“Yeah, exactly! Why else would you’ve wanted my help to find a way to interact with her unless you weren’t interested?”
“You’re not making any sense, Carmen.” He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. She was driving him mad.
“You’re not making any sense! Are you even listening to yourself right now? You’re making my head messier than most of my doodling with all this confusion.”
“Por Dios,” he swore under his breath, shoulders slumping in defeat, this nonsensical argument draining him of all energy. “Carmen,” he said slowly, stressing on each syllable like a teacher would speak to a kindergarten kid. “I do not like Willa in that way, okay? The rest is history.”
But Carmen didn’t seem to be satisfied with his explanation, and she didn’t appear to be leaving his truck either. She folded her arms across her stomach and nestled her side further into the seat.
“But then, why did you—I don’t understand.” She shook her head, completely ignoring his words about everything else being history.
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered. “It was nothing but a moment of impulse anyway. I was being stupid and an absolute idiot.”
He watched her pull in the rightmost corner of her bottom lip, her eyes never leaving his face as they searched and searched for something that would explain what he couldn’t find the words to.
“To whom doesn’t it matter?” she asked finally.
Asa blinked. “What?”
“You said it doesn’t matter,” she pointed out. “So, does it mean that it doesn’t matter to you? Or did you mean that your explanation wouldn’t matter to me?”
His lips parted because maybe his mind knew this was the time to say something—to respond somehow. But his heart was sending a different message, because words failed him right then. And Asa had always been a heart-over-head guy.
God, Carmen heard him. She heard him the way someone who’d been trapped in solitude and bound by shackles to cold concrete walls would want to be heard when their screams ripped through their vocal cords.
Carmen heard him, and somehow, that was everything.
“Your silence kind of answers that question,” she said, offering him a small smile. “Want to tell me why you think what you have to say wouldn’t matter to me?”
Asa swallowed, knowing he could just dodge these questions and get the hell out of there. Away from her. Away from Carmen West. because she heard him when he didn’t expect anyone to, and if Asa wasn’t careful, he could fall in love with her for it.
Despite that, he stayed put in his seat and only reached forward to kill the engine, realising that he might be here for a while.
“Because,” he paused, “it’s… stupid?” He couldn’t meet her eyes. He wouldn’t. “Yes. Stupid. Actually, it’s even stupider to be talking about it, so you should probably just get going, Carmen.”
“Why do you think it’s stupid?” Her eyes stayed fixed on his face, never faltering. Never wavering. She didn’t push him with her words or urge him on with her gaze. She just waited, and waited, and waited.
Carmen just sat there, her eyes patient and warm on Asa’s face as if she was ready to make the whole world pause on its axis if it meant that he’d have more time to formulate the war raging on inside his heart into words.
Asa noticed this. Again, he reminded himself that if he wasn’t careful, he could fall in love with her for it.
“Because…Well… I mean, when I first ran into Willa, she just…” he trailed off, creasing his forehead as he tried to explain something that had been building up ever since that moment in his predominantly-white primary school he’d attended in this predominantly-white city he lived in when one little girl had tapped her mother’s hand and pointed at Asa, exclaiming loudly that he had different skin and that he spoke with a different accent.
Asa must’ve been five or six at that time, same as the little girl. But the mother had still turned her daughter’s face away and shot her a disapproving look.
“Stick with the others in your class, honey,” she’d told her, tucking a strand of the girl’s red hair behind her ear. “It’s for your own good, okay? And stay away from that one, too.” The woman had then gestured at another boy whose mother had come to drop him off.
Asa hadn’t seen anything odd about the boy’s appearance because, unlike Asa, he had the same fair skin as the little girl’s, but then he noticed the boy’s mother with a cloth wrapped around her head, covering her hair, and he wondered if maybe that had been the problem.
Asa hadn’t been able to see anything wrong with it, though. He’d just seen himself in that boy, scared as all hell to start first grade at a new school. He had also seen other kids his age, with the same fear on their faces. He hadn’t seen them by the clothes their parents wore or the colour of their skin; he’d just seen the same frightened expression on each and every one of those students. Despite everything else, they’d all felt the same emotion.
Perhaps that moment was the stepping stone in Asa’s wondering why he wasn’t born in a way that everyone considered normal. And every other moment after that was just a chain reaction. A snowball effect. A snide remark here, a cruel comment there, a few nasty looks tossed into the mix. They’d all gathered as the years flew past, piling atop one another until it no longer suffocated Asa but became part of him.
And maybe it was a more open world now, maybe it being 2018 meant that things were different for this generation, but that luck was reserved for the kids born now. Asa’s damage had already been done years ago, when bigotry dominated every fibre
