lost_boy | (no subject)

Entry tags:

eddie

(no subject)

It was my second night in Darrow and I still wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing.

The first night I had shown up so late at night that the staff at the care home had bombarded me with information before bringing me up to a bedroom that was already occupied by another boy. That was nothing strange to me, I was used to sleeping in the same space with at least ten other boys, most of them piled up on animal skins, half sprawled on top of one another. But the boy was sleeping in a bed and I was expected to do the same.

The staff had asked me not to wake him and so I had quietly laid down on top of the blankets, put my head on the pillow, and proceeded to stare at the ceiling until the sun began to creep over the horizon.

When the other boy began to stir, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It was unfair of me, but I hadn't wanted to talk to him just yet. The night before had been strange and awful and every time I thought about Charlie and Sal I wanted to weep. I was afraid if I tried to talk to another boy just then, I would end up crying and would be unable to stop.

I slipped out during the day and looked for a way back to the island. I had longed to go back to the Other Place so I could finally grow up, but it was something I had wanted to do with Sally. She and I were supposed to grow up together and we would have taken Charlie back to his mother and he would have been happy and with his family again. But Sal was dead and I had no idea if Charlie was, too, so I searched and searched for a way back to Peter's island so I could be sure Charlie was safe and end Peter once and for all.

I didn't find anything.

When I came back to the home, no one really tried to talk to me. Some of the staff made sure I ate something for dinner and one of them told me on Monday I would have to start going to school, but I just shrugged and picked up a book and pretended to read. One of the volunteers joked around with me a bit, but he seemed distracted and he didn't even tell me to go to bed when all the other kids went upstairs. I hung around the common room for a little while longer, hoping the other boy would be asleep when I went upstairs.

I stood at the foot of my new bed for a long time before making a decision.

Working quietly, trying not to wake the other boy, I dragged all the blankets off the mattress. I left the pillow where it was, then moved toward a corner of the room and began to make a nest on the floor. The mattresses were so soft, they were impossible for me to sleep on, and even though the blankets would never been deerskin and the wood floor would never be the dirt floor of our Tree, I knew it would be better for me than the bed.

I tried to be as quiet as possible, but I soon realized the other boy had been awake all along.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The first night, Eddie didn't think much of it. The new guy obviously came in really late, and he'd probably been told to keep quiet. So, when he'd gotten up and there was somebody's stuff in the room, a curly head of hair sticking up from the top of the covers of the bed across the room, Eddie'd given the lump under the sheets a curious look and then gone about his business.

That day, he'd stayed mostly out of the Home. Things were really weird there lately, and who wanted to spend all day at an orphanage, anyway? He had friends, he had important shit to do.

When he finally came upstairs to crash, the room was empty, and he'd kind of wondered if the guy had already moved on-- it had happened before. But the thing about Eddie was that it took him a really long time to unwind enough to fall asleep, so he was only just starting to drift off when the door creaked open and someone tiptoed inside.

One eye cracked open, he watched the other kid shuffle around the room, expecting him to climb into his bed and sleep. Instead, he watched with increasing confusion as the kid stripped the clothes off his bed and... made a blanket nest in the corner of the room.

When he realized that they were peering at each other in the dark, Eddie sat up, stage-whispering, "Hey, what are you doing?"

It was a weird thing to do.

I had known that even before I started, but I had done it anyway and now the only other boy in the room was looking at me and asking what I was doing, because it was weird. I didn't want to be the weird one in this place, but the bed was too soft and I knew I wouldn't sleep in it and for a second I struggled to come up with an answer that didn't sound as stupid as that. I didn't have one, though. I had nothing. I shrugged, then hated myself for it, because it was what Peter would do if he didn't have an answer. He would shrug carelessly, dismissively, then suggest some new game and the boys would forget anyone had asked him a question at all.

I would not be like that.

"I haven't slept in a bed in a long time," I said, deciding to be honest. I wasn't Peter. I didn't have to be like him. I didn't have to lie. If the other boy thought I was weird, then he would think I was weird. I couldn't change that. "It's too soft. I don't like how it feels. I couldn't sleep last night."

"Why didn't you sleep in a bed?" Eddie blurted, knowing it was kind of rude to just ask questions like that, but the situation was too weird and he was too curious to keep himself quiet.

Climbing across the top of his covers, Eddie knelt on the end of the bed closest to the boy, wearing a rumpled T-Rex t-shirt and a pair of purple and blue striped boxers. He tugged at the hem of his shirt, full of his usual self-conscious energy.

The boy looked older than him, maybe by a few years, but as his face came into sharper focus, Eddie eyes widened. "Wait a minute, you're not--" He squinted, taking in the boy crouched there in the corner. It wasn't like Eddie knew Elio that well, but there was something off. Plus, Eddie knew that Elio was eighteen and lived with some tall, blonde guy, who looked like a Ken doll.

"Who are you? I mean, what's your name?"

Edited 2018-06-15 03:59 (UTC)

"I'm Jamie," I answered and I already knew who the boy thought I was. It was a strange thing, seeing my face and yet having it be so different. Elio was taller than I was and he wasn't as skinny, but he wasn't as strong either. His accent was different, too, and although I had never thought of my own voice as strange, hearing it in an American accent was a little odd. I'd lost some of my accent in my years on Peter's Island, but I still sounded like I'd come from London.

"I know I look like someone else," I said, then looked at the bedding I'd dragged onto the floor. I could no longer tell if I was tired or just frightened. I wanted to go back to the Island to get Charlie and Nod, but at the same time I was glad to be here, away from Peter. I felt selfish and cruel. I wanted to be smarter and older. I didn't know if I wanted to answer the question about why I didn't sleep in a bed. I didn't want him to think I was weird.

"What's your name?" I asked instead. Maybe I would tell him in a minute or two.

"Yeah, a little," Eddie said, vaguely sarcastic, because they were practically twins. Twins who'd been, somehow, born a couple of years apart, and had completely different life experiences, but still.

"I'm Eddie," he said, "You're like, the first guy they've moved in here for ages. I thought I was going to have the room to myself forever."

It had been kind of nice, but also lonely, not to mention kind of creepy at night. Waking up to a guy building a nest in the corner like some kind of freak wasn't exactly comforting, but being a freak himself, Eddie wasn't really one to judge.

"There's a lot of girls here," I agreed and that itself was odd to me. I'd never really spent any time around girls before here, unless we're counting Sal and I spent at least half my time with her thinking she was a boy. And I had really only met some of the girls who lived here, but I liked Beverly. She was pretty and she had been kind to me and she'd shown me the best ways to sneak out of this place, even if I hadn't used any of them yet.

"There wasn't any girls where I came from," I admitted. "It was all boys. We all lived together, all slept in this same... same place."

I knew it was weird that we'd lived in a tree. I saw the way people looked at me when I talked about it. I had already stopped bringing it up, because no one else had ever lived in a tree. At least not in the way I had, under its roots in a giant, sprawling room.

"Yeah, they're all pretty cool, though," Eddie said, trying to hide his surprise and growing interest in Jamie's story.

What kind of place was all just boys, sleeping all together but not in beds? He tried to imagine it, like a pack of wolves all sleeping in a pile. Was he raised by wolves? Was that actually a thing that happened to people outside of movies and stuff?

"Do you want more pillows? You can steal them from the other beds. Nobody's using them."

Edited 2018-07-02 22:05 (UTC)

"Yeah," I agreed with a little smile, even though I didn't know most of them. Beverly had been really nice and I was glad I'd met her and that she was living here, too, but it was hard for me to think of any girls besides Sal.

It was hard for me to think of anyone besides her and Charlie. I had to try, though. Eddie was being nice to me, just like a lot of other people had been so far, and since I had to stay here with him, I didn't want him to think I was a jerk.

"Do you steal pillows from the other beds?" I asked, my smile growing a little. "Just when you want extra? We didn't really have pillows either, we used stuff like deerskin blankets. We... we had to make most of them." I hoped that wasn't weird.

"Yeah, who cares? Nobody's using them," Eddie said, even though he probably never would've stolen any of them if he'd been alone. Climbing off his bed, he walked across the room to gather up a pillow each from the other two beds, carrying them over and dumping them into Jamie's blanket nest.

After a brief moment of hesitation, he knelt down on the floor, just off the edge of the blankets.

"I'm probably allergic to deerskin," he decided, presenting that fact like a badge of honor. "I'd be all gross and itchy and snotting all over the place."

I wasn't expecting him to sit down, but it made my smile grow a little further. It was pretty great, I realized, how a little bit of kindness could begin to make up for all the terrible things Peter had put me through.

It didn't bring back Charlie or Sal, it didn't make any of my scars disappear, but it made something loosen in my chest. Just a little. And it was a reminder that not all boys were going to be like Peter.

"Gross," I said and laughed, because I didn't really mean it. I smiled as I sat down, too, only a little awkwardly because of the stitches in my thigh. "You would have had a hard time on the island where I lived. All we had was deer and wolf skin. I had to wear deerskin trousers."

Eddie laughed, thinking about the awful rash he probably would've gotten on his balls and wrinkling his nose delicately.

"That's crazy, though. I mean, not in a bad way. It's just, you know, like the kind of stuff you read in books, you know?" He scooted a little closer, his eyes wide and alight with curiosity.

"Are clothes weird, too? Like, too soft or too thin or whatever?"

I hadn't read a book in a long time. I used to read all the time, I would read as I worked with the book binder, trying to be sneaky about it while I was supposed to be helping him, but he never minded whenever he caught me. He'd threaten me with the back of his hand, but he had never actually hit me and he was smiling when he spoke.

I missed him, I realized. Maybe not as much as I missed my mother, but far more than my father.

"They're not so bad," I said. I thought about telling him that underwear felt weird, but the thought of saying something like that made my neck feel hot. "It was pretty crazy, though. I didn't think so at the time, but now I remember stuff about before I went to the island and... it should have been impossible."

"What were you doing on an island, anyway? Were you in like, a plane crash?"

His curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he scooted forward, eyes wide, asking questions without any thought to whether or not they might've been too personal.

"How long were you there?"

"Um," I said, because I didn't want to lie, but I was starting to like Eddie and I didn't want him to stop liking me. Peter was a liar, though. Peter told people what he thought they wanted to hear so they would like him, so long as it served him, too. I didn't want to be that person.

"A long time," I settled on saying, because that much was the truth. I could even tell Eddie how old I was when Peter brought me there and that wouldn't be a lie either. I just didn't have to tell him that I had been there for as many years as I was. "I was brought there when I was eight. It was... I'm not sure, it was some sort of magic. I was bought there by a boy named Peter."

I swallowed and looked down for a second, then looked up at Eddie. "He killed my mother. He convinced me the police would blame me, so I ran away with him."

"Holy shit!" Eddie blurted, a stricken look crossing his face, "I mean, I'm sorry. That's... holy shit."

He thought of all the warnings his mother had given him about kidnappers and murderers and pedophiles, and more and more often lately, he'd been convinced she was just full of shit, but maybe she was right. At least some of the time, there were people out there who wanted to steal you away and hurt you.

And make you wear deerskin pants.

Then something in his head clicked. An island, a boy named Peter. Holy shit.

If the topic hadn't been how Peter had murdered my mother and stolen my life, I might have laughed. The grown ups in Darrow cursed so readily, but I hadn't heard it often from those around my age and when Eddie cursed it both surprised me and made me happy.

Or it would have. If not for the fact that I was once again thinking of my mother.

"He was terrible," I said, even though it felt like an understatement. And it felt like a lie. I had been like Peter in some ways, too, and I wished I could say I wasn't, but I knew better. "He hurt a lot of people. Other boys, too."

"I'm sorry," he said, overcoming the urge to shove aside the conversation in favor of something less serious and terrifying.

What the hell story had he been told as a child, anyway? Wasn't Peter just mischievous? A little scamp in tights who could fly? Since when did he murder people. He had to be wrong about this. There was no way this was the same story.

"My dad's dead," he blurted, "I mean, it was just cancer, nobody killed him, but, um. It sucks. I mean, I know it's... You know."

Edited 2018-07-26 01:23 (UTC)

"It... sucks," I echoed. I had never heard phrasing like that before, but as soon as Eddie said it, it just made sense. I might not understand it completely, but it felt like something that perfectly described what we were talking about. All of this, the death of our parents, the way Peter had been, whatever awful things we might have faced, it all sucked.

I liked how that sounded.

"I'm sorry, too," I said. I knew fathers could be good men, men who loved their sons and their wives, who provided for their families. I had seen them in Darrow already, even after only two days, I had seen them in the park throwing balls and pushing swings and walking dogs. Mine hadn't been anything like that, but maybe Eddie's had. I hoped he had been.

"And now you're stuck here with an odd roommate," I said with a small smile.

"Whatever. We're both weird. So what?"

Eddie shrugged. He wasn't all that bothered by Jamie's oddness, or the strangeness of his story. Weird kids had to stick together. It was as true in Darrow as it had been in Derry.

"At least it's not just me, now," he said, gesturing around the otherwise empty room. "If we're stuck here, at least we're not alone."

I didn't think Eddie was all that weird, but we had only just met, so maybe there was something odd about him that I hadn't yet seen. It wouldn't matter to me either, because I was a little weird, especially compared to the other kids who lived here. And it was nice, thinking I might not be alone in that. It was nice not being alone in anything.

"I think it'd be weird if I were alone. It wouldn't feel... it wouldn't feel right," I agreed. We were sitting on the floor in the nest I'd made and I leaned back against one of the pillow, letting myself recline. I smiled at Eddie. "And I promise I don't even snore."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only