But then I picked up a hint.
“On the glass,” I told her.
She nodded, smiling. “I love that sound. Like the world is asleep.”
It looked like it, too, remembering the blanket of white over everything outside. How water kind of had a habit of quieting the world around me my entire life, and in one form or another, I sought it out and reveled in hiding behind it.
Looking over her shoulder, out the window, the snow fell, charging the air with a little more beauty, the animation making the Earth look alive even when everything else was still. A little more pretty. A little more peaceful. A little more cover.
She always got that about me. She felt it, too.
Even when we were kids, she knew.
I sit in the fountain, the water spilling over the sides from the bowl above, down around me, and hiding me from her.
My finger stings, dripping with blood where I’d sliced myself on a thorn as I ran through the maze, but I don’t dare make a sound or even breathe.
She’s searching for me, and I just want to be left alone. My chin trembles. Just leave me alone.
Please.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she says, having bumped into a little girl. “Are you having fun?”
I close my eyes, imagining I’m far away. In a cave. Or out at sea. Anywhere away from here. I rub the little scratches on my wrist that I’d put there yesterday, trying to see if I had the balls to do it. Maybe I won’t do it. Maybe I will. If I did, I wouldn’t have to stay here with them. I wouldn’t have to live here. It would be over.
“Have you seen my son?” I hear her say, and I open my eyes, my hair and tears blurring my vision. “He loves parties, and I don’t want him to miss this.”
I don’t like parties. My knee shakes uncontrollably. I don’t like anything.
“No,” the little one says.
But I see her staring at me through the water, and I wait, terrified she’ll tell my mother I’m here.
Don’t, please.
My mother finally leaves, and the little girl moves toward the fountain, checking behind her to see if anyone is still there.
Approaching, she calls my name. “Damon?”
She can leave, too, for all I care. I want to be alone.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
Just fucking go. I don’t want to talk. I won’t say the right thing, and I don’t want to answer questions. Just leave.
“Why are you sitting in there?” She peers through the spills of water, and I shiver, the cold seeping through my clothes. “Can I come in, too?”
I notice she wears a tutu—everything white—and her hair is twisted into a tidy little bun. She’s younger than me, clearly one of the students from my mother’s school. Winter, I think? She’s been here before, and I was in the same grade as her sister.
“I see you at Cathedral sometimes,” she tells me. “You never take the bread, do you? When the whole row goes to receive communion, you stay sitting there. All by yourself.”
The nanny takes me every week—my parents making me attend but never bothering themselves. It’s the one thing that bitch lets me fight her on, too. It all felt so fake, like the makeup women put over their bruises to hide what’s happening to them. It’s an act.
“I have my first communion soon,” she says. “I’m supposed to have it, I mean. You have to go to confession first, and I don’t like that part.”
My lips twitch, my anger fading just a little.
I don’t like that part, either. It never stops me from making the same mistakes. It seems weird to receive forgiveness for repeatedly doing things I know are wrong but I’m not sorry for.