Starting point

That she went back to school was a good thing. Barry acquired such a routine inside Eugenie White’s apartment that he soon gave up on mistrusting. He had to live in the real world, and in the real world, she had accepted his presence and extended her hospitality indefinitely, given his situation, and he had to stop waking up in a sweat and his head at the foot of the bed with his fists ready to punch things around. There was no reason to continue paying attention to some murmurs that said that everything was too good to be true.

It is not too good to be true. Is is true. It wasn’t too good. It was just good. Excellent good.

Except for getting shot by a gun two times, which was not good at all, but even that part was improving splendidly. He was getting used to the pain, and making note that it was quietly leaving him, little by little, departing from his gut, or forgetting to constantly tug at his movements. Sometimes he felt like the fire inside of him was becoming bored of visiting him, spending more time burning elsewhere. It reminded him of that story about human consciousness not being located in the brain, contrary to popular belief, which provided a justification for how moments of nearing death let people remain conscious while their grey matter was underfed oxygen and they linked with awareness elsewhere than inside.

Maybe it was the same with pain. Everyone gravitating around a core of pleasure and pain like a vending machine or a sun, attached to it with some vibrating umbilical cord, allowing the drizzling of its contents according to stories or calamity, trials, tribulations, gratification, taking and giving in turn. Maybe the entity in the center had an awareness and choice as well, about whom they preferred to haunt or shower, simply pinch on the surface, impale or caress, force-feed or just sustain.

He woke up fresh every morning as soon as she left for work. The sound of her keys rattling in the lock of the door pulled him out of a very light sleep and then, it was impossible to go back there, to the land of dreams. The realization that he was still there, in her space, just at the other end of her corridor, was too crazy and nowhere near becoming a habit, so he refused to sleep again and lied awake and granted himself the time to take it all in.

With the swelling daylight in the living room, he took the time to admire everything around him, the things he had observed and wondered about when he had spied on her in the past. He marveled at being allowed to operate inside Eugenie White’s universe, drinking coffee inside her ridiculous mugs, which were almost all holiday-themed or souvenirs from various boring American cities, scrubbing himself with her soap, switching her lamps off and on, watering her plants. He kept the apartment clean, always did the dishes, always made his bed tidy. If his father could see him, since he was the man who had taught him to square a bed impeccably, he would be proud.

Barry assembled Eugenie White’s new dining room table, followed by the bookshelves they brought back from Ikea. She was concerned enough about his possible boredom to offer to him to join the venture, at the condition that he used his canes pacing through the endless aisles of the vast home goods store, which was upsetting at an astronomical level, but Barry’s protesting ego had obviously been toned down by his excitement. He knew that she was just worried about him being cooped up inside this small flat all week “Do you think I should go for pine as they were before? It’s hygge but a bit dull” She had genuinely asked him. He advised her for dark brown, and she gave it a try.

“Maybe you ought to buy new picture frames for the ones that exploded from your walls” he suggested

“You know what Barry? I don’t even remember what they were. It’s a good indication that I didn’t really need them. This year is going to be my minimalist year, thanks to you”

She always said stuff like that, such as “BARRY HOW DID I LIVE BEFORE WITHOUT YOU HERE” when he built her furniture and fixed the clog in her sink, tightened the pipes above her toilet, got her drier to run smoothly again. She had been the same in the classroom, speaking to students when they deserved a praise, even the smallest of praises, or when she had been grateful for his aid plugging the screen above the white board into the correct outlet so she could show a video to the class, Eugenie White was like that, enthusiastic about the good things in people, ‘Barry you are a life saver, how would I get any technology to work without you kids?’

“How have you managed to stay alive this whole time?” he joked back to her

“Exactly”

They seldom ate together, uninterested in former supper traditions, unwilling to recreate a family atmosphere or going over how their day had been in the evening time, but Barry suspected that the prospect of instating a meal habit between them was too much pressure for Eugenie White and her high-functioning autism. However, every once in a while, they did, ordered some sushi and sat together nibbling on them with soy sauce while watching a movie. That one time, they had done just that, playing the old Abyss, another James Cameron feat, on her big television set above the fireplace. But Barry could no longer help it, and asked: “Why are you so nice to me?”

“So nice to you?”

“Yes like, nice nice”

She waved her index finger at him, communicating that she wished to finish watching that scene when the little rat in the caged box starts breathing under water, and then she paused the film and she tilted her head towards him, “what do you mean Barry”

“You saying stuff like I’m useful ot whatever, like I’m big help or whatever, like your life has” he hesitated, “has some new nice things now that I am here or whatever”

“It’s not or whatever” she said, fighting to get just the right quantity out of a wasabi dip from the plastic tray with her knife, “I’m not speaking some empty words. Actually I like having you here”

“Buut you don’t seem to like people, Ms White” he dared to say, “you don’t… go out or hang out with people or whatever”

“Yeah” she sipped on some bubble water, “I’m kind of a hermit I know. People drain me, take all my energy, people are idiots”

“But you do?” he really went for it, bracing himself, “you do like to have me here?” He tightened his fingers around his chopsticks.

“Of course! If I had known you are such a pleasant individual, I wouldn’t have freaked out so much about you appearing on my balc—” her eyelids fluttered, “Uhu, yes of course I would have still lost my shit that you’d been shot and needed me to practice medicine while your issues were so grave” she chuckled, spreading the wasabi on her salmon bite, “but I would have been in a hygger mood” They stared at each other in the silence for a minute, chewing their roll, and she said, “you didn’t give me that impression at school, you were more, like, a train wreck”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“You are good at eye contact, for an autistic person”

“My students have helped me improve. Looking at them in the eye is essential to building a rapport and making things work” Barry had never heard that before, and he found himself fascinated. “It’s called Fake it ‘til you Make it”

“But they are so mean” he thought, we are so mean, your students.

“Nastiness isn’t something a lot of neuro-divergent people fear, you see? It’s more like, no truth, no realness, the absence of a structure, that presents the worst situation. Adults are constantly giving off a dishonest vibe, playing with code that feels obscure and threatening. Teenagers, on the contrary, are raw enough to reassure me” she concluded, followed by her flicking a grain of rice in his direction, and missing.

“Your aim is shit” he mocked her

“And your interpersonal skills are way higher than I thought. Also you clean my house and empty the dishwasher, I mean, what more can I ask”

He eyed the rest of the sushi on his plate, knowing he couldn’t eat them. His whole being and his soul were too full of happiness, he wouldn’t be able to have another bite or he would burst. Water, water would be nice

He knew that he would keep that conversation in a very special spot in his mind, and heart, the corner devoted to precious immaterial belongings, and he knew that he would replay it over and over when things got difficult. “It’s mesmerizing to witness, your recovery is remarkable” she added and pressed the resume button on the remote control. Terence would be fed some leftover sushi tonight. Nonetheless, fear gripped him, once more: should he continue to bounce back and heal so quickly, and endanger the reason of his stay at her place? Barry was facing more unknowns than he had before and sometimes, he felt powerless, he, the Bolt, in front of the choices he had to make so rapidly on a daily basis, sending some desirable or undesirable butterfly effect into motion.

He learned to clean himself up and his injuries on his own as fast as he could. It was evident that Eugenie White’s cornerstone to maintain their new relationship viable and in a state if un-ambiguity was to imprint on the way she interacted with her youngsters at school. Sharing that awkward moment every day where he sat with the top of his body unclothed in front of her and she had to torture him, was becoming overwhelming for her as they learned to know each other better and were no longer total strangers.

He saw that she needed to compartmentalize things and to ensure their roles were well defined. The bathroom settings didn’t help, with the space so confined “It’s not difficult” she explained, “once a day, you change your dressings, put them into the bin, run some water, hot hot water, wait until you see some big-ass vapor, and then spray that rubbing alcohol on the scar on your stomach, say a prayer, ‘cause it’s stingy, and then wrap yourself up again”

If she had marveled at his overt interpersonal skills, she would have delighted, had she uncovered his secret intra aptitudes. Discerning which Barry to show at which moment had been something he had trained himself to do very early on, juggling between his son status, one butt cheek on the use-your-power-to-fix-your-family-situation chair while the other cheek was sitting on the I-was-raised-better-than-that stool, juggling between being his father’s child and a mutant and a high school student and a nice one but a wild one and wondering where the real Barry was in the middle of all that, over a long long time. For that reason he could relate to her a little bit when it came to not following her heart and dispersed codes of society.

She had made such a carnage when trying to close the hole in the middle of his abdomen, and Barry laughed with a mix of fascination and grief and amusement at the sight of it –a comma-shaped mark, bearing some purple clouded-ness around it, a massacre, really. With time, humidity in the air would force him into hiding under a pile of pillows again, rolled into a ball of papier mâché. Rainy weather or huge magnetic fields of thunderstorms that the weatherman had not even announced yet. And still he would just wait those moments out without a fuss, suspended in a meditative state and replaying their discussion with the image of her relaxed face above the sushi speaking those delectable words to him. He would make fun of her for the rest of his life when it came to her poor stitching performance but, he saw, that was such a small price to pay for something like that.

Something like what? he heard

Something like. Home.

“Barry why are you not walking on both feet” She asked him at Ikea. She was pulling hard at a price tag from an industrial-looking night table in the bedroom area. There must have been a knot in the elastic that attached the little piece of paper to the item.

“I am” he protested

“You are skipping with your crutches”

“It’s faster this way”

“BARRY, I mean” she lowered her voice as a group of moms with children passed them, loaded with plushies and a cloud-shaped lamp and arguing about the way to follow the confusing arrows and signs of the store, “I got those for you so you would walk better, not for you to jump around like a fucking kangaroo” He gazed down at his left foot which was clearly hovering off the ground, “you want to have one leg that feels like jelly for the rest of your life? That’s how you get one leg that feels like jelly for the rest of your life” Two of the ladies with their stroller threw an intrigued look at them and Barry wondered if people thought they were mother and son. For some reason he found that possibility exhilarating.

“Right” he fought against his smile. Angered Ms White was still the version of her he found the most alluring. She didn’t seem aware of it. Barry didn’t know what to do. They ended up their Ikea mission with one teddy and one scratch board, both items destined to the cat, and some vegetarian hot dogs at the front desk, waiting for her new bookshelves to be delivered from the storage room.

“Do you know how to drive a stick?” Eugene White asked

“A stick? Like a broomstick, like Harry Potter?”

She laughed and dropped some ketchup on the table, landed her elbow in it without noticing, “I mean a stick shift, I mean a manual car”

“Yes” he answered promptly

“You wanna drive home? That’ll make you used to moving both of your fucking feet again”

Eugenie White owned a very pretty Lexus car, greenish hue. Before that, she had driven a Kia, and before that a Ford Taurus, even a faded red van when she had to leave the Kia at the repair station for a month, and previously, a Mazda that had been so second-hand that its passenger door opened in the sharpest of turns. Her first vehicle, bought by her uncle and aunt before she decided to become independent, had been a Citroën ZX. She let him drive them home, fight for a parking space in their busy corner of the city center, whistling with admiration at his patience in the task to parallel-shoving a rectangle of metal between two mammoth pick-up trucks on a minuscule street, not even biting into the curb.

“You are ready” she whispered when he turned off the ignition.

“You allleadty” he said with an accent, “do you get it, Avatar?”

“Close enough, you…” he saw the wheels turning inside Eugenie White’s skull, “you get your own Ikran”

“How will I know if he chooses me?”

“He will try to kill you, Jakesully” she replied

“Astounding”

“Death from above”

“Actually, death from above was not the Ikran, I think, it was Toruk Makto”

“Aah yes, Barry, you’re right!” she frowned, her face serious, “Toruk Makto came to us in time of great sorrows”

“Toruk Makto” letting go off the wheel, Barry put a hand on his heart, “I will fly with you”

“All the Navi’ people know the story”

“So Hollywood” he said

“That movie is so dumb” she agreed with a smile full of her long teeth, “you see, thanks to you now, I can quote Avatar at dinner parties”

“What dinner parties?” he threw the car keys at her

“Whatever, let’s get the bookshelves together!”

“You mean me”

She rolled herself into her winter scarf, pointed a finger at him, “I mean you”

She meant you, she meant him, he thought, she means me.