It was getting harder to pretend that I couldn't sense his eyes on me. I knew there was nothing romantic about the way he looked at me; he only seemed curious, but it made me uncomfortable, anyway.
I didn't feel bad about pretending I didn't know him; I was dealing with grief my way.
Talking about what happened wouldn't change anything. I was not an expert on grieving, but I knew as much.
My best bet was often not to think about it at all. Once I started, I knew it would be an impossible task to stop my mind from wandering to places where I wouldn't be able to retrieve it. I sometimes wondered if it was some kind of disorder that intensified the voices in my head way above the ones around me. A disorder much like physical pain.
I decided to stare back, as if I hadn't devoted most of my energy avoiding him these past few months.
Before I could meet his dark eyes, he had focused on the teacher again, leaving me somewhere between relieved and disappointed.
Mr. Scott finished scribbling words on the board. He turned to face us, stepping away to reveal what he had written. "Death penalty..." he read, emphasizing each word with a clap, even though that wasn't necessary. "It's a controversial issue even now--" He leaned against his desk, his pale eyes narrowing as he seemed to search for his next words--"maybe especially now that it's not as used as before. Who'd like to start our debate today?"
None of us dared to raise our hands. We had all learned, the hard way, that volunteering was never a good idea. Some students pretended to be busy, turning around to look for nonexistent items in their backpacks. Others looked down, trying to avoid making eye contact with Mr. Scott.
He shook his head in disappointment as his eyes roamed around the room in search of an innocent soul to pick on. They stopped on me. Most of my teachers seemed to have convinced themselves that calling on me somehow helped me. If that's what the self-help books taught about assisting those dealing with loss, they were far from helpful.
"Avery, would you start us off?" He started looking for his second victim without giving me a chance to refuse. "Who else? Who else?"
When he called Avan's name too, the optimistic lies I had already been telling myself collapsed.
Avan stopped doodling on the cover of his notebook and looked up, his eyes narrowed in annoyance.
Mr. Scott gave a slight nod in my direction, compelling me to begin.
"I'm against it," I said, knowing that Avan would have to choose whichever position I didn't pick. That's how the Debate class's discussions had to start.
Before giving it much thought, I added that everyone deserved a second chance. A generic sentence, maybe, but I didn't have the energy for better arguments.
"Everyone?" Avan leaned back in his chair. The long black strands of hair bounced and followed his movement. "That seems general enough to make room for a lot of misunderstandings. Not everyone wants a second chance."
"Dive in whenever you think you can contribute to the discussion," Mr. Scott reminded the rest of the class as I tried to come up with something else to say.
Trying to mask my uncertainty, I maintained eye contact and tried to ignore the whispers behind me. "Everyone has a right to live."
"I agree." Avan did not miss a beat. "That's exactly why the death penalty is even a thing. It makes sure that ending someone else's life doesn't go unpunished."
Even with the air conditioning, the room felt stifling to me. Perhaps it was a good thing that my hair never grew past my shoulders, otherwise, I might have wanted to tear it off.
"What do you mean, 'unpunished'?" I heard someone else ask from the back of the room. "Jail is still a thing—"
Avan scoffed and cut in, "A thing no one takes seriously anymore."
"Are you suggesting that death is the only way to fight death?" A high-pitched voice chimed in.
"Not quite. I'm sure there are a lot of ways. I'm just saying it's the most effective way."
Mr. Scott turned to look at each new person who spoke, sporting an encouraging smile on his lips. His topics didn't usually gather as much engagement.
"Executing someone isn't something you can undo. How do you apologize to the loved ones of an innocent person you've executed?" I focused on the board to distract myself from those who turned to look at me. The longer I stared at the words scribbled on it, the blurrier they became.
"Yeah," said a guy in a green letterman jacket. "Death penalty is pretty much murder."
"Dude." His teammate sitting beside him nudged him. "You know how in these superheroes movies, the villain can do whatever he wants because he doesn't care about morality? Meanwhile, the heroes are less cool because they're all 'Let's not kill anyone. We have to do things the right way'. Like, if they used the methods the villains used, less people would die. Sure, death penalty sucks or whatever, but if criminals are going to do crazy stuff, we should do the same, you know? Prevent more deaths and stuff."
Some people laughed at his comment, much more involved in the debate now that it applied to something they actually cared about.
As more people joined in, I returned to my thoughts. Stealing a glance at Avan, I noticed that he had started doodling again. The motion of his pencil hypnotized me until it stopped two centimeters above the page. I looked up to find Avan already staring at me.
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I kept my head down the rest of the morning, wincing every time I remembered the debate with Avan. If Riley were here, she'd have known what to shoot back at him or how to help me make sense of my arguments. But she wasn't here, and that was the problem in the first place.
Eleven months and thirteen days had passed since my sister died, but as I walked into the cafeteria, I still couldn't shake the feeling that she would be waving me over. My eyes still scanned the room, trying to locate her smile, but only unfamiliar faces stared back at me. There was no getting used to that.
"Avery? Why did you stop walking?"
Startled, I turned around. Arson was right behind me, wearing his signature grin. His parents must have known what they were doing when they named him. An invisible halo of energy constantly hung around him, both attracting and repelling.
"Not that I would mind standing around for half an hour or anything, but would you like to sit?" He nodded toward our usual table. As soon as we settled in our seats, he asked, "Are you okay, Ava?"
Even with the poor lighting of the cafeteria, I noticed his lips curving into a wide smile that showed off his teeth, with two of them positioned slightly above the others, but the imperfection suited him just as much as he was proud of it.
I winced at the nickname. It had started as a joke a few years ago when Riley first met Avan. She played on the similarities of our names because that cracked her up, for some reason. She was always easily amused.
"I'm okay," I said, remembering the question, and although I wasn't at the moment, I was trying, so maybe that made it only half a lie.
He jogged to the vending machines and came back with popcorn and chips.
"Hungry?" he asked as he poured whipped cream from his backpack into his popcorn bag, and I had to look away. If I had been hungry, watching him eat that killed it.
Our conversations followed a pattern. Arson would ask a few questions that I would answer without details, then he would rant about the school's varsity basketball team when I stopped replying. I would try to focus on what he was saying, pushing back the memories of Riley that competed for my attention.
"Debate class was interesting today," I started, surprising both him and myself.
He looked up with whipped cream coloring the corners of his lips. He nodded for me to go on as he tried to finish chewing.
"Avan still tries to pick fights with me," I joked, shrugging off the weird feeling of pronouncing his name for the first time in months.
The lightness of the statement almost seemed to appease the heaviness in my heart that came with talking about the past.
"He was always really good at arguing. That much hasn't changed," I continued, slight resentment tinging my tone.
With his mouth empty, he finally replied, "He's not the same guy. He changed a lot after Riley, you know..."
I decided not to notice the way Arson was trying to avoid mentioning the accident. He nodded to a table by the window where Avan and some other guy were sitting with their backs against the glass of the picture window.
"Remember how, back then, he was all loud and..." Arson did not finish that thought, but I assumed he would have added "happy" if he hadn't been filtering his thoughts, molding them into words he believed wouldn't affect me too much.
Loud and happy.
Those words were as effective as any to describe the Avan we used to know, with the visible and somewhat mischievous glint that seemed to take permanent residence in his brown eyes whenever he was around Riley.
The guy slouched against the window right now didn't show the slightest hint of the infatuated smile he wore when he was with her.
The distance made it difficult for me to see what his eyes looked like now, and I supposed walking up to him to ask to let me stare into his eyes was an unspoken no-no.
"Maybe you two should talk," Arson said as I continued to stare at Avan with no thought of being subtle. The sentence sounded ludicrous to me, but Arson went on as if he didn't notice I was scowling at him, "You could help each other."
"We tried. The weeks after the accident, Avan and I tried small talk--which, as it turns out, wasn't very effective." The more I talked about it, the more concrete the memories became. "Dad would invite him over for coffee or whatever, and we would sit in silence, all three of us staring at our mugs. It was torture."
Thinking about Avan reminded me of the funeral when we sat by each other for the longest and worst hours of my life.
I didn't move from the moment the ceremony started till they called me to read my eulogy. I climbed onto the stage, my body stiff from staying in the same position for so long. My eyes glanced down at the crowd, and I ran. Since then, I had had tons of reasons to regret it. I had left my father alone to deal with it, and I had taken the easiest way out, like the coward I was.
"Sometimes, people just need others to leave them alone," I said after an uncomfortable silence. His soft blue eyes made me feel bad for disagreeing.
"Well, he doesn't," he said with unfounded confidence. "If he knew what was happening to him, he would want something to hold on to. You should be able to tell that he isn't this blank-faced loser he's pretending to be. I think only good things can come out of this." That optimism of his was just as uplifting as it was annoying.
Arson's words still bugged me long after the bell rang. Something told me I'd soon have to break the blank-faced loser's silence.
A/N: Thank you for reading!
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-D.T. ➷