times when she stared into the mirror. The desperation of someone struggling to just coexist with everybody else. The plea for them to just be. To fit in.
But why the hell would Asa want to fit in? The question nestled into the corner of Carmen’s mind and stayed there, undoubtedly plotting to nag at her sometime later.
She decided Asa was a paradox; someone with sad eyes filled with the need to belong yet also someone with a happy face that sat on top of the school’s food chain.
“Fine?” he repeated, sounding genuinely surprised. As if he honestly expected her to put up a fight. Carmen mentally scoffed at the thought; there was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep herself sewn tightly at every single edge, and that art journal had all the means to undo her.
And that was too great a power she’d let anyone have over her. If Asa wanted her help with Willa, as he put it, then so be it.
Carmen, though quiet, was no means ignorant. She’d observed Willa as she interacted with Asa. And it didn’t take her long to realise that the new girl actually enjoyed the banter. Willa seemed to like the attention Asa was giving her.
That fact alone helped curb whatever guilt Carmen felt, knowing that she wasn’t shoving into Willa’s face something the girl wanted absolutely nothing to do with.
“You’ll actually do it?” Asa asked for clarification. “You’re okay with—”
“No,” she cut him off vehemently, her eyes piercing into his, making her feelings very clear. “I am far from okay with this. You do best to remember that.”
Carmen watched his posture soften the very slightest bit, and she wondered if some part of him hated doing this. If there was guilt eating him up on the inside—even a smudge of it.
But his eyes remained resolute; determined. He had set his course and didn’t seem to have any intention of budging.
She could sympathise with the probability that his reasoning stemmed from a troubled place inside his heart—but that, in no way, meant she had to be okay with this. With any of this.
Carmen didn’t have to pay for Asa’s battles. But she also wondered if perhaps this was the universe punishing her. If it was life’s natural course of payback. Karma. Or whatever it was that they call it these days.
It was taking away what she held most dear, and dropping it into the mercy of a stranger.
Just like how she herself had ripped away what her family once held most dear.
08.
The War Inside His Head
Asa deserved the coldness that was radiating off Carmen in waves. He knew that. She shouldn’t have to be a casualty in the war that was raging inside his head. And he was just an impulsive heartbeat away from handing her the journal, apologising profusely and then promising to never show her his face ever again. He couldn’t do it, though. Not when she’d already caved in to his offer. Except it wasn’t an offer, the nobler part of him realised, it was an unfair bargain. A blackmail.
He averted his eyes, feeling the shame crawl up the back of his neck.
But it’s just a godforsaken art book, the rasher part of him argued, not her heart on a silver platter.
“Well?”
Asa’s inner ramblings came to an abrupt stop when she spoke, snapping him out of his stupor and bringing him back to earth.
“What?” He blinked, staring at her. This was the second time she’d caught him off guard, and he was starting to feel like an idiot. She didn’t shoot him a condescending glance, though, or make any gesture that implied she thought he was an idiot, too.
“I literally just met Willa,” she went on. “Like, yesterday, when she joined. But, of course, you already know this. So tell me how I’m supposed to help you. It’s not like she and I have become best friends or something.”
“No?” Asa’s lips twitched, as he peered at her. “Doesn’t the loner girl and the new girl just automatically hit it off and become best pals?”
“You’re implying that I’m a loner,” Carmen stated rather than asked, her brows furrowing.
Now Asa felt truly uneasy. “Well, aren’t you?” he muttered, scratching the back of his head.
“No.”
He shifted on his feet, resisting the urge to bang his head against the concrete.
“Right.” He nodded, swallowing the embarrassment. “Right, sorry. I just…I thought—”
“Exactly. You thought,” she pointed out. “Not knew.”
“Sorry,” he squeaked out again.
Carmen just sighed, and her eyes turned weary. “You let me know when you’ve come up with a plan on how I’m supposed to help you.” She stood there, just staring at him a little while longer before her feet began moving soundlessly, walking away.
She was just walking away? No fight? No lecture on how he was holding her property against her own head? Asa didn’t know what he’d expected—not that he had any time for expectations since he’d just jumped at the notion of getting Carmen to help him—but it certainly wasn’t this.
He wondered just then, how much exactly the art book or journal or whatever mattered to her, if she was just willing to succumb to his whims this way.
09.
Take The Ugliness Away
Asa forgot whose house it was. Forgot the name of the boy hosting the party. All he knew were the red, blue, and green disco lights, the loud beat of the music and Marlene’s hands, lips and legs on him.
Marlene wasn’t someone he’d classify as a friend, despite being someone Asa had known ever since sophomore year. Over the course of their acquaintanceship though, they’d blurred certain lines, both of them enjoying each other’s presence in a way that they’ve become so comfortable with each other that they didn’t need a label. And tonight was another one of those times, with Marlene’s hands tangled in Asa’s hair, and her lips leaving a trail of hungry kisses down his throat.
It felt good. This felt good. Asa felt good.
Marlene let out a moan, her hands wrapped around his biceps, legs straddling his lap, as he sat with his back pressed against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him.
Her fingers trailed down his arms, her body writhing against his with want and pleasure. Asa could feel the way her breath was rushed and heavy, as if she couldn’t get enough of him. As if she thought he was irresisti
ble. As if she truly believed he was beautiful.
Because Marlene liked his skin, and his eyes, and his hair, and that slight Spanish accent in his voice he couldn’t get rid of despite his attempts. Everything that was a testament of where Asa came from, Marlene liked. So had that girl from last week, and all the girls before that. They liked the way he looked, the way he spoke. Just as he was.
They didn’t tell him he didn’t belong.
With them, his skin felt beautiful and Asa had a tendency to drown himself in whatever took the ugliness away.
•••
“Ace.”
Asa stopped stuffing books into his locker and looked up at Isla, in all her cherry-stained lips and platinum crowning glory.
“Asa,” he corrected with a sigh although he knew it was only futile. Isla was never going to grow out of calling him Ace.
“So, Ace, I was thinking—”
“Whoa.” Asa held up a finger. “You sure that isn’t hazardous to your brain or something?”
Isla only shot him a flat look in response, choosing not to dignify the gibe with a reply.
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” Asa mumbled as he went back to doing whatever he’d been doing. “You know I love hearing about your thoughts. Your dreams, goals, if your stars have finally aligned.” He glanced at his best friend sideways and shot her a cheeky grin.
“Sometimes I forget how much of a dick you can be,” Isla said, but there was amusement in her tone. “And then you remind me.”
“Yet you still put up with me.”
Isla only grunted in reply.
Asa had learnt a long time ago that Isla wasn’t the kind to have heart-to-hearts, and she stuck to grunting or making some sort of noncommittal noise in the back of her throat whenever the conversation ventured into any possible emotional territory.
So it wasn’t a surprise, really, when Isla didn’t say something sentimental that ran along the lines of Of course, I put up with you, Ace, you’re my best friend.