CH.5 - Something Wrong
1172 Words
Anna's POV
The party's already loud by the time we get there.
The whole team pours in together, still damp at the hairlines, still high off the win, and for once I let myself be carried by it. Music, bodies, someone's cheap speakers rattling on a folding table. Nobody here is whispering about the fish girl. For one night I'm just a girl who won her race, and it's enough.
Liam finds me almost immediately.
He's a year under me, all eager energy and a grin he aims at me like I'm the only person in the room. He's been doing this for weeks now, the cute little orbit, and it's sweet in a way I haven't decided what to do with.
"Did you see my relay split?" he says, falling in beside me. "Coach clocked it. Personal best."
"I saw. It was good, Liam."
"Good?" He clutches his chest like I've wounded him, and a laugh gets out of me before I can stop it, and that just lights him up more. He likes making me laugh. He's not subtle about liking it.
The crowd thickens toward the back of the room, where a ring's been set up on a low stage, ropes and all, a knot of people hollering around it. A boxing match, here at a party. Of course there is.
Liam's eyes go straight to it.
"Besides swimming," he says, puffing up a little, "I know a bit about boxing, you know."
"Do you."
"A bit."
"Then go on." I tip my chin at the ring, teasing. "Go win me a prize."
I don't actually think he'll do it. But he's eighteen and showing off for a girl, and that's a powerful kind of stupid, so before I can take it back he's pushing through the crowd and climbing up between the ropes to a roar of half-drunk approval.
And the thing is, he's good. Better than I expected. He's quick on his feet, light, and he takes down the guy he's matched with to a cheer that pulls my own hands up over my head. He beams straight at me across the room.
"That's my prize," he mouths.
I roll my eyes. I'm smiling though.
Then a man steps out of the crowd toward the ring, a beer still loose in one hand, and calls up to Liam in a lazy drawl.
"Fight with me."
My eyes catch on him and won't let go. I've seen the way he holds his shoulders before. The unhurried way he moves, like the room will wait for him. It tugs at the edge of something I can't reach, a face from a place I half remember, and then the crowd shifts him out of the light before I can pin it down.
Liam, riding his win, says yes.
It's over fast and it's wrong from the start.
The man is a different order of thing. Liam swings and he simply isn't where the punch lands. Liam's good, but this is a cat letting something smaller tire itself out, and within a minute Liam's the one stumbling, taking hits, and the smile slides off my face. This isn't a match anymore. It's a lesson, and Liam's too proud to stay down for it.
He gets up. He always gets up. That's the part I'd warn him about if I could reach him.
Blood opens at the corner of his mouth, bright under the lights.
And the man changes.
It happens between one breath and the next. The loose, lazy thing in him pulls tight. His chin drops, just slightly, and his nostrils flare, his whole body going still the way the water goes still right before something big moves underneath it. The cup in his hand hits the floor. He doesn't notice it fall.
The crowd's still cheering. They don't see it. The hair lifts along my arms and the back of my neck goes tight and cold, and I couldn't tell you why, only that my body has understood something my head hasn't caught yet.
He moves.
Too fast. The thought arrives sideways and lodges wrong, faster than that, faster than a person should, and Liam's on the floor and the man is over him, one knee pinning him, a fist drawn back over his head. There's nothing loose in him now. There's nothing playful. The crowd whoops like it's still part of the show.
His face turns half into the light.
Evan.
The name lands and the floor isn't quite under me anymore. The boy from the boat. The boy from the hallway. The boy whose stupid crooked smile I tore off the page, and his fist is c****d over a kid he's about to break, and the thing wearing his face has nothing behind the eyes that I recognize.
The shout's out of me before I choose it, ripping across the whole room.
"Are you crazy?"
He stops.
The fist hangs in the air. The terrible stillness in him fractures. His head comes up and his eyes find me through the crowd, and I watch something climb back up behind them, a person surfacing out of deep water, blinking, remembering his own name. His chest is heaving. He looks down at Liam pinned under his knee, then at his own raised hand, and something in his face says he knows neither of them.
The room's still roaring. Only the three of us are still.
"He's already hurt." My voice comes out shaking and furious at once as I push to the front. "And you've still got him pinned. Get off him."
Evan eases back. Slow. Careful all of a sudden, the way you'd set down something you've just realized could break in your grip.
"It's just a match," he says, but it scrapes out of him hoarse, like he's the one he's trying to convince.
"You could have stopped." I'm at the ropes now, Liam dragging himself up beside me, wiping red off his lip. "Whatever that was, you could have just stopped. Nobody has to get hurt here."
For half a second something crosses his face that isn't the cold and isn't the animal. His jaw tightens, his eyes flick away from mine and back, and there it is, gone almost before I catch it. Something that looks an awful lot like being afraid. Of me. Or of his own hands.
Then a shutter comes down over it, and the lazy mask drops back into place like he's lifted it off a hook.
"Your little boyfriend lost," he says, tipping his head at Liam, and he pitches it cruel on purpose, loud enough to carry. His eyes stay on mine. "Do you want to fight me next?"
The whole room laughs, sure it's a joke.
My hands have gone cold. I don't laugh, because I was watching his face in the half-second before this one, when he stared at his own fist like it belonged to something he was afraid of. That wasn't the act.
This is.
- Writer
