‘Paola?’ he said softly, knocking on the door. ‘You o-, okay in there? Can I come in?’
‘O-, okay,’ she whimpered between sobs.
Daekwon opened the door and stepped in, and saw Paola curled up on the bed, her eyes puffy and her cheeks damp with a sheen of tears. She had been writing something; there was a pen in one hand and a scrap of paper in the other. When Daekwon stepped into the room, though, she hurriedly tossed the pen aside and stuffed the paper into one of her jeans pockets and began nibbling on her nails. Daekwon had no interest in whatever it was she’d been writing, though; her obvious pain and distress was too immediate and acute for him to care about anything else. Empathy pierced his skin like a swarm of zipping arrows with jagged steel heads; in that curled-up foetal ball of grief and sorrow was all the naked pain that he himself had been doing his best to quash. A tight knot materialised in his throat – a solidification of every phlegmy molecule of his own bottled-up sadness, anger, frustration and melancholy – and he coughed, and had to clench his fists at his sides and tense the muscles of his core to prevent a sudden gush of tears.
‘How you f-, feelin’?’ he asked, knowing full well the futility of this question.
Paola’s gaze lingered on Daekwon’s feet for a while, but she was looking through them, not at them. Even in the presence of her crush, she did not remove the gnawed fingernails from her lips; instead, the action of her teeth on their ragged edges grew even more frenetic. Not even the acuteness of teenage self-consciousness could override the pain of the weeping sore that was her grief.
‘Not good,’ she eventually murmured, her eyes still pinned on the dread of future memories.
‘I figured. There anything I c-, c-, can do?’
Paola was torn, in this moment; her hormones stirred her blood with a sudden and unexpected boost of hungry desire and awkward self-awareness, all rolled into one tightly wound flutter of confusion, but then there was the sadness, its sickle-claws driven deep into her innards, its suffocating constrictor coils heavy and tight around her torso and throat. Both of these conflicting impulses battled fiercely for dominance, but neither could, for the moment, conclusively prevail.
‘I dunno,’ was the barely audible response, delivered in a choked-up voice.
Daekwon swallowed slowly, beholding the sad spectacle with a similarly warring mess of emotions churning in his own core. Ever stoic and determined, though, he pushed through the emotional turmoil and forced himself, as he often did, to take action instead of navel gaze.
‘Let’s g-, go for a walk, huh?’ he suggested, his words gentle and supple, comforting as the warmth of a soft blanket. ‘Get some f-, f-, fresh air an’ shit, yeah? The woods round here, they real b-, beautiful. You been sittin’ in this room a long time by y-, yo’self, Paola. I know you hurtin’, believe me, I’m h-, hurtin’ too, an’ I know that you don’t wanna do n-, n-, nothin’ but sit an’ feel sad … an’ that’s okay, I mean, we b-, been through some crazy-ass shit. But uh, maybe, if you g-, g-, get a lil’ fresh air, an’ take in some a’ this b-, beautiful scenery, you’ll feel a lil’ better? I mean, no p-, pressure or nothin’, you can stay here by yo’self if you want, I just thought I’d a-, a-, ask, y’know?’
Paola was silent for a while, but finally she looked up, forced a semblance of a smile onto her face, and nodded.
‘Sure,’ she said, drying her eyes and cheeks with her knuckles. ‘Yeah, why not. I guess I been cooped up in here a long time. I, um, yeah I could use some fresh air.’
‘Do you need a couple m-, minutes or anythin’?’
‘Um, yeah, gimme two minutes, okay? I just gotta, like, clean my face up.’
‘All right. I’ll go fill us up s-, some water bottles.’
A short while later the two of them were strolling through the woods. Inside each teenager a tumult of chaotic emotions whirled in a raging tempest. On the outside, each stole the occasional glance at the other, exchanging shy smiles that were at once delightful and somewhat awkward, and they chatted lightly, with attempts at conversations fluttering abruptly up like flocks of startled birds from the undergrowth, and scattering into the sky just as quickly. In each of them a ferocious desire for the other snarled and paced, a caged wild thing in whose baleful eyes the sight of a great forest yawned so frustratingly close, just beyond the unmalleable iron bars of the cage of shyness and self-consciousness. Neither could push far enough through these bars to reach the other, in spite of the fact that they both ached for a touch, even the slightest brush of fingertip against hand.
Despite this longing, it was enough to simply be alone in each other’s presence, unfettered by the bonds of silent eyes on them, watching and judging. In these primeval woods, in which titanic sequoias strained for the sky like living totem poles, the two teens felt as if they’d been shrunk, transmogrified via some primordial portal into the realm of insects. The distant waterfall provided an aural backdrop of continuous droning thunder, and ghostly hints of fast-moving wild things flitted through the shadows at the peripheries of their vision. Yet they did not feel vulnerable or afraid; perhaps it was the proximity of the beastwalkers nearby, in whose presence they always felt stronger, safer and braver than they were, or maybe it was simply the fact that there was an almost tangible energy in this place, an ancient power, far removed from the base good and evil of human beings, concerned only with balance and flow. At any rate, after
