I shook my head, reminding myself that I wasn’t a little boy who needed to be looked after anymore… and that I hadn’t been one for a long time. “It’s okay. I’d rather practice on my own. Maybe someplace outside and away from everyone?”
She thought for a moment, and then that almost-smile flashed again. “I know just the place.”
•—•—•
Just the place was, as I started to tell you earlier, somewhere on the west side of campus, through the thick forest of evergreens. There wasn’t any sort of path to follow and Dr. Gibbings’ directions had been unhelpfully vague. All I knew for sure was that I’d know it when I saw it and if I reached the wall that encircled the campus, I’d have gone too far.
I was willing to concede that Alexa might be a decent shrink—way easier to talk to than the fucker back in Bakersfield—but as far as navigators went, she kind of sucked. Next time, I’d request a map.
I thought about just taking a seat there in the woods. It was secluded enough, on the far side of campus from the so-called beach, and well away from the nearest buildings. The rough ground didn’t scream meditation though, and for all I knew there were tigers hanging out in the dark trees above me, just waiting for an easy target.
Or was it jaguars that jumped out of trees?
I was still mulling over that question when I found the place.
Alexa was right; I knew it the moment I saw it.
A small clearing appeared before me, as if by a Druid’s design. On three sides, it was bordered by the trees I’d been hiking through, but on the fourth was nothing but sky and darkness, the hill falling away in a deep slope down toward the campus wall. Above and beyond that wall, a thousand stars gleamed like a tapestry of light, reflected in the dark waters of an otherwise invisible ocean. The breeze from the Pacific was strong and cool, smelling of salt and age and something almost sad.
A stone bench sat maybe ten feet from the hill’s edge, and I could see why the doctor had recommended the clearing. It was easy to imagine sitting on that bench, staring out toward the ocean, and letting the peace and quiet of the place guide my meditation.
Or it would have been, if the bench hadn’t already been occupied.
Fuck my fucking life.
I was turning to leave, resigned to a hike back through the woods, when an all-too-recognizable sound stopped me. God knows I’d heard plenty of it over the years.
The person on the bench was crying.
•—•—•
Listen to enough tears in your life and you start to recognize the flavors they come in, kind of like how a connoisseur can blind-taste wine. That’s not the Crow in me talking. That’s the orphan. No place like an orphanage for tears, unless it’s a cemetery. Abandonment and regret. Fear and grief. Loneliness and pitch-black despair. All of it just another word for pain, just one more expression of that particular tightness that twists away at your core, that squeezes sound from your chest and salt from your eyes.
Whoever was crying on the bench wasn’t just homesick. She wasn’t merely frustrated or angry. Her sobs were quiet, choked gasps that wracked her body. A boy at Mama Rawlins’ had cried like that, three nights in a row, and we’d all let him be, each of us young and scared and maybe a little unwilling to risk caring about another human being. On the fourth night, he went silent, and it wasn’t until the next morning, when someone found his body on the street, twenty feet below the upstairs balcony, that we knew why.
I’d been ten, still dealing with the Jacobsens’ betrayal and the revelation of what I was going to become, but some part of me had looked down at that body, looked at the birds that kept trying to make away with the delicate pieces of what had been a boy, and wondered: what if I could’ve stopped this?
Took some of the older kids leaving. Took me gaining my height, more than a few pounds, and a shoebox of dirty tricks. Most of all, it took a lot of fights—scar tissue on my knuckles, bruises so regular they seemed like tattoos—but by the time I was thirteen, I had control. It was Mama Rawlins’ place, but I took charge of the little ones as they came in. I did what was needed to keep the fighting reasonable, to keep the bullying to a minimum. And when someone cried tears like that dead boy had, I sure as fuck made sure one of us, or two of us, or the whole god damn bedroom was there and did what we could to help.
This wasn’t Mama Rawlins’, and I had no authority at the Academy. Less than none, given the way my fellow first-years saw me. Probably should’ve gone to get a teacher. Or Alexa, even—I was pretty sure she lived in her office; maybe even slept upside down, hanging from the ceiling like some sort of oddly analytical vampire. But I didn’t know who the woman crying was, and I wasn’t sure she’d still be there when I got back.
I don’t like people. Not really. That might be the Crow in me talking. Might be the orphan too, I guess. But I like watching people suffer even less.
I stopped, turned around again, and headed for the bench.
•—•—•
Five steps away, and she was still crying like she hadn’t heard me coming.
Three steps away, I stopped. “Are you okay?”
She launched off the bench, like Her Majesty being shot off the motorcycle, and spun to face me, small hands coming up in fists. “What the hell?!?!”
Those were the first three
