Curses and Will Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Unwanted Dawn

Read chapter 2 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I hit the riverbank hard, dragged up onto dirt that hadn't seen rain in days, and the impact knocked something loose in my chest that felt almost like breathing again. Cold mud against my back. The smell of wet stone and night soil sharp enough to sting. A voice came from somewhere above me, out of breath, like she'd been running. "What were you thinking?" Not loud. Not gentle either. Something tighter than both. "Is that what your life is to you? A game you can just throw away?" I turned my head, slow, water still draining out of my ears in a dull ring. A girl stood a few steps back, hands on her knees, chest heaving. She didn't belong here, that was the first thing I understood about her, before I understood anything else. Her shirt was too white, her shorts too clean, the kind of clothes that hadn't yet learned what this town did to clothes. Her hair caught the streetlamp light in a way that made it look like the moment just before sunrise, when the dark hasn't fully let go and the light hasn't fully arrived. Her eyes, when they found mine, were a deep, unreasonable blue. She looked my age. I'd never seen her in this town before. New, maybe. It didn't matter. It wouldn't matter for long. Once she heard what I was, once someone told her about the fire and the boy who walked out of it wrong, she'd do exactly what everyone else did. Step back. Keep stepping back. People don't choose to stand against an entire town for a stranger pulled out of a river at midnight. Nobody does. You live in the world you're given, or you drown trying not to. I pushed myself up. Mud clung to my palms. My head wanted to stay down, the way it always wanted to stay down, but I forced it level, just level enough to meet her shoulder, not her eyes, and started walking. Her voice followed me, fraying at the edges now, like she was saying it more to the dark than to me. "Tell me why. Why did you decide to die tonight?" A pause, and something in it cracked slightly. "Isn't there someone waiting for you somewhere? Doesn't it matter to you how they'd feel?" I stopped. I don't know why I stopped. I turned back toward her slowly, and something in my chest that had been quiet for years woke up ugly. I thought of all the people who'd ever looked at me the way you'd look at something contagious. I thought of the careful half-step back they always took, like proximity itself was a kind of infection. A short, dry laugh came out of me before I could stop it. "No," I said. "Not anymore." Something pressed down hard behind my ribs. My hand curled into a fist at my side without my permission. "And you won't either," I said. "Not once you know. Give it a week." I looked past her, not at her. "Or maybe you'll just stop caring, like everyone else does. That's usually faster." I turned away before she could answer and didn't look back again. The walk home felt longer than usual that night. My body moved on its own, one foot and then the other, until I was lying on top of my blanket fully dressed, staring at the same water-stained ceiling I always stared at. Her voice wouldn't leave. Every time I closed my eyes, her face surfaced again, not the words, just the face, the way her eyes had held mine for exactly as long as I'd allow. Sleep finally took me somewhere past three in the morning. The alarm dragged me back out of it. Same walls. Same stains I'd never bothered to scrub, the shapes of them as familiar as scars. But the light through the window looked sharper than usual, almost rude in how clearly it lit the dust in the air. I dressed without thinking about it, brushed my teeth, stepped outside into a morning that felt, for no reason I could name, slightly too bright. School. I still went, most days. Not for anything they taught. For one woman: Mrs. Kouya, our homeroom teacher, the only adult in this entire town who looked at me like I was a student and not a rumor with a body attached. Some routines survive long after their reasons stop making sense. Maybe this was on