Time passed slowly as I looked at the clock on the dashboard of the car. Ten minutes of eight. I glanced behind me and saw the school buses lining up, the bodies pouring from them. They were faceless, every one of them an embodiment of my eternal torment. It didn’t matter if they had never bullied me themselves. No one ever stopped it. They were just as guilty.
The weight of my decisions pressed against the car door as I grabbed the handle with a sweaty palm. My chest felt tight as the oppressive heat assaulted me the moment I stepped out into the angry rays of the sun. With a heartbeat of hesitation, I went to the back of the old minivan. Students climbed out of their fancy cars, and I felt a pang of jealousy. I didn’t have parents who could buy me expensive things. Or inexpensive things.
The weight of the world rested upon my shoulders until I felt like nothing. Insignificant. No matter how big of a room I was in and no matter how many people surrounded me, I was alone. A crowded hallway felt empty. My heart ached for those around me to feel even a fraction of the pain I felt every single day.
I traced the scar on my arm, where metal was embedded to put my bones back together. All for existing? For being in the wrong place on the wrong person’s nerves?
With a tremulous hand, I turned the squeaking, rusted lock on my trunk and pulled the door upward. My eyes caught on the black duffle bag, filled with the resolve of my torment. The zipper snagged as I tried to open it, pleading with me to change my mind. With a final tug, the bag spread open, exposing the black metal of a couple of rifles. Metal scraped against metal as I tried to grab one. A sound forever embedded in my mind.
“Shawn?” said a hauntingly familiar voice from behind me. The one I didn’t want to hear today. I zipped up the bag with haste, turning around to greet her. Ellie, sweet Ellie.
“Oh . . . ” I hid the bag behind my body. “H-hey,” I said to her, stumbling over my words.
She came up and wrapped her arms around me in a hug. I kept my hands pinned to my sides, unaccustomed to the affection. Ellie peered behind me to look at what I had been rummaging through in my trunk.
“Why aren’t you heading to class? I saw you over here when I got off the bus.” She continued to look around me, focused on the bag.
I was focused on her, the bag becoming a distant thought in my mind.
She brushed curly auburn hair away from her face before shielding her eyes from the sun. She dropped her backpack onto the ground and sat on the lip of the trunk, her feet hovering above the grass. Her eyes wandered to the sinister black bag, and she went to touch it.
Not Ellie, sweet Ellie. I shoved the bag away from her prying fingers.
“That’s just camera equipment,” I blurted, trying to draw her eyes to me as I sat down beside her.
She looked at me with a hint of disbelief, but she had no reason not to trust me.
“Can I see it?” she asked with innocence in her powder blue eyes.
Never could I let her see what was in the bag.
“No,” I told her flatly, feeling sweat beaming on my forehead. “What do you want, anyway?” My tone was unintentionally harsh.
She recoiled a bit from me, scooting away a few inches. “I just . . . I just wanted to ask you if maybe you wanted to come by my house to study?”
Now I was the one recoiling, unsure how to respond to such a grand invitation. I cleared my throat, thick with nerves. “When?”
“I was thinking tonight, if you want.” She kicked her feet and toyed with the fabric of her pants.
Tonight? Would there even be a tonight? I thought about the bag in my trunk and released an exhale. Of course. There would have to be.
“I’d like that,” I said with a slight rise in my shoulders.
“You can bring your camera.” She gestured toward the bag, and I shivered.
Not Ellie, never Ellie.
I looked at the bag. A hint of a smile crept across my face. “No, I don’t need it, actually.”
“Shawn?” A hauntingly familiar voice shook me out of my memory, letting it slip back to where it’s hidden, though still able to torment me.
Ellie, sweet Ellie.
She walked over and glanced at the TV. A news report plastered the images of a young man with a gun across the screen. With a quick motion, she turned off the television.
I wiped nervous sweat from my brow, drawing my hand through my dark hair as I rose from the couch.
“Are you okay?” she asked, concern twisting her features.
I stepped toward her, wrapping her up in my arms and breathing in her scent. She smelled of coconut. Her presence within my arms equally soothed and tortured me. Every time she looked up at me with those stunning blue eyes, I would remember that day. The day that could have been—and would have been—the worst day.
“I’m okay, baby.” I kissed her, a gentle one that almost reminded me that I was not the monster I felt I was. A title I would always give myself as long as breath still entered my body.
It wasn’t she who saved anyone that day, including myself. Ellie merely reminded me of who I wasn’t. I was not a killer. I was a teenager who was made fun of for liking photography. For finding enjoyment from capturing memories through the lens of a camera. A teenager who was slammed against lockers for being too smart. I touched the scar on my arm, lighter and less apparent now. I was hated for being irrevocably me. Their hate made me despise myself. I had let the pain rise to levels that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. I hurt so badly that it almost boiled over into an act that would have been unconscionable.
“I have to tell you something.” I dropped my gaze as the words hitched and hesitated on top of my tongue.
“What?” she asked with a curious cock of her eyebrow.
“Remember that day by my van? Back in high school?” I gnawed at the inside of my cheek.
“Of course,” she said with a nod.
“I was going to take a gun into the school that day,” I said with a deflated breath. My heart shattered as she looked at me with what I could only assume was fear or mistrust.
“I know,” she said, her shoulders falling forward as if she, too, released the secret. “I found your notebook at your house one night. There was so much pain and sadness on every single page. I looked at you—the smiling boy behind the camera—and couldn’t believe the words were written by your hand.”
I studied the soft curves of her face and wondered if she could ever forgive me. Or if I could ever forgive myself.
“I’m a monster,” I said, sadness lacing my tone.
Since when do heroes care about villains? I didn’t deserve her. I never have. But there she was, loving me as I confessed a secret that had gnawed holes through my brain, so much so that it allowed the memory to leach in and out at will. Inescapable.
She touched my face, her lips parted ever so slightly, as if she were taking in every syllable of my confession. Her eyebrows drew together. “Wait,” she told me as she pulled away from me and left the kitchen.
The moments without her felt like an eternity, the ticking of the clock on the wall somehow deafening.
Ellie returned with a tan box and placed it down on the island. She blew dust from the top as she opened it. I peered inside at our memories. She dug through the pictures, little key chains and trinkets I won for her, and even my award for best photographer of the year for 2004. Her lips spread into a smile as she grabbed a photo and clutched it to her chest for a moment.
She motioned me toward her, drawing me like the tide toward the moon. She laid the picture down in front of me. My stomach dropped at the sight of her at seventeen years old, lying on her stomach in the grass. She held a beautiful pink and white flower toward me and the camera. The flower couldn’t begin to rival her beauty.
I looked at Ellie, whose eyes had begun to gloss over.
“Shawn. Do you remember?” she asked.
Of course I remembered. “We both missed the bus, and we were hanging out beside the building, waiting for the next ones—”
“Which never came!” she interrupted with a small laugh.
“You’re right. So, I walked you to your house, and we stopped at the park. I wasn’t in a rush to go home, and neither were you.” I smiled at her. My heart felt full.
“I definitely wasn’t,” she said as her eyes glassed over.
Her father used to hit her, leaving bruises on her pale skin. That’s why she was wearing long sleeves in the middle of summer in the picture. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, or I wouldn’t have let her go back home at all.
“Why did you keep this?” I asked her as I pulled her into me and tucked her head beneath my neck. I held up the photo, staring at the sun setting behind her, exploding in pink and orange hues.
“Shawn,” she spoke softly as tears hit my shirt, permeating the fabric and wetting my chest. “I was going to go home and do something—” Her breath caught in her throat for a moment. “I had no intention of making it to the next day. There wasn’t going to be a tonight that night,” she said as she sobbed into me, letting her confession fall down and weave into the cotton of my shirt. “You saved me that day.” She pulled away and looked up at me, her piercing eyes forcing their way into mine. “I knew when I saw you that day, I had to go talk to you. Maybe thank you. It wasn’t until later that I knew why you were there. You’ve shown me time and time again, every day since that day, that you aren’t the person who was outside the van that day. You nearly did a monstrous thing, but you aren’t a monster now, Shawn.”
My breaths were bated, trapped in the depths of my throat. The pain she felt was palpable. The pain she had been feeling at seventeen was nearly too much to bear. Our pain intermingled and pressed together until it became something beautiful, so many years later.
I finally allowed myself to breathe again, drawing a breath into a world we created together, because we both chose life.