Two Truths and a Liar

XXII • After

Leon

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 "I'm sick of hurting people,"

I dragged my fingers down the bottom eyelid of my eye and stared blankly at the ceiling.

"I'm so, so sick of it."

The girl Jenna, who asked me coldly to call her "Avella" helped me dress my wounds and find fresh clothes. Harley avoided me. I was unable to move, paralyzed in a creaky iron-frame bed somewhere in the backrooms of the chapel, where storage bins and dust covers clogged the airy spaces and not a soul but the dark haired girl coming in and out disturbing the silence.

The silence wasn't restful.

I wanted to apologise, but I wasn't sure how or to who. She said when I asked her, that he was here, but I never saw him. Not when I was conscious. My memory was like dark water, like a blanket of empty darkness save for a few ripples across the surface, flashes of scenes that made no sense, blurs of color, echoes of sound.

 I knew I'd done something. The pain in my chest, the shallow, slipping memory of darkness, faces leaning over me as I watched through dazed eyes half closed  told me I was going to remember all the parts I didn't want to. The parts that hurt. The parts I'd regret. 

And the scorching pain like lightning laced along my back told me I deserved it, from the knife they'd pulled from my back.

"It wasn't your fault,"

Her accent was strong, something I had only just noticed the second day when I wasn't running in fear of myself. I didn't hear many accents in the cookie cutter suburban circle, my mom only involving herself with other families of the same interests, same skin color, same life. There was no room for differences in friendships, it seemed, how on earth would you get along? 

It was why I saw the same people. Stayed on the same side of the block and the same side of the school. Never thought about the world of other people living other lives.

But who knew such a strange chain of events could tear me from the world I knew, the only people I could trust becoming the ones I never thought I would cross paths with. 

"Feels like it," I muttered.

There was a cross on the rusted table beside me, the form of the man slung across it, arms outstretched, glinting silver and dotted with black. He gazed at the room, the carved sockets of his eyes leaking disappointment. Even Jesus wouldn't meet my eyes.

I stretched, holding out my arm to touch the form against its metallic face. Don't be mad with me, I wanted to say, it wasn't my fault.

But scorching heat met the tips of my fingers, shooting up into my arms and making me recoil, crying out, the burn fizzling before dulling to a numb throbbing and a sting. 

"It's silver," Avella leaned over the frame of the footboard, arms crossed over the top. "You can't touch it,"

"Why's it here, then?"

"For protection. The maledictus shys away when faced with something it doesn't like,"

I swallowed hard, eyeing Jesus suspiciously.

"Hey, don't you have parents or something?"

She leaned over, peering out the doorway on the far side of the room at the lingering figure, half seen leaning against the wall steeped in silence. Phone in hand, other occasionally swiping the screen or brushing his untidy hair from his face.