They couldn’t make sense of me. I beat the odds. I came from nothing. I was abused and isolated; you couldn’t find a child more fucked-up than I had been. They’d questioned my earlier years. They asked me what I used to do when I was alone. I never answered them fully. There was no point telling them I passed my time counting the holes in the window screen, or the blades of grass in the tiny backyard they’d leave me in for hours, or the grains of sand in the run-down park I’d meandered to seven blocks from the house at the age of six.
Numbers distracted me from the screaming, from the images of blood and tears and the monstrous face of my father who had startling green eyes like mine. Numbers left me floating outside my body when my stomach growled from hunger and my foster fuck of a parent decided to snort cocaine than feed me.
I learned to be detached, idly chewing my nails to fill the hole in my belly, as I marked the painted basement walls with one tick after the other. You couldn’t explain that kind of hollow, cruel existence to anybody. They’d just pity you, and I didn’t want pity.
My story ended better than others in my position, anyway. I was saved. Arthur Wright saved me from destruction, from death. He took me to a home that was warm and showered me with food and love. It was like starting all over again. I had to teach myself to feel instead of not feel, to be openly vulnerable when I’d spent my earlier years locked up inside my head, determinedly impenetrable to those that could do me harm.
So when these “experts” spoke in hushed conversations to my adopted mother and father, they said I was wasting my potential. I needed to be higher. I needed to move forward faster. My brain was a gift and I needed to nurture it. Because it was boring sitting in a classroom enduring subjects I’d excelled at week one. I needed more. I needed to advance so they could throw more questions at me and pick apart my brain.
But I didn’t want any of that, and neither did my parents. Mom and Dad wanted me to have a normal life. To experience it than bury myself in academia where I might never come back to earth. They were scared I’d lock myself down again and throw the walls up, afraid of letting people in too close when loneliness reminded me of my past. They were right, but that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t want it too. If I advanced, left high school and started college early, then I’d be away from Elise. And Elise had eyes I got lost staring into. She had a smile that played with my heart, a heart that hadn’t thumped this hard in all the years in foster care combined.
I was bewitched the second I laid eyes on her. She was so beautiful, I almost felt unworthy of her presence. I couldn’t even eat properly, and she sat there, in all her tender gracefulness, watching me tentatively. I’d never felt more like a barn animal, but still, she wanted to know me. She taught me how to swim and knocked on the wall every night just to make sure I was alright. That kind of affection was foreign to me. I didn’t understand emotion until I was forced to feel the emotions she gave me head-on.
I was only a boy, and she did things to me I didn’t understand. I grew up, fascinated by everything – by anything – that was Elise Wright.
Elise and her pink lips. Those lips glossy, juicy, tempting enough to bite.
Elise and her laughter. That laughter, soft and breathless, music to my ears.
Elise.
Elise.
Elise.
I was addicted to Elise enough that I could endure the torturous hours in school if it meant she was there readily for me to see after class. I needed her within arm’s reach. I’d needed her since I’d walked through the door and my eyes drank in that sweet face. I needed her so much, it terrified me. It gave me nightmares. Me, walking through an endless black maze, searching for my Elise, never finding her, never having her, never getting within arm’s reach to catch her.
She was always so close yet so far away.
Every time I awoke from these nightmares, I tethered myself to her. I lingered around her for the sole purpose of breathing the same goddamn air as her. It was an unhealthy, needy obsession. My brain constructed her, pulled her apart, reconstructed her, and pulled her apart again. I spent countless hours studying the shape of her body, studying every inch so I could mentally undress her and see what lurked beneath.
My heart needed her, but my genius needed stimulation. And imagining her – my adopted sister – naked, dressed, and naked again was not the right distraction for the brain that I was gifted with. I felt dirty for not using it. Felt dirty for not feeding my mind numbers. That was another kind of obsession, and I couldn’t find the fucking balance to feed both.
Staying in this town meant going nowhere. The only college here was a college for agriculture, and I’d prefer needles in my fucking eyes. How could I go to a college – a proper real college in a city – and have Elise near me?