Alex sat in a fetal position against the wall for a long time. Long enough for a knock on the door to rouse him from his misery coma. For a second. He thought it might be Jack, but a second after the knock he heard Chef Jerimiah's voice.
"Alexander? Are you in there?" He said. "I know you didn't put in an order for a meal, but I have something for you. Just in case."
Alex let out a sigh and raised his head enough for his voice to not be muffled by his knees. "Thank you for thinking of me, Chef," he said, hoping his voice didn't sound like he had been sobbing for hours, "but I'm not hungry right now."
"I can leave it out here, and you can take it if you want. If not, I'll be back in an hour, and I'll take it away for you. Is that alright?"
Jeremiah's voice reminded him of how Pamela would talk to him when he was young and upset. Soft. Soothing. The way you would talk to a crying child.
"That's fine," Alex said, trying not to feel too embarrassed that Jerimiah had been able to read his state without even seeing him. "Thank you, Chef."
"Any time, Alexander."
Alex heard the clanging of plates, then the rolling of wheels. Then silence. He waited a couple more minutes before he struggled to his feet and opened the door. Jerimiah was gone, but his promised food was on a covered tray right in front of the door. Alex crouched down and lifted the tray's silver cover. Despite how rotten he still felt, the contents of the tray made him smile. A big plate of paella and a little tarte Tatin. Both were his favourite things that Jerimiah made, and neither were things he made very often. His stomach couldn't even consider the thought of eating, but he still picked up the food up brought it into his flat.
As he put down the tray on the dining table, Alex noticed a couple of his tea candles sitting there. He hadn't practised with them since his dad's phone calls started. Back when he didn't know who was calling, he was just too tired. And then once when he did know it was his dad, he was worried about lighting fires while being so on edge. He might accidentally burn the place down.
Yeah, he should probably leave the candles alone for now. Continuing with the water heating method might be a good idea, though. He kind of felt like taking a bath anyway. Maybe that would wash off some of the gunk he had picked up in the past few hours.
Alex shuffled towards the bathroom, and once he was inside, he twisted the tub's drain closed. After he turned on the cold waterspout, he sat on the tub's ledge and took off his socks, then his shirt and trousers. He waited until the tub was sufficiently full to turn off the water and get out of his boxers. He tossed them with the rest of his clothes and slowly lowered himself into the water, wincing slightly from the shock of the cold. Once he was sitting down, he floated his hands on the surface and let heat radiate out of his fingertips. Heat the water slowly. Gradually. Don't boil it. Don't vaporize it.
Alex used to be afraid of bodies of water when he was younger. Well, he still was, to an extent. Not as bad as he used to be. He never learned how to swim, so he was always a bit nervous about drowning. Back when Laurent had pushed him into that fountain, half the reason he had evaporated the water was pain. The other half was fear. He had nightmares about drowning for weeks after that. Once, when his family dragged him to a yacht party, his younger cousin Patrick shoved him towards the boat's railing. Alex genuinely thought he was going to fall in. He blacked out for maybe a second, and when he came back to reality, he was sitting on the deck while his cousins laughed. His mother was there too, looking disappointed and embarrassed.
Why are you thinking about her again? AJ chided as Alex's tears threatened to come back.
"Sorry," Alex muttered to himself. His throat tightened as the tears banged at his ducts. Why was he even holding them back? He was the only witness around. Too tired to feel embarrassed by himself anymore, he let them flow freely again. The heat from his hands started to come and go erratically until it stopped without him telling it to. He flicked the surface of the water and tilted his head back. The marbled tiles of the shower wall always seemed like they formed faces at certain spots, but with Alex's blurred vision and less-than-cheerful mindset, they all looked a lot more monstrous than normal.
Alex closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to see them and tried to distract himself with the sound of the dripping faucet. The tiles made it sound louder than it should. Plink. Plink. Plink. Cold water into lukewarm water that made it colder. It worked at first, but soon the plinking was drowned out as different voices crept back into his head.
His father's spoke first. He's dead! He's dead and they'll do nothing! Then his mother's. What could you do, Alexander? Don't do anything to make us look like fools. And Matthew's. Go. I don't want you here. So just go.
And finally, Baptiste. His laugh. The one Alex heard the first time they met. The one that sounded like it belonged to a child who still loved the world. Then the one he let out in the library, after scaring Matthew with a book. And then when he was talking to Matthew in the stables, only two weeks before. I prefer to be wooed, his memory said. I look forward to it.
Before Alex could stop his brain, it replaced the backs of his eyelids with the scene from the morning. Blue eyes. Blonde hair. Broken body. Blood pooling. Over and over while he listened to the Baptiste of two weeks ago looking forward to getting French pastries and flowers.
Alex's body shook with a heavy sob. He sunk lower into the tub so that the water was tickling his jaw. He gripped the side of the tub and let his head go under. The plinks of the faucet were muffled now, but in turn, the memory of Baptiste's voice got louder. That's all he was now. A memory. No more new laughs. No more new conversations. How many times had Alex gotten to talk to him? Four? Maybe five. And a couple were only in passing. Like he had told Nurse Clara, he didn't know Baptiste that well at all. So why did he feel like he had lost something so significant?
Alex opened his eyes under the water and noticed bubbles rising in the water around him. He quickly pushed his head up and broke the surface. The entire tub was boiling, like he was the main ingredient of a soup. He raised his hand from the edge of the tub and his heart rate spiked when he saw the damage he had accidentally done. His whole body was giving off waves of heat, and now that he realized what he was doing it was getting worse. The water bubbled and spilled over as steam quickly filled the room. Alex took a couple shaky breaths. In and out. In and out. He focused on his powers until the heat crept back in bit by bit. Soon it was just emanating from his hands, so hot they distorted the air above them. He held them above the water and brought them together in a little cup that reminded him of a prayer. After a few seconds his fingertips caught fire. Little wispy flames danced down his fingers and palms, then to his wrists. When they started crawling up his forearms, he dunked his hands back into the water to extinguish them. Damn. He was supposed to practice putting them out with his powers. He still hadn't done that. It was always his gut reaction to do something else to get rid of them. Like he couldn't trust his powers to fix things they started.
Alex tried not to look at the warped ledge of the tub and leaned forward to open the drain. He made sure he wasn't heating up anymore before he stood and stepped out of the tub. The last thing he needed was melted sections of tile in the shape of his footprints.
Alex wrapped his waist in a towel and walked out, not even thinking to check if Matthew had come back yet. A part of him truly believed he would never come back. When he looked at him in the courtyard... Alex hadn't seen rage like that in Matthew's eyes since after Eloise's party. He was an idiot for missing when Matthew cared about him enough to hate him.
As Alex was drying his hair in his bedroom, he heard the landline ringing again. That sound was starting to feel like it was injecting cortisol directly into his veins. He ignored it at first. The caller wouldn't be his mother. He doubted it would be Leilah, fulfilling her promise to call back. It might be his dad. He wouldn't be surprised if his mother had lied about him being sedated. But even if it was him, Alex wasn't ready to deal with dead air or uninterrupted ramblings. Ones that would give him more questions than answers. Ones that would just give him more reasons to panic and worry.
Sorry, dad, he thought to himself. Not today.
The phone stopped ringing after a minute, but then immediately started again. That made Alex think it really was his dad. He got dressed in some lounge clothes as it rang on and stopped. Then again it started. Stopped. Started. Stopped. On its fifth go around Alex walked out of his room and stared it down. He didn't realize until he was out there that it could be someone calling for Matthew. It was two o'clock, so... six in the morning in California? Not an odd time to be up. It could be his family.
Should Alex pick up? Would Matthew want him talking to his family? Were they so incessantly calling because they had heard about what happened? Had the school contacted families yet? What should he say if they hadn't heard? Should he tell them? How could he not? How was he supposed to explain why Matthew wasn't there? How could he lie to them?
Alex spent so long debating what to do that the phone stopped ringing. For the first time it didn't immediately start again. Alex was about to walk away when it sprang back up. He chewed his lip and waited for another two rings before he picked it up. His ears were immediately assaulted by someone speaking very frantically in a language that wasn't English. For a fraction of a second Alex thought it was his father, but logic kicked in when he recognized the voice was a woman's. And she wasn't speaking Hindi. She was speaking Spanish.
"- no me dijeron nada! " She was saying. " ¿Qué paso? ¿Estás bien? ¿Estás seguro?"
Alex froze from the disorientation of being shouted at by a stranger. Then he took a few seconds to switch gears and translate the Spanish. Of course, that meant that to the woman, he was now the ghost refusing to speak over the phone.
"¿Mateo? ¿Estás allí?"
"Um..." Alex stuttered as he struggled to remember his translations. "Lo siento," he said wincing at his terrible pronunciation. "Me llamo Alexander. Soy el... compañero de Matthew. ¿Usted es su madre?"
It was the woman's turn to be flustered into silence. After a couple seconds, she spoke again in accented English. "I am so sorry," she said, sounding mortified. "So sorry, I probably sounded like a crazy person to you. Yes, I'm Matthew's mother. Oh, I'm so sorry."
"It's alright. Um, I didn't catch all of what you said earlier, though. Something about someone not telling you anything?"
"Yes. I- I just woke up, about ten minutes ago. There was a message on the machine. From the school. They said classes were canceled today, and that students were being kept in the dorms over a safety concern. But that was all they said. So, of course, my mind goes to the worst possible outcome."
"Matthew is fine," Alex said, ignoring his pang of anger over his uncle's intentionally vague messaging. "He's not here, he's at the nurse's office. But he's fine! He just felt sick this morning, so he got permission to go. I'll tell him to ring you when he gets back."
Matthew's mother let out a breath, one it sounded like she had been holding for ten whole minutes. "Gracias a Dios ," she said. "How about you, Alexander?"
"Me?"
"Are you alright?"
Alex tensed up, the question throwing him off a little. It was the same question he had wished Leilah would ask. The one he never imagined his own mother would. It really was a natural thing to ask someone. A pretty common way for strangers to make polite conversation. But in the moment, after the day he was having, it felt alarmingly foreign to hear.
"Yeah," Alex said.
"Are you sure? Your voice sounds a little strained."
"I'm fine, really. Thank you."
"Okay... Can I ask... Do you know what happened? What this safety concern is?"
"...No," Alex said, the lie tasting sour. "I don't. Sorry. They haven't told us anything either. I didn't even realize they had sent a message to families."
"I should probably get off this line, in case your mother wants to get a hold of you. She must be worried too."
Oh, that might be the funniest shit I've heard in my life, AJ said.
"I already spoke with her," Alex said.
"Ah, that's good... Is it alright if I ask you something else?"
"Um, sure," Alex said, not sure what else she could want from him.
"Has Matthew... has my son been nice to you?"
"Nice?"
"Yes. I know he was upset, when he found out you would be his roommate. He complained for days. Spent hours on the phone with the student affairs office trying to get it changed. But he promised he would try to be civil. It's not you he's angry with, after all. Every time I've asked him, he's changed the subject, which is his go to tactic when he doesn't want to tell me the truth. Has he been rude to you at all?"
"No, no," Alex said instinctively. "He hasn't."
"Really?" Mrs. Montoya said, not sounding at all convinced.
"Yes. He's been very... hospitable."
Hospitable? AJ said around a laugh. Just like how you're so personable?
Alex told AJ to shut it while Mrs. Montoya suppressed a laugh of her own. "It's sweet of you to want to cover for him, Alexander. I'll tell him you tried. Maybe that could win you some points. Enough to get him to stop whatever underhanded things he's been doing.
Alex winced. "I guess I should know better," he muttered. "I've been told many times by many people that I'm a very bad liar."
"I think I just know my son too well," Mrs. Montoya said. "I apologize on his behalf. I hope you don't think ill of me, raising such a brash kid. He's not here, so I'll blame it on my husband."
"No, I don't think that all. I think... I think Matthew is very lucky to have a mother that worries about him like that."
"I have a feeling he would disagree with you about that. I know I drive him crazy. Maybe that's why he does it to me."
"He cares about you very much. I can tell."
"Oh, I know. That's family, no? Crazy love."
"I... never really thought of it like that."
Our family is one of those things, at least, AJ said.
Mrs. Montoya paused for a second. "Are you sure you're alright, Alexander?" She asked sounding a little hesitant. There was something different in her tone now. Like she wasn't just asking because it was the polite thing to do. It sounded like she was asking because really cared. Because she was worried about Alex the same way she was worried about her son.
"Uh-huh," Alex said, scared that if he made more than vague sounds he would start crying again.
"I... I hope it's not improper to push, but... Well, you sound upset. Did my son-"
"No, no," Alex said, his throat getting tight. "He hasn't done anything wrong; I promise. It's just... been a long day."
"I see... I'll let you get some rest, then."
"Thank you. And I'll tell Matthew to call you as soon as he gets back."
"Thank you, Alexander."
"You can call me Alex," Alex said without really knowing why.
"That's what you prefer?"
"Yeah."
"Take care then, Alex. And Matthew isn't as tough as he wants people to believe. If he does do anything to upset you, feel free to threaten to tattle to me. That'll get that little mocoso acting right real fast."
Alex smiled at the thought of that. "I don't know if I'll be brave enough to make that threat," he admitted, "but thank you for your blessing."
"Adiós, niño."
"Adiós."
Alex pulled the phone away and hung up before he could be tempted to keep talking to her.
Huh, so that's what it's supposed to feel like, AJ said.
"What are you talking about?" Alex asked even though he knew the answer.
Talking to a mother. Nice, wasn't it?
"I don't like it when you get sentimental. It's unnerving."
Sorry, I'll keep that mind. I mean, f*ck off sh*thead. Better?
Alex let out a laugh that probably would have sounded unhinged to any witnesses. "Yeah, it was," he said as he walked over to the sofa and spontaneously collapsed onto it. "Thanks, mate."
Any time, AJ said as Alex suddenly felt exhausted enough to drift to sleep.