Mama’s voice when she’s mad disassembles my DNA, like my body is rejecting all of my natural-born organs, pushing them to the surface until they leave my scrawny excuse for a body. So when Tommy came home last night drunk on adrenaline with a purple lump where his eye should be, my backpack was in my hand faster than the rage was in my mother’s eyes. My feet carried me out the door the way leaves are carried by a river, down and around the bend before anyone can blink an eye.
There’s only two places that I can hide where I am sure that my mother is not going to come looking. The first is my Aunt Tia’s; the two have been the starting players in our longtime family feud long before Papa died. Mama’s Spanish isn’t very good, so she avoids my father’s siblings at all cost. This doesn’t stop them from chirping at us in Spanish about our Guera mother every time we have dinner with them. In fact, I think it only makes their disdain for her worse.
The second place Mama will never come looking is the bookstore down the street. It’s low-light and corner shelves only remind her of my father, who carted my brother and I there as children in order to share with us his love for English literature. Papa learned to read between the pages of the great American classics. He went on to get his Masters in American Literature and to teach at the university in the middle of town. I never sat in on one of my father’s lectures, but we were told that his love for words was illuminating and that no one could doze off during his lectures because of the light and energy that he projected. My father wasn’t a star, but a whole constellation.
Two years ago, his students repaid his enthusiastic teaching methods by T-boning his car one night after a frat party. The tailspin sent him flying off the road, wrapping the rusty green metal of his truck around a tree. He made it to the hospital, but not to the operating table. In a matter of hours, Papa became more like the dead heroes of the constellations than ever before.
Mama can’t enter the bookstore without tearing up, but I can’t stay away from it. Every time I walk through the front door, the smell of him hits me like his spirit is stashed away somewhere between the rows of leather-bound books. Papa would be the most harmless of ghosts, haunting the store only to find out the ending of the next Stephen King novel.
Mr. Villanave, the owner, a spindly man with enormous round spectacles that teeter-totter over his mouse-sized face, gives me a head nod as I walk past the counter. The process almost knocks the grey beret off his head as he goes back to punching the keys on his computer.
I can already hear the cushion of voices from the book club meeting in the back room. They’re reading Ayn Rand this month, which was always a little too overthrow-the-government for me, not that I like reading in groups anyway. But their presence is the safety net that assures that none of the regulars will bother me with their constant stream of endless questions. Repetition is key when it comes to bothering teenagers, and all the locals are like the same track on repeat, every conversation mimicking the last.
Tucked away in the back corner of the room, a singular wooden desk with an old fashioned lamp secured to the surface, where my dad, Tommy, and I would sit for hours on Saturdays from dawn to dusk. The light from the windows betrays me by shining upon someone else’s face, a stranger sitting in my chair. I freeze up, but dive behind the confines of the nearest bookshelf before the thief can see me.
Bubbles of disappointment flutter to the surface of my skin as I peek through the hardcovers at the boy in my seat — my age with SAT books scattered around the wooden surface of my sanctuary.
“Spying on your lover?” A voice whispers in my ear, sending me into a flurry as the bookshelf becomes my victim, rocking from the force of my arm pushing against it. I whirl around to face a lion in a human body.
Underneath blond tufts of matted curls, two amber eyes peek out on a field of splattered freckles. He is huge in the way that makes me feel miniscule, as if the space around me is being sucked up into the vacuum of him. He is too old to be flirting with me but too young to own a parent voice and the millions of questions that come with it.
“He’s stolen something of mine,” I grumble in reply to the patches of stolen souls across his nose.
“Oh, you mean your heart?” he suggests, wagging his golden eyebrows at me. He laughs at my deepening scowl. “I’m just messing with you. Gotta have a little fun with it, you know?”
“Oh, yes, making fun of an innocent teenage girl in the back of a bookstore sounds like buckets of fun,” I snort. “You must feel so badass.” My own eyes going rolling away and out the door.
“I am so badass,” he retorts, feigning injury, crossing his heart with his copy of The Fountainhead. One of my eyebrows perks at the suggestion.
“Um…you’re in the book club?” I indicate to the hardcover in his hands.
“Yeah, but it’s a badass book club,” he says. The rows of teeth in his mouth doubles and triples until all I am looking at is flashing white.
“Whatever you need to tell yourself to get by,” I mutter as I make a move to escape past him and out of the blinding light that is his presence. My clumsy legs can barely draw me away, sending me swinging into the bookshelf with a loud thud. The contents of my backpack spill out onto the ground. Like the permanent stain of ink on paper, I know now that I will be unable to erase the image of the lion-faced man gathering up my books and stopping when his hands graze the cover of Papa’s leather journal, our last name inscribed in the cover in fancy gold script. It was a present from my mother on their 20th wedding anniversary. My heartstrings tie themselves into tiny precise knots as the paws of this man are pressing the journal back into my hands.
I see him shrinking, no longer the King of the Jungle but a small housecat — his eyes welling up as his throat tightens, reducing him to nothing more than a child.
“You-you’re Maria?” he blurts out, his voice hoarse. “Your father was my all-time favorite teacher. He was the greatest man I’ve ever met. I’m so sorr–…that night…”
And just like that the shadow that has followed me for the past two years rises out of the ground to darken not just my face but the boy in front of me. It is always trailing not far behind me, waiting to spring forward and slip its cold hands around mine.
“What do you mean that night?” My voice sounds far away, like it’s in someone else’s throat. Like I am not in my own body and I am watching an interaction between two strangers in a bookstore.
“I was in the back seat of the car that hit him.”
The words hang between us before they slowly wrap around my throat and choke the voice out of me.
I didn’t attend the trial of the drunk college boys that shouldn’t have been on the road that night.
I didn’t want to see their faces then, or transposed on every other person their age that I met on the street after that, wondering if they had been there that night.
It had been easier just to forget their names and appearances all together.
But this boy’s face I cannot forget. It’s tattooing itself onto the inside of my skull for me to look at every moment from this one on. The amber irises are widening, begging me to say something, anything, but my throat is constricting, becoming too small for me to even breathe through.
“I forgive you,” I manage to squeak out. The weight of the world is crashing down around us. Stars are falling from their place on the dark cloth of night, trees are uprooting themselves and floating towards the sky, the ocean floods past its outlined shores, swallowing us and the rest of humanity with it.
And at the relaxation of the boy’s face, it all ceases.
“You don’t know how much I needed to hear that,” he whispers, holding his copy of The Fountainhead like it will keep him afloat in the receding flood waters. I clutch my backpack across my chest like a parachute that will save us both.
Mr. Villanave’s rickety voice shatters the fragile silence that builds between us as he speaks through the shelves of books.
“Ms. Maria, your mother just called and said that if you’re not home in fifteen minutes, your hide is cooked.” His words wedge enough social comfort between me and the lion boy that I am able to break free of his spotlight hold and shuffle away.
“Uh… I guess, I’ll see you around,” I sputter as I make a beeline for the front door.
The fresh air that fills my lungs feels like a pillow catching my exhausted soul. The pieces of my shadow settle their way back into the ground below me. I slow my racehorse heart to a slow pony trot as the wind blows through my fingertips. I swear that it smells like paperback books, polished wood, and sunshine.
Leah Harter, nineteen years old, cannot remember a time when she was not writing since it has been her favorite pastime for most of her life. She grew up next to a library and spends most of her free time reading anything she can get her hands on. She is currently in college studying Government and hopes to continue to write in the future.