Evasive Darkness

Chapter Six - Lonely boy

Chapter Six – Lonely Boy

Bella and I barely spoke as she dropped me out the front of my house. I walked inside and past my mum, who was lying on the lounge room floor, without a word. I didn't have anything to say to anyone.

I fell onto my bed and the tears from earlier that day began their unrelenting flow. I was sobbing into my pillow when mum opened my door and silently came and lay on the bed besides me. She gently wrapped her arms around my shoulders and I moved so that I was sobbing into her chest.

"I don't want to be here," I told her between sobs. And it was the closest thing to the truth I had said in days. I didn't want to be there. I liked the Twilight world when I was channelling it through a book. I was here, but I couldn't ever really be here for fear of changing something. Instead, I had to stay out of things as much as possible. I wasn't allowed to get involved in people's lives. I was here, but I had to pretend like I was.

I was quite literally being pulled into two people and it was exhausting. I couldn't manage the life that I had and now I had two and they were both crumbling. Neither of them was fulfilled, both of them were lonely.

"Oh sweetheart," my mum purred, her voice soft in my ear. "What can I do to help? Did we make a mistake moving here?"

"We didn't have a choice," I told her, and then fell asleep in her arms.

I woke up in my Texan bedroom and was filled with the familiar feeling of resentment. It was a Sunday and I didn't have to go to work so I decided I would instead stay in bed and read. My friends had long ago stopped calling after the few times I had gone out with them I was too distracted to be any fun and I couldn't tell them what was wrong.

I grabbed off my shelf the first Harry Potter book, knowing that it would almost certainly be able to take my mind off things as it had on a many occasion before. After about an hour of reading my bedroom door cracked open and Eleanor peaked inside. I had barely spoken to her since we had fought and I wasn't feeling up to another argument.

"I really don't want to talk about anything Twilight related," I told her bluntly.

"It's not that," she said, entering my room and sitting on the end of my bed. She was fidgeting and her cheeks were glowing red.

"What is it?" I asked, putting down my book.

"Michael Smith asked me on a date," she spat out. She was fighting a smile, as if she wasn't quite sure if that was appropriate. The first thought that came into my mind was who exactly is Michael Smith. I hadn't heard her mention him before. She hadn't come to me asking me to decipher any text messages for her. I felt tears well up in my eyes as I realised that I had missed this because I was stuck in my own world, or two worlds.

"Aw, what's wrong Leighton?" asked Eleanor worriedly. She rushed to my side to give me a hug. She smelled like mint and honey.

"Who's Michael Smith?" I sobbed, and she laughed.

"Don't worry," she told me, "I know you've been so stressed out lately. I didn't want to lay my problems on you too."

This made me sob harder. "I don't want to do it anymore. I'm here but I'm not here and I'm there but I'm not there. I just want to be here. I want things to go back to normal. I don't want you dating."

Eleanor laughed and lent back against a pillow. She was almost as tall as me. I didn't know when she got so big; so grown up. "I've been thinking about this," she said seriously. "And I think that if you want to be here then you should just be here."

I looked at her sceptically, "What?"

"You've been walking around like a zombie for a month now and I think that if you want to be here then you need to just be here," she paused for a moment and looked me dead in the eyes. "And if you want to be in Forks you need to be there too. Stop holding back."