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She’s at the park. Again. She’s kicking her feet in the air, left and then right, both hands gripping onto the metal undersides to anchor herself as she swings her legs and her knees knock together on the way down. It’s a blunted sort of pain, bone on bone under skin scraped a few times too many, like the gelid air that settles after rain or the breeze on the back of her neck that makes her dinnerless stomach croak with irritation while the rest of her curses not wearing a cardigan for days like these. Because – drumroll please – she’s run away. Again. She’s used to it, though. It's bad weather to be underdressed, but a good one for an episode.
“Actually,” Norma lies, and doesn’t look at him, “I’m taking up birdwatching.”
“Ah, so you’re a dilettante. I see. Because I swore a few days ago it was a budding entomologist I was speaking to.”
From the corner of her eye she spots blurry movement. The afternoon’s tipping over into sunset, and he’s almost a shadow, a silhouette that could be anyone, even one of those things she prayed in her boredom to emerge from under her bed so they’d have something to talk about that wasn’t her for once – but the inordinately knowing smirk and all-around look of idiocy gives him away. Norma doesn’t need to turn her head to know, she can make an educated guess. She scowls into her blouse's collar.
“You were imagining things,” she says. “Bugs are gross. Also, I don’t remember ever talking to you before.”
“Don’t you need binoculars to do any of this… observing? And isn’t it too dark out right now, anyway?”
“If I had a pair I would be beating you over the head with them.”
“Ooh, scary~” The shape shakes with laughter. “There’s only pigeons around here. But if you like them so much, bird seeds are cheaper.”
Maybe a police officer will come this time. Or the upstairs window will be bolted shut already when she tries to sneak back in, the metal kernels more permanent than any latch or lock. Maybe no one will come for her for good. The thought should be liberating but it just makes her feel small.
“Leave me alone,” she snaps.
“You’re the one who keeps escaping from home to here,” he says. “So. Same time next week? Or is it more like three days?”
She doesn’t answer. Sven doesn’t move. He’s looking at her, who’s looking straight ahead, steadfastly ignoring him, but in the end it’s no good – she still feels his eyes on her the entire time, and, between her hungry stomach and dry throat and fighting the flush that rises to her cheeks, all the insults and invective she could have said to drive him away are slipping away from her like sand.
She lies to him when they first meet, on impulse, no cunning or calculation behind the gesture, like being fourteen just sounds a hell of a lot better than being thirteen from where she’s standing, and what’s stupid is that later, when the moment’s faded into a memory with the embarrassment still clinging to her like Dad’s pipe smoke, she won’t be able to explain why.
The man’s eyes are bright through his glasses. He ruffles her hair and laughs, far too pleased by the vantage point afforded by height, and… crap, didn’t Mom tell her not to talk to strange men? That’s the first commandment right there, the golden rule, and she’s just thrown it out the window – his palm on the top of her head before she can say poof to the advice she’d just tossed down the drain like a floppy dead goldfish.
You'd think trying to run away thrice would've taught her some things by now, but no, she's barely a few blocks past her house and she's already screwing up.
“I gotta go.” The urge to shake him off needles at her. Her bag feels oddly heavy. She does neither. Her legs freeze in place. “I mean, uh. Please don’t kill me or lock me in a dark attic or tell my parents I’m trying to run away from home–did I say that out loud.”
Her hand flies to cover her mouth, but it’s too late, and she figures she’s failed again. She braces herself for the questioning, the dragging, the sanctimonious lectures awaiting her like all the other times before. The predictability would be funny if it weren’t so foul.
He doesn’t do any of that, though. Instead the man in front of her steps back, grinning widely, and it’s then that a part of her whispers that it’s not like she’s ever been good at listening to her parents, anyway.
The truth is, there’s a lot of things she’s not very good at. At ten, her parents had her take an entire class just to teach her how to sit still in school, and by then their relationship with her and each other had soured enough that the moment she did well enough to be let go, she proceeded to go back to her usual jittery self within a day just to spite their sorry asses. Not one of her prouder moments, but hey, at least it made them mad.
When she tells Sven this, levelling her voice to sound off-hand, he rocks back against the bench and clutches his stomach saying, ha! I can’t believe you did that! That’s our Norma for you!
“It’s not that funny,” she intones. He ignores her, of course.
He’s freaking her out a little, the candid way he doubles over into fits of laughter like that – grown-ups aren’t supposed to look so happy, at least not any she’s ever known (well, besides him, but he’s a weirdo anyway) – but then, he hadn’t clucked his tongue in chastisement for her unbefitting choice of words, and though it’d be a lie to say that doesn’t bother her too… It’s not an entirely bad feeling. It’s one that spurs her on, lightens the load on her shoulders she didn’t know she had. It makes her want to take a chance. But it also makes her shudder.
Because maybe if he stopped looking at her legs like that she’ll learn to think he’s not so bad after all.
“What’s that?” she asks, but as the words come out she’s already plucking the notepapers out of his hands. She squints, turning the writings upside and back down and giving them a shake. “Can’t make heads or tails out of these scratches. And I’m not just talking about your lousy handwriting.”
“Hey, don’t manhandle my notes! You don’t know their worth!” He’s left snatching at empty air when she pulls back her arm at the last second, tossing him a gleeful smirk as she closes the papers to her chest. “Norma, pleeeease…”
“Looks like a buncha crap to me.”
“One little girl’s ‘crap’ is another man’s precious life’s work!” He flails some more. Are those tears gathering in his eyes? She shudders. He’s such a creep.
“Answer the question,” she says.
“They’re clues,” he says. “If I follow those words, I’ll be that much closer to the location of the Everlight. Though I’ll need to decode what they mean first…”
Norma asks, “What’s the Everlight?”
“Oh?” Sven’s eyes are scarily bright. “You haven’t heard?”
It’s one of those late afternoons that they’re feeding the birds in the park, and when they’ve run out of grains to scatter and Norma’s resorted to staring moodily out into the sky as Sven tosses the vacant thing that passes for a smile at nothing in particular (the creep) she wonders, not for the first time, when he stopped being a stranger to her, and became just another fixture in the grey landscape of her life.
Except, not really. Except that if he's anything, he's the solitary splotch of colour. It’s irritating, that in the boundaries of her thoughts he’s been granted such a prestigious place, but it’s hard not to, when Sven’s the only person who can make her so angry at the drop of a hat, and when she’s busy being mad at him it’s easy enough to forget that it’s getting late, and that the sooner her eres connects with his sorry ass and he falls over, the sooner she’ll have to leave him there, and then the sky will have gone dark, and she’ll have run of out excuses not to turn around and return to the house that feels less and less like a home with every passing year. To the faces with eyes darkened by expectations, waiting for the return of the good daughter Norma must have kidnapped or killed and taken the place of, and even if she could make it right – fix herself, reverse the process somehow – she’s not dumb enough to think that’ll be enough to keep her parents together. And she hates that part most of all.
It’s been a while since she last tried – really tried – to run away. She’s started to neglect counting the days.
She must’ve said it out loud (stupid lack of impulse control) because Sven’s smile falters, and then he’s looking at her, eyes hidden in the half-moon obfuscation of his glasses, his face backlit by the setting sun.
(Like something she’d once wanted to prove existed after being told she ought to fear it.)
For a second, she dreads the inevitable. She wonders if this is it, the goodbye. If maybe he’s figured out she’s just a kid and really, she’s not fooling herself, he must’ve figured long ago he was wasting his time. Maybe he felt bad for her – the problem kid, the space case – felt the same kind of pity that had tugged at her the first time they met and pulled her towards him even as the alarm bells rang clear and stark in her head.
For a second, Norma braces herself.
Instead, Sven leans over and flicks her forehead.
Once she’s given up on throttling him, he raises his hand in apology, and when he says, “Do you still want to run away?” he doesn’t sound like he’s kidding at all.
“Are you still hanging out with him?”
Norma’s pen strikes an absent line down her notebook, crossing out the length of an equation. Find the value of n. She frowns, and flips a page. She’d miswritten the question. Just them in the dorm room and a pile of homework, and girls aren't supposed to keep secrets from their best friends.
(She remembers when they'd moved on from graphite to ink. There’s something intimidating about permanence.)
“What?”
Past her algebra textbook and across the table, Agatha squints. “That guy! The one you keep complaining about? Don’t try to change the subject,” she says when she catches Norma’s half-opened mouth, the telltale splash of pink against her cheeks taking the edge out of whatever protest she’d meant to fire off.
“I guess I am.” Norma shrugs, elbows crossing. “I mean, that idiot? He’ll die if I don’t check up on him. It’s my responsibility as his student to make sure he still remembers how to feed himself, after all.” She tips her chin haughtily. It’s to her advantage if she doesn’t hide the sarcasm bleeding from her words, but it comes all too easily anyhow.
Agatha looks at her, eyes shining with scepticism, like she’s torn between asking, is he even a real teacher, or what are you really learning from him, huh? and nudging her with the capped end of her pen just to drive the point home.
“You’re cooking for him?”
“I know, right?” Norma says, and in an instant rolls her eyes to cover up the wincing regret at having admitted to it at all. “Well, sometimes… Rarely. When things get really gnarly,” she adds, making a face she hopes looks disgusted enough for appearances’ sake. “I’m not that kind of a pushover. And I’m not kidding. He’s that stupid, he really will die.”
“Really.”
“Biggest idiot I’ve ever met!” Her voice evens out as she adds, “I just owe a lot to him.” Her pen rolls over the edge of the table, onto the floor, and that’s all. That’s all.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Agatha says, returning to her work, and though her tone is light, Norma has to spend an additional two hours bent over the Relares tome just to go to bed with her thoughts in enough tangles and knots from all the transcribing and transliterating and translating – leaving no more room in all that mess to face the naked horror of following her friend’s words any further down the rabbit hole.
She’ll cross that bridge when she gets to it and burn it for good measure.
But there is one day where she wakes up with a painful knot in her chest, and as she’s spreading jam onto her toast it hits her that she can’t catch up to him fast enough. The time stretches before her like a road, infinite and indefinite, and yet there is so much of the world she hasn’t seen, so much Relares she cannot decipher yet.
And there is a part of her that keeps looking out the window – the part of her she hates, that always braces for impact, the worst case scenario – waiting for the day she’ll wake up to an empty study and a door left open. There is a part of her that remembers how to be alone, and it’s the one that keeps expecting him to leave.
Her feet scrape the kitchen floor as she pushes back the chair and stands, turning to face him. “Hey. Master? Heeeey!”
“Yeah?” If she didn’t know better she’d have attributed that dopey expression to chronic sleep deprivation.
“You’re burning your scrambled eggs,” Norma says, and makes a face, yawning, “I’ve got class. You better get it cleaned up by the time I’m back, I’m not washing the dishes for you,” but what she thinks is, sometimes I knock on the door without expecting anyone to answer.
But that isn’t going to happen.
Yeah, she tells herself; smiles a little, even. Fools don’t die so easily.
She stands in the doorway for a moment too long, and ends up late for class that day after all.