Holding My Breath [Wattys 2016]

5 7 ~ R u s t y

                 

Present Day ~ July 11, 2011

"You look tired."

"I am tired." I keep walking alongside Blue, dragging my feet and squinting at the rising sun. It's almost noon, I think, or maybe I'm just hallucinating.

"You know it's bad to look straight at the sun." Blue glances sideways at me.

I nod. "Hurts the rods in your eyes." He smiles a little.

"What?" I ask, and I see him readjust my duffle bag on his shoulder. I'd argued that I could carry it, but he insisted that I looked like a zombie fresh from the grave and if I try I might just crumble into ashes. I don't disagree with him, but I'm pretty sure that he's right about my flame being gone. I don't know, I guess I can still feel it inside me, but the difference is that now it feels like it's trapped in its own cage. I hate this thing inside of me, the monster that Caesar refers to as my flame. But I know it's what has kept me alive so far, and I might need it again someday soon when he finds me.

"So you're still in high school?" he asks. I know he is; he's always talking to the others about the teachers or the classes. The high school they have here in Wallen is small, and most of them have been in classes together, I think.

"Dropped out, I guess," I say, looking down at my feet where we are walking. The grass is ankle high or more and it tickles my skin in the place my jeans and boots separate. Blue is walking closest to the road, and I'm in the grass. I think he was afraid I might veer into the road while sleep walking and get myself killed. He's not wrong.

"How old are you?" he asks.

"How old are you?" I smirk sideways at him. I realize that I have actually been successful in not telling them anything about me. Not my age, not my name, not where I grew up.

"Seventeen. Senior next year," he says, smiling at me. Why does he do that? Why does he always smile at me? It twists me inside. It makes me feel... weird.

I take a deep breath. "Sixteen. Just barely inside the cutoff date for birthdays. I would be a senior next year." I think I see him grinning a little at me from the corner of my eye, but I try not to look at him. I think that he's just excited to get some information on me. We've known each other for a long while, I guess, but I don't know anything about him and he doesn't know me either. Well, I guess a few months is a long time when you're spending almost every day together.

"Let's see..." He trails off. "My favorite color is blue. You?"

"Did you choose that color because I call you Blue?" I ask.

"Do you call me Blue because of my shirt that day or because of my eyes?"

I laugh a little. "Both, I guess."

"Favorite color?" he asks again, kicking a trash bag that is in our way. I watch it blow lightly away, tumbling like a dead bush in a desert.

"I'd rather not say." He laughs at that.

"Is it that bad?" he wonders, and I shrug.

Red is fire.

White is snow.

Green is money.

Black is underwater.

Blue is ice.

I used to love those colors. I give it a little thought. Other than those colors, which one did I like?

"Come on, Rusty. You can tell me," he bumps my shoulder with his. He is smiling at me again.

"Gold," I say, smiling a little. I've always loved the light of the sun, not the orange of a sunset or the pink of a sunrise, but the gold that jumps off of the grass in the middle of the day. Casting everything just barely with a glittery yellow.

"Why? Is gold for winners?" he asks. I shake my head no. "What then?"

I take another breath. Maybe I'm tired, or I'm actually going crazy, but talking about my favorite color doesn't break my rules, does it? "Gold is... Nobody notices it. They always just think that the sun is bright and that it's hot out. Nobody ever looks at the gold that it layers on everything. Like the sky or the grass. Nobody ever just takes a moment to just look..."

"Straight at the sun?" he asks me, and I laugh.

"Yeah. Because it'll hurt their rods."

We get to Bailey's garage and slip in the back window. The door is louder, and I wouldn't want to wake anyone inside the house. Blue seems to know his way around and has probably done this a thousand times, being one of Bailey's closest friends. I crawl in through the open hole and find myself in the little room I've been crashing in for... how long has it been?

Blue watches me as I sit down my guitar case and drops my duffel beside it. I kick it under the bed and collapse into the thin sheets of the bed. They smell like outside air... that crisp and bitter smell of the sunshine creeping into the room.

He laughs at me and I just close my eyes. "So what are we doing today?" I ask, but it comes out as more of a mumble into the pillow. I think Blue catches his eyes on the wall, where I added a layer of the stencils to Bailey's work. A letter at the bottom, giving me away.

"Did you do this?" he asks. I realize that he asks a lot of questions, and I actually don't mind that much anymore. I nod.

"Farewell message of sorts." I think what I've said upset him somehow, and then he speaks and I get it.

"You were really going to leave, without saying goodbye to any of us?"

I pull my arms over my face, covering my expression. My fingers find their way into my hair, holding onto it and pulling on it to stabilize myself. "It was better that way, I guess. Clean break."

At this point I'm only semi-conscious, I think. Little colors and sounds are dancing beneath my eyelids, and when Blue speaks next, it comes as a wave of music notes flashing through my mind.

"Rusty?" he asks. I mumble and realize that I missed him saying something. I think I hear him laugh, or maybe it's just in my head. It sounds nice. Sweet, like honey. Like my guitar strums.

Every breath I'm taking feels like it's dragging me down into myself. Into the echoes of his voice in my head.

"Go to sleep. I'll wake you up later, okay?" I nod slightly and feel a blanket draping itself over my shoulders. I don't even think twice about falling asleep in a room that has an open window, or an unlocked door.

Blue will wake me up if someone comes in.

As I slip away into the comfort of the cotton blanket, I hear something. I smell the sharp smell that I smelled this morning. When I was spray painting the stencils. Like paint and alcohol, stinging my nose. I smile just the slightest bit.

Blue is finishing the painting of the snowflakes.

I lay there and listen to the sound of him moving about the room, working on the wall until I don't anymore. Until I slip into a trance of the sounds in my own mind, into the colors that dance behind my eyes. Until I find I'm becoming one of them.

And then I'm dreaming.

Drowning.