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Her name was Hannah and she had long blonde hair which she would always twirl around the end of her finger as though winding cotton candy onto a spool.
He was a sweet kid, mostly. Temper problems sometimes, but he tried. He tried very hard to be nice and good and quiet. Above all, quiet.
Her name was Hannah and she was eighteen years old, a whole seven months older than him. He sometimes wondered what she saw in a boy his age, but he never, ever questioned his luck.
He loved her more than he thought a man could love a woman, and he brought her flowers once a week, on Sunday. Usually they were wild things picked wherever he could find them; just once, the week of Valentine's Day, he scraped together the money for a proper bouquet. She always said thank you and kissed him on the cheek, and he'd wear the kiss like a badge for the rest of the day, an invisible trophy of affection that nobody could see to steal.
Her name was Hannah and she broke his heart casually, like stepping on a cockroach you find in your living room.
He asked her to repeat herself, desperately, not because he hadn't heard but because maybe if he pretended hard enough she wouldn't have said it at all; maybe, if he pretended hard enough, she'd tell him she'd misspoke, deliver some innocent explanation for the terrible words that had just come out of her mouth.
He didn't pretend hard enough.
I'm breaking up with you, she reiterated, and then added defiantly: Because I'm fucking tired of your-- your dandelions on Sunday, and--
It was a Thursday night and he was chopping onions for dinner, which was good, because they gave him an excuse for the hot shameful prickling of his eyes. He'd never heard her say the word fucking before, and a little part of him he didn't like very much thought it was quite exciting, even while the rest vowed silently to upgrade those dandelions to real roses if only she'd do him the kindness of never saying it again.
He has never been quite certain, afterwards, whether he knew when he raised his hand that it still held the knife. Variously he has convinced himself that no, of course not, he could never have meant to threaten her like that; and yeah, no shit, the bitch deserved a little scare after what she put him through. Either way, he remembers very clearly the flash of fear darting across her face like a startled rabbit, and the way how all at once it seemed to transmute his horror and shock and lonely confusion into a fevered, boiling rage.
You're fucking tired? he snarled, stepping forward, his fingers tightening convulsively on the handle of the cooking knife. You're fucking tired? I'll put you to sleep, bitch. I'll break your fucking neck.
The harsh words issued forth from some previously undiscovered corner of his mind, and they tasted wonderful on his tongue, like power and strawberry ice cream (a flavour which Hannah hated something awful, so he hadn't had any in all the three months they'd been going out, in case they kissed and she didn't like it); he felt he could build them up into a ladder and climb on it all the way to Heaven, if only he figured out how.
It was like an army in his head, the assembled ranks of everything he'd ever wanted to say or do and kept his mouth shut and his head down because that's what you did. And with an army, once the signal goes out and all the soldiers are headed in the same direction, there's nothing you can do to stop it. Not a goddamn blessed thing.
After, he went and threw up, out back of the house; emptied his stomach of lunch and breakfast and maybe even last night's dinner, hating himself for being so fucking weak about it, hating himself right back for what he'd just done to Hannah. When the shakes had passed and there was nothing left to throw up anymore, he wiped his mouth on a bloodied sleeve and ran upstairs to take a shower, and then ran to his room to change his clothes, and once he was satisfied there was no more blood or vomit on him anywhere he ran out the front door and kept on running until he almost, almost forgot what he was running from.