But it didn’t work. She saw herself breathing, living, existing. And it had the complete opposite effect on her. She might’ve told Asa that he needed to use his own self as an anchor when things got too much, to remind himself that his existence was something that made this world seem less cruel, and she’d meant every single word. She did.
But looking into the mirror never worked when the problem wasn’t with the rest of the world but with you.
She looked into that mirror, and she loathed what she saw there.
When the rest of the world was asleep, she would find herself on the floor, lying helplessly as everything around her crumbled to dust yet again, with her heart dying again along with her mother.
She’d been the wings of too many broken people who were weighed down by burdens that weren’t theirs to carry, but she’d never learn to grow a pair herself.
Her wings had been clipped off long before she could even fathom the concept of flying, and it’d always remain that way.
32.
What Falling In Love Feels Like
All the way back home, Asa couldn’t help but think about how much Carmen’s dad’s sand-coloured hair and sea-green eyes contrasted with Carmen’s midnight hair and stormy grey eyes.
They looked nothing alike. Even their facial features were completely different that there was no way, really, to tell that those two shared the same blood, let alone be parent and child.
Was she adopted? Asa didn’t really know, and despite sharing a few emotionally intimate moments and blurring the lines of their friendship recently, he still thought it was too soon for him to ask her something deeply personal like that. Hell, he didn’t think it would even be acceptable to ask such a question, regardless of what the relationship between two people were.
But, goddamn, Carmen was everything, and he wanted to take his time peeling back layers after layers of her soul and memorising every single curve, edge and vertex of her existence.
Existence.
She’d said that his existence was proof enough that this world wasn’t too terrible a place.
Something exploded in his chest and seeped into his veins, running through his bloodstream like its sole purpose was to flush out the poison Hunter and the others like him had poured into Asa’s being. As if it was on a mission to wash out the venom that had manifested itself in him as Isla’s words—and others’—had pierced into his flesh and his bones.
Carmen believed he made this world seem less cruel. Carmen believed that.
Asa wondered if she also believed that she turned everything she looked at and touched into magic, because he swore she’d left her imprint on his skin where her palm had made contact with his cheek in the gentlest of gestures. For the first time in forever, he was looking at his reflection through the rear-view mirror like there was something worth looking back at.
If Asa’s existence dimmed the world’s ugliness, then he was pretty sure it was Carmen’s presence that lit it up in all its beautiful places.
She lit it up with the touch of galaxies she carried in her veins, and the constellations she weaved with her fingertips whenever they brushed against something that nobody else would spare a second glance to.
Just as he pulled his truck into his driveway, his eyes snuck a glance at the empty passenger seat next to him.
She wasn’t seated there right now, but there were loose threads hanging from the edge of the seat where her fingers had been picking at it without her being aware of her actions. Asa’s eyes had drunk it all in though.
She wasn’t by his side right then, but she still left traces of her in his truck. Whether it was a strand of her dark hair that was lying on the headrest, or the belt buckle she’d tucked further into the seat, or even a few pieces that’d fallen off one of her shoes’ peeling logo.
Asa had been completely oblivious to her existence before he’d taken the journal, thinking it belonged to Willa, but now that she’d planted herself in his world, there was just no going back.
Carmen had built herself a home in his very being and he didn’t know how to burn it down without setting his own heart on fire.
She was everywhere: a few seats down in his AP Lit class, right behind him in AP Cal, the ghost of her touch in the vacant spot in the passenger seat of his truck, the table at the leftmost corner of the cafeteria that his eyes always found against his permission, in the paint stains he’d find on the bottom edges of the school walls and even in all the scattered autumn leaves that decorated the city’s streets and pavements.
She was everywhere without needing to be physically present; she just left pieces of herself in every nook and corner of Asa’s world. There was no going back, not unless Carmen herself plucked her presence out of Asa’s life and left without another glance back.
•••
“Ma!” Asa called out as he let the front door slam shut to announce his arrival. “I’m home!”
“Great!” he heard her yell back from the living room. “You can see yourself out!”
Asa’s grin slipped off his face, and he quickly kicked off his shoes, taking huge strides towards the direction of her voice.
“Why on earth would I do that?” he asked, staring at her in bewilderment. His mind raced through the past few days, trying to pinpoint any particular incident that he must’ve taken part in to annoy his mother.
“Oh, hey,” a familiar voice
