Making It So

I realize that what I’ve posted is quite unpolished. An excess of dialogue is only the least of its sins, I’m sure, but that’s one I tend to notice early. After reading this excellent piece on Writer Beware, I wanted to note that I am under no illusions about the quality of this work. I took a dare, you will recall, that specified a finished novel rather than a publishable one. I can work on the latter, if I choose, once I finish the former. I now return you to your irregularly scheduled blogging…

He sat across from me at dinner that night. I guessed meals weren’t the strong suit of any place feeding large numbers of kids. We’d moved up in the world from chicken nuggets to sliced turkey, and there was blueberry cobbler for dessert, but the most that could be said for any of it was that it was optimistic. I picked at my plate, moving gravy around, stacking and unstacking my peas, until I heard a tray slide on the table, and saw Arion putting his hand on the back of a chair.

“Good evening, Rachel,” he said. He pitched his voice soft and low, and I could not only hear him, but I didn’t feel as though I was being shouted at, like I usually did if someone spoke to me during the cacophony of meals. “May I sit here?”

I wasn’t sure if I should blush or not — even back when I was normal, when life was normal, I hadn’t exactly thought of myself as the girl guys wanted to be around — but I felt my face growing warm anyway. I nodded assent, and he sat, waiting until I had redirected my attention to food before picking up his own fork. Myself, I didn’t know what to do, so I began working industrially at cutting pieces of turkey and putting them in my mouth. If my mouth was full, I couldn’t talk, right?

“I miss music,” Arion said softly, and I nearly goggled except for the fact that I didn’t want gravy to drip out of my mouth if I gaped while I was eating. The conversation seemed so normal and so genuine; it wasn’t about things I’d lost interest in years ago or in things like drugs or vandalism that I had never been interested in. “At home, we always had music at dinner — so many different kinds! Every people and culture has their own music, and all are beautiful.”

He paused, and he was so earnest, so honest, that I found myself swallowing and answering, though the minute before I’d have said I wasn’t interested in conversation.  “There’s music therapy,” I said, “but it’s not much like listening to music with your family.” I looked down again. I thought about concerts I’d been taken to as a child, records I’d been played, and I wished I’d appreciated them more.

“What happened to them? Your family.”

“They died,” I said softly. I turned my hands up and looked at the scars. “Almost a year ago.”

Arion nodded; I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye. “My parents are also dead,” he said. His voice was also quiet, but I caught steel in his tone. “They were murdered.”

There were a lot of tragic tales around here, and a lot of less-than-tragic ones. Mine wasn’t anything special. But murder was something I hadn’t heard before. It added to the growing fascination I felt for Arion. He seemed sad and gentle, and somehow noble, as though he were carrying honor and responsibility. We began to spend our free time together, and I began to tell him about the things I’d lost.

“I guess it was just about ten months ago,” I said. We were sitting on the swings again — that corner had become our place, and though fights weren’t exactly uncommon, none of the other boys bothered Arion, with his well-muscled figure — and a little ray of sunlight was warming my hair. “I hadn’t wanted to go the party with them. My mom said it was okay. They left me money for pizza and I had such a good time by myself just watching TV and stuff. And then the cops came, and I just felt so awful. Like, maybe if I’d been with them, they wouldn’t have been on the road so late because I’d have wanted to leave earlier. Or maybe I would have seen the truck that hit their car. I don’t know, I just — like I was responsible. I just felt so guilty. So, one night, I just — did it. I took a knife and just — cut them. It was like watching someone else do it. It didn’t even hurt, really. I just felt so relieved to know that I was finally getting the punishment I deserved. Then I passed out, and I woke up in the hospital. Afterwards, they brought me here. I still feel like that, you know. Like I should be punished for my parents’ death.”

There was a long moment when I expected Arion to tell me that I was stupid or that I had done something wrong. Instead, he reached out and took my wrists, covering the scars gently with his hands. “I understand,” he said softly, and the words were like a shock of ice waking me from sleep.

“You — you do?”

“I do,” he replied. “I feel that, had I been there, I might have prevented my own parents’ deaths. Instead, they were killed, and in the rush of grief I was an easy target, and it was not difficult for our enemies to take me and bring me here, out of their way. But, Rachel,” he said, earnestly now, “I cannot give in to guilt. I must return and avenge their deaths, and take my place as their heir. Surely your parents left you some legacy of duty or honor that you must fulfill, and even if not, then I cannot believe they would desire your death, no matter how angry their souls or how deep your guilt.”

“No,” I said, “but I still don’t know what to do.”

Arion shook his head, but he did not let me go. “I don’t know,” he said, “but for now, let our task be healing. Once we have come a little ways out of death’s shadow, then we will see our paths more clearly.”

Until the fight, I thought we were just friends. Afterward, I knew there was something more to it than that.
Some of the kids in that place — they were bullies to the littler kids. The staff tried to stop it as much as they could, but it was like any school or any place. If you’re bigger and stronger, you have power, and people with the wrong mindset use that power to get the things they want without regard for others. There was this kid – Donny. And there was this other kid, a littler kid, who went by Petey. He’d been a foster kid — I guess technically he still was. He’d been brought here because the foster family was abusing him, taking the state money but not feeding him, things like that. I remembered the night they brought him in, filthy, looking like a starved rabbit. He didn’t look so starved by this time, but he was still rabbity. An easy target for a kid like Donny.

So Donny was picking on Petey, trying to get Petey to lose his temper. If a big kid attacks a little kid, it’s bullying, but if the little kid swings first, it’s self-defense, and Donny and his friends thought it was funny, watching a little kid try to take on a teenager twice his size. Petey was getting red in the face, and I saw him cock his fist back, ready to take a swing.

Then Arion stepped in. He caught Petey’s punch neatly, without hurting the younger boy, and said, “I admire your bravery, but this foolish knave can fight someone who knows how to fight back.” And he turned, just in time to block the swipe that would have caught him on the back of the head.

The fight was so short that it was over by the time the counselors got there. Arion fought like an artist. The first punch was blocked; the block was followed by a fast strike to the side of Donny’s face. The next blow was directed at Arion’s ribs, but he turned and caught Donny’s arm and just — tugged, a little. Donny went staggering into the side of the wall. He turned, and you could see on his face that he was going to duck the next blow to make Arion hit the wall instead. But that blow never came; instead a next roundhouse kick took Donny in the side and he hit the dirt, hard. Arion pressed his foot into the back of Donny’s neck and demanded, “Yield to me.” And that was it. Any reply Donny made was muffled in the dirt, and then the counselors were there, shouting for Arion to get away. Arion backed off, and I saw a syringe pocketed surreptitiously, and he went meekly enough to be interviewed by a therapist about the fight.

When I saw him later, he was completely unmarked by the scuffle, but disgusted.

“In my home, I was taught to defend the small and weak. Here, I stand up for a child being bullied by a youth the size of a knight, and they want me to take drugs! For being aggressive!”

“There was a kid a few months ago,” I said, “who attacked a boy three times her size. She bit him. They had to sedate her to get her off him. He had to go to the hospital, he was injured so bad.”

Arion frowned. “And the girl?”

“Well, she gained a lot of weight from the medicine. She went home, but I heard a counselor say that she has to go to special ed now, because the drugs dumb her down.”

He shook his head, eyes flashing. “Rachel, I cannot stay here much longer. I had intended to use this time to grieve for my parents and regain my strength, but if I wait, they will attempt to drug me into submission, which is surely what my captor intended.”

“But, where will you go? How will you leave?”

“Will you help me?”

I was stunned, that this capable boy could need or want my help, but my mouth said, “Of course,” before I could even consider the question.

“Then I have a plan.”

Chapter One

The first thing I noticed about him was the look in his eyes. It was late spring, but the temperature had climbed to the nineties, and it was chicken nugget day. The playground smelled like French fries and despair. Two of the smaller kids, I noticed, had already thrown up from playing too much in the heat after lunch. The teenagers had claimed the swingset as our own, and I was twisting on one of the swings across from a group talking, I think, about the drugs they had done and the things they had shoplifted. No one was paying much attention to me, and that was how I wanted it.

The new boy stood aloof. He listened to the group for a moment as he passed by, but shook his head as though dismissing them like the poseurs they were and walked on. Myself he gave a more considering look to, and sat on the third swing, next to me. I looked at the foot-scuffed ditch under the swing, expecting him to move along or at least look away. But when I glanced back up, he was still looking at me, and his eyes were filled with compassion and determination. I occasionally saw one or the other in the faces of some of the adults around here, but never on the kids. Usually by the time they ended up here, the kids were either too cynical or too drugged-out to feel compassionate or determined about anything.

“Here” was a sort of orphanage-cum-psych ward with the optimistic name of ChildSafe. Most of the younger kids had some sort of psychological problem and had been passed from foster home to foster home until someone someplace decided they needed 24-hour “care.” Most of the older kids had been on drugs and were minor delinquents, at the shoplifting and vandalism level. Usually they had been sent here by the court as an alternative to prison, and most of them looked forward to getting out after six months and going back to using and petty crime. I fit into neither category, and preferred to be by myself, and had been mostly left alone.

He was still staring. Had he seen the scars? My face reddened. I didn’t care about the scars, not really, only as a mark of failure. If I’d been successful, no one would be looking at the scars. No one would be looking at me, or wondering about me or worrying about me or trying to get me to participate in a world that offered me nothing. I glanced again. Still looking. This time he caught my glance and held it with his, and I realized that his eyes were — blue, I thought, they must be blue, but there was a purple cast to them, exotic, like something out of a story. Caught thusly, something loosened a little inside me, and the constant tight pain in my wrists seemed to ease a little. I stared back. It may have been the first time in four months that I met someone’s eyes.

“I am Arion,” he said, and it was like an offering. He continued to hold the chains of the swings just like I did, but this was like being offered a handshake. Or maybe it was like a lifeline.

“Rachel,” I said in return.

“Rachel,” he said, as though he was tasting it, as though he’d never heard the name before. “You have a beautiful name, Rachel.” He paused before saying it again, giving it extra emphasis. It was the most earnest compliment I’d ever heard.

I blinked, and then I remembered what you are supposed to do when someone pays you a compliment. “Thank you,” I said. I felt my lips twitch a little. I had almost smiled.