Wild ― Piper McLean

―xxiii. birdsongs

VERONA FOLLOWED HECTOR INTO THE HOUSE, their footsteps the only noise they brought with them. They stepped into the kitchen, where a man in muted blue scrubs was doing dishes.

He looked up, frowning. "Hector? Everything okay?"

"Everything's fine, Jack," Hector assured him. "This is Verona, an—an old friend. Verona, this is Jack, one of Auggie's nurses." 

Jack smiled at her in greeting. 

"How is he?" Hector asked. 

"He's calm today," Jack said. "And he ate most of his lunch, so that's a good sign. He's in the living room—I've got The Outsiders playing for him." 

Verona choked on nothing. She'd watched that movie with him. He loved it so much he'd mouth the lines right along with the movie. He made all of them watch it and wouldn't shut up until they'd all seen it. 

That was a lifetime ago, but for Verona, it felt like only a few years. 

"Are you okay?" Hector asked. 

Verona took a deep breath. "Yeah," she lied. "Yeah, I'm—can I go see him?"

Hector nodded. "Through that door," he said, gesturing to the right one. "We'll—we'll be in here, if you need us." 

Verona nodded, and made her way to the living room. 

He was facing the TV, away from her. His hair was a familiar shock of bleach-blond, not a gray hair in sight. 

Slowly, for both herself and him, Verona made her way around his chair until she could see his face. His eyes, blue like the sky behind wire-frame glasses, were trained on the TV as Ponyboy and Johnny played poker. He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and Verona wondered if he still felt the cold, too—if it felt as inescapable for him as it did for her. His face was wrinkled with age and scarred, a long white line where he'd been slashed in Alaska, but he was still Auggie—one of her closest friends. 

She wasn't sure how she managed not to cry as she said, "Auggie." 

There was no reaction, not even a flicker of movement to show he'd heard her. She knelt beside his chair, studying his face like she might see what she should have looked like, as if they looked anything alike. It was as if he'd been her age one minute and thirty years older the next. 

How long had those years felt for him? 

Verona's eyes burned, and she lost the fight against the urge to cry. She swallowed thickly as she managed, "You look good, Sunshine." 

He'd hated the nickname at first, but it had grown on him. He'd even started to blush when Lawrence called him that, though he swore up and down he was just overheated. 

"I don't—" She swallowed hard. "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say. I'm not—I'm not really sure about anything these days." She smiled shakily. "Guess it makes sense I'm talking to you, then. You always gave the best advice." 

Auggie had been one of the smartest boys she'd known, and the kindest, too. He was the best listener of any of them, and he knew just what to say to pull them out of their own heads. He'd given Verona and Jordan names to how they'd felt their entire lives—lesbian and asexual. He'd organized the first pride club at Camp Jupiter, despite pushback from so much of the Senate. He'd worn blue, pink, and white stripes on his cheeks even as the old and ignorant insisted on calling him a name he'd long since buried.  

He deserved the world, but the world had never deserved him. 

"I killed him," Verona told him. She couldn't say his name, couldn't speak it into a world that had suffered because of him. But she could tell Auggie what she'd done. "I don't—I don't know if you saw it, but I... I did. For Jordan. For Lawrence. For all of us. For you." She choked on her own tongue. "I wish I could say I feel bad about it, but—I don't." She swallowed. "He deserved worse."