Page 7 of All That We Never Were

“You think?”

I nodded and smiled at her. “Keep doing that.”

In the months to come, every time I went to see my parents or the Joneses, I would spend a while with her looking at her latest work. Leah was… She was her. There was nothing else like her. She didn’t have influences; her lines were so distinctive I could have picked them out anywhere. She was light, and there was something that drew me to her, as if her pictures compelled me to keep looking, keep discovering…

8

_________

Leah

I got out of bed with a sigh when Axel shouted that dinner was ready. He had made some vegetable tacos that were steaming on his so-called coffee table, a surfboard with four wooden legs in front of the sofa. Apart from his desk covered in junk, it was the only table in his house, unless you counted the old trunk where he kept his record player. Everything there was very him, with that furniture that matched despite being so different, the order in the disorder, the reflection of inner peace in the small things.

I envied him. That way of living, so unworried, so relaxed, always looking ahead without stopping to look back, always focused on the now.

I sat on one end of the sofa and ate in silence.

“So you’re taking your bike to school tomorrow.”

I nodded.

“Would you rather I drive you?”

I shook my head.

“Sure, your call.” Axel sighed. “You want some tea?”

I looked up at him slowly.

“Tea? Now?”

“I always have some at night.”

“It’s got caffeine,” I whispered.

“Doesn’t bother me.”

Axel took the plates to the kitchen. I looked at him over my shoulder as he did. His hair was dirty blond, like ripe wheat or the sand on the beach at dusk. I looked away from him quickly, confused, pushing aside the colors, burying them.

Axel called me a few minutes later, cup of tea in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in another.

“Come out on the porch?” he proposed.

“Nah, I’m going to bed. Good night.”

“Good night, Leah. Get some rest.”

I got under the sheets even though I wasn’t cold, and hid my head beneath the pillow. Darkness. Just darkness. In Axel’s house, you didn’t hear a single car pass down the street, no distant voices; there was just silence and my thoughts, which seemed to shake and shout and try to break out. When I felt anxiety bearing down on my chest and my breathing turning irregular, I closed my eyes tight and grabbed the sheets, wanting everything to be gone. Everything.

* * *

The next morning, I found him in the kitchen.

All he had on was a wet red swimsuit. He was making toast. He smiled at me. And I hated him a little for that, for smiling at me like that with those perfect lips and that gleam in his eyes. I tried not to look at him and opened the fridge to take out the milk.

“Sleep well?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I lied. I’d had nightmares again.

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