RIOT HOUSE by Hart Callie

Author:Hart, Callie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

ME: Going away for three days. Catch you when I get back.

21

ELODIE

There are cracks everywhere, of course. And a few spots where the color of his wings is gone, replaced by smooth, white ceramic, where a chip or a shard of his original veneer was lost. But the bird my mother gave me is mostly whole again, and of all the people in the world, Wren Jacobi put him back together for me.

For me.

I have questions. Namely: where did he find all of the pieces? How did he retrieve them? Harcourt said they were vacuumed up and disposed of. Did he tear open the vacuum cleaner to get them out? And how the hell did he piece the figurine back together? It would have taken hours. Days. I can’t even comprehend how much time it must have taken. How much patience such an undertaking would have required. Far more patience than I credited Wren with possessing, that’s for sure.

It doesn’t take long for an uncomfortable suspicion to take root in my mind, like a weed pushing its way up through the cracks in a pavement. Wren didn’t put the bird back together. He just couldn’t have. In no reality would he have taken the time to do something that required that much effort. Which means that he forced, bribed or threatened someone else and made them do it. And then he dropped his little turquoise box off at my door, smug as fuck, pretending like he’s some kind of hero for returning something so precious to me. I go from grateful and amazed to jaded and disappointed in three seconds flat. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.

At six in the evening, I get a message from Wren, saying that he’s going away for three days. His short, ‘catch you when I get back,’ makes me so unreasonably angry that I lock myself in my room and I don’t come out until Sunday afternoon. What happened to the attic? Three days getting to know him my ass. I’ve expected this kind of behavior from him since the word go, so then why does it still sting?

I skip dinner, telling Carina I’m not hungry when she asks if I want to join her in the food hall, and I brood in my room, pacing up and down, wearing a trench in the floorboards as I whip back and forth like a lion in a cage, all the while staring at the bird like it’s a hand grenade, about to go off on my mattress.

How can he do something like this and then just bail? It makes no sense.

Monday and Tuesday scrape by, and every little thing gets on my nerves: the line in the cafeteria; Damiana’s snarky, relentless comments in English; the fact that there’s no creamer left for my coffee; my assignments, which have piled up to the point that I have to stay up all night on Tuesday to complete them. Carina notices my shitty mood and comments on it, but I tell her I’m PMSing, and she seems to take it all in stride.

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