Free Falling Harder by W. H. Vega Page B

hell
do you see in me, Nadia?” he asks, “I’m serious. There’s nothing in me that’s
good enough for someone like you.”
    “I think that I
get to be the judge of that,” I tell him. My voice rides low in my throat, and
I realize for the first time how alone we are, out here by the pond. I take a
deep breath and, inch by inch, move closer to where he’s sitting.
    “I’m no good,
Nadia,” Trace says, his eyes intent on my face as our bodies come together,
almost of their own accord, “But...I know I could be good to you. I know—”
    “Trace,” I say,
our faces not a foot apart, “Shut up about good and bad and just...kiss me
already.”
    I don’t have to
ask him twice. Trace’s firm hands take hold of my face, and he lowers his lips
to mine. He presses his mouth softly against mine, and I let my mouth open to
him, relishing the first taste of this unknowable person.
    Our lips move
together, our hands fumble in the dark for the other’s body. I pull just an
inch away and look up into Trace’s green, green eyes. But as I open my mouth to
speak, I see that I don’t have to say a word. Everything I want him to know is
already written there, behind the mask he wears for the rest of the world.
    In the starlit
park, we wrap our arms around as much of each other as we can hold. We let the
silence do the talking, and hold each other as dusk gives way to twilight.

 
    Eight
    Trace
    Almost Happy
     
    “I have to say,
Mr. O’Conner, I’m not minding this sudden change that seems to have come over
you.”
    I cock an
eyebrow at The Colonel and lean back in my rickety chair. “Would you speak
English once in a while, Sanders?”
    “You seem
different,” he clarifies, resting his patched elbows on the desk. “You seem
more stable, less tempestuous.”
    “Again: English,
please.”
    “It’s almost
like you’re...happy,” Sanders says, “It’s wonderful to see, truly.”
    My first
instinct is to tell the guidance counselor to screw off. Happy is a word that
people try and force on you when they’re through paying you any mind. Social
workers, foster parents, school principals—they’ve all tried to slap the “happy
label” on me before. Once you can call a kid happy, you can wash your hands of
him.
    The H Word has
never been one that I wanted anything to do with, but...it kind of snuck up on
me this time. I can’t say for sure, because I’ve never actually experienced it,
but Sanders might be right—I might actually be a tiny bit happy for the first
time I can remember.
    “I don’t know
what to tell you,” I say to The Colonel, “Things haven’t been complete shit
lately, I guess.”
    “Has anything
changed for you, recently?” Sanders asks, “Any shifts in your home life, or
your life here at school?”
    The answer is
pretty simple, of course. It’s all thanks to Nadia. For two weeks now, we’ve
been sneaking off alone, going on micro-dates or whatever. Neither of us has
any money to speak of, so we can’t go out for fancy dinners or whatever normal
people do. Instead, we just disappear from the house for a couple hours here
and there. We go to the park, listen to music in the car, just drive around for
the hell of it. I’ve even been waking up super early like she does so that we
can chill before school.
    I don’t do the
whole girlfriend thing. Never have, never will. I’ve had plenty of girls, to be
sure. My first time was with the biological daughter of some foster parents I
was staying with. I was thirteen at the time, she was sixteen.
    One night, after
good old Mom and Dad had gone to bed, she snuck into my bedroom and climbed
right the fuck on top of me. I was petrified at the time, and felt terrible afterwards.
But it felt good enough while it was happening that I didn’t do anything to
stop it. Turns out I didn’t have to—she was particularly loud one night and got
us caught by her parents.
    I was the one
who got punished, obviously, and they sent me packing the very next