Everything looks so different and unfamiliar. He’s struggling to let sleep in and give up on staying awake. The house is quiet, not a single noise is disturbing it. He can’t even hear the sounds of the outside world.
It’s Friday night and Evan is wondering what normal people are doing, the ones who still have a social life, friends, interests to share with each other. All things he obviously lacks of. He forgot what it feels like to organise a night out with friends and maybe go to the movies or eat at the diner down the street, listen to one another and share thoughts and feelings. Maybe he never really had the pleasure to experience all of this, but he doesn’t remember. His mind is still fairly foggy; he can barely make out the shape of the building in front of his window.
“Where am I?” he wonders, jumping when he hears his voice echoing in his mind. He looks around: the room is not as he remembers it. The walls are not empty nor as tight, the window doesn’t have iron bars and the bed is not as small and uncomfortable anymore. It’s warm and cosy, instead. The walls are painted with a light blue he’s not sure he likes, but he knows he doesn’t dislike it either. There’s a massive window and the sill comes back inside the room; someone put together a little sofa that Evan didn’t try out yet. The same someone also chose to put some square-shaped cushions and they look very comfortable, but he can’t figure out whose idea that one might have been. There’s a king sized bed and a rug beneath it that looks like it came out of a classic novel. On his right they put a desk, on top of it some shelves full of books – some of his favourite. There’s also a wardrobe they built in the wall and a chest of drawers in case that massive thing, with polished black doors, wouldn’t be enough. He didn’t realise he owned so many clothes they wouldn’t fit in just one place. And finally, his absolute favourite bit: a whole wall covered in shelves, every single one full of books in so many different languages he kind of feels seasick when he looks at them.
Is that really his room?
Whoever put it together – Evan is sure it wasn’t him, otherwise he would’ve remembered – must know him pretty well.
«Evan? You still awake?»
He startles again. The voice is now real, concrete. Someone is talking to his back. He turns slowly, moving the gaze first and then the head and finally the body. He tries to stay hidden in the shadow, because he doesn’t want anyone to see.
Obviously he’s still awake, he thinks. If he was asleep, he wouldn’t be standing in front of the window, staring at the absolute nothing on the other side of the road.
Oh, no. Wait. Not the absolute nothing necessarily.
There’s someone hiding there the same way Evan is hiding now. That person is choosing the darkness coming from a narrow alley that Evan can see without straining his eyes too much, but it’s definitely there. He’s sure. But he’s also sure he’s not willing to go outside and verify that his eyes aren’t fooling him. Maybe it’s a person. Maybe it’s just an animal. Maybe. One thing is for sure though: there’s colour, there’s a shade that’s not black nor grey and it makes him feel like the day could still be saved, that the night could still appear less scary and dark. Is it waiting for him?
Evan ignores Eean and his question. His brother is now looking at him with sad eyes. If Evan would make the effort to look past that sadness that doesn’t belong to the older only, he would find an open wound that is still heavily bleeding. He knows that the silence treatment is not fair on him, but he can’t seem to be able to bring himself to feel sorry for Eean. Part of him thinks his brother deserved a lot worse. At the end of the day, it’s Eean’s fault if he lost contact with the friends he had back home – only a few, carefully chosen. He now remembers a couple of names, not more; it could be the medicine, but he’s starting to doubt that maybe those friends he thinks he had are an illusion? – and if now he’s left with nothing, not a family nor an anchor.
«Mom asked me to come by and see how you’re doing…» Eean tries again. In his voice, Evan can feel hesitation, but he refuses to give in and reply.
It’s been weeks now. Evan is still stubbornly hiding in his room, he barely eats and he can’t get enough of staring out of the window – possibly a habit he developed whilst in that facility. He looks at the crowd that sometimes passes by with curiosity, sometimes with indifference. It looks like he’s studying their faces but he doesn’t really see any of them. His stare is attentive and Evan looks like he’s waiting for something – like he’s looking for someone. Perhaps something. Perhaps that stain of colour?
Eean tries to imitate him, sometimes. He stands next to his brother and hopes this will make him understand the younger boy better. He hopes it will help Evan to open up and talk to him again so that he could explain what changed, what’s different, what’s wrong, but he yet have to achieve something out of it.
Ever since he came back, Eean feels like he’s living with a stranger. His brother is not the Evan he was before, back home, with his pitch black hair always clean and perfectly trimmed and styled and his green eyes shining like emeralds in the sun. Eean feels like someone pressed the off switch in his brother and erased the person he used to be. He wish he had been strong enough to stop his parents, he should’ve fought and stopped them from sending him away. He should’ve stuck around and never left his side, but he did the opposite. He’d been a coward, he betrayed Evan. Twice. Eean ruined his own brother’s life and he’s well aware of that: it’s his fault only if Evan stopped living life at its fullest.
The younger brother stares at the older for a little while longer, his stare cold and unperturbed, then he decides that the window definitely deserves more attention than Eean, so he gets back to it and gives his back to the other boy. Evan barely dares to breathe. His heart is beating like crazy and he feels like Eean on the doorway can feel it. He wishes he was able to cease all the sounds in the whole world so Eean could pay an even more expensive price for his betrayal. Eean would deserve it.
The noise of the door that closes behind him breaks the silence and Evan finally breathes out. Peace. He’s alone again, with his thoughts and his ghosts, but he can breathe again. He can let the night fall over him so he can embrace it, finally put a full stop to that endless day.
Before going to sleep, Evan risks another glance at the street, over at the narrow alley where the shape usually like to hide because it’s almost as if the light is never able to hit that specific spot.
The shape is gone now. The stranger has disappeared, but Evan is certain. He saw it. A stain of colour. Red.
They found him.
*
«Do you know who that is? Do you remember?»
Evan snaps his eyes wide open and sits on the mattress. By his side there’s a boy. They spoke so many times together he should stop getting startled every time he appears out of nowhere. Yet again it’s hard to get used to his presence, above all considering the fact that the boy looks harmless and much more friendly than all the others, except for his empty stare. Evan should feel safe around him, yet he can’t help but being weary. He’s seen so many of them chasing him around, many like that boy but willing to hurt him, more cruel. Being afraid is legit, or so his therapist said; according to the therapist, Evan has to remind himself that not every person comes in his life to cause him arm, every new person deserves a chance. At that time, Evan didn’t have the heart to explain to Joël that they weren’t talking about people necessarily, that a misstep could’ve sent him flying. He just nodded and Joël had looked satisfied and happy to change focus.
«It’s just a shadow,» Evan mutters. He barely moves his lips and finds himself wondering how that boy manages to hear his words every time. It’s true that he spoke a lot with them in the past, when in loneliness, when in public places; he mastered the art. He’d be surprised of the opposite, he’d be surprised to find out that there’s actually someone who is not able to hear his words or communicate with him, or that may need his voice to live and move in that limbo they’ve been stuck ever since god only knows when.
Evan laughs at himself because if it was working in that way, then they wouldn’t be trying to kill him almost on a daily basis, they wouldn’t be hunting him down like hungry predators. Evan laughs because the thought of the shape in the alley being an actual human person is as surreal as is ridiculous. It must be just a dream.
He moves a hand on his face and kicks away that little bit of sleep that still hangs around his eyes, making the eyelids feel heavy and ready to be closed once again, then sighs thinking about how stupid and naïve they both are.
«At least he won’t try to kill you.» The boy shrugs and jumps off the bed. He slips silently across the room and climbs the chest of drawers towards the window, that opens by itself. No one moves for a while.
«What a joy,» Evan replies, sarcastic. Sitting on the mattress, he makes himself comfortable against the headboard and frowns. The wind blows in the room, sending some of the papers on the desk flying around and making the curtains Yvonne chose for the big window on the other side of the room free to move a little. The boy stands on the windowsill and puts his legs on the outside.
«What are you doing?» Evan asks, confused. He never saw him behaving like this before. It’s also true that he never stuck around long enough to see how he disappeared after one of their conversations. Evan is pretty sure it’s not the right moment to find out.
«They’re coming for me,» the boy explains, his tone flat. «I gotta go before they change their mind and leave me behind. You… You should talk to him. It will do you good. He will be a good ally.»
“With him? Who is him?” Evan would like to ask him more about this person he’s supposed to talk to, but the boy turns his back to the room in order to face the garden and jumps. Everything that is left in the room now, is a feeling that Evan can’t quite name. It makes him feel uncomfortable. It’s fear, betrayal. Nothing new to him. Then there’s relief, the same kind people allow themselves to feel when they finally are able to reach something they longed for, or when a full stop is put at the end of a particularly painful sentence or paragraph.
Evan hugs his knee to his chest and hides his face in them. It’s a poor attempt of pushing that happy smile off of his mind, a smile that’s not supposed to be there, facing the starless sky in the middle of the night, because no one should be happy to be betrayed and die alone, by mistake. Because they chased an illusion in which they locked everything, every hope, every dream. He tells himself he has to forget the derisive laughs that follow and that soon turn into screams, voices that become muffled noises and sirens wailing in the distance.
It’s too late anyway.
Evan comes back to the present moment when someone puts a hand on his shoulder, scaring the hell out of him. Evan screams and everything is back to normal.
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