I am motion.
Jem Walker thinks this. She will never understand poetry and she's not going to lose any sleep over that. There's her music, but…if she were a poet, maybe she could explain why music is different—separate from everything else. Still, she is motion. She allows herself this…simile, is it? She doesn't think about what it means. She wouldn't be motion if she stopped to do that. She pushes through, keeps her colt at the ready, keeps herself alive and watches Gary's back. She is motion. It feels like sending a message to her brother, who painted, but whom she always thought of as a poet. He was an artist through and through. He gave her the music that's the closest she'll ever get to poetry and she feels a bit like he's near when she says the words, because they aren't her words, but she loves them. It's how she thinks he would see her.
Jem used to think her brother was the strong one, when she walked tip-toe and he did what no one else knew to do. But then the whispers started at school. People said things about Jem that she couldn't bear, and so she didn't. It hurt her knuckles and it hurt something else that she didn't know how to describe, but she survived and people learned to stop hurting her. Jem knew then that she could be strong, even if strength, in the short term, was more painful than keeping her head down.
She never saw her brother fight back. She saw the hurt build up in him, day by day, but it didn't make him strong the way it had with her. At home he was her big brother and he could pull her out of anything. But Jem was growing up and out of home, and Kier didn't look like the same person at all, not out in the real world.
And then it was confirmed. Kieren dead. Her strong big brother wasn't real. It was some illusion that house walls and common upbringing had pulled over her eyes, but it wasn't real. Kieren was gone, and how could she be sure he had ever really been there, when she had been so wrong about him? Jemima Walker knew who she was. She was strong and…I am motion. That was all she could do. A short poetic phrase that she didn't understand, but loved. That was Kieran.
There are days that stand out and can never be made to fit in with the rest of life. A day came when she saw her brother, gone fourteen months and half wiped from her memory by uncertainty, standing over the body of her friend, newly erased from the world. The one lost love tore the other to bloody fragments, and that would not stand. That could not be rationalized or assimilated or turned to rage that would turn to strength. Losing a brother should mean some sort of free pass, something in exchange so that the rest of life wasn't quite as shit. But losing Kieren meant losing Lisa as well.
Kieren had not been strong. Her wonderful, kind, weak brother couldn't do the small harm necessary to push people back, to earn his separate place, and so he dissipated, became nothing. And something evil took his place.
It all happened very quickly. She was still frozen in the supermarket, watching Kieren and Lisa. For the first time she entertained the dim but horrifying possibility that she had never left behind the silent, scared girl who walked on her toes. Maybe Kieren had always been strong in a way that didn't have anything to do with bloody knuckles or guns. Maybe his was a better kind of strength, but it was gone now. He was falling apart, bleeding black like the empty parts of the universe were inside him. He was so close and she felt as if it were the old days, like she could almost understand poetry if she just listened to him long enough. But he was not close enough. She would never be able to reach him. Perhaps he would not have left if she could have helped him, if she could have understood and respected the nature of his strength. But he had left, and come back with the brutal strength that she had always wished for him to develop. It was cold and inescapable. It allowed him to open Lisa's skull with an iron grip, and Jem was going to die because she had not been able to stop him becoming this. Kieren's eyes were pointed in her direction and she had one shot.
Some things are so irredeemably bad that nothing can fix them, not even a bullet, a last screech, a slump into non-existence. This moment, the past fourteen months, Jem's entire life since she had dismissed the boy who had made her first punk mixtape—it was all too wrong to fix and there was no point in trying.