Joshua
When Sundo comes back from his own shower, he looks considerably refreshed. His black hair is still damp, though it's beginning to dry now. While it's noticeably shorter than it used to be, it's also no longer stiff and matted; instead it's soft and looks like something I could run my fingers through. I almost kind of want to.
But the reminder that he's going out stops me.
While he was in the shower, I thought of a way I could help him. He'd already told me that he had some money to spend, but it was a pathetic amount honestly, and if I still have one thing on me, it's my wallet.
I held it in my hands as I waited on him, sitting on the couch and tapping it repeatedly against my palm. I bounce my leg too until I realise I'm doing it and make myself stop doing both things.
I have about twenty-something dollars left in my wallet that I can give Sundo, and almost all of it is left from that abortive date with Ying. Just recalling that has a twinge of anxiety shooting through me, and I wish all over again that I had my phone, so I could text her, so I could see what she wanted. Ugh, I should have at least read her message!
Now I don't know if I'll ever be able to.
What's worse, all the money came from my dad. And thinking of him makes me feel worse than thinking about the texts from Ying that I put off. If only I had my goddamn phone! Then I could text him and at least know he's alright.
Needless to say, by the time Sundo comes down, freshly showered with his floppy sun hat in hand, I'm a ball of anxiety, coiled right and ready to burst.
I feel like my world is falling apart around me. I really don't want him to go.
I say as much to him as I stop him in front of the door, gripping the bills in my sweaty palms so tightly they're crumpling.
"It's going to be alright, Joshua. I promise." He says to me, steadily holding my gaze with his otherworldly one. Gently, he pulls the money from my outstretched hands.
I drop my gaze from his. "I..." I try to swallow the lump clinging to my throat. "I thought this money would help. Don't buy anything that needs to be refrigerated, or that will go bad quickly. Alright?"
"Okay. I understand." He says, slipping my money in his pocket with the money he'd taken from the jar by the door.
There's so much more I want to say to him: I want to try and convince him not to go again, even though I know he needs to go. He'll be back, I tell myself, he promised. And he always finds his way back.
I take a deep breath, and Sundo smiles. As is quickly becoming a habit for him, he leans down and presses a kiss against my forehead, and I scrunch up my face, still looking down at our shoes.
"See you." He mumbles, and then just like that, he opens the door, and he's gone.
* * *
While he's gone, I find I need something to keep me occupied, lest I worry myself to a groaning heap on the floor.
Many times I find myself ready to just get up and go find him, to haul him back just to make this excessive, gnawing worry go away. But then I remember that I have no idea where he might be, and going out has me just as likely, if not more, to be caught.
So I don't go out, and I still don't like this.
Since I need something to do, I wander the house. It's a small place, with not much to find, but it's still something to do rather than sitting and waiting.
And I do find something interesting.
While the first floor consists solely of the kitchen, the bare living room, a coat closet, and a door leading to the overgrown backyard, the second floor has more to explore. It's essentially just one hall that branches into multiple rooms. On one side there's the bedroom, with the floors overrun with clothes, the bed overflowing with sheets and pillows, and the dresser that looks like it's hardly been used (since all the clothes are on the floor, e.g. see previously mentioned).
On the same side of the hall, surprisingly, there's a second bedroom that has only a baren bed and dust. It's bigger than the other bedroom, with a walk-in closet whose battered sliding doors hang open. Somehow its size only seems to make it feel emptier. Standing in the doorway feels weird, as the atmosphere of the room is stale and dead. I don't stay there long.
On the other side is the bathroom and a room that I soon find is the office. And what a room it is. If I thought Sundo left his bedroom cluttered, this room blows that messiness out of the water. It's like an explosion of stuff: the tiny room is filled with papers and scattered writing utensils and books that lie open, textbooks and library books alike.
Taking a tentative step into the room, I look around in awe. The room is tiny, with a window on the wall opposite the door, filtering in red-tinted light through the curtain with a crammed bookshelf on the wall beside it. Against the wall adjacent to the door is a desk, even more cluttered than the floor, with its chair dragged back to the window, piled high with even more books.
Laying open on the rug is a book that catches my eye, because I recognise it. I have to stop short and do a double take, before I crouch down to have a look. It's a biology book. From my school. All at once I'm remembering Mr. Hayden complaining about the missing books, and my eyes grow wide. It feels like so long ago... I hardly even remembered they were gone. But... here they are.
There are more textbooks from my school that I recognise, I realise as I take another look around. Textbooks on Spanish, French, Physics, Algebra, Geometry, Psychology. I look back to the the Spanish textbook with a strange feeling in my gut. Delicately, I reach out and flip it open. It's filled with scribbled notes, pen scratch marks, all in a messy, incredibly rushed hand.
Is this... Seth's handwriting?
What's more, has he been stealing and reading all of these? As I flip the Spanish book closed, I notice a second one, for a second year of the class, then another and another, for the third and fourth years. Piled next to them are the same textbooks for French. My stomach flip flops, and the thought strikes me like lightning: Seth has learned these languages, hasn't he?
That would mean that that conversation I had with Ethan on the baseball bleachers- if Seth could hear us then he probably could have understood every word of it. Somehow the knowledge leaves me feeling shaken, and I try to recall everything we said, but I can't imagine how Seth knowing that I told Ethan what he was could have changed their first meeting.
Turning away from the Spanish textbooks, I find my gaze drawing back to that biology book, to the pages it's lying open on. It's chapter 12.3: The Origin of Life. The book is so marked up with different pens and pencils that I don't think it could be returned even if it was taken back.
Quickly skimming the chapter and the notes, I find myself coming away with a confusing impression of hypotheses and possibilities.
What... what is Seth trying to learn? His notes are excited, and he's circled many passages on the beginnings of life on Earth, on the theories of single celled organisms forming from elements brought from other planets, from meteors. My brain feels like it's been put through the washer. I feel like I should be getting something, but I'm all spun up and too dizzy to grasp it. What big picture could his notes possibly elude too?
I feel short of breath as I return the book back to how I found it, taking a step back. I want to leave, I feel like I've already done too much snooping, but at the same time I'm too curious to let this go.
Turning, I glance to the cluttered desk. There are piles of ink-filled notebook paper, pages clearly ripped from various books, and printed articles, as though he printed out to keep those he found on the internet. But there are no actual notebooks. There are more pens and mechanical pencils than he could possibly need, unless half of them are dried out or missing lead, and he just hasn't thrown them out.
Above the desk is something that immediately catches my eye. With an assortment of tape and tack and thumb tacks, he's pinned up articles that have been scribbled on and highlighted over. And they're all about him.
There's the newspaper page from the day I was interviewed, about when he stopped the car. A "Miracle Save".
There are articles on the "bear attack" back in Windsor, on the Windor meteor strike from the day I found him, on possible unidentified creature roaming the area. I can only think of Shari's friend, and, leaning in to squint at one of the printed pages, an uneasy wave shudders through me as I find that the site of the article is truly is SomethingStrange.US.
Why is Seth reading these? How does he find them?
There are other things that catch my eye, like a picture of me, for example. Towards the side of the strange collage there are more articles, ones that have been torn from a newspaper rather than printed from the internet, and they're about my team, the Grand Junction Tigers. These articles have seemingly nothing to do with him, and yet he's kept them. And I remember half of them, because I've kept them as well. Especially the one in which we made the front page, and there was a picture of me and my teammate making a pass.
There's so much here, I don't know what to focus on.
There, in the middle, is something that's different than all the rest. It's a map, colored only in black lines and red circles. It seems to depict the Americas, divided by longitude and latitude lines, and there, labelled tiny in the corner, is the title: Meteorite Landing Sites Within the Month of August.
It was dated nine years ago.
The red circles are everywhere. My gaze is immediately drawn to Colorado, and sure enough, in the Windsor area, there is a little red circle.
My head is spinning with the possibilities that this map is implying. When we were kids, Sundo said something about a meteor, about being in a crash. If somehow he came from that meteorite, could that mean...?
I look at Seth's map again, at all the little circles scattered across the Americas. My heart is pounding in my throat, and I'm almost shaking with this idea, with what this map could possibly imply.
Could this mean there are more creatures like him?
The door downstairs creaks open.
"I'm home!" Seth calls gleefully, and I jolt halfway out of my skin.
I tear my gaze from the collage of paper on the wall and the map within it, rushing from the room and swinging the door shut behind me.
"H-hi!" I call back, and it sounds more like a squawk. My hands are shaking badly, and I can hear my rapid heartbeat in my ear drums.
Calm down.
I take one stiff step after another, and I can hear Seth in the kitchen, rummaging around with plastic bags. I don't know what to do. Stopping at the top of the stairs, I stare down them like they're a set of jaws that will swallow me whole as soon as I take a step down into them. What should I do? Do I ask Seth about what I found? Will he be upset?
I freeze. I'd started thinking of him as Seth again without realising it. How? Why? Is that bad? I run a shaky, nervous hand through my hair, tugging and hoping the pain at my scalp will help yank me out of this stupor.
I'm fine, we're fine. Knowing this doesn't change who Sundo is. He's still the same sweet creature who's devoted to a fault. But... does it change how I see him?
I'm stuck at the top of the stairs for who knows how long before Sundo steps out from the kitchen, looking up curiously.
"Joshua? Oh! There you are! Come, come, see what I've got! And no one recognised me! I told you I could do it!" He's beaming wide enough that his bright eyes are merry crescents.
I let out a breath. Still the same, I tell myself. Still the same. I'll ask him about it, I decide. Later. I'll ask him about it.
As smoothly as I can, I descend the stairs, and I let him lead me into the kitchen, where he gleefully shows off his haul.
"Oh," he interrupts himself to say eventually, and his manner visibly deflates a little bit. "And I, eum... I found something... of yours..." He tells me slowly, hesitantly.
I raise an eyebrow at him.
He looks away.
Reaching into his back pocket, he begins to pull out something, something that I recognise as soon as I see it, and my stomach drops.
"I found this... I'm surprised it was still there... But... I have it now." Sundo is saying, though I'm not listening at all.
"My phone." I say, breathless, reaching out to take it from him immediately.
He lets me take it, however reluctantly, and I turn the shitty device over and over in my hands. I didn't think I'd miss the piece of crap as much as I did, but I can't describe how happy I am to have it back. I can finally message my dad, I can read Ying's texts. I can...
Not get it to turn on.
I try again, pressing the power button, and still nothing happens. The screen remains dark, and Sundo begins to nervously fidget with his sleeves again. My spirits sink.
It was already cracked before, but now it looks utterly ruined. The screen is shattered, and a fracture runs through one of the corners of the device, chipping even the metal backing.
"I... I'm sorry, Joshua." Seth manages to say. "I didn't know if it'd work, but I went to go find it, because you wanted it so much..."
I can't look up at him, not now. Still gazing down at the phone, I mumble, "So you knew where it was?"
"I... Yes. I did." He admits dejectedly, after seemingly taking a moment to debate doing so. "I remember it falling out of your pocket, when... You know." He gestures feebly in front of him, and he knows he doesn't have to say it for me to know when he's referring to. I remember.
Clasping the ruined phone tight enough that the shards of the screen dig into my palm, I take a deep breath. I count down as I exhale, thinking of that paramedic, and I still don't feel better when I finish. Seth is still watching me, and suddenly his gaze is too much for me.
"I need a moment." I mutter.
Seth looks frightened, but he doesn't try to stop me as I walk away, and I don't try to explain to him that I'm not leaving. Because I think he knows. I'll be back.
I just need a moment for now, alone, to think.
.
.
.
Surprise! Two fun chapters out of the blue, because I was on a long car trip and somehow found the motivation to pound out two and a half awesome chapters on my phone. Very proud :)
No fun songs for now, because I don't feel like choosing any, though if you can think of songs that remind you of this story? I'd love to hear? So much??
Fun fact I learned while writing this chapter! A meteoroid is the rock that's flying through space and the solar system; when it enters the Earth's atmosphere, it becomes a meteor, and when it hits the surface, it becomes a meteorite! Who knew, right?
Hope you all enjoy, and please let me know your thoughts! I live for comments, and votes are amazing too! That being said, thanks for reading as always, and I hope y'all have a stellar day/night!