Chemistry (11 page)

“Please,” I say, still not daring to look at her. “Please, don’t. Just let me get through this.” Keep running down that hill, Claude. Faster and faster. “When I heard what kind of girl you were, when I heard you were good and kind, I knew you didn’t stand a chance against him. He’s the worst kind of person. I learned that he wanted to… take advantage of you the night of the dance. So I attended with Valentine, and we planned to keep watch, just to make sure you were safe. I had no idea how things would turn out. I had no idea what would happen to me when I saw you dance.”

My heart races and I feel dizzy, but I can’t stop now. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you. Then you would understand—I know you would. I thought I’d seen beautiful things before, but now I know I was wrong. You… You’re unbelievable. You’re light, you’re warmth, you’re summer. I never knew how cold I’d been my whole life until I stood next to you and felt warm for the first time. In that moment, I laid all my ambitions, all my dreams at your feet. I would have given anything just to be allowed to stand next to you for the rest of my life. But you hated me—I was certain of it. Still I had to make sure you were safe. It was the least I could do for you. You, who had melted me. You, who were slowly destroying me, though I barely felt it. It’s the old adage of the slow boil. At the time, I only knew I wanted to stay where it was warm. And then the party… and Phoebus.”

In a voice so low anyone else would strain to hear her, she whispers, “Phoebus.” To me, she may as well have screamed it. Each time she speaks his name with that look in her eyes, I see a horrifying reflection of myself. She’s in love, just as I am. Only the person she loves is a monster. I hate him, and I’ve never hated anyone before. Not really. Sure, I’ve been disappointed in people. I’ve looked down on them, I admit. I’ve never felt as though I belonged anywhere, so maybe those sour grapes helped me get by. After all, why would I want to belong to such a pathetic group of people? But hatred? No. Wishing violence or pain on anyone? Never.

Not until now.

“Where is Phoebus?” she says.

I cringe. “Please, don’t say his name like that, for both our sakes. You have no idea what it does to me—what
he’s
done. He’s… He’s ruining everything. He’s made you think he loves you, hasn’t he? He doesn’t, but you believe him.” I realize I’m scolding her, and that’s the last thing she needs right now. She doesn’t deserve this. “No, it isn’t your fault. It isn’t mine either. I mean, it’s human nature, isn’t it? There’s just no fighting it. We want… We need to be loved. I can’t believe I’ve wasted so much time imagining I could survive without it.”

You know that feeling you get when your chest has been constricted or you’ve been sitting too long in a stifling place, and then suddenly you can breathe again? You step outside, and the clear, chill air finally fills your lungs. You feel like you could float away, and you can’t believe you were ever accustomed to asphyxiation. That’s how I feel right now. Every chain I had wrapped around myself, every plate of metal in my armor has just disintegrated. I feel like laughing or dancing. But when I look at Esmeralda, I am reminded of why I’m here.

“Sorry. We should probably go now.” I reach out my hand to her.

She refuses to take it. “Where is Phoebus?”

“Please,” I say between my teeth. “Please don’t.” I’m shaking again, but not from nervousness. This time, I’m overcome with rage. I hate myself this way. “Esmeralda.” The sound of her name quells the anger in me. “Esmeralda, if you had any idea how much I loved you, how much you’ve changed me, you wouldn’t be so cruel. You couldn’t. I would do anything for you—I honestly would. No other guy will say that to you and mean it, but I do. Ask anything of me. Every dime I make will go to you. Every hour I live will go to you. My heart is yours. My mind is yours. Every work I produce in life, I’ll dedicate to you. Just stay with me.”

At first, I can’t read the expression on her face, but when she finally bursts out laughing, I know it for what it is: contempt. “Look at you,” she says, with more venom than I could have imagined would come from that perfect mouth. “You’re pathetic.”

Her words hurt—I won’t lie—but I know I should have expected them. She knows I stabbed Phoebus. Of course, she hates me now, but we can sort all this out later. “That’s fine. I’m pathetic. Insult me all you want. It won’t change how I feel about you. Hate me and call me names. Just come with me. It’ll be dawn before you know it, and those guys are coming back here with a rope and a ladder and God knows what else.” I take her by the wrist and try to pull her to her feet, but she resists me.

“Where is Phoebus?”

“Please, Esmeralda.”

“Where is Phoebus?” She’s mechanical. She’s ruthless.

I can’t stand it any more. “He’s dead,” I say.

She looks almost as though she expected to hear exactly what I said. She most definitely believes it. Her whole body sags. She looks like she’s going to be sick. I know I’m doing this to her, but I can’t stop. No, I don’t want to stop. Her horror, her hatred of me is far easier for me to handle than seeing her dream of love with him.

“If he’s dead,” she says, nearly spitting the words at me, “you’d better leave me here because I have no intention of surviving this.”

I can barely see her through the red in my eyes. How dare she show me such beautiful possibilities, and then snatch them away. How dare she. I can’t understand it. I can’t understand anything. But suddenly, I want Phoebus to be dead more than I’ve ever wanted anything. And my reason for wanting this is what truly disgusts me. I don’t want it for any hatred I have for him. I want him dead so she will suffer. I want to punish her for loving him, for choosing an asshole over someone who would have died for her, for daring to prove false everything beautiful I saw in her. She is not intelligent. She is not different from other girls. She’s just like them, in fact. She’s just like every last one of them.

“He’s got to be dead,” I say, desperate to convince myself. “The knife went too deep. I must have killed him. I must have.”

She lunges. I expect everything but rage from her. In my mind, she’s not allowed strength after I’ve just discovered her feebleness. But she lunges, and she hits me hard. I fall back into a rotting table stacked with old, plastic planters.

So this is what they mean when they talk about cruel fate. I control nothing. I wonder whether she feels it, too: that she’s being pushed into place like a chess piece, that she has no choice in this matter. Her actions are someone else’s moves. We’ve been pitted against each other. Star-crossed, I imagine.

“Get away from me!” she screams, her accent heavier than ever. “Freak! Murderer!” Then she loses her English completely and starts screaming in a language I don’t understand.

I clamber to my feet, toppling several more stacks of plastic planters as I do. She hates me. Even if she didn’t before, she does now. And I both love and loathe her. “He’s dead,” I repeat, if only to see the pain in her face. Phoebus is our mutual weapon. She swung at me with his name, and I will slice her with his fate. I can be crueler. She shouldn’t have woken the beast in me. She should have accepted my kindness. “He’s dead!”

I back toward the door, and she sinks to the ground, defeated and ready to die. I can already feel the tears burning my own eyes. Lucky Esmeralda. It’s much more pleasant to freeze to death than it is to burn. It’s much easier to fall asleep in the snow and just give up. When you’re on fire, you can’t stop fighting, even though you know you’ve already lost.

BOOK NINE

The only thing left for me to do is run.

I doubt I’m even human any more. That’s the truth. I’m fleeing like a hunted animal, but the shadow I can’t escape is my own. It is forever at my heels.

After an hour, I board a city bus, breathless and exhausted. I don’t bother to see where it’s headed. I don’t care. I just have to keep moving. I have to get away. The moon has set, and soon the sun will rise. I wish I could freeze time, but it wouldn’t matter. If I approached Esmeralda again and offered to save her a second time, if I reached out my hand to her, wouldn’t she just slap it away? Wouldn’t she just tell me she’d rather die alone than spend another second with me? How can I fight that? Who am I to take from her the tragic end she so badly wants?

Three people sit in the seats across the aisle from me. Two of them are making out. It takes me several minutes to recognize them. The third-wheel’s name is Tristan. He plays defense, I believe, although I’ve never actually been to a soccer game, so I couldn’t say for sure. The other two, the boy and girl who can’t seem to separate their faces are—it pains me to report this—Lily Darling and Phoebus. He’s just fine, a little stiff maybe. I can see a bandage peaking out from under his shirt.

I pull my hood strings tight and wish to God I’d stabbed him deeper.

“You know they’re only doing this because they think you’re dead, right?” I hear Tristan say.

Phoebus pulls his face away from Lily. “I think they’re doing it because they want to do it. Wouldn’t make any difference whether I got involved or not, most likely. Those guys are brutal.”

For a moment, Tristan seems troubled by Phoebus’ complacency. “Yeah, but it could make a difference. I mean… don’t you care?”

Lily pulls Phoebus back into her arms and gives Tristan a look that would be more appropriate on a mother grizzly standing over her young. “Why should he care? She tried to kill him. I’m not letting him get anywhere near that bitch ever again… not even to save her life.” For a moment, I see regret in her expression, but whatever goodness Lily Darling has buried at her core doesn’t stand a chance against her fear, her jealousy, and her terrible animal instinct. She punctuates with a timid, “Fuck her,” which is even less convincing than her new attempt at behaving like a proper slut.

In the past, I couldn’t understand why one person would go through so much to secure the affections of another. I scoffed at it. I saw the way people changed who they were for the sake of a crush or even love, and I thought them stupid for doing so. Now I know the truth. The change in you doesn’t happen because you want it to. It happens regardless of your intentions. And, like quicksand, the more you fight it, the faster it pulls you in.

II

Long after Phoebus, Lily, and Tristan have gone, I’m still sitting in the same uncomfortable seat, riding the bus to the end of the line. I don’t want to be anywhere near the school or church at dawn. I don’t want to be able to find my way back.

It’s clear to me now. My own reflection is finally coming into focus. All along, what I thought was a hero’s cape was really a monk’s cowl: the dark costume of the gothic villain. I am the freak, the lurking shadow, the breath on the other end of the line. I’m not supposed to save the girl; it’s me she must be saved from. Probably this idea is laughable to you, but let me show you what it looks like from the inside.

My first thought is of my brother, how right he was. It was ignorance of myself that led to this, my own belief that I could choose what I became. Every good deed I ever tried to do was twisted, from my earliest days, into something destructive.

I spoiled my brother; now he’s an addict.

I befriended Valentine; now he’s been accused of assault.

I tutored Peter; now he’s hanging out in the Court of Miracles.

I fell in love…

Love, in anyone else, is the highest of human virtues. But in me, love is warped. In me, it’s a fire, devouring everything I wanted to become. It’s hopeless. Poor Esmeralda. To be loved by a thing like me… Every girl I scorn walks away with a free after-school alibi. I despise Phoebus, and he’ll probably be more popular than ever because of his injury. But Esmeralda I love, and for that, she’ll be killed.

And then I think about her killers, how they’ve stripped her, how they’ll handle her. She’s a holy vessel, and those animals will deface her. This thought is followed by two more I only wish I could attribute to madness. First I’m angry with her for letting them touch her. She had a chance to escape and she threw it away, just because it came from me. Second—and this I am most ashamed to admit—I envy her killers. Because they’ll put their arms around her body. They’ll embrace her to hoist her into the noose they’ve made, and she won’t reject them the way she did me. This thought, this first glance at the demon in me, is enough to make me shiver in fear and disgust.

I exit the bus at a stop I don’t recognize. It’s rural, away from the city. If I can just get far enough from the world I know, maybe I can outrun this. I wish I could just keep going until I hit the coast. I want to stand in the sea and taste the salt in the air. I want to feel small and believe that nothing I ever do could possibly matter.

I walk down the old road, run my hands along the rotting fences, and breathe in the dawn. The cattle and horses are just starting their day. I feel like I’ve stepped into another world, and suddenly, I wonder if I really could. Is the idea of all possibilities existing at once more than just popular science fiction? Could another me exist on another plane, a me who is not a monster or “the priest”? Have I, somewhere, held Esmeralda in my arms, kissed her, told her how much I treasure her, and has she responded with equal love? Do we travel in the summertime? Do we go walking along the coast? Do we study together during the school year? Are we part of each other’s lives?

I swear if she loves me on another plane, we are the happiest couple that ever lived. I swear no one ever loved another person as much as I love her. But in this twisted world of mine, that only means no one has ever hated another person as much as I hate her.

The cock crows a third time, and my mind swells with the guilt the universe intends to inflict on me. Yet when I examine myself more deeply, when I dig under that pretentious layer of remorse, I can see the truth in me. I’m not sorry. Right now they’re tying a rope around her neck and clumsily attempting to string her at an appropriate height. Right now someone is trying to match her handwriting and compose her suicide note. But all I can think about is how, right now, she does not belong to Phoebus. And she never, ever will. So how monstrous will you think I am when I tell you that every decision I have made to this point, I would make again and again?