Page 54 of In This Iron Ground
“I’m not joking, I’m trying to make a point. What they did was sick.”
“You don’t even know what they did.”
“I know how they made you feel. I fucking hate myself for not pressing sooner.”
“I wouldn’t have talked, Hakan. And it wasn’t your business!”
“Not my business? Not my business? How can you say that?”
“What I meant is that it wasn’t your responsibility.”
“You’re my friend, how does that not make it my responsibility?” Hakan asked, almost leaning out of his chair as he bent towards him. Damien ignored the jolt that went through him at the word ‘friend’.
“I can take care of myself,” Damien said, but his voice was weak without the pulp of conviction.
“Nobody takes care of themselves alone, Damien! I don’t know what I would do without my family. I’d fucking…I wouldn’t cope. I just think that…I just hate them. The McKenzies. I hate them.”
“So do I.” The words surprised Damien as they came out of his mouth. It was the first time that he had ever admitted it. Whether what they did was wrong or right, whether he deserved it or not…he hated them.
Suddenly, the floodgates opened.
“They were so…hateful. It was just hate, all the time. That’s why you guys could never be like them. Not really. It’s like…it’s like it was in their Ousía. Like theirs was corrupted. Out of balance. But you guys, you’re in balance,” Damien tried to explain.
“So are you.” Hakan’s voice was quiet but filled with force.
Damien sighed. “Just, stop.”
“No. Okay, I get that it upsets you, but I’m not gonna stop telling you the truth. You could never be like them either. You’re so much better it shouldn’t even be a comparison,” Hakan said forcefully.
Damien shrank a little further. “Okay. Okay, okay, just drop it right now, alright?” Damien pleaded. There was a moment of silence.
“Fine. But my point stands,” Hakan said finally.
“Noted.”
The silence paced around the room. Slowly, Damien uncurled from himself. He looked up at Hakan.
“Thanks,” Damien said quietly. Hakan smiled.
Sometimes it was nice to hear things even if he didn’t quite believe them.
**********
As Damien’s sixteenth birthday ticked past, so did Hakan’s eighteenth. With it approached another lumbering creature.
Hakan was off to university at the end of the coming summer.
Damien watched with pride tightening a knot in his chest as Hakan applied to universities. Damien would flip through the brochures, looking at all the students in neatly diversified skin colours smile from the pages.
“This is the one I wanna go to,” Damien said, pointing to Eketon University. Hakan looked down at the glossy pages.
“What do you want to major in?”
“Um…psychology,” Damien admitted. It was the first time he’d told anybody. Hakan blinked at him.
“I thought you were gonna say graphic design or biology or botany or something but…you would make a great psychologist,” Hakan said. Damien ignored the praise even as it swam through his chest.
“I wanna specialize in art therapy. Work with kids, maybe, you know…looked-after children. Foster kids and that stuff. I don’t know.”
