I Fell in Love with Hope(96)

“That doesn’t matter because–” Neo is interrupted by a rough grab of his forearm, but he doesn’t fall into his resentful quiet. He speaks louder. “Because I’m a good writer!” he yells. “I’m smart, and I learned infinitely more from books you deem immoral and the people within these walls than I ever have from you.”

Neo makes fists with his hands, tensing. He focuses on the smell of crisp pages and the pinching vice grip around his flesh. He waits, breathing with his mouth open, for his father to hit him. He waits for the stinging sensation, a nail to nick his lip, or the numbing heat.

When Neo looks into his father’s eyes, he finds the frustration, the restraint, the desire to hurt him that is as old as the day he threw a baseball straight at Neo’s skull.

Neo laughs. He laughs so hard tears run down his face and drip onto the papers on the floor.

“There was a part of me that always believed you could change,” he says. His limp wrist rises to his eyes, blanketing them. “When I got sick, when I got beaten up, when I was in a fucking wheelchair–all those times I thought, maybe he’ll change.”

Neo’s father doesn’t relinquish his hold. He doesn’t move to strike or shove or startle him. He knows that is futile. Neo is not hurt by those things anymore. In fact, it hurts more when his father tries to show concern for him. It hurts that after all this time, he can still show him affection.

Neo laughs again, practically wailing. Pain in its purest form rips him apart from core to skin. It infects all echoes of C. It claims him as a casualty of the past and reminds Neo with every fleeting memory they share that from here on, there will be no more.

Neo throws his head back against the wall, his crazed laughter becoming a long sigh. “I wonder, dad, would you change now?” he asks. “If you knew that the boy I love just died? Would you hug me and tell me it’ll all be okay?”

Frozen still, Neo’s father cannot so much as open his mouth, let alone answer.

“No, you don’t care enough for that,” Neo says. “You care enough to feel sorry for me, I think, but your values are stronger. I mean, you knew all along, right?” He smiles with a whisper. “Your hatred always had a name. We just never spoke it.”

“I’m sorry about the boy,” his father says, quickly, sitting down on the bed. He doesn’t let him go. “I can’t blame you for being confused. When we go home–”

“I’m not going home with you.” Neo stares at his stories, the ink dissolving in his tears like paint.

His father pulls him by the arm in the slightest, a warning.

“Neo–”

“You may want to be careful when you touch me now,” Neo says. “You’re not the only person I wrote a letter to.”

The door opens with wind. Eric stands at the threshold. He practically crushes the doorknob, hair frazzled, scrubs, and dark under eyes at the ready.

“Neo, is everything okay?” he asks.

“It’s alright, I’m his father–”

Eric’s eyes flick from the irritated red and creasing skin on Neo’s forearm to the wet trails down his face.

“Get your hand off him.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re hurting him, sir,” he says, urgency in the tone. “I’m telling you to get your hand off him.”

Neo’s father tries to reason with Eric, calm and collected like a true businessman. Neo rolls his eyes at the age-old tactic that always seemed to work when he slipped up and raised his voice or grabbed Neo too roughly in public.

“Oh, for God’s sake, do you ever shut up?”

His father’s head snaps in Neo’s direction.

“What’d you say?” His hand goes from vice to branding iron, squeezing so hard that Neo cringes.

Eric snaps. “Security!”

Neo watches as panic stirs in his father’s eyes, a satisfaction dulled by guilt settling in his stomach.

“Neo.” He takes Neo by the shoulders as gently as he can, the way he did when he kissed tenderly worded apologies. “Tell him you lied, that you’re confused.”

Neo does nothing of the sort. Instead, he smiles again.

“I’ll always love you for the in between moments, Dad,” he says. “But I don’t forgive you for the rest of them.”

The head security guard rushes into the room and escorts Neo’s father out. The commotion catches attention from the whole floor, but Neo retains his calmness.

Eric lets Hikari and me into the room, telling Neo he’ll be right back, that he’s okay now.

“Neo,” Hikari calls, Hee cuddled in her sweater. The cat hops onto Neo’s bed, nuzzling onto his lap.

“I’m fine,” Neo says. She stares at his arm with crescent-shaped cuts dripping onto the sheets. Neo runs his touch around Hikari’s neck and pulls her into an embrace. “Don’t cry, stupid. I’m fine.”

Neo decides to stop packing his things then. Instead, he leaves the room as it is, our headquarters. He imagines Sony laying supine on the window sill, playing with Hee, while Coeur sits tapping his thighs with the rhythm of his earbuds.

His and Coeur’s manuscript sits in the corner.

He tells himself he will finish it another day.

“I want to lie down in the sun for a while, don’t you?” he whispers. Hikari agrees and we make our way to the gardens together, sure not to sit too close to the hedge. Neo lays flat in the grass, wearing C’s varsity jacket, inhaling his scent and his warmth, pretending that it is C’s arms holding him rather than empty fabric. I lay beside him, Hikari and Hee too. Lonely, sunkissed survivors.