Human Design | Sirius Black

xxxxii. Torn Between Two Worlds

REECE WAS LYING face front on the bed, his feet pressed against the headboard, and his head hanging slightly off the edge because he was too tall to actually fit on the bed when someone knocked and then opened the door to his flat before he could so much as crane his neck to look up. "Yo, I've been sent to collect a –" Savannah cut herself off when she saw the miserable look on her face. "What's this?"

He let his head fall back down again. "I've been trying to send a letter to my sister for months now and I can't write anything and I hate it and I'm upset because she's supposed to be my best friend and I'm supposed to be able to tell her everything but I haven't even told her that I'm gay and I'm not going to write to her and tell her that I'm just having lots of sex and getting high because that's not – I don't know – that's not how I exist in her head, I'm like a completely different person to everyone at home in comparison to who I am here and I thought it would be thrilling to live two lives but it's just exhausting and I hate not knowing what to say." He spoke all this against the mattress of his bed so that his words were muffled, and he doubted Savannah could understand most of them, but it must have been clear enough for her to know something was wrong because she moved over to sit down at the foot of the bed.

"Yo, chill," she said gently, and Reece could hear the comforting smile in her voice even though his face was still hanging over the mattress of his bed. "Look, if you don't want her to know that you're gay or any of this other stuff, then just tell her something else –"

He snapped his head up. "I don't want to lie to her –!"

"You don't need to lie," she said. Reece let his face fall back down to the mattress, and Savannah laced her fingers into his hair to pull him back up. "Just tell her about something insignificant that stood out to you. I mean, tell her about how you found a new favourite candy – and I just realised that you don't eat candy cause you're a psychopath but something else then – how you saw something the other day that made you think about some childhood thing or how you've gotten better at basketball, who cares, you can find something that's honest but that you're comfortable with." Reece continued to frown but felt slightly relieved, processing her words slowly. Removing her fingers from his hair, she cupped the sides of his face to brush the few tears that had fluttered from his eyes off his skin, rolling her eyes as she did so. "Why is it that white boys get to look so pretty when you cry? I cry and look like I've just caught my head inside a beehive, for fuck's sake."

Reece nodded the best he could with her holding his face. "You're right."

"I always am," she said, smirking.

Except the smirk reflected weakly on his face, and he mumbled, "I do look pretty when I cry."

Savannah let go of his head, and it fell back down onto the mattress. "Fuck off." She climbed back up to her feet, brushing down the denim of her dungarees. "Anyway, I came here to ask if you own an enamel pot because Zeke's only got metal ones and the recipe says enamel is better for keeping the flavour."

Climbing off the bed, Reece nodded, saying, "Yeah," as he walked over to collect it from a cupboard and then followed Savannah across the aisle to the apartment on the other side.

"Look! Look at this!" A newspaper was thrust so close to his face that it brushed his nose, which made looking at it nearly impossible. Reece took a step back to see the headline, which said, ANOTHER MURDER AND BURGLARY IN MONTEREY PARK, but he couldn't get a better look at it before Zeke pulled it back to himself and turned it around so that Reece could see the story on the other side, MICHAEL JORDAN NAMED NBA'S 'ROOKIE OF THE YEAR'. He started to read out excerpts from it without giving Reece a chance to respond. "William Doi, 66, Monterey Park, shot to death in his home, which he shared with his wife, Lillie, who was ten years his junior. Doi was shot in the face as he attempted to go for his own handgun. Even though he was already mortally wounded, the felon proceeded to beat Doi into unconsciousness before restraining Lillian with thumb cuffs and raping her. Sticking to his usual pattern, he ransacked the home for valuables. Bill Doi died of his injuries while in the hospital, but Lillian lived. She described the felon to the police as a tall Hispanic man dressed in all black with bad teeth." He stopped reading and threw the paper down onto a chair covered in clothes and snapped his made-up face to glare at Reece. "Am I paranoid? Am I? Tell me, please!"