Chapter10
941 Words
He is there.
I see him from the top of the Westfield front steps — the black car, the self absorbed way he stands beside it, like he belongs in every space he occupies and knows it.
Like gravity works slightly differently in his vicinity and he’s made his peace with this.
I haven’t seen him since the verification night.
I don’t change pace.
I go down the steps at exactly the speed I was going.
I walk past him.
I am twelve feet past him when he falls into step behind me, and I don’t turn around, because I have decided his being there does not affect my movement.
I walk.
He follows with the determination of someone who has made a decision and is committed to it without being aggressive about it.
I make it half a block before I say, without turning.
“Go away.”
“I know.”
I stop and turn around.
He stops.
He is exactly three feet behind me on the sidewalk, looking at me with the expression I have been trying to read correctly since the Verification and failing at.
It’s not coldness or calm, but the product of enormous ongoing effort to maintain a tough exterior.
He is in his regular clothes, the non-ceremonial version of Caden Ashvale, and he looks like the person I have known for six years and also like someone I’ve never met, and both things are true in a way that makes me tired.
“You’re following me.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t invite you to follow me.”
“I know.”
I look at him and think about the forum post — the dead wolf, the carved message, the girl with the golden blood — and I think about Roman’s protection offer and Elias’s folded paper and the gold in the bathroom mirror and the way this week has rearranged everything I thought I understood about my own situation.
Caden is here, on a Tuesday afternoon, outside a school he has no reason to be near, three weeks after destroying something irreparable between us, and he has followed me for two and a half blocks without saying anything except no and I know.
“I want you to explain yourself.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
“I don’t have anything better to say right now.”
“You publicly rejected me in front of seventy people and severed a bond we had been carrying for two years without warning or asking me. You didn’t tell me anything.”
I say this at a normal volume, on a public sidewalk, which is the version of the story I can manage.
The full version lives somewhere in my sternum where the bond used to be, where the c***k is, and I’m not accessing that version on a Tuesday afternoon in front of a hardware store.
“You showed up at my new school. You followed me for two and a half blocks. And the only thing you have to say is ‘I know.’”
“Yes.”
“That’s not enough.”
He doesn’t flinch or argue.
He just stares at me with the same pair of steady eyes.
“I know that too.”
I look at him for a long moment.
I look for the angle — the thing he wants from this conversation, the outcome he’s trying to achieve.
I’m good at finding angles.
I’ve been finding angles and motivations and the gap between what people say and what they want for my entire life.
I look at Caden Ashvale on a Tuesday afternoon on a public sidewalk and I cannot find the angle.
I find something else instead, something I don’t have language for yet, something that looks like: he doesn’t know what he’s doing here either.
He showed up.
He’s following me.
He has nothing prepared because he came without preparation, and Caden Ashvale does not do unprepared things.
Which means this is something outside his usual repertoire.
“Why are you here?”
“Because I needed to see that you were—” He stops. Starts again. “Because I needed to see you.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that.”
“I know. I’m not asking you to believe it.”
“Then what are you asking?”
He is quiet for a long moment.
“Nothing. I’m not asking anything.”
I look at him.
The October afternoon goes on around us — a woman with a stroller, a delivery truck, the ordinary machinery of a weekday.
He came here to see me and he isn’t asking for anything.
Even though he knew I’d walk away, he followed me anyway and when I confronted him, he didn’t defend himself.
“Stay away from my school.”
“Okay.”
“And stay away from Mira’s house.”
“Okay.”
“If you have something to tell me — something important, something I need to know — you can text.”
“Okay.”
I turn around and walk away.
I count to forty before I let myself check.
I look back once, quickly, the kind of look that’s over before anyone can register it as looking.
He is still on the sidewalk.
He hasn’t moved.
He’s watching me go with the expression I’ve been trying to read correctly and can’t, and he doesn’t look away when I look at him, and I face forward and I keep walking.
I don’t know what to think.
I don’t let myself dwell on him either.
I walk home.
- Writer
