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Felix is fourteen, and looking up at the stars. It’s late, and the cold air nips at his fingers. The grass is coarse beneath his palms. The night sky above him is beautiful and cold and unknowable and endless, and he knows that looking at it should make him feel small and insignificant. But he’s got his best friends on either side of him, and it’s hard to feel small when they’re holding him up.
“Looking for aliens?” Jake mutters in his ear. Felix lets out a breath of laughter, and tears his gaze away from the sky. He turns to Jake, grinning.
“Yeah, trying to find the mothership. Maybe they’ll finally take you back home,” he replies. Jake shoves him, sending him sprawling into Ellen. “Hey!”
“If they’re looking for anyone, it’d be you,” Jake retorts, but he’s smiling. Ellen digs her fingers into Felix’s side and he scrambles off her, shrugging apologetically.
“Don’t be stupid,” she tells them. “Aliens are only interested in intelligent lifeforms, there’s no way they’d come after either of you.”
“Oooh, that was cold,” Jake laughs.
“I’m hurt,” Felix tells her, the picture of offense. “I am deeply, deeply wounded.” Ellen just smiles back at them, barely visible in the dim light of the electric lantern.
“Speaking of cold,” Jake says, giving an exaggerated shiver. “I’m going to go get the sleeping bags.”
“Okay,” Felix says, and watches Jake cross the backyard and disappear into the house. When he turns back to Ellen, she has both her eyebrows raised so high they almost disappear into her hairline. “What?”
“You need to tell him,” Ellen says, in a tone that is somehow gently mocking and also brooks no argument.
“Tell who what?” Felix asks blithely. Ellen digs her fingers into his side again. “Ow! I don’t need to, okay, it’s nothing.”
“It really isn’t,” Ellen says. “You need-“
“What I need,” Felix interrupts, “is for you to stop worrying. Seriously. I’m… I’m happy with the way things are. I don’t want to mess that up. I don’t want to mess us up.”
“You wouldn’t mess us up,” Ellen says, exasperated (they may have had this conversation before). “Felix, you’re being stupid.”
“Yeah, what else is new?” asks Jake from behind them, and dumps the rolled-up sleeping bags into their laps.
“I resent that,” Felix tells him, trying to calm his suddenly-racing heart (how much did he hear?). He fumbles with his sleeping bag, glad that the dark is most likely masking his blush.
“Maybe we’d stop saying it if you stopped being an idiot,” says Jake, teasingly, unrolling his own sleeping bag beside him.
“Please, like you’re any better,” Ellen says pointedly from Felix’s other side. “Wasn’t the whole eyeliner thing the other day your idea?”
Felix winces. “I thought we weren’t talking about that anymore.” The idea had been a good one, in theory – Felix had read a little about people drawing on their own facial hair – but he’d vastly overestimated Jake’s skill with an eyeliner pencil. Ellen had come across them eventually and done a much better job, but not before snapping a few pictures of the mess Jake had left all over Felix’s face, ‘for posterity’.
“Cheer up,” Ellen says. “I’ll delete the pictures eventually.” At that, Jake snickers.
Felix scowls at him. “Next time, I’m scribbling all over your face,” he says moodily, and slips into his sleeping bag. On either side of him, he can hear the rustling that indicates Jake and Ellen are doing the same.
“Come on, I said I was sorry,” Jake protests. “I was only trying to help.”
Felix turns to look at him, his annoyance seeping away now the comforting warmth of the sleeping bag enveloped him. Jake looks back at him, genuinely contrite – or at least decently faking it. “I know,” Felix tells him, softly, then smiles to show Jake he’s forgiven. Then he turns to his other side and smiles at Ellen, too, before turning on to his back and looking back up at the sky.
Tonight, it doesn’t matter that Jake made faces when Felix and Ellen made him listen to the new bands they were discovering. It doesn’t matter that Jake was spending more time with his other friends, the ones from the football team. It doesn’t matter that, when Felix thought about Jake, something twisted in his stomach. It doesn’t even matter that they are probably all going to get eaten alive by mosquitoes. He has his two best friends in the world on either side of him, and nothing can touch them.
Felix is fourteen, and his brother is never going to walk again
He doesn’t remember much about what happened immediately after – he must have climbed down from the tree, must have called an ambulance, but everything is a blur in contrast to the bright whiteness of the hospital. He has never seen his brother look so small as he does in the hospital bed.
His mother won’t stop crying. She hasn’t looked at him yet.
At some point – he’s not quite sure, time has gone fuzzy – Ellen joins him (he will wonder, later, how she convinced the doctors to let her in). She grips Felix’s hand tight in her own, murmurs reassurances in his ear. He blocks them out – he doesn’t deserve them.
(Felix does not remember later, but Ellen rides with them home from the hospital. She pulls him out of the car and into his room and onto his bed. She watches him fall into a fitful sleep and she never lets go of his hand.
She tries calling Jake again and again, but he doesn’t pick up.)
Jake appears at Felix’s door early the next day, babbling something about a footy game and going out with the team and he’s sorry and are you okay? Felix barely hears him, and what he does hear he doesn’t care for. Jake should’ve been there yesterday, but wasn’t. Jake makes him feel things Felix doesn’t think he deserves to feel anymore.
(Jake was the one that had told him about the tree in the first place.)
It’s all too much to take. Felix slams the door in Jake’s face.
Felix is fourteen, and he no longer knows what to do with himself. It’s his first day back at school since Oscar- since the accident. He’d rather be spending every moment in the hospital, but his parents said he can’t miss any more days.
Ellen sticks close to him all day, glaring at anyone who tries to approach. He doesn’t even see Jake until their first class – he’s sitting up the back, with his friends from the football team. He doesn’t look at Felix or Ellen as they come in.
At lunch time, Felix excuses himself from Ellen’s protective glower to go to the bathroom. He stops for a long time in front of the single mirror, examining himself.
Even when his mother was still forcing him into dresses, he has never hated his reflection more. Before he even recognises what he’s doing, he’s pulling his hand back and punching the glass, again and again till it shatters into pieces. Like something out of a crappy movie, he thinks, detached, as shards rain upon the filthy tile floor and blood drips from his knuckles.
(The principal looks at him with deep concern, even as he sentences him to a month of Saturday detentions. Felix does not care.)
After school, Felix drags Ellen to the pharmacy, buys a bottle of black hair dye and ignores the look the woman at the counter gives him. He applies it himself in the bathroom sink – he looks a little different afterwards, a little less like the boy that dropped his little brother out of a tree. When he visits Oscar that evening, Oscar smiles and tells him it looks awesome. Felix smiles tentatively back.
Over the next few weeks, he makes several more shopping trips – buys new clothes in shades of black (for mourning, he thinks, how appropriate), and even gets two piercings in his lip (the guy that does them never asks for ID). He puts on his new clothes and examines himself in the mirror, blaring the latest recommendations from Ellen on his iPod – The Used, Joy Division, H.I.M. When Jake finally meets his eyes again at school, he looks like he no longer recognises him.
Felix thinks, viciously, good.