What The House Forgot

The English Version of American Boys

Victor POV: Victor wished England would make a move against him. He wished that the whole country might turn in revolution, banning him and his family from stepping foot on their precious British soil. He wish they would spit in his direction, and cast their eyes away from the Americans. He wish any part of this country would give him a valid reason to hate it. It would be better than this bitterness, this apparent one way agony that forced Victor to seem like the villain. An unprovoked one at that.
It didn't feel correct. Nothing about this place seemed as if it fit in his idea of what England should have looked like. Victor had looked up pictures online before he traveled, he saw the grass roves, the brick lined streets, the ivy clinging to old row homes that glistened in the golden hour of the evening. He saw royal guards and monarchs and portraits of ancient poets. He didn't see suburbia, necessarily. Though he was in it now. England's suburbs weren't as different from America's, not nearly as different as one might expect. Yes, the buildings were shaped a bit more rectangular, made of bricks rather than plastic siding, though the lawns were the same. The sidewalks were the same. The cars parked in the driveways, the basketball hoops, the mailboxes. If Victor stood in his front yard and closed his eyes, he might just be able to convince himself that he was back home. He only did that once, he only played with his fantasies for a single, fleeting moment. Pausing to take a break from unloading the moving truck, with his arms full of boxes he had loaded on the other side of the ocean, he planted his feet upon the garden path and stared upwards. Letting the world float out of his peripherals, letting the details blur, he might have recognized the house he was now supposed to live in. He might have convinced himself that nothing had changed.
But something had changed, for the worse that is. Victor could never have imagined he'd have a stroke of good luck, nor even a stroke of predictability that might be mistaken for good fortune. Of course he was uprooted from everything he started to care about. Of course he was removed from the one place that might have felt like home. The boy was fragmented, he always had been. There seemed to be two parts of his soul, one that had been lost, slipped from the tethers of his skin and scampered away to God knows where. Even on the best of days, Victor felt lost. Confused. Only now it was worse, wasn't it? He didn't just have two sections of himself, he had three. One had escaped long ago, long before he had taken his first breath without the aid of an umbilical cord. The second stayed in America, rooted within the bed frame in his old room, undoubtedly getting smothered with sheets that were not his own and crushed under an uninvited, unwelcomed body. The third part, the smallest part, stayed within his body. The shape of a boy that did not feel so familiar. The human that was filled mostly with air, with water, with static. Victor possessed so little of his soul that it was difficult to pilot his whole human form. It was difficult to felt like he was supposed to be in his own skin.  

The most notable absence was John. Everything else had remained semi-constant. In the days of loneliness leading up to his first day of school, Victor had feigned unpacking enough to actually complete the task. One box at a time, usually spread minutes to hours to days apart, his new bedroom was beginning to look like a poorly reconstructed version of his old one. The furniture was different, and so the spaces for items had to be shifted. The dresser lacked some of the appropriate drawers, the bed frame was wire instead of wood, the closet door was not big enough to host the assortment of posters that hung in America. Perhaps this was supposed to be seen as an opportunity for change. Perhaps that's what his parents had in mind when they told him that this move was going to be worthwhile. He could change the style of his bedroom, change any aspect he wanted. He could trash the old art projects, the pinnacles of his creativity in ninth grade; he could get some new posters to display his more recent obsessions. He could frame photographs and hang them on the walls instead, or get a potted plant to add some life to the dreary, single window room. He might even go minimalist. Paint the room. Get a bean bag. The possibilities were endless! And yet, here he was, tacking up the old posters. Rearranging his bobble heads along the strange mahogany writing desk. Pulling his Star Wars sheets over his mattress and finding that they didn't fit quite right.
As the room came together Victor wondered if it wasn't too late to run away. The idea stuck with him throughout the extended weekend, the long stretches of useless time that was filled only with bouts of severe depression. At one point the boy opened the window, the two story window, with the intention of jumping to freedom. In his delirious mind he couldn't consider a better way of escaping. He didn't see the front door as a possibility. When he wasn't contemplating his life as a tramp, Victor was instead playing video games. They were a constant comfort of home, and while his television was a little smaller here in England, the graphics were good enough to settle him back into complacency. The multiplayer maps were the closest he'd ever get to home, save for when the phone rang with John's number on the screen. Only then did Victor get the opportunity to slip back into his old life, for a moment pretending that they were only houses away, rather than hundreds of miles.
John had been taken for granted. As Victor sat in his silence for four days, he realized that he never quite grasped the idea of a friend. He never stopped to consider all that John's presence did for him, how the very chance existence might have filled the gap that his absent soul had left. Perhaps John housed what part of Victor was absent from his own body, perhaps their being together healed the wound so perfectly that a seam was not quite noticed. Victor had always imagined that John would be at his side. They were going to go to college together, live together, work together; somehow their lives would have remained close, steady, and constant. It just felt appropriate; it felt as if it was guaranteed. And yet, sitting here, alone and quiet, staring at a phone that may never ring, Victor realized that daydreaming had done nothing to solidify John's presence in his life. He never stopped to consider that, no matter how ideal, all plans eventually fell through. All childhood dreams were subject to uprooting, for a parent's whimsical decision could put it all so dangerously on the line. For the first time in his life, Victor was alone. Truly, truly alone.