Page 98 of Gunslinger Girl
“Living my own life,” he said. “Doing what I want and not only what I’m expected to. You should understand that.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “But if that’s what you want, why would you go back?”
He looked away from her. A full minute passed, one in which each second lengthened and expanded, only to settle on Max’s shoulders like invisible weights.
“Because,” he said quietly, “I promised that someday I would.”
A chill settled on Pity. She pulled the blanket tighter, thinking back to the day at the fountain and his single candle. “What was her name?” She couldn’t help it. If Max was telling the truth, she wanted—needed—all of it. “And how did she die?”
If he was surprised that she had figured out that much, it didn’t show. “Sonya,” he said. “She was murdered.”
The admission was a fresh wound on an old injury, seeping from him. His eyes went red around the edges.
She didn’t want to ask but couldn’t bear not to. “Did you love her?”
“We weren’t really old enough for that, but…” He stopped, considered. “Yes, I guess I did.”
Pity felt something twist in her chest. “Are you… still in love with her?”
Max shook his head. “No. No, just… just listen, okay? I don’t know how else to tell this but straight through.”
He lay down again, the mattress creaking under his weight. Pity slid back beside him. Hesitantly, she laid her head on his shoulder. Max wrapped an arm around her, chasing off the goose bumps that had broken out on her skin.
“She was no one…” he began softly.
CHAPTER 32
Pity heard the gravity in his story, his reluctance to tell it, in the very first words.
“She was no one,” Max repeated, as if reacquainting himself with a particular definition of that statement. “Her mother and father worked in our house, and sometimes she hung around the servants’ areas when she wasn’t in school. I had seen her, but I never really noticed her until the day I caught her reading in our library.
“When she saw me, she… she begged me not to say anything, to not get her parents in trouble. I remember thinking that she shouldn’t have touched the books without permission. But I also remember being embarrassed that she was apologizing so… profusely. Like she was afraid of me. So I asked her if she wanted to stay and read for a while, to keep me company.”
Pity stared at the bare plane of his chest, trying to ignore the ache in hers. “That was kind of you.”
“I’m not sure it was,” he replied. “I just wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. My only ‘friends’ were like me, and I only ever saw them at whatever ridiculous event was being thrown that week. You think the scheming in Cessation is something? It doesn’t compare to what goes on in Columbia. At every meeting, every party, my parents’ associates would parade around like peacocks while at the same time acting as if they had a knife at their ribs. It was brittle, exhausting. Even as a kid I hated it.
“Sonya was so far from that world. She went to a good school, on a special scholarship. She’d read anything she got her hands on—physics, art, philosophy. That’s how it started. We’d read together, on the pretext of studying the same topics. But mostly we talked. She told me about the pieces of Columbia I knew nothing about: the slums; the shortages; wages that would cover rent or food or medicine, but not all three; jobs that paid well, but only because they were dangerous.
“At first my parents didn’t care. Maybe they thought I was just having some fun with her. Then one day we snuck out to a rally for better working conditions. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before—thousands of people coming together. So many were struggling to live, but that didn’t dampen the undercurrent of hope. One group was painting a mural with some slogan. I don’t even remember what it was, but I picked up a paintbrush to help and… lost myself. Before I knew it, I had covered an entire corner of wall with the ugliest flowers you’ve ever seen.
“When I got home, I was so energized, so optimistic. I thought I had seen the truth on both sides, which meant I could make others see it, too. When I told my parents…” Max stared at the ceiling. “They told me that Sonya wasn’t a proper companion for me… and punctuated it by firing her parents.”
Pity shifted beside him. That was the world you tried to run to. Not Max’s—Sonya’s. That’s what would have been waiting for you in Columbia. When he didn’t continue, she took his hand in hers and squeezed. “What did you do?”
Max took a deep breath. “What I should have done was never see Sonya again. What I did do—what we did—was leave. Sonya knew about some movements in the northern cities. I had access to plenty of funds. We thought we’d be long gone before anyone even knew we’d left.
“In reality, we made it a day and a half before my parents’ people found us. They dragged us out of the old barn we had crashed in after a day of hitching rides. Sonya was screaming… I think I was screaming, too. They separated us. When I asked where they were taking us, they said home.”
Max stopped again. This time a full minute passed before he continued.
“When I saw my parents, they were livid. There was a lot of yelling, mostly on their end, about what could have happened if anyone had found us, found out who I was—kidnappers, ransom, or worse. They didn’t want me to see Sonya ever again. I told them that they couldn’t keep us apart forever. After that, I became a prisoner, someone on my heels at every minute. And Sonya, she…” Max’s voice broke.
Pity threaded her fingers through his hair again as if doing so would somehow draw his pain into her.
“They fished her body out of a river. The story was that she had lost her scholarship and was so upset that she jumped from a bridge.” A pair of tears drew wet lines on his cheeks. “I knew it was a lie. And my parents knew that I knew. It wasn’t a suicide—it was a lesson.”
Frost blossomed in her chest. She thought of her father. As nasty and indifferent as he was, there were domains of cruelty he’d never come close to.
