lost_boy | Entries tagged with eddie

It was Christmas Eve and I was fairly certain I was going out of my mind with anxiety and excitement.

I had told Eddie we were just going to Kagura for dinner. Earlier in the day, I had gone up without him, checked in, and I had taken our bags, the ones I packed the night before without him noticing. In my own bag was the ring I had settled on, the ring that had jumped out at me long before I expected it would have. In early November, I had promised myself I was just looking. Waiting for the right ring.

By the first of December, I had found it.

It was simple, beautifully polished wood. Simple, but personal. In the end, I hadn't even found it in a jewelry store, but at a small Christmas market, where people were selling their handmade items. This ring was the only one like it, the swirls of the wood making it completely unique. And it felt right.

But our bags and the ring were all waiting in our room. Right now, as we entered Kagura, Eddie only thought we were coming for dinner.

And we were. We could order room service if we wanted to. I expected we would. Maybe even champagne. As we approached the front doors, Eddie's hand in mine, I was glad all over again that I had carefully saved and budgeted for this. I wanted it to be special and I didn't want either of us to have to worry about anything.

A week into my classes at Barton and I was still incredibly excited to be there.

Being at college was different than high school. The students wanted to be there, for the most part, and despite what my high school teachers had said, it seemed like the professors were much more relaxed. They expected things of us, of course, but in general, I felt like I was going to have a better time at college than I'd had in high school.

I'd meant to start earlier, but with my injury, it had seemed smarter to put it off until the fall. Eddie started at the same time as I did, which I liked, too. For the first time, we were approaching this new stage together rather than one of us having to jump in before the other.

A week in, though, my class on early childhood education had thrown me. The topic of student teaching was brought up and we discussed what it would mean, how we would be placed, where we would be going, and what would be expected of us. At the end of the class, though, my professor had asked me to stay behind and then, gently, had asked what I might want the students to call me.

It was only then I realized what he meant. All my teachers had been called by their last name. Some of the professors didn't ask us to do the same thing here, but others did.

I didn't have a last name. I didn't remember what it was.

As I unlocked the apartment door and set down my bag, I was still thinking about it. Beverly had suggested maybe I would want to make a last name for myself, but I wasn't sure how to do that, what to choose. It felt strange, trying to just pick a name that fit me.

I was distracted as I came in, but I still walked to where Eddie was sitting and kissed the top of his head in greeting.

"Hullo," I said, still thinking. "How were your classes today?"

Bit by bit, the flat started to feel more and more like home.

Until Eddie had joined me, I had felt restless, unable to settle whenever I was alone, uncertain of how I should set things up or where I should put anything. Before he was able to officially move in, I rearranged the furniture in the living room three times and the furniture in the bedroom had been in complete disarray when he arrived. It hadn't felt right, making any of those decisions without him.

It was lucky for me that he was much better at being organized than I was. I was neat and I liked things to go in their place, I liked to make sure our belongings were put away, but it was Eddie who had made sense of where things ought to go.

I'd never had a home like this before. Even before Peter. My memories of the home where I lived with my parents were often fragmented and I could never put them together to get a real sense of what it had been like, but I knew it was small. Cold. Dirty. No matter how hard my mother scrubbed, it was never clean enough. I remembered my fingers and toes being cold all the time. Finding it difficult to sleep because the bed was hard and the draft never stopped.

This was home, though. A real home.

As I unlocked the door and came inside after a shift at the library, I put my keys in the bowl by the door, then took off my shoes and put them away in the closet.

"Hi!" I called to Eddie. "I brought food home."

I had burgers in a bag, stopping by one of the really good places on a whim while driving home.

East Hallow was... well, it was an odd place. Even now, weeks after it had suddenly opened up to us all, I wasn't particularly sure if I liked it. The entire village seemed to be slowly shifting toward something else, something a little more sinister, something that felt like whispers on a cold wind warning me of something darker. I knew Halloween was meant to be fun, so I was trying to take it all in stride, viewing the slumped and eerie jack-o-lanterns as a neat and spooky effect, but I was a little on edge.

More on edge now, I realized, because Richie and I had lost Eddie somewhere in the crowd. We were heading to the corn maze and he knew we were going there, so I assumed he would just meet us when he managed to make his way through the crowd. It seemed like everyone in Darrow was here to celebrate Halloween, which made sense, as East Hallow had asserted itself right off as the place for it.

Still, I wished Eddie was with us as Richie and I got to the start of the corn maze.

Before I realized what was happening, we were being ushered into the maze as part of another group and none of my protests that we were waiting for someone were heeded. We were caught up in the flow of the group, only able to stop once they'd split off into different directions, laughing and shrieking as they headed off into the dark.

"Eddie's not going to like that we didn't wait for him," I said, although this seemed like it might be a good time to ask Richie about something that had been weighing on me. Only a little, I wasn't really angry about it, but my curiosity was getting the best of me. How many people really knew I was a man called Captain Hook?

"They gave me a list," I announced as I walked into Eddie's room, glad to find it otherwise empty, and then flung myself facedown on his bed.

I knew that wasn't going to make sense to him. I hadn't even been aware of the ambush before it was suddenly happening and three of the volunteers were pulling me into the kitchen of the Home to sit down and make a list with me. My eighteenth birthday was still months away and I had decided to focus on school before even beginning to worry about leaving, but apparently that wasn't going to be as easy as I thought.

The volunteers wanted to help me. They wanted to make sure I was prepared. So now I had a list. I wished they understood I didn't need a list of household items to be prepared for having to leave the Home. It went deeper than that, running right down into the fear I had of being alone. Being without a group of people around me at almost all times.

It was something I was working on with my therapist, but it wasn't just going to go away overnight. And it wasn't something I talked about much otherwise, so I knew there was no way for them to know, but making sure I bought myself a set of pots and pans wasn't going to make this easier.

I lifted my hand and waved the list at Eddie, then turned my head so I could look at him.

"They want me to go shopping for some of these things," I said, then sighed. "They said they'll keep them in storage for me until August."

I didn't like any of this.

It wasn't the snow that bothered me so much, even though it was far colder than it should have been for the month of June, and it was too cold for it to be pleasant, but the lack of light. The sun was barely rising at all and not until noon, when it disappeared soon after. Sometimes, if the wind was blowing hard enough, the snow almost entirely blocked it out and it was like there was no daylight whatsoever.

I wasn't afraid of the dark. For so long I had lived on an Island with nothing but fires to guide our way after the sun slipped behind the horizon and even that had become pointless once I had learned all the paths and routes the Island had to offer. I had spent much of my life moving about in the dark and it didn't bother me. This darkness felt heavy, though. It seemed like everyone noticed. We were all more subdued than usual and the Home was quiet even when it was full of people.

Nearly everyone was spending all their waking hours in the rec room. It felt safer there, all of us gathered, and when the power went out, which it was doing every few hours, it meant it would be easier to stay warm grouped together, too.

But I felt restless. Eddie and I were sitting together, the power blessedly on for the moment, although the room was still cool from the last blackout and we were under a blanket. I was trying to read, but I couldn't focus, and so after a few moments I touched Eddie's leg under the blanket and then nodded toward the rec room door. I didn't know where I wanted to go, just that I had to get away from everyone else for a little while.

"Jamie?" one of the volunteers asked as I stood.

"I just need something to drink," I told her with a smile. "It's okay, we're just going to the kitchen."

She nodded and smiled back at us. "Can you bring some of the juice boxes back for the little ones?" She knew me well, knew I wouldn't be able to resist doing something to help the littler kids and that asking me to do so would guarantee I would come back sooner rather than later. It made me grin a little helplessly despite myself and I nodded before taking Eddie's hand.

Lisbeth was coming to visit me at the Home today.

I had told her weeks ago that she could and I was excited that she was coming, not because I thought the Home was anything particularly special, but because I knew it would make her feel better about the fact that I had to live here. I didn't mind it, but I liked being around my friends and so close to Eddie, even if they had made us move into separate rooms now. I knew Lisbeth had bad associations with places like this, though, and I wanted to make it easier for her.

Truthfully, I liked that she was worried. It meant she cared and for such a long time, I had been the one taking care of everyone else, so it was nice that now someone wanted to look after me.

I spent the morning tidying up my area of the shared bedroom, making sure my bed was made neatly, the lion Eddie had given me for Valentine's Day sitting proudly on the pillow. My books were stacked on my bedside table, my clothes and shoes stored away where they were meant to. I couldn't make the other boys clean up if they didn't want to, but I was pleased with how my space looked.

More than anything, I wanted for her to be comfortable that I was here. No, that wasn't entirely true. More than anything else, I wanted her and Eddie to like each other. I had promised Eddie she was really cool, although he had looked skeptical when I told him about her motorcycle, and so I had just kissed him and promised he would like her.

I was waiting for her now, sitting on the steps in front of the Home with my phone in my hands, wondering what we would do today. Maybe I could convince Eddie to take a ride on her motorcycle. I laughed as I thought about that, knowing it wasn't likely, but that didn't mean I wouldn't try.

I had spent a lot of time thinking about today, about what I could possibly do that might be special enough to consider it something different from a regular day out with Eddie. It had kept me up for a few nights one week, worrying whatever I did wouldn't be good enough, but in the end I had decided that something Nina told me a long time ago was right. It didn't matter if it was something special in terms of what other people wanted or expected, it only mattered if it was something the two of us enjoyed. As long as we had a good time, it didn't matter what anyone else thought.

I had struggled more over the gift than anything else. Everyone had ideas they were willing to give me and while some were better than others -- I was not giving him a personalized fanny pack, like Richie suggested -- none of them felt quite right. I didn't want to give Eddie flowers, and those stuffed bears holding hearts, while cute, were not quite personal enough for me.

A very nice woman at the flower shop had found me staring at roses and gently asked if they were what I really wanted. When I ended up confessing nearly my entire life story to her, she had smiled and taken me over to a corner where I had been able to build my own gift for Eddie. And now, sitting on my bed at the Home, I was holding a small cactus in a dark stone pot, studying it and trying to decide if it was the right gift. It was the one I had now anyway and I thought it was pretty. The leaves -- were they leaves? -- were a dark green and at the top of one were three tiny, dark pink flowers. Inside the pot was a special kind of soil, but then on top of the soil I had placed rocks collected from the amusement park, the first place we had gone together.

Suddenly I was worried it was a weird gift, but there was no going back now. Not with Eddie coming down the hall toward me.

I had been thinking about my conversation with Elio for days now, turning his words over in my mind, dwelling on them long after I should have been asleep. I would lie there, turned on my side in my bed -- because I was sleeping in my bed now, albeit a bit reluctantly -- watching the moonlight filter into the room and wash all the colour away. And then I would close my eyes and try to sleep and all the colour would return, splashes and explosions of it, just like the night of the party.

Elio had said kissing didn't mean we were boyfriends. I wasn't sure I agreed with him, but Eddie might. With Sal, the kisses we exchanged had felt like promises almost more than the words we'd spoken, and with Eddie the kisses had felt much the same. More. It wasn't just a few kisses on one single night, I didn't believe that at all, but Elio was right. I needed to be certain.

Especially before school started and it was just around the corner. I didn't want to walk into those halls and try to work out what I was meant to do all while working out what I meant to Eddie, too.

I was worried I would be bad at it. Being someone's boyfriend. But I would never get the chance to find out unless I knew for certain I was.

The day was warm, hot even, and sweat prickled the skin between my shoulder blades as I wandered the park looking for Eddie. I had been cornered by my tutor after breakfast, dragged into one final math lesson that I tried to pay attention to, and by the time I was free, Eddie was gone. We both often spent the day away from the Home, so I wasn't surprised, but without Beverly here these days, I didn't know who to ask. So instead I just looked for him.

It was nearly two hours before I thought to use my phone. By then I was back at the Home, sitting on the front steps, and I sent Eddie a text. Hello. Where are you? I am at the Home.

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.