Page 76 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
I look down at the painting in my lap before answering, as if the color there can steady me.
“Octavia.”
He repeats it more quietly, almost to himself first.
“Octavia.”
Something in the way he says it makes my own name sound softer, like he’s not just reading it off a file or hearing it shouted down a hallway by a sister with a clipboard. He says it like it belongs to a person, not a placement.
“That’s…” He stops, searching for the right word. For some reason that makes my heart beat harder.
“That’s a beautiful name.”
Heat creeps up my neck.
He doesn’t laugh at himself for saying it. He doesn’t cover it with a joke. He just keeps looking at me with that same strange light in his eyes, his mouth shifting slightly, not quite a smile, more like something gentler that he doesn’t know how to wear for long.
“It sounds like something you’d say quietly because you don’t want to ruin it,” he adds. “Like a song people only know if they’re listening close enough.”
For a second I forget what to do with my face.
Nobody has ever said anything like that to me. Not about my name. Not about anything, really.
My mother used to spit it like a curse when she was drunk and sweeten it into bait when she wanted something from me. The sisters say it crisply, neatly, like checking a box. The kids at Brightside use it the way girls in places like this use everything, carelessly, unless they’re trying to hurt you.
But he says it like it deserves tenderness.
“Thanks,” I murmur.
The word feels too small for what just passed between us.
He shrugs one shoulder like he didn’t mean to say anything that would matter, but the softness doesn’t leave his face completely. It stays there, flickering faintly, while the light from the window catches one side of him and leaves the other in shadow.
I want to ask his name then.
It’s right there on my tongue, ready. We have traded stories, laughter and pieces of ourselves all afternoon, and somehow I still don’t know what to call him except St. Augustine boy in the privacy of my own head.
The question never makes it out.
The door flies open so hard it slams into the wall with a crack that makes me jump.
Three boys crowd into the room at once, bringing the hallway noise in with them like filth on their shoes. They’re older than him, older than me too, large boys who have learned how to use their size before they’ve learned anything worth knowing. The one in front is already grinning before his eyes land on the boy sitting on my floor.
“There he is,” he sneers. There’s something viciously pleased in it. His gaze slides around my room, catches on me, then returns to him. “Trying to sneak in some private time to see if your pecker still works?”
The other two burst out laughing.
The whole room curdles.
The air changes so fast it almost hurts. Everything kind and stolen about the last few hours is gone in a second, replaced by their bodies, voices and the way they take up space like they think they own it.
“You can’t come in here,” I say, sliding off the bed before I fully register moving. My voice is sharper than I feel, but underneath it something colder is already rising. Fear.
I don’t even get close to the call button.
One of them shoves me hard enough that I stumble sideways into my desk. The corner catches me at the hip with a sharp jolt of pain. Before I can right myself, he’s already moving.
The boy from my floor is on his feet in a blur.
