Chapter Twenty-Six
ALEX
*
Ugh. Reader, I haven't been looking forward to this part. There are some parts of my history that I feel totally ruin my image of a cool, suave, handsome Adonis of a man, and this is probably the worst offender. So if you want to keep on thinking of me as a kind of male god, exemplifying sex personified and like Ryan Gosling, Ryan Reynolds, and George Clooney all rolled into one super-man, you might want to skip this chapter.
But then again, maybe you're like Paxton, and you want to pry into my past and figure out my flaws, why I can be a bit of an ass at times. In that case, I suppose you might as well keep reading.
Just keep in mind that I warned you. These next few pages don't paint me in the most flattering light.
Looking over at Paxton, I could tell that she wasn't keen on sticking around for long, not if I didn't tell her the complete and open truth. I doubted that, if I'd showed up without a sandwich for her, she would have even come out to talk to me at all.
I couldn't squander this last chance.
So, even though I hated every single detail I revealed, I opened my mouth and began to talk about something I hadn't told anyone, not once.
"I... I didn't look like this when I was a kid," I began, gesturing down at myself.
She raised an eyebrow as she looked sidelong at me. "What's that mean?"
I heard the acerbic tone of her voice and barely contained my wince. She definitely wasn't sounding at all sympathetic towards me. "I mean that I was a scrawny, ugly little loser of a kid. And that's the truth."
There. Even remembering it, now, hurt me. Deciding that a picture would probably do a better job of explaining than I could manage with words, I grabbed another item that I'd brought in the same paper bag as the sandwiches.
"Here," I said, lifting out the book and opening it on my lap. "This was my school's yearbook. There's one picture in here, I feel, that properly sums up all of my childhood, in a single image."
I found the marked page and turned the book around, holding it out for Paxton to see. She peered at it, still frowning. "Which one is you?"
I moved in a little closer to her on the bench so that we could both look down at the book. I felt the softness of her thigh bump lightly against me and nearly lost my concentration, but managed to hold off any seductive thoughts. Telling her the truth was more important. "This one. There, see that kid flopped down on the ground, with the football team captain's foot on top of him?"
"What, you weren't the football team captain?" Paxton said, joking. Maybe. Her voice didn't give anything away.
I barked a short, sharp, bitter laugh. "Furthest thing from it. I was the loser nerd kid that no one liked, that never got invited to anything, who was always the first target of every bully. The reason I'm on the ground in this picture is because Jimmy," and I tapped the football quarterback, "just gave me a wedgie and dumped his drink over my head."
"And someone took a picture of that?" Paxton looked down at the picture, then back up at me, her mouth falling open. "And they thought it was appropriate to put in the yearbook?"
"Why not?" I shrugged. "Everyone did it to me. Hell, there was an underground bet going around about whether or not I'd try and kill myself before I graduated."
"Oh my god." Paxton pulled the book over to her lap, peered down at the caption. "Wait – the caption says that this is 'the football team giving school punching bag Alex "Piggie" Hamilton a roughhousing.'"
"That was me. Welcome to growing up in small town America, where a bit of bullying is good for a kid's character, helps shape those wimps into real me. When they don't kill themselves, of course."
"That's horrible!" Paxton looked up at me, her face softening, but I held up a hand.
"I'm not done yet. There's more to the story."
She looked like she wanted to say something else, but she bit the words back. Instead, she closed the book firmly, nodded, and turned towards me so that I had her full attention.
"I thought that college would be my opportunity to turn myself around," I went on, looking down at my lap. My fingers were twisted together there, a batch of nervously writhing worms. I hated even remembering those dark times in my life, but I needed to tell Paxton, to finally get it out there. "I met Tommy, but one friend isn't exactly a turnaround. And try as I might, I couldn't seem to catch a break."
"Like what?"
"Oh, take your pick." I felt anger creeping into my tone, forced it back out. "I managed to get up the courage three different times to ask out a girl – three rejections. Bam, bam, bam. I managed to get a decent scholarship when I first came into college, since I saw it as my only way out of my hell of a hometown. But the stress and pressure got to me, and I ended up losing the scholarship from poor grades. I tried to work a part-time job, but that just put me back at the bottom of another social ladder, another place for everyone to pick on me." I shook my head. "It's like I had a damn 'kick me' sign on my back, and everyone could see it except for me. It never stopped."
"Until you got your powers," Paxton guessed.
I shook my head. "Nope. Not quite yet. There's a little more drama to come, first."
Her eyebrows jumped, perhaps wondering what else could possibly happen to make the story even sadder, but she waited and listened.
"It was a week before Christmas," I said, my voice growing softer.
This, right here, was the worst part. I'd never told anyone else about this part. Even Tommy didn't know these details. I'd kept them inside me for so long, I'd nearly succeeded in convincing myself that they never really happened. That the whole thing wasn't real, just a fiction in my head.
"I'd found out that I barely managed to pass most of my classes – I had been on probation for my scholarship, and I hadn't done well enough to keep it. I was about to run out of money, wouldn't be able to afford the next semester's classes."
I closed my eyes, feeling almost like I was reliving the damn memory itself, back there in the grip of soul-crushing, utterly demoralizing fear and hopelessness. "There was a party that I knew about, off campus. I wasn't invited, of course, but I decided to sneak in. One last college hurrah, try and get a real college experience before I had to give up and go find some minimum wage job and attempt to save up enough for another semester of tuition.
"I got to the party, and it was a madhouse. I snuck in, sure enough, started drinking. I hadn't had much experience with alcohol before this – surprise! – and so, in short order, I got very drunk."
"I'm not sure I like where this is going," Paxton said uncertainly.
"Trust me, it gets worse. I tried dancing, got laughed off the floor. Tried chatting with women, got called a disgusting pig – and this is from a drunken girl who, not five minutes later, was on the floor grinding her ass against some douchebag! So finally, drunkenly, I decided to just leave. So I went out, got in my car, floored it out of there while crying."
"You were driving? Didn't you say that you were drunk?"
I nodded. "Very. And I knew that it was a bad decision – but by that point, I didn't care any longer. Hell, I kind of wanted to crash, even. At least if I died in a car crash, I wouldn't have to fight against the crushing inevitability of life any longer. I'd be free, in a way."
I looked up at Paxton. Her eyes were wide, and she covered her mouth with one hand as she shook her head back and forth. She let out a soft sigh, that might have been the word "no".
"Yeah. It was a long way back to my dorm, and the road was icy; there'd just been a snowfall a couple days earlier, and most of it had melted into ice. I lost control going around a curve at a speed that was way too high, and I slammed my crappy little car hood-first into a big oak tree."
I fell silent, remembering. Paxton stared at me, lowering her hand from her open mouth. "On purpose?" she asked, almost too softly for me to hear.
I shrugged. "I don't know," I replied, wincing as tears made the corners of my vision go fuzzy. "I've wondered about it, a lot. Usually late at night, when I can't fall asleep. I want to say that it was an accident, but I don't really know, and sometimes I think that I might have steered towards it."
"But it didn't kill you, at least."
"Nearly," I said. "I woke up the next day in a hospital bed, in so much pain that I could barely think. Hell, I couldn't even really breathe. I was attached to machines, couldn't sleep because they were beeping, couldn't do anything. Three of my limbs were in casts, and the doctor later told me that I'd gotten a punctured lung and a couple of broken ribs, as well. I didn't know any of that at the time, though. All I knew was that it hurt."
I paused for a moment, taking a deep, unsteady breath. Paxton reached out to lay her hand gently against my arm, her face soft and caring. I nodded at her in wordless thanks, reached up with one sleeve to try and wipe some of the wetness away from my eyes.
"It's hard to talk about this," I apologized. "It... it makes me feel vulnerable, in a way that I hate."
"I know," she nodded, rubbing her arm softly against me. "It's okay. You're nearly through."
She was right. I took one last breath, telling me that I could finish the tale, at least. "So I was there, lying in the hospital bed, in more pain than I thought possible. And there, I wished with all my mind, screamed inside my head, that I just wanted the pain to stop.
"And then it did."
I looked up at Paxton, wondering if she understood it. She did. "That was when they started working?" she asked.
"Yes. When I was in the hospital, after trying to kill myself, nearly dead. Suddenly, with a thought, the pain stopped. Like turning off a switch." I remembered the amazement, my confusion about what might have happened. "I didn't understand, thought maybe my brain was shutting down, finally dying. So I wished for the ability to get up and walk around, see something other than the inside of this hospital room before I died.
"And then my legs suddenly felt fine. I got up, and everything worked. I took off the bandages, found newly healed skin underneath them. I summoned up the courage to crack open one of the casts, and my arm was fine. I closed my eyes and made a wish, and the other casts also just... vanished."
I had to stop and wipe my eyes again; it seemed that there were still a few more residual tears that had waited until now to emerge. "It was... it was like nothing I can describe," I told Paxton, gazing into her warm eyes, feeling more vulnerable than I'd ever felt before in my life. "It was like I was reborn. I wandered out of the hospital, barefoot, into the snow, and felt alive. I didn't know how long the wishes would last, but I decided that I'd do as much as I could, as quickly as I could, before they went away. I'd escape that past life, recapture everything I'd missed out on as a loser, turn myself into someone completely else."
I looked down at my hands. "A winner."
For a long minute, Paxton was silent, the two of us sitting quietly there together on the bench. Her hand, I couldn't help noticing, stayed on my arm, curled slightly around my bicep.
"Wow," she said finally. "That is... not what I expected."
"The truth usually isn't what people expect," I replied. "But I wanted to tell you. So when I woke up the other morning, and my powers were gone again..." I didn't finish the sentence, but the rest was pretty clear.
I took a deep breath, started to stand up. "So there, now you know," I finished. "And now, you don't have to say another thing to me, if you don't want."
I started to stand up, leaving the last of my heart behind as I turned to walk away – but Paxton's hand tightened on my arm, keeping me there.
"Just give me a minute," she whispered, and, heart pounding in my chest, I dropped back down onto the bench beside her.