CHAPTER THIRTEEN
COVENANT
"There were all sat opposite of each other as far as I can remember. The lights were dimmed to a mellow amber, walls painted in a lazy eggshell white, the radio was giving out a soft static. Somehow, I found it impressive that nobody was speaking. The words of the radio were interesting to me so I was the only one paying attention. But all that everyone else could think about was what the old man was thinking about. He was by far, the most frightening one. The two boys, one significantly older than the other, the wife, pregnant with the third — it's a girl definitely. It's a vanilla and daffodils scent that gets stronger and doesn't leave the mother till after birth— but anyway, he was just sat there waiting."
She was still sat in the middle of class, dwindling upon the different aspects of American History, listening to a voice that was speaking inside her head from across the classroom. To say that it was rather awkward listening to this as she sat beside the boy in question was an understatement as to say.
"Your poetics are impressive Sanah, but it doesn't really explain what you wanted to tell me before," telling her as she rests her head on her hand, poised to give the impression that she wasn't falling asleep in class. "But continue as before."
"Maybe I should leave it there. A cliffhanger would add some flavour to this bland dialogue," which she can tell she's grinning about while the nib of pen dips into the sheet of printing paper. "I'll continue though, don't worry. I want a happy ending."
"Your story is telling me that there'll be anything but a happy ending."
"He breaks the silence. So you got all C's? This is what you were so ecstatic to show me? The mother takes the chance she has to leave the room with the older son, but the father orders him to say. He says nothing about the mother. You want to tell me that your teachers couldn't look through your pathetic and worthless self, just to even scrape you an A? The son stays silent. But it wasn't his shouting that got to me. Everything was just so silent. When he stood up, it was intimidating. Like the glass that he had so furiously thrown against the wall wasn't enough to scare me, but the haste he was in to send him into the cellar, and lock him in ..... in the um..... I just woke up."
"Sanah?"
The lonesome little girl had watched him push the boy into a freezer despite the protests that he was putting up and silenced his cries with the never-ending length of chains that wrapped around the appliance. The period of time that she's been in the same preschool and middle school as Lahey, she's never understood where his claustrophobia originated from, and her inconsistent nagging didn't imply that she wanted to know because it was never any of her business, but seeing it made her eyes prick with tears.
She would hold onto that so Roman would find out herself. His phobias were to be discussed between people who he trusted, not that he was aware that she was seeking out memories in his mind. Despite it being second nature, it wasn't supposed to be something that she told others about. Not only the fact that they would question her abundantly vast knowledge on their thoughts and stuff but rather the fact that it wasn't morally right.
You see, Sanah and Isaac shared very similar personalities. Looking through his memories during History gave her the time to truly understand why some things had clicked with other things or why he behaved the way he did. He was silent because he was always waiting for the strike, he spoke curtly and short because he didn't want to speak out of turn, his phobias were self-explanatory and made her feel sick just thinking about how his father didn't even care about how it mentally affected his son.
