Page 49 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
We’re being attacked.
They’re the first words to pop into my head when I bolt upright, squinting into the dim light. My heart slams furiously against my chest as I rub my eyes, muscles bunched, searching for the source of the noise. Someone had been gasping. No, crying. Maybe a thief had broken in during the middle of the night—
But the hotel room appears undisturbed. The door is closed, the velvet curtains half-drawn over the city lights outside. The faint blue glow of the alarm clock blinks from the bedside table: 3:42 a.m. I look around more slowly, waiting for my heart to settle down again.
And then I spot Cyrus on the other bed. Only the corner of the blanket is draped over his stomach, his long legs hanging over the side, and his eyes are squeezed tight, as if in pain. A broken, helpless sound escapes his lips.
“No …”he murmurs. “No—please—”
“Cyrus?” I whisper. Wide awake now, I hop off the bed and lower myself down by his side, my mouth dry. He’s lost in whatever nightmare he’s having. A sliver of moonlight creeps in past the curtains, illuminating the sheen of sweat on his forehead. He’s never looked so helpless before, so afraid, not even when he thought the plane was going down. “Cyrus,” I say, louder, touching his shoulder.
He flinches, inhaling sharply like someone breaking through the currents right before they’re about to drown, his eyes wide and disoriented. Then they find my face, and something in him changes. Goes quiet.
“Are you okay?” I ask, flicking on the night-light.
“Yes,” he whispers, pulling himself up against the pillows, his knees drawn to his chest. His hair is all mussed, so long that it falls like black silk over his brows. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“That’s fine,” I say, smoothing out my nightgown. Under normal circumstances, I would be more self-conscious about waking up in the middle of the night with a boy in his hotel room, but there’s something about this moment that’s safe, private—I feel like I could say or do anything right now and he wouldn’t judge me for it. I stand up and grab one of the bottles of water from the table, twisting the cap for him before holding it out. “Here.”
He accepts it gladly, and I watch the movement in his throat as he tips his head back and drinks.
“Do you have them often?” I ask, sitting down on his bed. There’s only just enough room for me to avoid brushing against his legs when I turn around to face him. “The nightmares?”
“More often than I’d prefer,” he says, quiet. His hands tremble faintly as he screws the cap back on. “I’m actually surprised Oliver hasn’t said anything about it. I must have woken him up a bunch of times.”
“I had no idea,” I tell him.
And I should really just stop there, leave it at that. I should probably even be delighted to see him suffering. But it hurts, watching him like this, his fears flooding in over his head. If I were a soldier, I would be the very first to be dismissed from the front lines or killed on the spot for my weakness, because who else would run across the battlefield to their enemy, offering up bandages instead of bullets?
“You know,” I say slowly, “I get nightmares a lot too. Really vivid ones. I don’t think I ever scream out or anything, but that’s because I’m usually frozen inside them—like I can’t move or speak. I can only wait until I wake up. When I was younger, if I had a really bad nightmare, I’d turn on all the lights in my bedroom and drink a giant glass of warm water, and then I would sing to myself under my breath. Not, like, a lullaby. But something really annoying and ridiculous, like an advertising jingle.”
“An advertising jingle?” he repeats with a soft laugh, resting his cheek against his arm.
“The more obnoxious the better,” I confirm, hating how much the sound of his laughter pleases me. “That way, the only thing I can hear is the jingle stuck on loop selling me crunchy chocolate cereal, instead of my own thoughts.”
“I should give it a try sometime, then,” he says.
“You should. Or, if that fails, you can call me,” I say before I can stop myself. God help me. The desire to comfort him is so much stronger than the desire to destroy him now.“And I’ll sing advertising jingles to you until they’re permanently stuck in your head. I have a beautiful singing voice, you know. Very throaty.”
His smile is careful, as if he doesn’t want to take the offer too seriously. “Is that a threat?”
“It’s a promise.” I meet his surprised gaze, hold it, my heart picking up its pace inside my chest like it’s in a hurry to go somewhere. He’s the first to look away, the red flush of his neck visible even in the mellow light.
“I doubt you understand what you’d be signing up for here,” he says quietly. “It takes forever for me to go back to sleep once I’ve woken from a bad dream. A lot of the time, I lie wide awake until morning, just—thinking. Thinking about things I shouldn’t.”
“Like?”
He hesitates. Starts to say something. Stops again before it can get past his lips. “Mostly, the things I regret,” he tells me. “The things I should have done differently, or shouldn’t have said. Terrible mistakes I’ve made. The measures I could have taken to prevent my parents from splitting—”
“Your parents split?” I ask, shock rippling through me. I had seen them together a few times at school, when they were coming to pick Cyrus up or attend the annual school concert or one of his piano recitals. I’d never spoken to either of them, but even from afar, they seemed the perfect match. His mother was beautiful in that elegant, timeless way that could have made her a star in another age. His father was popular among the teachers, with a booming voice and laugh and a rotation of tailored suits. They seemedhappy, holding hands as they strolled across the football field, down the wide corridors where the preschoolers’ fingerprint art was on display.
“It happened right after you left,” Cyrus explains, the words coming slowly, like he’s piecing them together out loud for the very first time. “The official split, at least. They’d been fighting long before that. That was actually why I started to get into reading. Whenever I heard their voices rise, I’d quickly grab a book and go to my room and it would help me escape into this other world where I could pretend to be someone else.
“But even then, even though I hated it when they were mad at each other, it was like—you know how people say that growing up, they thought it was normal to have candy for breakfast, or to skip school whenever it rained, because that’s simply what their family did, and they had no other point of reference? I thought it was normal for your parents to fight at home almost every night. For them to throw things and slam doors and scream at each other for hours on end. I asked my dad about it once, and he said that my mom was only angry at him because she loved him. Because it meant that she cared. He said that was the secret to a relationship: You had to keep things interesting, even if that meant getting on their nerves. So maybe I should’ve seen it coming, but I didn’t—when they told me it wasn’t working out anymore, I wasn’t even sad at first. I was purely stunned.” He scoffs, shaking his head. “Stupid, right?”
“No. You couldn’t have seen it coming,” I say firmly, my chest aching for him. “You were so young.”
His eyes are exquisitely dark, desolate. “But I keep thinking that if only I had—I don’t know, maybe everything would have turned out better. I wouldn’t have made things so difficult for them. They argued about me more than they argued about any other topic. Whether I should be spending more time practicing piano, or if I was spendingtoomuch time on the piano. Whether I should sign up for summer camp or stay home, and if I did, then who was going to cook for me and look after me. Whether I should pick Chinese or French as my language elective. And it might seem ridiculous, but part of the reason why I want to get into Stanford so badly is because that was one of the only things they ever agreed on. It meant something to them. I still remember sitting with them on the couch together one night, and it was so … unusually peaceful. They were both in a good mood for once, and my dad was holding my mom’s hand, and we were sharing these bowls of roasted sunflower seeds, and they started talking about the future … They met at Stanford, you know that?”
