about a boy,
who was lost,
and thought he was found,
until he meets a girl,
the same girl,
who makes him wonder
if there's more to life
than just getting by.
-
[a Jem-centered novella/sequel to The Girl Who Saw Through Jem]
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Chapter Ten
You're Not My Homeland Anymore
Jem
It was a very lovely summer evening in New York; fast-paced, transient, and sporadic. Cars ebbed and flowed from every cornerstone as Caleb and I escaped the club Effy brought us to.
"Where should we go?" I asked him.
"I heard of a great bar just down the street," Caleb professed and I followed his lead. Walking down these foreign but familiar streets of Manhattan with Caleb gave me the strongest sense of nostalgia and deja vu as we passed by bodegas and grimy sidewalks because all I could think about it was that night- that night where everything went wrong, where I wrecked my mother's wedding, we fought and everything on the fragile bridge I called the relationship with Ellis collapsed.
Memories from back then don't come through cleanly; they're all speckled with grit and dust by now. Holes and gaps could be found in the movies of my past; segmented with details missing or foggy images. As much as I like to replay the times from before, they never come back the same ever again. Nostalgia was inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed.
When we turned into a corner, we came across this fancy restaurant with a massive glass interface. A girl was looking at me through the glass and I stopped in my tracks automatically, my breath stuck in my chest, my throat hurting from stifling back a gasp.
Everything seemed to slow down then, like a slow-motion sequence in a movie. I drank her in. Her short hair was now past her shoulders, to her back, like a river of black, and her delicate features drenched in her milk pale skin was twisted up in shock, then pain, then hurt. I noticed a boy next to her, all suited up with two older types sitting on their table. They were eating dessert and I got the picture.
"Jem, what's wrong?" Caleb asked me when he caught me stopping. He followed my gaze and saw what I was looking at. Surprise at seeing Ellis Chan out of nowhere in New York registered on his face and he opened his mouth to speak but then he saw Ellis, her date presumably, and his parents and promptly shut his mouth. His gaze flickered at me and he didn't say anything.
It was a loaded silence, one that said everything in nothing.
With a herculean effort, I wrangled my face to arrange itself into a smile and then walked away.
-
I was sunrise-flushed when my eyes cracked open to the ubiquitous scent of coffee brewing in the air. My gaze was drawn to the large, wide windows. There was always something magical about this first glimpse of the city, especially now, with the windows dipped in the amber haze of the rising sun.
Something a lot like reality slapped me hard on the face when I blinked once more and raised my head from the couch I was sleeping on to gather my whereabouts. I licked the dry roof of my mouth, which is coated with the dirty grime of last night's beer and dehydration, and looked at the leather watch latched onto my wrist.
