I Am Grey

by Jane Washington

  One of his dark brows inched higher, his mouth tightening into a firm line. “Isn’t it?”

  I grew angrier, and that insipid word popped straight back into the forefront of my mind. Why? Why him? Why did he have to sit there, knees slightly parted, perfectly-formed muscles evident beneath his dress shirt, while my feet bled against the ground? Why did he have to stare at me with frightening eyes and immaculate features while I desperately scrambled to bury whatever pain I might have once felt beneath the numb remains of who I was now? He still smelt amazing—like the frigid breeze that had been whipping at me all evening. Every inhale with him sitting so close only reminded me of the sharp, icy sting against my bare arms and legs. I didn’t understand why it had to be him trying to help me.

  I closed my eyes against the image he presented, pulling his jacket closer.

  “Want isn’t so simple,” I found myself saying, as my body began to shiver. I wanted that smell, that feeling of pain; I wanted him to move closer. Everything about him was pristine, undamaged, unblemished, and it annoyed me and intrigued me in equal measure. It annoyed me because it intrigued me. “Sometimes I want to scream at night,” I admitted quietly. “Just to tear the silence apart. Just to feel that shiver in the air—the after-effects of something having happened. Sometimes I can’t stand it; the darkness, the silence. It’s so heavy, like one of those promises you’re sure you can’t keep, you know? It feels like death.”

  He stretched his legs out, his dress shoes edging into my tunnelled vision, pulling me back to his presence, and away from the spiralling panic that had been moments away from clawing at me.

  “You’re wrong.” He spoke softly, unassumingly, as though he wasn’t outwardly invalidating my feelings. He leaned toward me, the arm that had been resting on the back of the bench shifting, landing over my shoulders. “That’s what life feels like.”

  He had lowered his voice to a whisper, probably because my cab was pulling up to the curb. The warmth of his breath spread over my neck, causing another shiver, and then he was standing, his body heat abandoning me completely. He offered me a hand. I didn’t take it. I was developing a dependence on him already. I knew it, and I didn’t want to encourage it. I needed to take care of myself. I handed his jacket back without looking at him.

  “Take care of yourself,” he said, watching me hobble to the cab.

  4

  Appearances

  Sunday was torture, plain and simple. The sunlight was too bright; it stung my eyes and burned against my shoulders. It drove me inside, and inside drove me halfway to insane. I wasn’t an inside person. I didn’t like to be in close quarters with myself—it was cruel, and it felt dangerous. Duke knocked on the door of my RV a few times, but I pretended that I wasn’t home. I couldn’t get Nicholai’s words out of my head.

  “Did you want to be kissed?”

  It wasn’t like Duke had assaulted me. It wasn’t like he had preyed upon me. Maybe it was exactly the way it appeared and there was no deeper analysis to be made of it. Duke hadn’t kissed me for me. What person ever kissed another person without themselves in mind? He was doing it for him, and I didn’t care at all. So it was okay.

  But …

  There was the girl. The girl who was supposed to be a girlfriend.

  That didn’t seem right.

  So I hid, and pretended, and eventually I convinced even myself. There was nobody home, nobody inside. Only a shell of a body. The echo of a sound. The vibration in the air that follows a scream in the night.

  Monday couldn’t come quick enough. I walked the two hours to school several hours early and was forced to wait another hour for my study hall teacher to arrive.

  Mr. McKinnon had known me for years, but he didn’t seem to know me anymore. He stared at me as though I was a complete stranger. I knew about his divorce, I knew that his ex-wife was a lawyer, and that she had cheated on him with her boss at work. I knew that he didn’t take it well, because he gained several pounds and came to school hungover most days. I knew that he had started wearing black, as though she had died: black vests, black socks, black glasses. I had turned up to the funeral of his relationship every day, marking off my attendance with sympathy.

  He should have known about me, too, but he didn’t. Not anymore.

  “I’m ready to come back to class,” I announced, before he could turn me away once again. Before he could illustrate just how little he knew me anymore, by denying me purpose.

  He blinked, and I watched his adam’s apple move up and down.

  “Okay.” His voice was hoarse. He was forced to clear his throat before he spoke again. “Okay then … Miss Grey.”

  He used to call me Mika.

  He ignored me after that, but the tension never left him. Even the notes scrawled on the board seemed to have gained an edge. The classroom filled twenty minutes later—the students seeming to carry in even more tension. It rode in on their shoulders, jumping into the air and multiplying until the strain was so thick that it was almost impossible to breathe through.

  “I heard she killed them,” someone whispered. A girl, the voice somewhat familiar. Probably someone that I used to know.

  Mr. McKinnon couldn’t seem to force them to pay attention. They separated themselves from me, sitting in a ring around my desk so that I had an empty desk to turn to in any given direction.

  “I hear she stabbed them to death.”

  “I hear she was locked up—”

  “Quit making shit up, Hansen, I’ve seen her round, she just hasn't been coming to classes.”

  “I’ve seen her waiting outside the councillor’s office.”

  “We have a councillor?”

  “I hear her aunt kicked her out, because she's a—”

  “I swear I wasn’t with Hannah, babe, I was with my parents.”

  “Liar! You promised you wouldn’t see that skank again!”

  “I didn’t, baby, but—”

  “Willis got drunk again.”

  “I know. Such a marshmallow. He was drinking shots out of his shoe because he lost his cup—”

  “Why don’t they just lock her up?”

  “Right? She might be dangerous.”

  “My mom said I shouldn’t come to school if she’s here. She might hurt me. She never liked me—”

  “You didn’t know we had a councillor?”

  “Do I look like I need head-shrinking?”

  “Quit making excuses, Des, you’re a lying piece of shit. I saw you at Hannah’s house!”

  “What the hell were you doing at Hannah’s house?”

  “You kind of look like you need head-shrinking. You’ve got a big-ass head, man.”

  “I hear she did it with a fork.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Shut up!”

  It took me a moment to realise that my own voice had joined the fray of disjointed conversation. Everyone was staring at me, startled. Mr. McKinnon had dropped his chalk.

  “That’s enough!” He seemed to be talking to me, but he quickly turned his glare on the others, including them in his censure. “Everyone pick a club to join. It’s going to be a long year; believe me, there’s no harm in making a few friends to help you out along the way, and you’ll need extracurriculars to show on your college applications.”

  I started laughing, but quickly swallowed the evidence, as everyone turned to stare at me again. Mr. McKinnon seemed to grow red in the cheeks.

  See? Even he knew that he was lying.

  Friends. What were friends? I used to think that Lacey was my friend. She borrowed my denim skirt—that was supposed to be a binding contract. But no. Lacey wasn’t my friend. I thought that Jedd, who now sat three seats away from me, used to be my friend. He would come over to my house to study, and sometimes we got ice cream. Weren’t those things that you did with your friends? No. Jedd wasn’t my friend. Every person who had set foot inside my house with the hand of friendship extended firmly before them had disappeare
d the very same month that my parents died. They had disappeared, and they had taken their friendship with them. It was portable, it seemed. A kind of currency. One of those pliable plastic cards: easily snapped under pressure or cut up when declined. And the helplines? They were outsourced. If your ‘friendship’ broke down, there was a single number to call, directing you to a hot-box office in Delhi. If you failed the security questions, you were locked out for good.

  What’s your mother’s maiden-name?

  What’s the name of your first pet?

  Have you ever partaken in obscene shouting?

  Were you institutionalised for a year following the suspicious circumstances of your parents’ deaths?

  I had a bad friendship credit rating, and none of these people were going to invest in me. I wasn’t sure what that reduced friendship to, but I feared that it wasn’t much.

  It certainly wasn’t anything to lean on.

  My notoriety seemed to spread ahead of me—through World History, through Spanish, through Geology, through Math, English and Chemistry. And then it went further.

  Into next week, and the week after that.

  Very quickly, it became a part of my routine. I would sit down in my forced bubble and listen to the disjointed whispers around me. Sometimes they knew things that I didn’t. Things about my family, about my parents, about the incident … but then again, maybe those things weren’t true at all. It was impossible to extract truth from whispers; the impossibility of it was in the very nature of a whisper, which carried from ear-to-ear, losing credibility with each pass. At lunch times, I would go to see Nicholai. He would feed me sandwiches that he was obviously buying from the cafeteria. He didn’t need to. I had money. I even told him so, once. He just shook his head at me, and I supposed he was right.

  It wasn’t money that I needed.

  Maybe it wasn’t a sandwich either, but the sandwiches helped.

  After two weeks, though, even that changed.

  I stared at the salad in my lap—at the little red container, at the spiky edge of a kale leaf, and the matted orange of a carrot stick. Nicholai brought these red containers to school every day, always containing a different kind of salad. He would hand me my sandwich while he ate his salad, and then I would go back to class. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we didn’t. But today … today he had brought two little red containers.

  “You made me this?” I asked. I couldn’t tear my eyes from it to look at him. I wasn’t sure why it meant so much to me. It wasn’t so different to buying a sandwich … except that it was.

  I imagined him in his kitchen at home, cutting up carrot sticks. Putting some into his container and some into mine. The picture gave me chills—not because he had done something for me, but because I couldn’t actually picture the kitchen. It was impossible to imagine him in a domestic space. He didn’t belong anywhere so common, anywhere so human.

  “Let’s talk today, Mika.”

  And just like that, my appetite disappeared. Let’s not, I wanted to reply, but he was already speaking again.

  “Some of your teachers have come to speak to me. Do you know what they’re concerned about?”

  “They think I’m detached.”

  “Are you detached?”

  “I suppose.” I glanced up.

  He was smiling, just a tiny bit. “In what way are you detached?”

  “I don’t care about their classes. I don’t care about Japan’s economic revolution. I don’t care about the Vietnam War, or Animal Farm. I don’t care about Shakespeare. I don’t care about—”

  “What do you care about?”

  I stopped to think through his question, as I usually did. I cared about his questions, but he didn’t need to know that. I cared about his opinions. I cared about the plant that he had given me. I cared that he still hadn’t replied to my email. I cared that he hurt to look at, right now, with the smile hovering and two small, dimple-like indentations hinting either side of his mouth.

  “I care about my routine.”

  His smile disappeared, as though it had never existed in the first place. The professional was back; he even pushed his salad away. He eyed the container in my lap, watching my hands curl protectively around it.

  “Eat. Tell me about your routine.”

  I obeyed reflexively, using my fork to spear one of the little tomatoes. I was sitting right before his desk, close enough to lean forward and rest my elbows on it … but I couldn’t, because he had already done that. He dipped forward, his hands loose against the polished wood, his eyes fixed on the tomato. It was at my lips now, but the office was suddenly full of tension. I didn’t understand why. I started to lower the fork, but his head shifted. First to one side, and then to the other. The barest of movements. My mouth was dry, my lips trembling as I parted them and hastily stuffed the tomato inside.

  “Now,” his voice had grown rougher, “tell me about your routine.”

  “I walk,” I croaked out. “Walking … helps me.”

  “Do you live far from here?”

  “It takes a couple of hours.”

  He closed his eyes, releasing me from whatever hypnosis he had woven over me. The room seemed darker, colder, all of a sudden.

  “Do you see anyone? Friends? A boyfriend?” He opened his eyes again.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I make people uncomfortable.”

  “What about the boy who kissed you? It wasn’t that long ago.”

  “He wasn’t really a boy.” At my statement, Nicholai’s expression fell blank, and I was spurred to keep talking, to somehow smother what I had just said. “I suppose I don’t make him uncomfortable. Or his younger brothers. They’re nice. I don’t think it’s very easy for them to make friends.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “They look mean.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.” He leaned back, the mask falling away from his face as he folded his arms behind his head.

  The material of his shirt pulled tight around his arms, one of the cuffs slipping down his wrist to reveal a hint of black, edging its way into view. He had a tattoo. Mister Nicholai Fell, the Doctor of Deviance, had a tattoo.

  “Something funny, Mika?”

  “You have a … um …” It didn’t seem appropriate to point it out, so I shook my head. “Never mind.”

  But he knew. Of course he did. The smile was hovering again, and he shook out his sleeve a little bit to hide the edge of his tattoo, his eyelids lowering almost lazily.

  “You stopped eating,” he pointed out.

  It wasn’t so much of a command, but it still felt like one. I finished the rest of the salad without tasting any of it, and he watched me the entire time. It was unnerving. When the bell rang to signify the end of lunch, I jumped out of my seat hastily.

  “Thanks,” I muttered, on my way out the door.

  5

  Grey Girl

  I had crossed a line.

  I could feel the whiskey in my stomach turning sour and threatening to come back up again. Duke was celebrating something. He had turned up to my RV after three weeks of silence, telling me that he had broken up with his girlfriend. I didn’t really care so much, but then he asked me if I wanted to hang out with him and his brothers, and I suddenly found that I did care.

  I wanted to spend time with Marcus again. He seemed happy to see me when Duke led me back to his trailer, and that made me like him enough to want to stay. He had pushed his dark hair back from his forehead and grinned at me, his arm around a girl, before turning back to his conversation.

  “Here.” Duke pushed a plastic cup into my hand before banding his arm around my waist and dragging me to a chair.

  I sat in his lap, drinking whiskey that seemed strangely out-of-place in a plastic cup, while people hovered around us in a circle. They were all older than me, though a few of Marcus’s friends lingered around, too. I didn’t see Smith anywhere. When Duke laughed at something a guy had said to him, his h
and cupping the back of my neck, I knew that I had crossed a line.

  I felt like vomiting.

  “Need the bathroom,” I muttered, slipping from his lap.

  I stumbled inside, trying to recall how many times my cup had been refilled. Counting was difficult, so I stopped to lean against the table. Someone came up behind me, a small hand on the middle of my back.

  “Grey-girl?” a feminine voice asked. “You okay?”

  I straightened up and turned. Her hand fell away. I knew who she was at once; her arresting dark eyes were the same shape and tilt as Duke’s; her soft black curls reminding me of Marcus.

  “You’re the sister,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she replied, a grin lighting her face. “And you’re plastered, babe.”

  “Sorry.”

  She shook her head, the grin remaining. “No problem. Want to go for a walk? Might be better than locking yourself in here.”

  “Okay.”

  She gripped my arm loosely, leading me out of the trailer and around to the path that twisted toward the train-tracks. Duke’s gathering had been a relatively quiet one, so it didn’t take long to fade out of ear-shot.

  “I’m Jean, by the way,” she said, as soon as the silence wrapped around me.

  “I’m Grey-girl,” I returned, a hint of irony in my voice.

  Jean made a face, twisting her features up until she was transformed from something exotic to something cute. “Sorry about that. It’s how they mentioned you to me—they being my brothers.”

  “It’s okay, I don’t mind.”

  “Your name’s Mika, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Mind if I call you Grey? It kinda suits you.”

  “Uh.”

  She laughed, the sound genuinely amused. “Don’t take it the wrong way. Grey is my favourite colour. It’s the only colour that isn’t attached to an emotion. Grey just is.”

  “My teachers think I’m detached,” I spilled out. The whiskey was probably making me chatty, but Jean didn’t seem so bad a person, so I allowed her to lead us further out, closer to the train tracks.