Damage & Decay

Chapter 13

Part two: Zombie Cards (Collect the Whole Set!)

"Everyone carries around his own monsters."

-Richard Pryor

----

For five days after they got back, Eren did nothing. In the mornings he sat in the backyard, invisible in the cool shade of the house as the sun rose in the east. When the sun was overhead, Eren went inside and sat in his room and stared out the window. As the sun set he'd go downstairs and sit on the top step of the porch. He didn't say more than a dozen words. Armin cooked meals and laid them out, and sometimes Eren ate and sometimes he didn't.

Armin did not try to force a conversation. Each night he gave Eren a hug and said, "We can talk tomorrow if you want to."

Nix came over on the third day. When Eren saw her standing on the other side of the garden gate, he just gave her a single small nod. She came in and sat down next to him.

"I didn't know you were back," she said

Eren said nothing.

"Are you okay?"

Eren shrugged, but kept silent.

Nix sat with him for five hours and then went home.

Levi and Marco came by with gloves and a ball, but Armin met them at the garden gate.

"What's up with Eren?" Levi asked.

Armin sipped form a cup of water and squinted at the sun-drowsy honeybees, hovering over the hedge. "He needs a little time, is all."

"For what?" asked Marco.

Armin didn't answer. The three of them looked across to where Eren sat staring at the grass that curled around the edges of his sneakers.

"He just needs some time," Armin repeated.

They went away.

Nix came again the next day. And the next.

On the sixth morning she brought a straw basket filled with blueberry muffins that were still hot from the oven. Eren accepted one, sniffed it, and ate it without comment.

A pair of crows landed on the fence, and Eren and Nix watched them for almost an hour.

Eren said, "I hate them."

Nix nodded, knowing that the comment wasn't about the crows or anything else they could see. She didn't know who Eren meant, but she understood hate. Her mother was crippled by it. Nix could not remember a single day when her mother didn't find some reason to curse Charlie Pink-eye or damn him to hell.

Eren bent and picked up a stone, and for a moment he looked at the crows, as if he was going to throw the rock at them, the way he and Marco always did. Not to hurt the birds, but to scare a noise from them. Eren weighed the stone in his palm, then opened his fingers to let it tumble to the grass.

"What happened out there?" Nix said, asking the question that had hung burning in the air for a week.

It took Eren ten minutes to tell her about what he had seen out there. But Eren didn't just talk about the zoms. Instead he talked about three bounty hunters on a rocky cleft by a stream in the mountains. He spoke without emotion, almost monotone, but long before he was finished, Nix was crying. Eren's eyes were hard and dry, as if all of his tears had been burned away by what he'd seen. Nix put her hand on Eren's, and they sat like that for more than an hour after he was done, watching as the day grew older.

As they sat Nix waited for Eren to turn his hand, to take hers in his, to curl his fingers or thread them through hers. She had never felt closer to him, never believed in the possibility of them more than she did then. But the hour burned away and turned to ash, and Eren did not return her grip. He merely allowed it.

When the evening crickets began singing, Nix got up and went through the garden gate. Eren had not said another word since he'd finished telling his tale. Nix really wasn't sure that he knew she'd held his hand. Or that she'd left.

She cried all the way home. Quietly, to herself, without drama. Not because she had lost Eren, but because she now knew that she had never had him. She wept for the hurt that he owned, a hurt she could never hope to remove.

Eren sat outside until it was fully dark. Twice he looked at the garden gate, at the memory of Nix carefully opening it and closing it behind her. He ached. Not for her, but because she ached for him--and he could feel it now. He'd always known it was there, but now--somehow, for some indefinable reason--he could feel it. And he knew he wanted her. He wanted to break his oath with Levi and forget that they were just friends and . . .

He wanted a lot of things. But the world had changed, and when he had the chance to take her hand, he hadn't.

Why not?

He knew that it had nothing to do with the oath. Or with friendship. He knew that much, but the rest of his mind was draped in weird shadows that blinded his inward eye. Nothing made sense anymore.

He could feel the heat of her touch on his hand even though she was now out of sight.

"Nix," he said. But she was gone, and he had let her go.

He got up and slapped dirt from his jeans, then looked up at the yellow August moon that hung in the sky beyond the garden fence. It was the same moon, but it looked different now. He knew it always would.