After I'd exhausted the topic of Ethan and McDonalds for an hour by cracking multiple puns and jokes on it and making Ethan want to murder me, we found ourselves inside the movie theatre. It was unsurprisingly crowded with people of all types - the nerds who read the book and came to criticize the movie, the fans of the movies who didn't have the time to read the book and wanted to watch the movie, teenaged girls who loved Jennifer Lawrence for tripping on the stage and not being embarrassed by it, couples who couldn't get a compromise between having an action movie night and a romance movie night and decided to go for a movie that had both, unwilling dads forced to come with their overenthusiastic kids, thirteen year olds on their first dates, and that one annoying baby who was going to constantly wail and shriek whenever the movie became serious - and me with a drug-addict.
What a fun and diverse gathering.
Ethan had a bored look on his face when the movie started, so I obviously decided to take it upon myself to relieve him from the boredom.
Tapping his hand, I said, "Do you know the story?"
"No."
"But you know about it."
He shrugged, letting his eyes glaze over the screen and land on me. "Who doesn't?"
"Why are you not excited?"
He looked back at the screen, "Because I'm not a little kid like you."
I wanted to argue with him on his insistence to keep calling me a 'kid', but then the movie had just started, and I didn't see the point in wasting my time on his ignorance while I could spend it watching the epic beginning of an epic movie.
Unfortunately, it was only the beginning which was epic. Fifteen minutes into the movie, I was cursing the director of the abomination he called Mockinjay-part two. Being one of the nerds who actually read the book, I knew exactly what happened in the story, from the start to the end, and I also knew exactly how the events should play out, but from watching the movie, it was blithely obvious that the director had done some serious improvisation. Why couldn't he stick to the script and follow the genius of Suzanne Collins' story like a good human being? The entire thing was completely messed up, with everyone looking out of place in their roles, and the importance of the situations being diluted by ridiculous music.
Needless to say, I wasn't enjoying the movie as much as I'd hoped to.
"This sucks," I muttered quietly, watching Katniss make another exaggerated movement as she pulled at her bowstring.
"I thought you desperately wanted to watch this," he said, sounding somewhat annoyed.
"Yeah, well, I didn't think it would suck this bad." I shrugged
"So we can leave now?" He asked hopefully.
I grinned, "No."
He huffed and slumped on his seat.
Still keeping my eyes on the screen, I grabbed a handful of popcorn and stuffed it in my mouth before gulping down some coke. I ended up finishing my popcorn half an hour through the movie, so I just stole Ethan's.
He didn't protest, but said, "You eat a lot."
I shrugged, still dumping popcorn into my mouth. This was the only day I'd be allowed to eat any junk food - even if it was in 'limited quantity', as my mother said - without having to hide it from her. I was going to make the best of the day, not that I'd even stopped eating junk on my mother's account, but it felt good to do it without hiding it from her.
"I thought you said you ate some chocolate cake before coming here." He said curiously.
"I did," I answered. " Ate a full chocolate cake. Why?"
He gave me a strange look, and I stared back at him with my popcorn-filled mouth. "You ate a whole cake?"
I nodded.
"Where does all the food go?"
I swallowed my popcorn and smiled widely. "My dad says I have a vacuum in my stomach. Don't think I should trust him after he tried to create a 'magic potion' from some Harry Potter fan-fiction, which would help reduce my appetite for food, and burned down the kitchen in the process, but I think you'll agree with him."
"What?"
"Don't worry. I have a crazy dad." I said.
A look of pity came on his face. "I didn't know your dad was crazy."
I shook my head. "Oh no! He's not crazy crazy, he's just kinda weird and a little eccentric. But he's fun."
"So a 'cool dad'," he said.
"He'll like being called cool. I don't think I'll ever say that to him, but yeah, he's fun."
An expression that could only be interpreted as envy passed his face, then he turned away from me, unable to hide it anymore.
I bit down on my lip and played with the end of my shirt as I recalled all the stories Ethan had told me about his own father; about how he had been physically and mentally abused whenever he didn't do something right, the times he had been locked in his room without food for speaking his mind, the continues pressure he had been put under to get into Harvard or an equally prestigious college after high school - and being kicked out of his house for not being able to do it, the neglect and feeling like he was unwanted in his own house, the love and affection which was directed to his stepmother after his mother's death: everything that had led him to seek refuge in drugs.
Although the movie was still playing and hadn't magically stopped due to the tension between us, it went incredibly quiet in our surroundings.
"Ethan, I didn't mean to-" but I wasn't allowed to finish my sentence.
"It's fine," he sighed. "You have a 'cool dad', and I have a douchebag. I know you feel sorry for me. You don't have to. It's okay."
Again, it grew quiet. Even the movie couldn't disturb the silence - not that it should be able to, there was a serious scene happening in the movie, and everyone was watching it with their full attention. Just then (and I never thought I'd say this), the annoying four year old saved the day by giving a loud cry. "Momma! Want coooookie!"
I stuffed my fingers into my mouth to stop myself from laughing and glanced at Ethan. He held it back for a moment, but finally let out a small chuckle. And the day was saved by a kid who shared my love for food. Who said food-lovers couldn't be awesome superheroes?
"You do have a douchebag of a father, but sometimes I wish I had a less 'cool one', as you put it." I said suddenly, remembering something.
He sighed again and looked at me. "I thought I told you to drop it."
"Okay." I continued fidgeting with my shirt, trying to stop myself from saying what I wanted to say.
His eyes twinkled with amusement. "You really want to get it out, don't you? Whatever you're thinking."
"Maybe."
His amusement only increased. "Okay. Go on. Why do you wish you had a less 'cool' dad?"
"You really want to know?" I asked, excited.
"Not really," he shook his head, "but you won't rest until you tell me. So we might as well get over with this."
I grinned. "It's because of my name."
"What about your name?"
"Don't you think 'Emmaline' is a weird name?"
He shrugged. "A weird name for a weird girl."
I ignored his insult, mostly because I was used to it by now. "Do you want to know how he came by such a weird name?"
He looked a little interested. "Let me guess. Emmaline is your grandmother's grandmother's name, and you were named after her?"
I rolled my eyes. "No. And that's the lamest explanation ever.
"Then?"
"Well, when I was born, neither of my parents could come up with a proper name, and ended up debating for a long time. Even after a year, my name was undecided. But when my first birthday came, my grandmother visited us; and she's a fierce women. When she found out that I still didn't have a name, she had a fight with dad. Then dad had a fight with mom, who blamed him and told him it was his fault. Dad got mad, and just picked up a list of names from some book. He put them on a wall, blindfolded himself, and threw a dart at it. The first dart fell at 'Emmaline', and he got it registered that day itself. So even my mom couldn't do much to change it. And now I'm stuck with the weirdest name in the century."
He stared at me, the bright light from the screen reflecting off the side of his high cheekbones, turning one side a bright red and letting the other remain in the dark. His hair turned red from the bright fire shown on the screen, making him look ethereal. Then he smiled. The widest smile he should physically be capable of smiling, and said -
"Do you mind! This is a theatre, not a place for you to talk!" An irritating voice of a pre-teen sounded from behind, making me look away from Ethan and at the loud-mouthed, pre-pubescent fangirl sitting behind me, with beaver-teeth in their shiny braces. She was skinny and tiny, but glared at me with the force of a dragon.
"I'm so-" I started to say.
"Shhhh!" she snapped, placing a finger against her lips to shut me up.
I snorted at her dramatics, and turned back to look at Ethan instead. His eyes were again fixed at the screen, but I could see a small smile playing on his lips.
I tapped his hand. "So-"
"SHHHHH!" Snapped the girl from behind again, this time louder.
I frowned, shaking my leg restlessly. The movie was boring, I wanted out, and I was hungry. The cake I'd eaten more that two hours ago was long gone. And I was in the mood to talk, which is a hard thing to do if you have a ferocious dragon-like skinny teenager sitting behind you and breathing fire down your neck.
A warm arm slid up, all the way up from the side of my waist and to my shoulders, leaving a warm, tingly feeling behind. I looked at Ethan, surprised. He gave me a small smile, the side of his face still kissed by the fire on the screen. "Let's go, I can see that you're bored," he said.
I offered zero resistance to his proposal, accepting his help to get up from the seat and limp out of the theatre. Outside, the whole place was empty, but the food-court was only a few steps away, and we found ourselves inside in no time.
"I have a feeling we're not going to McDonalds," I said, guessing rightly that he wouldn't want me around his McDonalds buddies either.
He just shrugged and led me into a small fast-food place that seemed to sell practically every kind of food.
Soon, we were sitting opposite each other with large trays holding huge burgers and even huger cokes. Well, mine had a huge burger and a large french fries, but all he had was a large coke. Then we did the one thing I'd always been a good at: talking.
"Why did you do that?" I asked him. Not many people could read my mood like that and judge what I wanted to do next, not without me shouting at them or punching them on the face.
"Do what?" he asked, taking his straw and pushing it into his glass of coke.
"You literally read my mind and got me out of the movie before I could punch the stupid kid."
He grinned, "Anyone could have guessed that you were pissed off. I didn't want to have to pull you out of a catfight."
I rolled my eyes. "I don't do catfights, I punch."
"I'm sure that's true. But we were talking about your name. Your father threw a dart?" I didn't think that was possible, but he was smiling again for some reason. The smile was somewhat tired, but a smile nonetheless.
I nodded, smiling along with him. "Yeah. Mom was very mad with him, but he already got it registered and even refused to change it. His argument was that fate led him to choose a unique name for his unique daughter, but I think he was too lazy to change it. And now I'm stuck with a name that sounds more like some rule in basketball. I would've been happy with Em, but he just had to add the 'line' to it and screw it up. What about you? Any tragic stories behind your name?"
And then he was sad. I could see it. Asking him about his name had been a stupid, tactless move, probably reminding him of his OWN parenting which included an abusive father and a mother who died when he was ten and a negligent step-mother who left Ethan to the wolves. And that wasn't the worst of it, there were moments when he would lose the little control he had on his expressions, and I could get a glimpse of the raw pain he held beneath the surface. Even the thought of having to deal with everything he had told me was scary to me, how could he bear MORE than that? I bit down on my bottom lip and let my eyes fall on the burger, before stuffing it into my mouth to stop myself from talking more.
"You know," he said. "You're very very very good at screwing up a happy conversation."
"Showwy," I tried to apologize with my mouth still filled with food.
"It's fine, I'm used to it now."
I have him a wide smile for that.
He stared at his coke, a thoughtful expression coming over his face. Then he looked at me, face set with unfamiliar determination. "If you want to know, it was my mom who named me. She. . . she really liked it," he said, in his saddest voice yet, eyes reflecting the sadness.
I nodded. "Any story behind it?"
He laughed for some reason, a throaty dry laugh that didn't even sound like a laugh. "No. But I bet she wanted one."
"What do you mean?"
More sadness. The guy seemed to have that in plenty, and I wanted to know why, although there was very less chance of him revealing that any time soon. I wanted to know so badly.
"I don't think my mom and your dad would've been very good friends . . . if she were alive, that is. Your father said you have a special name to mark your uniqueness, right?" When I nodded, he went on, "but mom was the complete opposite. She actually believed that if you were something special, names or titles didn't matter. She said that all you needed was yourself to be special, nothing else. And she believed that everyone was special in some way." He closed his eyes. "But that was a long time ago."
I said nothing. He said nothing. But we didn't need to. He was uncomfortable, clenching and unclenching his fists, face set like stone. I could see his feet tapping on the floor, willing him to escape. Talking about his past did that to him, especially if it was about his mother. He wanted out, he wanted to escape. He wanted to run away from the words he said and forget everything, forget his past in his drugs. He even started sweating. "I'm." He seemed to have trouble breathing. He opened his eyes, calmness gone from them to be replaced by a lost look that took me by surprise by its intensity. "Out." He finished, then bolted out the door.
Or at least tried to.
My hand had unconsciously reached out to hold his while he had been talking, and I had a pretty tight grip. He started panicking, fear etched in every line on his face as he tried to pull his hand away from under mine. I just held on tighter. I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't want to think about it. All I knew was that it didn't feel right to let him screw up his health just because I'd let some words slip from my mouth and made him remember things that had the potential to hurt him the worst way. This wasn't the first time he wanted to escape after he'd opened up about some painful bit of his past, but it didn't feel right to let him keep doing that.
We were at a stand still, neither of us backing down. He'd managed to reduce his intake of drugs for a week, I knew that a lot better than he thought I did. But something happened yesterday, and I wasn't going allow him to slip-up after he'd tried so hard to control himself. He could read my thoughts, and he didn't like them. Let me go, he was saying, it's none of your business. I'll do what I want to. I need this! Can't you see?
I could feel the pulse in his warm hand, throbbing and throbbing to keep him alive. Why did I care whether he hurt himself or not? I didn't know, but in a way, I did.
He gave in finally, slowly sliding back into his seat in defeat. His hand clenched into a fist under mine, and he pulled away with a pained look on his face. "You have a strong grip for a kid," he said.
He was trying to stay strong, forget what the things that hurt him, talk about anything else and distract himself from the painful memories, I could see that. And I was more than willing to help.
"Boxing does that to you," I said, hoping to tell him stories of Horry's craziness, Preston's madness, or even Victor's asshole-ness, anything to keep him occupied.
His chest rose and fell as he took a deep breath. "Especially in Greeneville, huh? Horry still working there?"
I blinked in surprise, the intensity of the situation forgotten, trying to make a connection between Mr. Horry The Death-Eater, and Ethan. "How-how do you know . . . Horry of all people?" I asked, baffled.
He relaxed a little on his seat, although it was obvious that he still wanted to run away. "I had to get through high school to get into college, remember? And Greeneville is the only public school in this town."
"Oh." I considered this for a moment, honestly, the thought of Ethan going to a normal high school, sitting in class, having a locker, submitting his assignments and puking out the cafeteria's 'Green Power Juice' - which was basically a mixture of every gross vegetable in existence crushed and sweetened with all natural sugar - didn't sit well with me. It felt unnatural. "So you were there when Greeneville did its health drive?" I asked in a small voice.
He nodded slowly. "I was."
"But not many people know Horry. How do you...?"
He sipped his drink, settling down more in his seat. "Because he was my coach too."
If Ethan had shocked by making me realize that he and I had been to the same high school, it was nothing compared to what I felt now. Ethan was into boxing. Boxing. With Horry. And Preston. I imagined him waking up at five in the morning and doing Horry's crazy warm-up routine, and it was such a ridiculous image that I smiled, even though I was confused with everything that was happening. But then it would explain the surprising strength he had in his arms, and the fact that he didn't look as sick as he should for someone who spent most of his time with a smoke. If he'd led a healthy lifestyle in high school, the drug use shouldn't effect him as much as it would a normal person.
"I-I didn't think you were...." I trailed off, still trying to comprehend the image of Ethan and Horry in one room.
Then a wide smile took over my face. "Seems like you and me have a lot more in common than we thought."
He shook his head, playing with the straw in his fingers, still a little uneasy about revealing more of his past. "No. Not really. Because unlike you, I never really liked punching a bag, people or anything."
"Then why did you do it?" It was pretty obvious that he had done some amount of boxing, especially if the first thing he could associate with 'Greenville' was our sadistic trainer.
He shrugged. "My father wanted me to do some kind of 'manly' sport, as he called it, and boxing was the only one which gave me the chance to imagine I was punching his face. It was also a way to learn self-defense." Against the very same person who gave me life. But he didn't say it, although it was implied.
And as always, every single one of Ethan's demons led us back to the same man. Over and over again. Why did he have such a bad childhood? Because of his father. Why was he doing drugs now? Because of his father. Why was he always hurting? Because of his father. Why did every single one of his instinct make him want to run away from people? Because of his useless father.
"What about you? Why do you want to spend hours punching things?" He leaned forward and glanced at the back of my hands which had small, white scars earned from the rough tape I used inside the gloves.
I let my hands fall to my side, effectively hiding them from his gaze and making myself unable to eat the delicious food in front of me. "Because I like it. Although, sometimes if I get mad at someone I tend to do what you do, and imagine their faces on the bag." That was about as close to the truth as I wanted to go. There was a big story behind my reasons for joining the boxing team; a story I wasn't about to reveal.
He looked like he didn't believe me, but he let it slide and took another sip of his drink. Then he pushed it away and started coughing, apparently choking on the coke. "Wait," he said, his hand against his mouth as he coughed. "Is that why you were so upset about your ankle? How long do you have to be away from training?"
"A week. Probably more" I answered, wondering whether I should hit him on the back to stop his from dying.
"And Horry's not going to be happy, is he?"
I shook my head. "No. But I don't like missing practice either. You seem to know so much about him, did you have lot of experience?"
He finally stopped coughing and nodded at me. "Yeah. Both, Horry and Preston. I think they're part of the reason I was looking forward to college so much. Even if I was being forced to do something I didn't like." By my father. He didn't add that, but I knew.
"What do you do in college?" I asked curiously. "And did you drop out or are you still there?"
He looked like he didn't want to answer that, but he did. "Majors in Business, and Minors in Economics. And no, I didn't drop out yet."
"Oh." I said, then changed my tone of voice because the conversation was getting depressing. "But did you know that's exactly what I want to do? Majors in Business and Minors in Economics in London School of Economics is literally my dream. No wonder you can help me out with my subjects. We're so similar."
He stared at me, something I couldn't recognize but knew was important swirling in his eyes. "Yes," he agreed, his voice soft, "but if I was given a choice, I would never choose business or anything close to that. It's not my thing."
I leaned forward so that our faces were inches apart, meeting the intensity of his gaze with my own. "What's your thing, then?" The sarcastic, cynical part of me wanted to say: What's your thing then? Except getting stoned twelve hours a day? But I didn't.
"Something else . . ." He turned away, suddenly breaking the eye contact. "What about you, though? I thought you wanted to write. Why are you doing business if you want to write?"
I shrugged. "Long story short, writing is something that I fell in live with a few years ago, and I might lose interest in the long run and, and I don't want to end up jobless by the time I finish college just because I lost inspiration to write. And not everyone can be a writer. So I figured I should just do this business thing and earn a degree, then decide what to do. And I always wanted to travel and get out of the country, and Europe seems to be a good place to start, given that my dad's from there. So I sent an application to LSE."
For some reason, he looked angry and disappointed for a moment, then the look was gone and replaced by his usual fake calmness. "Your dad's from Europe?"
I nodded. "Yeah. Why do you think my last name is Wilson? How many Americans have the name 'Wilson'? Dad's a Brit, and mom's a pure American."
"They must be fun," he said wistfully.
"Not really. But I love them. They're a little strict. And a little weird when it comes to protecting me. But they're amazing most of the time."
He leaned back, his eyes silently studying me. Then he sighed softly. "You are possibly the strangest person I've ever met, Emmaline."
Somehow I didn't care anymore that he was calling me by my full name. "And interesting," I added.
"And interesting," he agreed.
Author's note: There you go kids! This is the next part. And I know it's been a long time, but I really suck at writing a conversation between two people, so yeah. Let me know if this sucks, I won't blame you :) Hopefully, the next chapter will be longer and better :) As usual, please let me know what you think and don't hesitate to point out any mistakes I definitely would have made!
Thanks for reading! :)
Cyan.