All I can remember is that we were laughing about something and then, the next second, we were kissing. I don’t remember what he was wearing or where my hands settled on him, but I remember his hands weaving into my hair and pulling me toward him, holding me close.
I remember these shadows like the girl in them is someone else because she’s so different from the one slumped in this rocking chair that they can’t be the same. I replay the shards of the memory like I’m jealous of the seventeen-year-old version of this girl and think about how I’d trade my life for hers in an instant . . . then I kill that wish. I don’t want her happiness to come to an end any sooner than it already did.
I might have been that girl, but there’s too much poison in me now. It killed her off, and she can never come back. I’m stuck with this. Me. Whoever that is.
“Don’t make me kick this door in, Jade, because so help me God, I will do it.” My dad’s voice quivers as he pounds on the door again. It seems to shake the whole room.
“Just do it then. Go ahead. You wouldn’t be the first person to take away my freedom.”
The pounding stops, and I think I hear Mom cry, but I cover my ears because I’m so tired of tears. I’m so tired of knowing I’m responsible for them. I’ve heard so many, late at night when they think I’m asleep, that I’ve started wishing my family had found me dead. At least they’d have had some measure of peace once my body was laid to rest.
At least they could move on. But now, alive, I’m dragging them under with me.
I’m still covering my ears when I hear more knocking, but this kind is different. It isn’t the same thud of knuckles on wood—it’s lighter. Clearer sounding. I lower my hands and look in the direction it’s coming from—my window.
When he sees he’s caught my attention, he stops tapping at the glass and waves. When he smiles, my chest seizes. I haven’t seen Torrin in days. Seeing him now, even through a sheet of glass, makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay. I feel like that for a few seconds.
Then I notice his priest’s collar, then my neck burns with phantom pain, and I realize the sheet of glass separating us isn’t the smallest thing keeping us apart.
When I stay in the chair, he lifts his hands like he’s waiting for me to say something. Or do something.
Torrin and I used to climb the roofs to each other’s bedrooms so much as kids that my dad had threatened to grow thorn bushes on this side of the house when we became teenagers. He planted them the day we went on our first “date” to the pizza parlor on Lake Washington. Except he didn’t realize the climbing rose bush he’d planted was a thornless variety. It didn’t keep Torrin from climbing up here, and when they were in bloom, he always snagged a rose on his way up. So yeah, Dad’s plan had totally backfired.
How nice it must be to wind up with roses when you were expecting thorns.
After a minute, Torrin shrugs and takes a seat. He doesn’t turn away though—he just keeps looking at me through the pane of glass.
I don’t last more than a minute before shoving out of the rocking chair and moving toward the window. After unlocking it, I lift it. When I step back so he can climb in, he doesn’t move.
“Can I come in?” he asks.
He isn’t ordering. He isn’t demanding. He isn’t forcing. He’s asking.
“You can come in,” I reply.
When he climbs inside, the air moves in my room like the heaviness of it is escaping out the window. He leaves the window open and stands in front of me. The last time Torrin and I were in my bedroom together behind a locked door, he laid me down on my bed and kissed me until I felt that spot where this world recedes and the curtain to the other side starts to lift.
He glances around my room for a moment. I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing. I wonder if he knows the exact spot where we had our first kiss, cross-legged and laughing on the floor.
“So I noticed you’ve been avoiding the world lately.” He backs into the closet doors and leans into them. My bed’s in the opposite corner.
“The world can just kiss my ass.” I settle the stuffed elephant back onto the rocking chair.
Torrin notices it, something flickering in his eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”
My exhale comes out in a huff. “No.
“Good.” He claps and continues. “So let’s move on to the reason I scaled your roof.” He holds my eyes, not letting them wander away from him. “Why have you been avoiding me?”
I wander my room, not sure where to go now that he’s here. I’m not sure where I fit now. I’m not sure where I fit in his life.
“You know why,” I say quietly. “Could have saved yourself the scaling.”
“I want to hear you tell me why.”
“Why?”
“So I can change your mind.” His hands slide into his front pockets, and the sunlight catches on his dad’s watch and casts golden beams through the room. It lights up like someone just lit a million candles at once. “I can’t do that unless I know exactly why you don’t want to see me.”
“Because I don’t want to drag you into my mess of a world any more than I already have. Because I don’t want to smear you through the mud on the media’s march to burying me. Because I don’t want to hurt you—again—and because I want to protect you.”
“I can protect myself from them.”