❝she was the girl, who bit the horizon, who peeled the stars from the sky and put them on her tongue, the girl who was hungry for the universe, who craved magic and saw the broken boy for who he truly was- a broken boy.❞
Beca...
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Chapter 5
Ellis
Your Scars Aren't Even Scars To Me
His shoulder looked as though he had run it repeatedly into a brick wall. It used to be a dark blue, purple twilight colour but it blossomed into an ugly black expanding over the delicate flesh. He hastily covered up his shoulder with his shirt.
"It's nothing," he said quickly and for a moment, there was a flicker of fear exploding in his eyes. Instantly, I was suspicious but I knew that directly asking him to state what was wrong was not going to let me get the answer I wanted. Jem was the sort of person who swerves and steers away to avoid anything that forced him to come into realisation with his problems- a fact that triggered sympathy from me and irritated me as well.
"It doesn't look like nothing."
"Just get back to work," he snapped at me. But I wasn't about to let it go.
"Let me see," I draped my cloth onto the tap and reached to pull down his shirt but he slapped my hand away. I flinched, recoiling back like an automatic spring. He fixed his jaw and his guard had snapped into a tall, towering and barricading Berlin Wall.
"Don't touch me." It came out like bullet blanks dipped in battery acid.
"Why not, Jeremy?" I frowned to inspect it further, "It looks-"
"Just leave it alone." He gritted his teeth and marched away from me towards the toilet stall where he had abandoned the map, leaning onto the cubicle. He took it into his hand and fiddled with the wooden handle, indecisive as he continued scratching the floor with the bristled ends of the grey, discoloured mop.
"Jeremy."
"What, Mom?"
I ignored the Mom comment- since it was obviously atypical behaviour and I wasn't armed with enough wits for a Round 2. I was still in a recharge and Jem's tongue-lashing comments was doubtlessly a customary trait of his. I fixed him a stare.
"Let me see."
"No. Jesus."
"Was it football practice?" I suggested lightly. And he considered it, then nodded. Liar. I knew it wasn't football practice, the shape and the discoloration of the bruise looked like a punch instead.
He shrugged, attempting nonchalance. "Yeah- yeah, it was."
Shaky answer. Hesitant. He was relieved for a way out, nodding immediately and much too fast. I was so naive. I didn't know it then- how he was trapped inside this darkening world of his home life and his mother who had fled and left him behind. He hated his mother. He hated his father. Most importantly, he hated himself. And that hatred transformed into selfishness- selfishness for a distraction from the pain throbbing in his shoulder, the pain haunting the four corners of his life. It became the selfishness to toy with girls and fueled them with deception, then break their hearts, like marionettes on his strings because he was a puppet controlled by his surroundings captured inside a cage. It wasn't fair that he was the only one who seemed to be suffering- so selfishness changed into a self-pity; a desperate, neediness for a way out of the twisted maze.
