Dan wasn’t one to scream. It took a lot to faze her, to surprise her.
Still, she felt that she wouldn’t be completely alone if she screamed at this.
This being a kid standing in her kitchen, wielding a kitchen knife.
“Who are you? Where am I?” The boy asked.
Dan shook her head, confused, but she caught on. She responded, “I’m Dan. We’re at Palmetto State University.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.
She shook her head, but the boy’s eyes only squinted further. When Dan looked closer, she could see a purple shadow on the kid’s cheekbone. She held up her hands like she was trying to calm a wild animal, which this kid might as well have been.
“What’s your name?” She asked.
The boy paused, took a long, drawn out breath, and spoke. “My name is Andreas.”
Dan was surprised for a moment. She hadn’t expected the kid to respond. Dan studied the boy while he gave her a scrutinizing look. He had blue eyes, light enough to be blue, but dark enough that it was hard to see in the dim lighting.
His hair was a dark brown, but what troubled Dan the most were the bruises all over the child in varying colors.
Violet, yellow, green, red, each mark was of a different spectrum.
Like a rainbow made of pain, Dan thought.
It was hard to see in the dim, but as Dan’s sight adjusted, she could see that the bruises were everywhere. Up the boy’s collar, his arms, his legs, his face, they were covered in sickening shades.
But what troubled Dan the most was his hands.
There were fresh, dark marks, and tiny slices overlaying them.
It looked painful. It must have stung to even make a grip, but the injured hands holding the knife didn’t waver from their target. She didn’t even know what sorts of marks decorated the boy under his clothes.
And that was when Dan spotted a stain on his pant leg. It looked red.
“Are you okay?” She asked.
It struck Dan then, how similar that sounded to Neil. The boy said in the same way as Neil did, too, when he first came to Palmetto.
The boy’s tone said, I’m used to this, and I need to be fine.
It was then that the boy collapsed onto the cheap plastic and wood floor, knife clattered to the side, mouth open in a silent gasp of pain.
His eyes shuttered once, twice before closing.
“What the hell are you talking about.”
“I don’t know! I just- there’s a kid in my dorm, he’s like twelve-ish, and his leg is stabbed. I do not know what to do. Just- just get here quick.”
Dan took a shaky breath, then clutched at her phone harder.
Down the hallway and through the first door on the left, lay a boy with bruises on every inch of skin, and a stab wound in his left leg.
On highway 62, Andrew Minyard was driving twenty miles over the speed limit to get to the Fox Tower.
In Fox Tower, Danielle Wilds was attempting to barricade the room where the boy lay with a dresser without making a sound.
In the first room in the left dwelled Nathaniel Wesninski. He was dreaming.
“You stupid child, I have explained this to you seven times.”
Mary brought the ruler down on Andreas’ hand. He didn’t wince, though. He just erased the incorrect word and scribbled down the correct letters. But still, his mother wasn’t pleased.
“How are you going to fit into the sixth grade when you cannot even spell? If you do not learn quickly, your father will come. You know what happens then.”
Andreas ducked his head down and nodded. His hands ached with every movement of the pen, but he ignored it and jotted more words and pronunciations.
Eventually, through enough swats and cuts, Andreas stopped seeing his hands as his.
Instead, he imagined that his hands were petals. Delicate, soft, but still unwilling to tear. Marks upon marks appeared, but still, Andreas saw lined blossoms instead of injured hands.
Andreas startled awake on an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. He counted to ten in english, then in german in his head.
That was how long it took for Andreas to steady his breathing and compartmentalize his injuries.
There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the room with Andreas, so he opened his eyes and sat up as quietly as he could.
It seemed as though someone had bandaged it. Maybe his mother had done it. Probably not.
The wound wasn’t important enough to waste supplies on.
Andreas wasn’t important enough to waste supplies on.
It was unlocked, but it wouldn’t open.
The door was unlocked, but Andreas couldn’t get out.
Trapped. That was what Andreas was.
He’d tried pushing the door open, but something blocked the entire doorway. Somebody had heard him, too. Softened footsteps had sounded right after the groan and creak of his attempts.
Eventually, he’d given up on escaping. There was a window, but it was too high up and steep to climb down from.
But through the glass pane, Andreas could see cherry blossoms whirling around in the wind.
Dan decided that the kid was Neil. It was too unlikely to be anyone else.
Neil had been in her dorm to avoid Andrew and Kevin’s argument, and Dan had gone out to buy some food. That was when she discovered the boy. He did look suspiciously like Neil, too.
But all of that reasoning didn’t explain why Neil was suddenly a child. There was no plausible reason for that, besides magic.
And magic didn’t exist, did it?
Andreas woke up to the door opening.
It was almost silent, but he’d learned to wake up at any sound while sleeping. At the doorway, a blond man stood. He didn’t look surprised that Andreas had woken up.
He watched the man carefully, when he spoke two words that froze
The man continued, unfazed by Andreas’s shock.
“That’s your name, isn’t it?” The man said.
Andreas let himself breathe shakily for a moment, then spoke in the calmest voice he could muster.
“That’s not my name, sir. I think you are confused.”
At that, the man seemed amused, as his brow twitched up and he looked disbelieving.
“Liar. You are Nathaniel Wesninski, and are pretending to be someone else.”
Andreas’s eyes darted back and forth, trying to find a way to escape this man, who clearly knew who he was.
He opened his mouth, and got ready to lie, lie, lie.
Dan almost screamed when Andrew walked out of the room with the kid in tow.
The boy’s voice was surprisingly smooth. It was high, too, still containing just a little trace of childhood in it.
Dan eagerly nodded, and the kid’s mouth tightened at the sight.
“And you’re Andreas?” She asked.
“Do you want some lunch?”
Another nod. Fake brown eyes angled at the ground.
Andrew watched Neil- no, Andreas sit in the backseat of the maserati. Andreas didn’t sit like a normal twelve year old would. He didn’t swing his legs, or look out the window, or fidget.
He just stayed perfectly still. Like a statue. Andrew didn’t know why, but it bothered him. Maybe it was because the kid was what Neil had once been.
Andrew knew that at this point, Neil had already escaped Nathan with his mother. But there was still a minor stab wound in Andreas’s leg, and bruises all over. Andrew knew that Mary had been abusive to Neil, but he’d never pushed it, seeing as Neil still believed it was for the best.
Andrew had learned to accept that, but the new marks on Andreas’s hands and body brought up the old hatred he’d kept inside when Neil had first told him about Mary.
But Andreas wouldn’t want to hear about his dead mother, so Andrew ignored just how silent the boy was.
Andreas was picking at his fries at McDonalds, when he looked up with his fake brown eyes, and asked, “Is my mother dead?”
Next to Andreas, Dan sucked in a panicked breath, and Andrew watched the kid with a calculating gaze. A normal person would probably say something about she was somewhere else, but there was no reason to lie.
Dan’s hissed “Andrew!” was lost in Andreas’s quiet voice.
“How’d she die? Did my father die before her, or after?” He asked.
Andrew answered both questions unflinchingly, while Dan looked more and more panicked, probably scared that Andreas would cry or run. He did neither of those things, but Andrew saw him clench his fists under the table, and his mouth tremble.
The kid was good at hiding things, Andrew could give him that. A sob story that the rest of the foxes would probably fuss over. He knew that they would find out eventually, so when Andreas said he was done with the Happy Meal, despite not having eaten a bite of his burger, Andrew sped to the Fox Tower with Dan watching nervously in the backseat.
The reactions of the Foxes was just what Andrew had expected. Nicky had been shocked at first, then started to coo over Andreas. Renee had watched from a distance, with Allison. Aaron hadn’t cared, and Kevin had almost immediately asked about the upcoming exy game, while Andreas looked extremely shocked at the sight of Kevin.
Matt had attempted to strike a conversation with Andreas, to no avail. And all throughout the whole ordeal, Andreas had looked very uncomfortable. When he’d requested to go the bathroom, he hadn’t come out, even after twenty minutes had passed.
Surprisingly, Renee was the one to knock on the door first. Her normally sweet voice was rougher, more real.
“Andreas? Are you still in there? It’s Renee. I know it’s a bit overwhelming, meeting us, but I promise, we won’t make you go out if you don’t want to,” she said. “I won’t lie. We all know what happened with your father, and I know it must be a shock, finding out that both your parents are dead in a day, but we all understand. The Foxes are a family of messed-up people, and you might find that some of us have more in common with you than you think.”
A moment passed, then Andrew could hear shuffling behind the locked door.
“I want to speak to Renee. Alone.” Andreas said, muffled.
Turning away, Andrew said, “Everybody get out.”
For once, the Foxes all listened, shuffling outside, undoubtedly to try to listen through the door.
At Renee’s meaningful glance, Andrew stepped outside as well.
Renee knocked again, and said softly, “Andreas? Everybody’s out. I swear.”
A pause, and then the door came open.
Andreas came out, and Renee’s heart broke at how his shoulders curved in, how his battered hands clenched as he walked over the threshold.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Renee asked.
She watched Andreas breathe for a minute, before he spoke.
“I don’t know what to think. I woke up in a stranger’s bed, and apparently, my mom is dead, my father’s dead, there a bunch of people who apparently know my whole life’s events, and the craziest thing is- I’m supposed to be twenty.”
“Can you tell me what happened to your hands?” she asked.
Andreas immediately looked suspicious, and put his hands behind his back.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Renee said.
And for a tense moment, he didn’t. Then Renee watched as he crumbled.
“I mess up sometimes. In German. Mom doesn’t like it when I do.”
Renee clenched her fists, but didn’t say anything, until Andreas looked up, and his scowl lessened.
“I’m glad he-I have all these friends. They seem okay. This life seems okay.” he murmured.
And Renee, dropping her nice-christian-girl face for a moment, answered back, “Trust me. It gets a lot better.”
Neil Josten woke up in the dorm room of the Fox Tower, surrounded by his friends, his family, the reason it got so much better, and took the day off to watch the cherry blossoms fall, while Andrew sat with him.
Written by @alvarez-sara and posted here with permission.
