I am sick of living here. Sick of the fact that what you look like can set you up to glide through life or equip you with leaden shoes. Sick of people being so conscious of what they don’t have that they allow themselves to get hurt. Sick of pretending. Sick of feeling alone because of what you know. Sick of this house with its hard silence and its closed doors and the look my father gives me across the dinner table as he passes the wine. As if he were still worth looking up to. I am not going to fake it any longer. I am not going to watch people shutting their eyes. I used to try to shut my eyes. But then I saw Pete.
I came home to the computer. Updated the site, checked the messages. Someone was there. Called himself Pete. Could only be my Pete. I checked.
It was a sign. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. Waiting for him to come to me. The site was bait, if I’m honest. Guess I’m the hook. Counting on curiosity. Maybe I shouldn’t have found out about his mother’s name. Almost lost him there. Had to fight beneath a veneer of not really caring one way or the other. Totally untrue. But he couldn’t know that yet.
This was meant to happen. Unstoppable. We are tied together through belief and difference and rhyming breaths in a midnight room. But he couldn’t know that yet. No amount of flattery would have brought him back then. A fucked in the head computer geek like he thought at first. I don’t think he meant it really. I’m not fucked in the head. I’m just getting to where I need to be. By the scenic route, yes, but I couldn’t tell him I was Sophie. Too real to be believable. This sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. And the stupid thing with the grades. Trying to help turning out all wrong.
It was seductively easy, slipping into a new skin. No secrets. No past save for an on-screen history window. Rob. A sensible, solid name. A name to believe in. To bridge the gap between Sophie and Pete. Guilt and excitement took over, the lie became a person. Full, fleshed out in my head. Pete spoke to him directly, like he never would have to me. So close. Playing every card to keep him there. Letting out the line, letting him think he had a choice in the matter.
And he came back. Hope is no longer part of this. This is real. This is what it feels like to matter. To communicate. Not just talk, but actually speak.
I missed school. Attention is a drug. There’s no going back. Talking to him makes me think. About the things you read and see. How you accept it all completely until the light falls in a different way. It makes me feel clever. The words don’t have to try as hard. With Pete I can be me.
I went back, the next night, to his house. Dark clothes. A woollen hat in my pocket. Dressed for crime. Every step taking me further from who I was. I am a blank. No history, just a purpose. Even just for one night.
I have to keep going back. There is no other option. No substitute for that feeling. Watching from the outside. Part fascination, part sheer freak out. Partly that feeling you remember from hide and seek as a kid. Being the last to get caught.
Every time it gets easier. I know the mint in the flowerpot, which floorboards to avoid. The shush of his door on carpet. I belong there. It makes up for almost everything.