A.N.: Hey guys, not exactly my first story, but the first story I post in this archive. English isn't my first language, but I tried my best. A huge 'Thank you' to I'm Over There, for helping me with this, for writing the story that brought me to this "Pairing" (bah, hate this word) at all, and for being awesome on a general level.
I know that there are a whole lot of similar stories everywhere, and parallels to stories like "The Anatomist", "See You In Hell" or "God And His Priests And His Kings" are no coincidence, but simply unavoidable.
This is going to be a Three- or Fourshot, I've already written it, it just needs some corrections and minor updates.
Warnings: Uhm… yeah, it's a little angsty and not everything is sunshine and rainbows here, and I guess the ending might be a little perve. Sorry if I offend anyone. And as I said, English is not my first language, so if you'll find a mistake, don't keep it. (That would be basically steeling, now wouldn't it? It's MY mistake after all. MINE!) Give it to me, and I'll correct everything. 'Kay?
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They move to England when he's seven. His mother has kissed a man that wasn't his dad, and his father can't stand the shame. Their family needs a new place where they can be anonymous, so they move from the small village where everybody knows them, and disappear into the bigcity.
Jim doesn't mind his mother's other man (after all, his father slept with other women, and even though he was more careful than his mother had been, Jim can tell and so can his mother) but he minds leaving Ireland. He likes the new city, but he hates its accents and its people's obsession with tea and manners.
His mother doesn't like England either.She feels lonely without her parish and her church.
She sits beside his bed at night, and tells him about god and power.
She whispers: "Jimmy, god loves you and his angels will always guard you."
She says "God sees the bad things", and: "The angels will always be by your side."
She says: "I love you, Jimmy. I love you so much."
He isn't sure what she means by love. It's a word that has always felt strange in his mouth, and he thinks that maybe love is something like god; something that belongs to his mother only and not to him. Sometimes, he looks at her and wonders if her angels left her alone.
The first months pass by. His father is busy with socializing, his mother is busy looking for god, and he is busy with seeing everything new.The big city has so many new things to discover. He spends all the free time that he has inside the streets, looking at everything until he knows it and everything starts to get dull. He finds that even though the big city looks different from the small village it is still the same.
Everything is always the same. It's because of the people. All people are the same, they make everywhere they live the same. There is nowhere Jim can go that is different, he knows that he is the only one who is. When he was younger it used to scare him, but now he likes the thought. It makes him proud. So what if he's different? At least he's not dull.
School is useless, as it always was, and so he teaches himself, as he always did. He does not try to socialize. Socializing is boring. Almost everythingis boring when you are different. And so Jim has to keep searching for things that are not.
His mother doesn't care he hasn't got any company. His father does. He hears them talk in the kitchen, late at night when he's upstairs in bed and supposed to be asleep. His father says that he isn't normal. His mother says that he is special. He yells and she cries. After, she comes to his bed while he pretends to sleep and whispers that god made him special.(Sometimes he thinks that she might be wrong, but as long as she doesn't ask him to change, he doesn't mind.)
They move from Brighton to London when she is six. Her dad got a new job and so her family got a new life. In London they'll have good schools for her, her dad says. She likes London. It is loud and colorful and exciting, as it has always been described in books. Their new house is bigger than their old one, and her room is huge. The yard even has a tree she could climb if she wanted to. She doesn't want to,but it isfun to have the possibility.
They live at 35 Rose Street now. Her mum thinks that this is lovely, her dad just snorts, as he always does whenever her mother gets excited over anything. Molly couldn't care less about the street's name but she does like roses. The houses on Rose Street all look more or less the same, big white houses with small tidy backyards and a balcony and white fences.
They day after they move in, their next door neighbor, Mr. Brook, from 37 Rose Street stop by the fence separating their yards to introduce himself to her and her father. Molly listens politely and pays attention to them (she always pays attention to everything) even though she is not really interested (they talk adult-stuff, and it is boring), and when Mr. Brook suggests that his son should come around to play with her she almost rolls her eyes. Molly doesn't like boys. They are noisy and stupid and dirty. They play violent games of war and dying, and they don't like to play with her anyway, because she's a girl.
Molly stays around until her daddy tells her that she is allowed to leave, then she goes off to find her mum in the kitchen and towards the dollhouse in the floor. It will be in her room soon, but her dad did not bring it upstairs yet and she wants to play right now. She can still hear the men chatting outside the front door and soon her mother joins them, leaving Molly alone.
Molly hates being alone. She does not mind being silent, or to be on her own, but being the only person in the room scares her a little. Yet, since she does not want to follow her parents, she bites her lip, turns towards the dolls and starts singing something she heard on the radio some time before. She does not actually know the song, but singing makes her less afraid and so she keeps the tune for a while, until there are steps on the floor.
She turns her head and sees a boy, a little older than her and just a little taller, with brown hair and eyes, a blue baseball-cap and a tooth-gap. Molly smiles. She likes baseball-caps and she has a tooth gap herself.
The boy doesn't smile back. He doesn't frown or make a face either, in fact, he makes no face at all, and looks at her without really seeing her.
"My dad is forcing me to play with you", he states.
Molly blinks. "You're rude", she answers. She doesn't mind, not really, but she feels that he should know. The boy shrugs, but his face does not change a bit. He reminds her of a doll. They stay silent for a moment, and Molly thinks of something to say. "What's your favorite color?", she asks, and because he stays silent, looking at her without an expression, she adds: "Mine is pink." Molly smiles, proud of herself. She really is a good conversationalist.
The boy blinks. "Turquoise", he says.
"That's a mixture between green and blue, right?"
The boy rolls his eyes and nods. Molly grins. She decides to like this boy.
From now on, everything she'd write or paint would be in turquoise and pink. She writes their names with chalk on the streets, and she always uses green and blue for his name. Her name turns out to be Molly, his name turns out to be Jim, and on the first summer their colors are everywhere. He actually never liked turquoise very much, but since it is just a color, he doesn't mind.
It's not like he had a choice, anyway. His father insists that he keeps playing with her, saying that she is "a nice girl", and that she makes him "less weird". Jim doubts that anyone could ever make him be less of whatever he decides to be, but he stays silent as he always does when his father is being stupid.
Jim is her very first friend in London. He doesn't talk to her much and she lets him alone as much as she can, because she knows that he would push her away if she didn't.
Her mother doesn't listen to her, though, and neither does his father. If he has his weeks, when he calls everything dull and tells her that he doesn't play with babies, she stays in her room but if she's alone for too long her mother brings her to his house, his room. He opens the door and her mother smiles and says: "Molly came to play" and "Isn't that nice?" and he looks at them without an expression and lets her in. His room is even bigger than hers, with white walls and some pictures and posters and even more books than she has.
She'd like to apologize for coming here, she'd like to say that it is not her fault, that her mum just does not listen sometimes, but she knows he doesn't hear her when he has his moods, and so she keeps herself busy with reading for some hours until she leaves, while he is doing other stuff (reading, looking at maps or doing small experiments with stuff like water and honey and insects). She likes it that way – silent but not alone.
Molly would have loved to bring her own books when she went to visit Jim, but her mum said that this was rude. "I'm sure he'd be disappointed, dear, if you just came to read. He will want to talk to you, but that is not easy if you're reading a book, is it?"
Her mother knows a lot of things, but she knows nothing about Jim.
Sometimes, when she leaves after such afternoons, he says a goodbye before she closes the door. More often than not, he doesn't.
Occasionally, though, he'd talk to her. Then he'd just sit on his bed, without a book or an experiment, playing with a green bouncing ball, while she'd sit on the floor, leaning at the door, looking at him. She is not sure if he even hears himself talk, but on these days, he tells her everything. He tells her about his mum and his dad, about lying and about everyone except him being dull. He tells her about things that happen in school, about plans he made, that he is going to be important one day, even though he doesn't know in which way yet. Molly listens and thinks that he'll probably become a bad person, but at least that means that he won't become a boring person.
He tells her everything and she never tells anything. She always just listens. Sometimes he thinks that she is something like his diary. (It does not occur to him that it might be dangerous to have a breathing secret-keeper. Not yet.) Sometimes he wonders if he made her up.
And sometimes they even play, really play. Then they are outside and are playing hide and seek (Molly often wins and she loves that, and she likes that Jim doesn't mind when she does like other kids would) or they are drawing pictures with chalk on the street, sometimes they even play with her dollhouse ("One day", Jim says, "we'll be playing with real people". Molly thinks that this sounds creepy, but she doesn't say anything because she is flattered that he said "we", and "one day" is far away from now, after all) and it's fun.
Sometimes they play and she laughs and looks so content he envies her. Sometimes, when he is really bored or when Molly looks so very happy that her whole body is laughing he thinks that he might even give up being special if that could teach him what happiness means.
She attends Junior School and it is incredible. All the exercises, all the possibilities to ask questions, all the things she can do and learn make her feel dizzy sometimes. Teacher tell her that she is a very smart girl, her father is so proud of her, and her mother keeps reminding her that having fun is important as well.
In the morning she's learning, in the afternoon, she's with Jim.
He keeps integrating her more and more in what he's doing. He does not let her help with the experiments, but he lets her watch. He keeps calling her "baby", if he's angry or moody, but they are looking for distractions together now, and she loves his plans and ideas and he likes that she does everything he says. More often than not, they are getting into trouble, because they are often dealing with grown-up stuff and sometimes even terrible stuff. (They see a corpse one evening in June, shortly before Molly's ninth birthday. She isn't afraid of the dead body, but she is terrified by the look in his eyes. They make their way home silently that night.)
But it doesn't matter because whenever he tells her to run, her whole body flies and she feels free and excited and alive. Sometimes they just run far enough to hide somewhere, sometimes they run all the way home. Any way, they end up sweating and wet and dirty and breathless and Molly is laughing and even Jim looks content, kind of.
Molly is so happy that it's hard to remember later. It is a feeling she'll just have once in her life.
Jim loves surprises. He loves the unexpected, the challenge. Of course, there aren't too much real challenges when you are eleven, and he still isn't sure in which way he wants to be special. He hasn't found the right thing yet. He thinks about becoming a superhero (but he hasn't got a super-capeand he's never had the longing to save people, so maybe he is not quite right for that) about politics (but that is so utterly boring he wants to die), and then he decides that he's got all the time left to decide. He spends his time with other stuff. He is learning Latin now; there are some good stories that have to be told in the original language. He looks for people's stories in the city whenever he has the chance to. He starts examining animals.
No, actually,Mollystarts examining animals.It beginswith a rat he has killed in his backyard. (They don't have a cat, and his mother is afraid of mice and rats, so Jim catches them and feeds poison. Killing them isn't exactly a funny thing to do, but watching them die is interesting – they always try to escape, to save themselves, not understanding that what causes them harm is inside of them. They never understand that they don't have a chance; that it's over. Sometimes he wonders if that is what makes human beings different. Would they know when to give up?) He watches it shiver one last time (it had tried to hide, but had been too weak) and then it lies still. Just as he wants to take it to the trashcan, Molly calls behind him.
"Jim, what are you doing?" He turns around and bites his lip. He expects her to scream and to draw attention to the adults (of course he'd tell that it has already been dead (people don't seem to like the thought that he has killed anything bigger than a fly), but his father would not believe him and then he would say again that he was a creep). He likes Molly as a companion, but his life would be a whole lot easier if he didn't have to keep her satisfied.
But Molly does not scream. Instead, she says: "Wait a moment, I'll be right back" and runs out of his garden to her house. She is back within two minutes (the girl really is rather quick, he has to admit sometimes) and she has a claw, shears, a knife, tweezers and a small cutting board with her.
Jim is so perplexed that he takes a step back. "What do you want with this stuff?" he asks and Molly smiles at him.
"I'd like to know what it looks like on the inside."
"You want to cut it open?" The thought is quite fascinating, but it's disturbing that it came to Molly before it came to him.
"Yeah, of course. Why else did you kill it for?" She looks genuinely confused and he shakes his head.
"You're strange", he tells her, using his father's words. But Molly just grins.
"You're one to tell."
She never watches him kill them. She just can't. Molly knows that there is no difference if she watches them die, she knows that he even kills them for her, so she can continue her studies, but it doesn't change a thing. Molly can't look them in the eye, no matter if it's a bird or a mouseor a squirrel. She feels guilty, if she looks, like she is obliged to stop Jim. So he calls her when it's over, and she cuts them open and compares them to the pictures in the books from the library. She starts drawing the inside, starts drawing the organs, and she starts putting the animals back together. Soon she can make it look like nobody changedanything, and Molly is so very proud. Sometimes, it even makes Jim smile.
But it doesn't change the fact that Molly likes them better, when they are already dead. Jim calls her "such a girl", and a "baby" like he always does, but Molly thinks it's worse than that. She isn't just "a girl", she isn't just a "baby", she's a coward.
She isn't quite like Jim but she isn't like the others, either. She is something in between.
Molly changes into his class when he's ten. She skips a year and from now on, they'll sit side by side. Even though he sometimes says that hewishes he couldget rid of her, he actually enjoys it. He even starts doing his homework sometimes (because even though he finds it amusing that the adults think she's smarter than him, he sometimes believes she might think the sameand that isnotamusing andso he shows her that he's better wheneverhe feels she needs to be reminded). Because of this, his mother calls Molly a "godsend" and everyone, everyone is happy for a while. (Except for Jim, of course. He doesn't know how to be happy, but he's okay and he's entertained and that's all that ever matters to him anyway.)
Molly never thought that she could ever teach him anything. Jim just isn't the kind of person who takes advice. He still tries to eat his Spaghetti with a spoon and he still wears the baseball cap he wore when they first met, even though he always splashes red sauce on his shirts and the tablecloth, and even though the cap isn't just old and dirty and holey, it's also too small for him.
The thing with the faces is, however, different. Molly had noticed the first time they met that his expression was blank, and that hasn'tchanged a bit in the five-and-a-bit years she knew him. She doesn't care, not really (but sometimes she really, really envies him). Unlike Jim, Molly herself was one whose every thought could be read straight from her age even, she realizes that his emotionlessness might be his biggest problem.
She has always wondered why all the kids found Jim strange. Why nobody wanted to play with him (or with her, after they saw them together), why her father has told her once to "be careful with this boy", why his own father calls him "creepy" (they didn't know about the thing with the animals, after all). Jim isn't flashy or impolite. He sticks to himself, yes, and he does not talk to a lot of kids (he doesn't talk a lot to anyone except Molly), but he doesn't harm anyone. He doesn't stick out at all. And that is why Molly finds it hard to understand why he is shunned by the others until she is eleven.
It is one of the times she can bring one of the shy, unpopular kids, Judy Flamland, to play with them. Jim isn't keen, but he accepts it. And while they are playing (hide and seek and, later, tag, after Molly has won for the fourth time), she watches both of them. Judy's expression changes. She looks shy and awkward at the beginning, content later, sometimes triumphant, annoyed, excited, exhausted, and happy. Her eyebrows move up and down; her mouth writhes and relaxes, her eyes narrow and widen.
Jims face doesn't change. Not much, at least. He blinks, his mouth moves when he talks, his eyes narrow a bit when he is running or searching. Molly has seen him roll his eyes from time to time, she has seen him raise an eyebrow, she has even seen him smile five or six times, but except that, he is... blank.
She tells him some days later, on a Sunday afternoon in march after they cut open a rabbit (Jim did not have to kill this one, it was already dead) and they are sitting in the grass, turning their faces to the sun.
"You've got to do something about your face", she tells him.
He doesn't even turn his head. "Am I not pretty enough for you anymore?"
Molly blushes. Of course he'd get it wrong. "I mean, about you're mimicry."
"What's wrong with it?"
"You don't do it."
"So what?"
She hesitates. "…Well, most people do it."
"I'm not most people."
"No", she agrees. Her voice is soft. "But maybe you should start acting."
This time, he turns his head. His eyes are as big and as dark as hers, his expression is unreadable. "Would you like me to?" he asks.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"They'd stop calling you thoseterrible names. And you'll never be important, if you can't be like them." She adds the last sentence after a moment of hesitation. She has thought about saying "like us".
He is silent for a moment. Then he stands up, and rubs his hands on his jeans. "That sounds like a challenge."
He doesn't know why he is doing it, at least not in the beginning. He has never listened to anyone when they told him what to do, just out of pure stubbornness because nobody ever should tell him how to be. This, however, is a challenge. It is more exciting than just learning a language; it's more complicated and it's fun. It's the best game he's ever played, and it's a game he can play together with Molly.
They are going into the school's dance room, where all the walls are just mirrors. They sit on the floor and she tells him to watch both of them while they are talking.
"What are we supposed to talk about?" he asks, watching his face. He can't find anything special.
Molly shrugs. "Dunno, anything. I got a new book out of the library today..."
And while they are talking for some minutes, he's watching, and while he's watching, he understands. He sees the difference. He'd never thought it made a difference, but apparently, it did. Molly smiles at him and he smiles back, wide and trying to make his eyes crinkle like hers do. Her smile fades. "Very good, Jim", she says, and then the bell rings and they go back to lesson.
For two weeks, Jim watches all of them very, very closely. Their frowns and laughs and the way their eyes get wide when they're afraid, and the way the corners of their mouth jiggle when they're upset. He watches films, the old films without tone, and he tries to copy all of their faces in the mirror. At the beginning, all the movement feels weird and strange, but he gets used to it, and he learns to play.
Jim tests his faces on everyone: His parents, teachers, students, people on the street, Molly's parents, Molly herself (it doesn't work for her, though, and sometime later, he gives up on her and continues to wear his usual face when they're alone). The way they react is hilarious, and Jim notices that he can make them act anyway he wants,just by changing his face. He tries out new roles and characters, tries to imitate actors. It keeps him entertained for almost a year.
Molly is frightened by the way the others change. Jim can be so incredible charming Molly herself has to remind her that all that isn't real, that it's just a mask. He continues to be himself when they are alone, which calms her a little, but suddenly he's got everyone on his side. Her mother calls him a "lovely boy", his father says "He's rather smart, isn't he?", he soon becomes the teacher's pet and all of the girls love him, even though he still is almost as small as Molly is. Jim is the centre of attention wherever he is and suddenly Molly's not "shy girl who's friends with the freak" anymore but Jim is "the cool boy who's friends with what's-her-name". Molly would be lying if she said that she wasn't jealous, that she didn't mind. She minds very much, and whenever her mother tells something about a "hilarious thing Jim said today" at the dinner table, Molly clinches her fork and tries not to scream. She can't believe that they seem to have forgotten everything he had been before. Hadn't they noticed? Is she the only one who sees?
They still are friends; still spend almost every minute together, so nothing really changes. Actually, what she wanted has happened, nothing more or less.
But whenever one of the boys asks him to come anywhere, and whenever the girls watch him with huge eyes, Molly can't help but feel that she gave the monster its claws.
Jim still goes to church with his mother every Sunday. He is listening to everything the priest says and looks at his mother's content eyes. He sometimes listens when she prays at night. She tells this god everything, every pitiful little thought, every of her dreams and fears. (It strangely reminds him of the way he is talking to Molly, but he never gives that a closer thought, since it is kind of terrifying) Sometimes, that is everything she says: Things about her day and sorrows and wishes. Sometimes, she thanks god for something (anything, everything), sometimes, she asks for the saving of her soul, of his father's soul, of his soul. She is asking for protection. (Jim doesn't want protection, he does not want to be saved. He is not sure about a god (maybe it's just something people made up because they needed it, as well as they made up plans for washers or cars?), and even if it exists, there's no reason it should want to save him.) He doesn't feel the love his mother talks about, he has read everything he could about theology and mythology, but never found an explanation why he was different.
Until, one day, he does.
Molly always found it strange that Jim was still choosing RE-courses. She understands that his mother is a religious woman, but she would have thought that Jim would prefer to learn something useful, a language or a science. (She has never been much of a philosopher.) Still, she guesses it must give him something; otherwise he'd be doing something else.
He comes to her in lunch break, blank-faced as usual, but with a glimmer in his eyes she has seen just two or three times before, once when she was nine and they were looking at a corpse, once when he watched her cutting open the dead rat, once when he had looked at her at school, caught her watching him while he talked to Prissy Gordon, the dumb cow.
It's a glimmer that makes her step back. "What happened?", she asks him and he smiles. (She hates when he does that. She hates that he still thinks he's able to manipulate her.)
"I know it now", he whispers, his face strangely pale.
"You know what?", she asks, and tries to sound impatient, so she does not have to sound afraid.
"The side of the angels", he says.
"So what?", she asks. "It's a saying."
"It means there are sides, Molly."
She feels where this is leading to, so her voice is weak when she repeats: "So what?"
He smiles, and she can tell it's one of the rare genuine ones. It is terrifying.
"It means I've got a choice."
She could ask again, could ask a dozens of questions, but she's afraid he might answer.
So she just says nothing, and they make their way to the canteen silently. It's pasta-day today. Molly chooses mushroom sauce, Jim chooses cheese and tomatoes.
Jim knows now in which way he is going to be special, in which way he is going to be important. The thing is that he has been searching on the wrong side – he isn't good at being the hero (with or without acape), and he most certainly will not be a politician. Jim will be so much more. He will be the one who'll make the world go round, who'll keep humanity awake. He will make trouble. He will burn the world and watch the people dance, all together. He will be fun.
The only thing he regrets is that he won't be able to let Molly know, at least not yet. She wouldn't betray him, he knows she wouldn't, but she would not understand it either and he thinks that maybe all she needs is time. But then again, no one ever stays together with their friends from school and he thinks that maybe now is the right time to keep a distance.
Jim starts to change. He has never been one to cuddle with, of course he hasn't, but he's never been that cold either. He comes around more and more rarely, and if he does, all he talks about is trivial stuff, from school and the neighborhood, gossip she knows he always enjoyed to know because of what one could do with the knowledge, but never found important in any way. He keeps being around other people, the guys from the swimming team and some kids from the chemistry club.
Not so long ago, there has barely been an hour when they did not talk together (expect when they were sleeping, of course), now it are weeks. Molly tries desperately to keep up with him, to keep in touch, she even talks to his parents (she always found his mother even more creepy than him and his father looks at her in a way Molly is sure she does not like) on a regularly base, still she feels him slip away.
After four months, Molly has enough. She stands in his room and he plays with the stupid green bouncing ball he still refuses to throw away, and he doesn't look at her until she starts to speak.
"I'm sick of this."
"Sick of what?" he asks, and catches the ball without taking his eyes off her.
"Of whatever this is supposed to be. You barely talk to me anymore."
He raises his eyebrow. "Oh, really? I thought we were talking right now!"
Molly shrugs tiredly. "I don't know where this is leading to. But if you don't want to talk to me anymore, for whatever reasons, just say it, cause then I won't waste anymore time standing in front of your door."
He gives her a long look, than he nods. "Good. I don't want to talk to you anymore."
She nods and turns around, but doesn't leave. "If you are in trouble, tell me, okay? I'll help you."
"Yeah. Sure." He doesn't speak out the words "When have I ever needed your help?", and he does not need to. Molly leaves without looking back.
From now on, Molly chooses to have other friends: girls that are even shyer and not half as smart as she is. Molly feels like she's asleep. Her grades are good, her parents even suggest she visits a boarding school for gifted students (Molly refuses, she can't take the thought to leave their little world yet, even though she knows Jim is already gone), she even gets a little more popular (there are one or two boys who ask her out regularly, she refuses at the beginning, but after some time, she gives in), but she feels nothing, nothing but boredom. She hates Jim for spoiling her. She hates Jim for not being there. She hates Jim for still not hating him sometimes.
The first date goes well. Bernie and she go to the cinema, then to an open-air-concert (actually, they just sit outside the concert area and listen to music), and on their third date, he kisses her. Molly has never cared for boys a lot, but she's thirteen, and she is supposed to care for boys, so she closes her eyes and kisses back. (She desperately tries not to think about what the heck he is doing with his tongue, but sometimes she just can't help herself.)
Molly is holding hands with one of the guys of the book club, Bernhard, and Jim can't help but laugh at the sight. Her face is a little too pale, her smile just a little too thin, but he sees it nonetheless. She really tries, he has to acknowledge, and the idiot doesn't seem to notice. He kisses her, and Jim stops laughing.
He wanted her to be on a distance, yes, but he did not want her to have a life of her own. He most certainly did not want her to go around and kiss the first idiot who's coming across her. Jim's eyes narrow. He has to do something about that.
Suddenly, a guy from the swimming team jostles into him. Jim turns around.
It's Carl Powers, a year younger than he is, and even duller than most people are. Dull and arrogant.
The boy grins. "Staring at what you can't have? If I'd choose, I'd take one with bigger boobs, but maybe she'd be enough for the start..." Jim glances at the boy as he's walking by. He isn't sure what annoys him more: The idiots loud mouth or the fact, that he just titled Molly as something he can't have.
He stands in her room a few weeks later. Molly is not sure if she's supposed to smack or to hug him, so she crosses her arms and leans against her desk. "What are you doing here?"
He shrugs. "Dunno, hanging around? Do you want to go to 'Jeremy's'? Or the park?"
Asking her what she'd like to do is the closest thing to an apology she'll ever get, so she just shrugs, says: "Both" and they leave the house as if nothing ever happened. (But it has happened, and Molly never makes the mistake of leaning on him again. She sometimes thinks that he just wanted to show her that she depends on him, but all she's learned is that she can get on without him as well.)
They spend more time without each other than they did before, though. Molly keeps going out with guys and he sees two girls or three and sometimes, they argue about that, without actually saying anything. (Sometimes, after Jim is back late at night and has the smell of Sally Olliver's perfume linger on him, she'll sit on his front steps, wrinkle her nose and say that he doesn't get the loving smile quite right yet and that he looks like a gopher wearing that expression. Sometimes, after a guy has walked her home and Molly has already loosen her hair and is about to get undressed, he'll lie on her bed, making snarky comments about the love novels in her bookshelves and saying that her expectations are too high.) But despite the banter and squabble, the pitiful jealousy and the sarcasm, Molly feels awake again.
He is stealing the shoes while everyone is watching the competition. They won't watch for a clue or a hint, they won't suspect anything – a tragic accident is what everyone can live with, and so they shall live – but since it's the first time he directly kills a human being, he does not want to make any mistakes. He hears the silence and, two seconds later, the screams as he is making his way out of the locker room. He hears them cry and he knows it's just a matter of seconds until the first people will be there, panicking and searching for help (help that will come too late, because the boy is dead, dead, dead). They'll be crying and there will be funerals and speeches (Jim can already see them, already hear the words), and apart from two or three people that truly will be upset, they all will be strangely satisfied by the feeling of horror that will keep them busy for months. As the first people come around the corner, a look of horror and sensation on their faces, Jim smiles.
Molly stands next to Sally and Bernhard while the headmaster holds his speech. He names all the good qualities of Carl (some real, some invented), and Molly looks around as a slow melody fills the auditorium. Most people are looking at the ground, a woman is crying in the front row and Molly wishes, hopes and prays, prays, prays that her suspicions are wrong. Jim isn't looking at the ground. He is with the guys from the swimming team and his mouth quirks into a small smile. While their eyes meet, the woman's sobs are getting embarrassingly loud. Molly looks at the boy with the old baseball cap and knows that they couldn't be.
They meet at the front door, while the rest is inside, crying and leaving flowers for a boy they had barely known.
"Such a fuss", Jims says, his face familiar blank, as Molly sits beside him on the front steps.
She swallows. "A life ended", she answers quietly. "It's supposed to be a fuss."
"Most of them didn't even know him."
"I guess that's the point."
Jim turns his head and looks at her. "Sarcasm to such hour? How undue."
She stays silent for a moment, collecting strength for the next words. "It... wasn't an accident, was it?"
His answer is quick. "Yes it was. A tragic one, I might add." He turns his heads and Molly searches in his face for something, anything, anger or regret or sadness or just satisfaction, but there is nothing.
Molly feels like crying.
"Why?"
He tilts his head. "That's what people do, isn't it? Die?"
"You ask me? Am I the killer in this scenario?" Her voice sounds bitter and defensive and she has no idea why.
"No, but you're on the killer's side."
Molly gapes. "Am I?"
"You're still here, aren't you?"
"Maybe I don't want to choose a side."
He nods. "Maybe you don't. But you'll have to, at some point."
Molly stands up and goes back to the auditorium. She feels Jim's glance, but she doesn't turn around.
He feels that something has changed with the loudmouth's death, but he is not sure what. They are closer and distanced at the same time. Anyway, he's got bigger things to deal with.
Some boy has got a clue, someone that wasn't even there when the accident happened. Jim isn't worried, but he is curious. The boy turns out to be at his age, and after some days of research he is not just curious, he is fascinated. Jim has stopped reading comics a long time ago, but he thinks that maybe the boy has the capability to be the superhero to his villain. At the very least, he keeps watching him.
Molly's dad keeps reminding her of the boarding school. She has not even told Jim yet, but she thinks about writing an application. It feels like a secret, a betrayal, and she doesn't know yet it will be the smallest of all secrets she'll have to keep this summer. It's a month after Carl Powers died when things start to go wrong – and they start by going right.
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