Song of the Fireflies

Chapter Sixteen

Elias

“Brayelle?” I spoke up when I could no longer stand the silence.

I didn’t expect her to answer and was prepared to leave her alone on the beach if that was really what she wanted, but she surprised me when she said, “I did it wrong.” She kept her gaze on the dark ocean out ahead of us.

“You… you did what wrong?”

“The way I slit my wrists.”

A knot formed in my throat. Hearing those words come from her lips did something to me, something really fucked up. It hurt. It hurt like hell hearing her admit it, even more so than seeing her scars.

I couldn’t speak. And I couldn’t look at her. Pain and even resentment for what she had done assailed me.

She sniffled and said, “Lissa found me. I did everything wrong. The way I cut them, the house I chose to do it in. The hour. I—”

“Why did you do it, Bray? Why?” I looked right at her. “I want you to tell me the truth. If I had anything to do with why you did it, I want to know.”

I didn’t want to know. I needed to.

I swallowed hard and stared at her from the side, my forearms perched on the tops of my bent knees.

She still wouldn’t look at me and as the silence grew between us, I knew without her having to admit it that I was part of the reason, after all. I just hoped like hell I wasn’t the reason.

“Elias… I lied to you when I said I was afraid of having more with you than we already had because things would change and we’d grow apart. That was all just an excuse. A watered-down version of the truth.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Instantly, my mind began scrambling to find what could be the truth before she told me, but I came up short.

She steadied her breath. I sat quiet and motionless and confused.

“I’ve been pretty messed up all my life,” she said. “You’ve known that. Better than anyone.”

No. I haven’t.

“Crazy, fucked-up mood swings. Highs and lows that gave me whiplash. That gave everyone around me whiplash. I clung to you from the day I met you. I couldn’t have known that there was something wrong with me when I was a little girl. I was just me. I didn’t know I was any different from anybody else. Who knows stuff like that when they’re kids?” She shook her head shamefully, as if she had been trying to convince herself of this for years, that it wasn’t her fault.

“But I clung to you because you were the only person who wanted to be around me, who went out of his way to be around me.” She laughed lightly and it caught me off guard. “Did you know that Lissa was scared of me?” She glanced over at me briefly, but looked back out at the ocean. “I had no idea. Not until I turned fifteen. I got that ceramic music box from my grandma for my birthday, the one with my name engraved on the side. Lissa dropped and broke it right in front of me. It was an accident, but I’ll never forget the look on her face. She thought I was going to beat the shit out of her.” She laughed lightly again. “That was crazy, of course, but she told me that day that she had always been afraid of me. The other girls at school when we were growing up, they all thought I was a nutcase.”

Then the soft look of nostalgia darkened on her face.

“No one really wanted to be around me,” she said, and I could hear the pain in her voice. “I never knew it. No one ever told me. Not until Lissa told me that day.” She sighed and shut her eyes softly and repeated, “No one ever told me, they just all talked shit about me behind my back. Lissa admitted to it, but she was the only person who remained my friend. But she never really wanted any part of my problems. And who could blame her?”

I scooted over closer to her, touching my shoulder to hers. But that was all I did. I didn’t want to interrupt. It felt like the things she was saying to me were things she had wanted to say to me, to anyone, for so long.

“My mom caught me curled up in a ball on my bedroom floor clawing at my wrists with my fingernails. I was sixteen. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I didn’t even draw blood. I… well, it’s so hard to explain.” She clenched her right hand into a fist and gritted her teeth. “I just had so much anger inside of me. Chaos. It’s the only way I can describe it. I had to get it out. I felt like I was going to explode and I just needed a release. It was itching on the inside. I had to get it out. I can’t explain it.”

She glanced at me again only briefly. Silence ensued as she jumped from one memory to another.

“All those trips I was taking with my mom to gymnastics… Elias, I’ve never taken a gymnastics class in my life. I was seeing a shrink. A fucking shrink. She didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want anyone to know.”

Finally, Bray turned her head and looked straight at me, giving me all of her attention, her eyes filled with intensity and with intent.

“You were the only person in the world who I felt deep down accepted me for the way I was, even though you had no idea there was something wrong with me. Who didn’t run the other way or talk about me to other people. Even my parents… Elias, they loved me, I know, but they were so exhausted by me. They didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I was always getting into trouble. Sneaking out. Getting picked up by the cops. Sent to Juvenile. They didn’t want to deal with me anymore.”

She looked away and a tear escaped her eye. She tried to hide it, but I reached up and wiped it away with the pad of my thumb.

“Tell me,” I urged her. “Tell me everything.” I had known growing up with her that she spent so much time with me because she had problems at home. I had seen it, the way her parents regarded her, how her father favored her sister and looked down on Bray, but until now I never knew why. I never knew, just like Bray had said, that there was something wrong with her, that she had lived all her life with this eternal struggle.

She gathered her composure, forcing down the other tears that threatened to turn her into a blubbering mess.

“I overheard my dad telling my mom once that he didn’t care anymore, that I was just a spoiled brat that hated authority and that I deserved whatever I got. They gave up on me. My mom and dad just gave up. They didn’t care where I went or what I did. I got worse after that. My highs and lows went from being a bad teenager to a very sick one. Some days I was the happiest person on Earth, while other days I wouldn’t get out of bed. I wanted to lay there forever. I would stare up at the ceiling and wish that the world would just crumble to bits around me.”

She caught my eyes.

“You were part of the reason, Elias,” she said, finally answering my question about the suicide attempt. That knot just got bigger in my throat. “Lissa, trying to be a good friend I guess, talked me in to seeing another shrink when I moved to South Carolina with her. I thought she was really trying to get involved and be proactive by helping me. No one who knew about my problems had ever really done that for me before. Sure, my parents sent me to a shrink, but I always felt like they did it for themselves and not for me. Or like it was their duty. So, when Lissa sat me down that day and she looked me in the eyes—she even held my hands, Elias. She came at me with all of the right things—I felt like, Wow, she really cares about me and wants to help. So, wanting to show her how much I appreciated the gesture, I agreed to go.”

Bray stopped and looked back out at the ocean again. The wind blew softly through her hair, pushing a few dark strands across her lips. I moved around to sit in front of her and then reached up and pulled the hair away, tucking it back behind her ear. But she never stopped looking at the ocean even with me in front of her. Her mind was lost in her darkest memories. I waited patiently for her to go on. She needed this moment to reflect, I knew.

“I never wanted to take medication. I was afraid that if I took it that would make it real, that I would believe I was crazy. I would prove my parents right. So I never did. The medication I was prescribed when I was sixteen, I only pretended to take. But in South Carolina, I was so caught up in Lissa wanting to help me that I took the medication the shrink she talked me into seeing prescribed.”

She paused and said, “It was the worst thing I could’ve done.”

“Why?”

“Because it was ultimately what made me want to kill myself.”

Confused, I just stared at her, longing for the answers.

“That shrink was a quack,” she said. “Had to be. After Lissa found me sitting in a chair with blood pooling on the floor beneath me, I woke up in the hospital to my parents and two women with tablets in their hands and judgment on their faces. They committed me. My parents left me in the care of the State and they went back to Georgia. Lissa, she visited me once but that was it. That was when I knew she was just like my parents. She cared about me, but she was exhausted by me and wanted to hand me over to someone else to deal with.”

I rested my hands on her knees.

“I was under the State’s thumb for two weeks before they released me. Before they felt I was no longer a danger to myself. I convinced them that I had never tried or really wanted to commit suicide before I started taking those pills. And it was the truth. I mean, yeah, I did have suicidal thoughts. I had them a lot, I won’t say I didn’t. But I never attempted it until after the medication. Idiots prescribed me something else, slapped me on the wrist and said, We hope we never see you in here again, Miss Bates,” she said, mimicking a man’s voice. “And they sent me on my way. After three more months living with Lissa—who by then avoided me as much as possible—I was done with her and with South Carolina.” She raised her eyes to me again. I felt a hot chill run through my back. “I was done hiding from the only person in the world who I knew loved me. And so I came home. To you.”

I just stared at her.

Ocean water continuously pushed against the shore. The clatter of voices and music steadily funneled from the beach house many feet away, though faint and not at all distracting. The wind was mild, moving between the two of us quietly, as if it had a mind of its own and wanted to give us this time together without interruption. Bray sat Indian style with her hands in her lap. Tears still clung to her lashes, but she couldn’t cry anymore. I could sense that she wanted to look me in the eyes, but now that she had told me all of this, she was ashamed.

I reached out and took both of her hands into mine and I turned her wrists up. She didn’t protest, but she watched me curiously. I wedged my thumb and index finger between the bracelets on her left wrist and when my finger found the scar, I caressed it. Then I lifted that wrist to my lips and I kissed it. I did the same to the other one and then placed both of her hands back into her lap, and I held them there.

“Before I have to say what I intend to say to you,” I began, “You have to tell me how I was partly to blame for this.”

Confusion flickered in her eyes. She shook her head no, her eyebrows drawn inward creating tiny wrinkles in her forehead.

“No, Elias,” she said. “No part of you was to blame for this.”

I didn’t speak. I didn’t want to. I only wanted to listen.

“Two days before I did it,” she said in a soft, distant voice, “I started thinking about the last phone call I had with Mitchell. He had told me that you were in love with Aline, and I knew that I had lost you forever. You were all I had. The thought of never having you in my life just made my mind-set worse. It made everything worse. I thought of you when I put that blade to my skin. I thought of when we first met. Our first kiss. Our first everything. Yes, I thought of you, but it wasn’t your fault.”

“And it wasn’t yours,” I said. “You know that, right?” I held her hands more firmly.

She nodded. “I know.” It seemed like she wanted to say more than that, but she looked back down into her lap instead.

“I’m really pissed off,” I said, and her head shot back up before I could finish. I wrenched her hands. “Why didn’t you ever tell me? You told Lissa. You confided in her. You sit here and basically tell me that I was the only person who loved you enough to understand, that I was all that you had.” I stared harshly into her shrinking face. I wanted this to sound as angry and as resentful as it did. It needed to be said that way, to be taken that way. “Yet I was the one person you didn’t tell, the one person you didn’t confide in, the one person you didn’t go to for help.”

Tears stung the backs of my eyes. I took a deep breath to contain them.

“I was the one person you knew loved you more than anyone ever could, yet you didn’t trust in me enough to let me be there for you.”

I had hurt her. Tremendously. Her bottom lip began to quiver and her hands began to shake beneath my own. But I refused to let go of her. She was going to face this truth if it was the last thing I ever said to her.

“Why didn’t you come to me? Why did you constantly push me away?”

“I told you why!” she roared.

I remained calm. “No, you didn’t. You told me that everything you said was a lie, a watered-down version of the truth.”

“Yes! It was watered down! It was… it—” Her jaw snapped shut.

Finally, she sighed and said, “I was afraid. I was afraid that I would only push you away like I did everybody else. Especially if you knew the truth. You looked at me like I was beautiful. Perfect. And that’s what I wanted to be for you. I never wanted to shatter your image of me by telling you the truth. I was embarrassed and ashamed.”

“Of what?” I said with disbelief.

Her eyes began to fall away from mine. I pulled on her hands to shake her attention back to me.

“Seventeen years I’ve known you, Bray. Seventeen years. I have loved everything about you. Your foul mouth. Your crazy-ass, brazen antics. Your fearless attitude. Your highs, your lows, whatever they were, I only saw a girl with a vivid personality. A girl who sometimes did give me whiplash, I won’t lie, but I liked that about you. You kept me on my toes. You challenged me. Don’t you understand? I went out of my way to be around you because of the way you were. And if you were ever going to scare me away or make me think badly of you, would I have made you the center of my world for seventeen years?”

I caught a tiny smile hidden in her eyes.

I let go of her hands and stood up from the sand.

“Out in the open. Everything. Right now. No more secrets or lies between us.”

I began to pace, but then stopped and looked down at her and said, “When I was fifteen, and we crashed at Lissa’s house that night of her birthday party, I touched your boob when you were sleeping.”

Her mouth fell open with a spat of air. I was smiling from ear to ear.

“Pervert!”

I nodded. “Yeah, I was. A total fucking pervert. Hell, I still am. I always will be. But yeah, I touched your boob without your permission or you knowing about it. And I don’t regret it.”

She just shook her head, smiling the more I spoke.

I rested my chin in my hand for a moment, pondering. Then my index finger shot up. “OK, you want another one?” I slapped my hands together. “Senior year. You were supposed to go to the prom with that jack-off—what was his name?—anyway, he called you and cancelled because I threatened him.”

“What?”

I nodded again. “I did. I knew he was a fucking douchebag. The thought of him trying to get in your pants made me fucking mental. I tried to talk you out of going with him, but you were hell-bent. So Mitchell watched the restroom door while I cornered him inside right after he had taken a piss. I told him that if he didn’t back off, I’d fucking kill him.”

“I can’t believe you did that,” she said and she wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Well I did, and I’d do it again. Are you going to leave me now? Have I run you off?” I knew I hadn’t. I was trying to prove a point.

She shook her head.

“You want something worse about me?” I asked and at this point, even I was a little afraid to go on. But this was our moment of truth. If I was going to make her understand anything, I had to show her a side of me that I knew she wouldn’t like.

I reached out and took her hands, pulling her to her feet.

“I did coke for a year after you left,” I said. “And twice, when I couldn’t find any—because I was becoming addicted fast—I actually smoked crack. Right off a soda can. That’s about as fucked up as it gets.”

She looked like I had just slapped her across the face.

I put my thumb and index finger a centimeter apart in front of us and said with a squinted eye, “I was this close to becoming a full-blown addict. This close to being strung out twenty-four-seven, sleeping in fucking Dumpsters, giving blowjobs for blow. It was why I think I was so hell-bent on helping Mitchell get off that meth. I saw what it was doing to him. The same thing my shit almost did to me.”

Bray let out a long, concentrated breath and dug both of her bare feet deeper into the sand.

Then she looked back up into my eyes. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Ever do any of those things?”

I shook my head. “No. In fact, what sobered me up quicker than anything was when I went to a drug house with this guy—I didn’t even know his name—and I was offered a line of coke. Primo shit. The other guy there, the one selling the stuff, was going to blow me. He would’ve given me a line and all I had to do was let him suck my dick. I almost did. I thought, hey, at least it’s not the other way around. But then the guy who I went there with, he stepped up before I could answer and said he would let the guy do it if I wouldn’t. And then two minutes later, there I was, watching this drug dealer suck this guy off who I rode there with. I thought, that could be me, getting violated for drugs. Willingly.” I took a breath, softened my face and said, “And then I thought of you.”

Bray took my hands into hers, consolation and understanding and even a little bit of horror lay resting in her face.

“I thought of you and of when we were kids swimming in that pond. Just seeing your face looking back at me in my head made me want to stop that shit. It didn’t matter to me that I thought you were engaged—” I pointed at her. “I was pissed about that, just so you know. I thought that should’ve been me. Anyway, it didn’t matter to me that you were in love and that I thought I’d lost you forever, I wanted to be a better person for myself and because I knew you would hate to see me like that. I never touched coke or crack again and I never will. None of that life-killing shit. No fucking way. And smoking weed became a rare recreational thing for me.”

Without giving her a chance to respond, I added quickly, “Would you have left me if I said yes? If I admitted I took part in something like that?”

This time, even though my heart told me that no, she wouldn’t have left me, another part of me felt ashamed enough about everything I had told her that I thought maybe she might. It was when I truly understood what she went through with me all those years. I didn’t agree with how she handled things, but I understood it at least.

“No,” she said softly. “There’s nothing you could do or say to make me leave you.” And even though we had both said this very same thing to each other a few times in the past two weeks, it felt new and more real every time it was said.

She leaned in and kissed my lips. “Now it’s my turn,” she said.

I honestly didn’t expect it. I knew I had told her that I wanted us to get everything out in the open. Right there. Right then. But I think a part of me assumed she had no other secrets. Hell, the ones she had been keeping were pretty bad in and of themselves. What else could she have possibly been hiding from me?