The Gray Case

twenty-four

The hallways are always chaos, filled with raging and racing students. Emotions are always tangible there, but not this time.

It's close to empty where Maya and Marcus stand. One in front of the other, he avoids looking at her, seeming ashamed of something that's never been told.

"Look at me, Marcus. I'm tired of all this." He doesn't seem to listen. He is there, but he isn't. His eyes are blank and looking at him, he doesn't feel like anything anymore, not in this light and under this circumstances.

He is tired, too. His shoulder leans lazily on the locker and he keeps his lips somehow agape. Not pursed, because he has words, but not open because he probably dreads the effect they have.

"Alexander broke up with her, right?" His words are hesitant, angry and quivery. Just like him since the day he had too many questions not even he knew the genesis of.

She sighs and that's because he hasn't changed. Maya crosses her arms over her chest, still patiently hoping he would talk with her instead of just talking to her.

"That's what I heard."

For a second, for a heartbeat, the thought of Alexander crosses her mind, she hasn't seen him all day and there is something in her chest that slowly opens, like a void or a black hole that's just waiting for it to be filled by something good. That something good being Alexander.

But that thought is gone as soon as Marcus's voice crashes abruptly against the edges of Maya's mind, echoing and pulsing.

"Fucking asshole."

Maya now leaks a new energy, it runs in her bloodstream and in the life trapped in her limbs, sporadic and wild. It's incessant yet ephemeral but until it falls into Marcus's oblivion, it doesn't stop.

"What's really wrong with you, Marcus? Why do you seem to care so much about him?"

"Why do you care about him? Do you really care about him that much?" No longer seeking for the locker's support, he stands alone, on his two feet breathing in the intensity of his insecurities and breathing out from within heavy, heavy, poison that taints her in a way he doesn't see.

"Yes, I do! I really do," she says and admitting it was as easy as the truth always is. She takes a step closer towards him and softly, with a slight brushing of fingers on his arm, she touches him. "But I care about you too and I just want you to tell me what's going on."

On her side, there are gloomy innuendos that lead to sheer faith she still has in him. She holds him tight, but only through the eye. She has always been patient like that, even when in front of her stands a boy that has become a fallen city, dark, dead and corroded.

For a few days now he has had traces of an apocalypse laying deep under his eyes and there has been, for now and now only, no way of reviving him.

"What is it that he has? What's so special about him, hm?"

He tilts his head to a side, sending his thoughts and doubts to a place in his mind that is filled with them—questions that have no answer. And this one is one of them because she doesn't reply.

She could go on and on, ramble by talking about every single thing she has learned to like about Alexander. His fragile insecurity and the manner he only has of always holding onto the past for things that have no future.

Flaws, to her, are just complementary and inevitable and no matter what, she's glad that there is a sort of complicity between them. Even if she may be the one to feel a little more.

At loss of perfect and better words, she doesn't speak, but there is magic and sweet understanding in the unspoken.

He smiles bitterly without a word added. With him, he drags hints of clear jealousy but right now it's invalid and superficial because to Maya, there is something missing, lacking, blurred and what that is, is the cause of that jealousy, the genesis of it.