Nights Without Night
Page 20
“Can I take a shower?” Damien managed to say through his chattering teeth. He didn’t have to look at Mrs. McKenzie’s face to know she was frowning.
“What for? I just washed you!”
“I’m cold.”
“Just go upstairs and put some clothes on, Damien. Come on, it’ll be nice and warm in your room.” Mrs. McKenzie ushered Damien inside, shooing him up the stairs with a warning to be quiet and not “stomp all over the place” like Damien tended to do.
He stumbled upstairs, shutting the door of his room softly behind him. A vicious part of him wanted to slam it sometimes, wanted to break the windows and punch the walls and… but it wasn’t worth thinking about that.
He put on three layers of clothes and hid under the covers with the towel around his head to protect the sheets from his still-damp hair, letting his own breath warm the burrow he had made himself. He tried to hold on as long as he could in the stale space made more and more of his own breath, but had to burst out after a few minutes, gasping the cool air into his lungs.
He lay there for as long as his restlessness let him before rolling out of the bed. He grabbed one of the comic books he’d gotten at the library out of his backpack, along with the round pin he always carried with him. He crawled under his desk with his treasure and rubbed the pin with his fingers. His first foster carer had given it to him for talking to the social worker that first time after the three-week-long silence his parents’ death had seemed to have cursed him with. “You Are Super!” the badge proclaimed cheerfully in reds and blues and yellows, the ‘S’ stylized in Superman fashion. The plasticky colours were chipping at the edges, the back rusting into a diseased looking black. Damien tried to look after it, but he wasn’t great at taking care of things, even if he loved them.
He’d liked that foster carer. She’d been nice and quiet, not shouting at Damien when he was bad, even when his throat and lungs choked up and his head filled with an odd sound like the static of a police scanner. Not even when he started talking and couldn’t stop, coming out of him in retches, filling up all that dead space between him and everything else. Not even when he started crying and couldn’t sleep and kept everybody up with all the noise he was making, like he was in pain but in a place too deep, where even he couldn’t quite reach.
He stared at nothing for a while. He liked the nothingness. It was safe.
Damien had discovered there were lots of ways to escape the world. His favourites were comic books and fantasy stories. He liked to imagine himself in the adventure, in a land where good always triumphed. He’d tried drawing his own stories, but Mr. McKenzie had found them and taken them away. Both Mr. and Mrs. McKenzie had sat him down and asked him what was wrong with him to draw something like that, with so much blood and gore. They’d thrown all the drawings away and Damien hadn’t cried or anything, even if his teeth hurt later from clenching them shut. As much as he didn’t really like the McKenzies, he didn’t want to be passed on again. He didn’t want to make them angry, though it seemed to be something he was especially good at.
Damien flipped open the comic book carefully, where superheroes with powers they hadn’t asked for fought for a cause. Damien wouldn’t mind getting superpowers, even if they hurt. If he could choose, he’d pick time travel. He’d go back in time and stop his parents from getting into that car. He’d be a different person if they hadn’t died.
He might not have become so rotten inside
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