Boon: Book 7

Pre-term

"I didn't hate or even dislike my brother. I am not even sure how so many of those close to me got that impression. Perhaps it was because I was never forward in my affections with him as I was with my parents. But it wasn't because I didn't love him. It was more because he was as much an extension of myself as he was my brother, and I would think it rather out of habit for one to show affection and fondness towards oneself. Otherwise you'd be a narcissist, wouldn't you? And I'd like to think most of us do our best to be or appear to be selfless.

Then again, perhaps that is why so many have low self-esteem or even self hatred. Just because it is yourself doesn't mean it isn't human. If one were to exist with another who abused or neglected one constantly, it would be natural for that one to grow to hate the other. Thus would be the case if one abused or neglected oneself.

It was once Eugene was gone that I really started to understand this. 'Miss' or even 'devastated' doesn't really cover what I experienced. At first it was disbelief, of course. I, after all, could still breathe and function as I had before, so some strange logic concluded that Eugene couldn't be dead. But then he was gone, and so was I as well. There was a hole where potential had been lost, and it leaked regret and 'never will be' like an infected wound. My brother, my other me, was gone, and only in the emptiness could I comprehend just how poorly I had shown him my affection. Now all I had left of him was my reflection, and I found I couldn't hate it as much as I once had before.

Maybe that's why, ever since, I have been called a narcissist."

-Oliver Davis in Gang, under a different name.

I ended up in my doctor's office at 35 weeks, even though my next appointment wasn't until I was 36 weeks along. The painful contractions had been coming more often, interspersed with the regular 'Eugene not backing off from my bellybutton' contractions. One of these contractions had sent a mug full of Naru's hot tea all over his office's carpet and up my legs. Since it was August, I had been wearing shorts and ended up with scalding water up my shins. I can't say I'd ever been less amused to see Naru shoot up and out of his chair like it was on fire. It was just a contraction, I wasn't dying.

Even so, he was with me when we walked into the doctor's office and I saw the girl sitting right where I had left her, jeans, striped shirt, short black hair and all. This time, however, though I made my best effort to act like I didn't see anyone there at all, the chair she sat in along with the one next to it were the only ones open. Naru sat in the chair next to her and gave me a weird look when I just stood there in front of the chair, staring at her.

"Another contraction?" he asked, his eyebrows steepening inward. I had been having them since the night before when Naru had made this call into the doctor's office.

"I...uh..." I couldn't sit on her, can I?

Just as I decided that, yes, I could, she was just a ghost after all, she looked up at me.

Except her face wasn't as I remembered it. Her eyes had gone inhumanly dark, swallowing up the white, and her mouth had frozen in a dried, open-mouth gape. Flecks of skin fell from it as it moved.

"Oh, it's you again," she said, and her voice sounded to me as though from a distance. As the words reached my ears, I caught a growing, darkening stain in the crotch of her jeans. It had a red tint to it. Even though I had just noticed it, blood started dripping off the chair, staining the carpet with dark little circles.

Naru stood-and he kept going up. It wasn't till I hit the floor that I realized it wasn't him that had kept going up, but me that had been going down.

But I caught myself on off white tile. Pale arms trembled to hold me up against a renting pain tearing up my abdomen. The cold lip of a toilet pressed between my thighs, but as I looked down between them I could see past the striped shirt I was wearing to the blood crawling down it's porcelain curve. It was coming so quick-too quick, and it hurt so much. I had never been in so much pain before. Was this a miscarriage? No one had ever told me it could be so painful. I had only ever heard of the sorrow of losing a baby. At most I had been told it was like getting a bad period, but I never cramped when I had a period. My friends had been so jealous of that. So maybe it was just like this for me...