In the brief moment they’d spoken, Miles decided he didn’t like this girl.
Maybe it was unfair for him to make that kind of snap judgement about her. After all, there was nothing he hated more than having assumptions levied against him, but he couldn’t help it — trusting his gut was the only was he could survive, and his gut told him he shouldn’t like her. He didn’t like her eyes, maybe not warm, but certainly honest. He didn’t like her soft voice, trying to sound wise, like she knew better than him. He didn’t like the feeling he got in the pit of his stomach that hold him hey, maybe she does.
Most of all, he didn’t like how he felt like he was supposed to trust her.
He’d caught a glimpse of his CPS file once; not a long one, only seeing a flash over a desk, but long enough to catch a phrase, bolded, highlighted and triple-underlined: HAS TRUST ISSUES. To which Miles said: duh. He’d be shocked if anyone who had been through what he had didn’t have some level of trust issues; beyond his family traumas, the number of times he’d been handed from (supposedly) charitable and loving family to another would screw anyone up. At sixteen, he was tired of ripping the same scars open over and over, and the tissue was building up too thick for him to be able to — despite being little more than a child, he was marred, toughened, impenetrable.
So anything that made him feel any inkling of safety triggered immediate sirens; her gentle words activated his fight-or-flight response, but he was too caught in the headlights to do either.
“If you don’t want people to feel targeted, maybe don’t gawk at them then?” he said, sputtering the words out, more desperate than his intended intimidation. “I’m not a friggin’ freakshow. Do you, like, come here for fun? To see all the fuckups? Feel better about yourself?”
His lip quivered, almost imperceptibly, at her tone. Miles felt.. bad about snapping at her, even if that shame was momentary — but he shook it off quickly. He wouldn’t allow himself to be duped so easily. “Oh, yeah. I’m really gonna make the most out of this. When that motherfucker,” he spat, jabbing a thumb towards a hulking teenage boy, stupid and hulking over the pastry plate, “jams me into a locker tomorrow morning, he’ll be so much nicer, knowing my dad killed himself, like he didn’t already know that.”
On some level, he wanted to pick a fight with her.
On another, he wanted her to ask. Ask what his deal was, ask why he was so angry, ask what happened to him, ask him how he felt. For the first time in a long time, Miles felt as though he was faced with someone who wanted to know, not for their own grim curiosity, but because they wanted to hear what he had to say. “… you had to come here? I don’t— I don’t believe that. You’re way too — you’re not angry enough.”
“Well, Rosie, right? I don’t know how you got it, but I’m sleepin’ in my truck until I show up for four of these things. Then, my case worker’ll consider placing me with another family. And it’s gettin’ cold, and I like havin’ toes, so if I wanna keep ‘em, I gotta show.” He bared his teeth in a mean sneer — he wasn’t sure how effective it was. He sometimes growled at himself like that mirror, testing out different faces, seeing which one was the scariest, the best one to throw on when kids at school were fucking with him or drunks were knocking on his window after the bars kicked them out. It was hard to pick a scariest face when all of them made him look like a particularly cross bulldog puppy — except for his eyes. His eyes were as mean as he was trying to be. He didn’t know how to feel about that.
Miles’ eyes opened wide, dismayed by her words — they were far too close, hit too deep, sent his shaky stability rocking. “You don’t know shit about abandonment,” he spat through gritted teeth, knuckles white as he crushed the styrofoam in his hands.
The boy was angry. Rosaline saw that at once.
“Gawk? Now that’s a bit too much buddy,” his accusation, now more direct, took her aback, and it took all the depressive energy she had soaked up in her that evening to not break into a fit of defensive laughter. “Anyways, I said I was sorry.” Her expression, now resembling a candid one, was stern, forcibly so, in an attempt to obscure the emotions that suddenly overcame the better part of her. Her gaze wavered as he continued, and a mixture of shame and guilt took over when she caught his eyes glaring. They seared with pain, with confusion, and they hated.
“No geez— no, not for fun.” She knew that wasn’t what he meant, but she responded immediately nonetheless, in careless utterance, to Miles’ taunting. His words stung, as truths often do. She felt her own eyes burn, and anguish stirring up within. No—why, why now? She wanted to grunt in frustration, possessed by the feeling that come when you realise you are about to wake up from a perfect dream, but she kept still, her voice the same mellow solace as it was before.
“But you’re not wrong, actually,” she said, “I did come here to listen, and I do want to feel better about myself.” It is a destructive thing, to hide behind a mask of passive aggression, she learned. And ironically these days, Rosaline found honesty to be her best protection. “Wouldn’t you too? And people here… I mean us, we’re more like fucked than actual Fuck Ups though, aren’t we.” She still felt uneasy under his gaze, though noticing that he seemed just as muddled as she was, if not more. “Like, what did we do that was so wrong?” She rambled on, dragging out her sentence and interjecting snark if only to diffuse the tension building up within herself. “Well, most of us, anyway.” She felt an agonising chuckle rend her mouth, and she held her lips before she could let slip another confession.
There will be a better time for that, she thought.
Her eyes followed his gesture to the sight of a hefty figure, whose name she could barely recall— because he sure wasn’t a sharer, as his looks suggested. “Yeah about that, I think he has plenty of targets to cycle through before he’ll get to you, you got enough time to run, like, he doesn’t look all that… agile.” She wasn’t sure what she said in the first place prompted him to respond this way, but she did remember what it was like when she couldn’t help but to assume the worst of everyone’s intentions. She averted her gaze from him again, muttering, “yeah I know, not helping.” And truly, she felt terrible about the fact that what he said could very well be true. All that bullying awareness, sticks and stones crap fooled no one, but she knew that she deserved little say in that matter. She never had to go to school scared of anyone besides herself, after all.
Where there was a brief moment of pause, she flickered her gaze back to him, a shadow of sympathy in her eyes. “You know, Miles, you don’t really have to trust me or anything, if you’re hung up about that,” she said with an air of easiness, “I’m not asking anything from you.”
“No, I didn’t have to come here,” she replied, in the same vein as her earlier confession, “been made to go to enough of these now that no one bothers with me anymore.” She quirked her lips and shrugged, feeling the torrent of shame from earlier morph back into its regular, contained form. “Either think I’m fixed now, or unfixable,” she’s not sure if there really can be a repaired person, but not being an addict may be a start. “I’ve ran out of excuses long ago. So right now I just kind of am.” Funny how he’d used anger as the metric to judge people here, she thought, and it wasn’t as if Rosaline harboured no rage, it’s just the more excuses she found to lash out at the world, the more the self resentment was amplified within.
“The case workers can go suck it, is what I’d say, ” she retorted in full earnestness, “you have every right to be angry, Miles. And you have every right to want to burn the world to the fucking ground for what it did to you. Shit, I kind of wish you’d do that,” she faced his sneer directly, his eyes appearing less hostile now somehow, though still no where near friendly. “But yea, we’re still here. Cut into pieces, thrown into a whirl pool and spat back out.”
“No, I don’t suppose I do.” She felt a twinge in her heart when he cursed at her, and her eyes felt funny again. She looked at him sombrely, facing his whole burst of anger, and felt oddly calm.
He was angry. She was too.
“We’ll keep drifting no matter what,” she continued, “so we can choose to come together or give up and drown.” Rosaline hesitated, her gaze drifting down as her words trailed off. “What else is there to do.”
