Chapter forty-three:

 

 

The world keeps turning, no matter what we throw at it.

Throw bombs. Throw disease. Throw famine. Throw hate and love and war and peace. Throw your swords and your vermin. Throw your everything and it will still stand. It will still turn and be and move and live.

It will always continue, whether it wants to or not.

But I am not the world.

I am a man.

I am Ethan Cowells.

And I will fall if you break me.

I will crumble if you hurt me.

I am only human.

The clock always seemed to tick louder when I was waiting for Carrie. As if the clock was mocking me, and my impatience.

Today was no different.

Mom was going out to the grocery store. Dad had gone to work.

Carrie had said she would come over to see me. I was excited to see her.

I liked Carrie. She let me touch her. She had pretty eyes. She made me feel special, like I was the only one. More special than my mom made me feel. More special than my dad made me feel.

It was a different type of special I felt when I was with Carrie.

She knocked three times on the back door.

Knock, knock, knock…

I almost knocked my stool over when I stood up.

I opened it, my heart full. But she looked different today. She’d been looking more and more different every time I saw her, but today was really bad.

Her lip was bruised—no change there—but this time the blood was still wet. She forced a smile, and I saw the blood on her teeth.

“Carrie?” I said her name and she took a step toward me.

She collapsed in the door and I caught her in my arms.

“I’m okay,” she mumbled. “I’m okay.”

But she didn’t seem okay.

I helped her inside. She winced when she sat on the stool, so I took her to our living room. She still winced, but less so, when she sat down on our sofa. It was soft and comfy. It had large arms that Dad leaned on when he read the newspaper. Carrie used them now to rest her head on.

“What happened?” I ask, but I don’t want to know. I can tell before she speaks that I don’t want to know.

She shakes her head because she doesn’t want to me to know too. She doesn’t want to speak about it. And I breathe a sigh of relief and I’m about to ask her if she wants to get an orange juice and go upstairs. Because the last thing I want is for my mom to come home and find Carrie in the house again.

“I don’t think I can do it anymore, Ethan,” she whispers.

I put my arm around her. “It will be okay,” I say, and I kiss the side of her head like Dad does to Mom when she’s stressed out.

“It won’t. I can’t—” Carrie takes a deep breath. “I’m going to leave.”

“Don’t go,” I automatically say, and then I realize that she means she’s going to go go. Not just from my house, but from her house too.

“I have to. He’ll kill me if I don’t.” Her voice sounds rough and I can tell she’s been crying.

“He’ll kill you if you go,” I say.

And it sounds cruel, but it’s the truth. She ran away before and her skin was purple for a week. If she leaves again and he finds her, he’ll hurt her more than that. I just know it. I can tell from the way he looks at her.

“I’m working on something,” I say. And I am. I have been. I wasn’t planning on telling her for a little longer. I’m only fourteen. But by the time I’m fifteen, or even sixteen, I’ll be a man, and then I will be able to stop Carrie’s dad from hurting her.

“What is it?” she asks, but she doesn’t look at me.

I stand up and I lift up my shirt. I pull it over my head and she stares at me blankly. I flex my arms and I grin, from ear to ear, like my mom says sometimes.

“I’ve been working out,” I say proudly. “I’m getting muscles so that I can stop him. Soon I’ll be strong enough. Just you wait and see.”

Because everyone on our street knows that Carrie’s dad hits her. And that her mom is a drunk. Everyone knows that Carrie’s house is a bad place. None of the kids play near there, because you can sense the evil in it. It’s not just the dirty windows and the peeling paint, or the porch swing that squeaks in the wind. It’s something else. Something unexplainable.

Maybe it’s the men that frequent the house. They don’t look like good people. That’s what my mom always said. I’ve had the same feeling about our house, I want to say.

Carrie smiles at me. I can see from her face that it hurts to smile, because she winces and a fresh drop of blood drips out of the cut on her lip. She stands up and places a hand on my chest. “You’re too good for me, Ethan Cowells.”

“I’m not!” I say. “I’m not, Carrie.” And I mean it too.

She smiles and her hand moves to my face. She strokes her palm along my jawline. There is soft hair growing there now. ‘You’re becoming a man’, my mom said. ‘I’ll show you how to shave,’ my dad said.

“You’re too good for me.” She says it again, but her eyes are far away. “Can I have some orange juice?” she asks, and I say yes and then we go to the kitchen and I pour her a glass, and she says she has to go. She sees I’m disappointed and she lets me touch her breasts before she goes.

“So long, cowboy,” she says as she leaves through the back door.

The door shuts behind her, and I stand at the kitchen window and I follow her with my eyes all the way back home. She stands in front of her own back door for several minutes and I will her to go inside, to not run away again, but after five and a half minutes she turns and walks away from the door.

And I’m left wondering, not for the first time, if I will ever see her again.