PILGRIMS

Born of the Goddess,

To her we belong.

From dream into thought,

From thought into song.

From song into dance,

From dance into flame.

A lifetime is granted

For each set ablaze.

To die is to wake,

To wake is to burn,

Born of the Goddess,

To her we return.

I

At the beginning of summer, my mother lost all of her hair. At first, her jet-black curls began to scatter on her bedsheets. Soon after, they spread throughout the whole apartment on Magnolia Street, lining it in a suffocating blackness. Once she was hopelessly bare-headed, my father checked her into the hospital across the street.

Neither of us could muster up the strength to sweep the hair from the floors.

My father sat next to her bed for weeks on end, tangled between her IVs.

I, on the other hand, spent the beginning of summer in the back of a Fiat. In the driver's seat was Paul, Lia's boyfriend.

I had known Lia for a lifetime. We had been friends since kindergarten. She was my first kiss when we were five years old. We flipped a silver coin that she found on the street. Heads: we go to the girl's bathroom. Tails: we go to the boy's bathroom. Neither of us knew heads from tails, but we decided on the girl's bathroom in the end. It was safer that way. * I looked more like a girl than she did a boy anyways.

Her apartment building was a few streets away from mine. It stood ten floors high, with Lia's apartment on the top floor. For twelve years, I would wait every morning for her to come down and walk to school with me. Her mother, Mrs. Goode, would watch over us from the balcony, though my nearsightedness made it hard for me to see her.

I fell in love with Lia twice.

First: in the girl's bathroom in kindergarten.

The second time: at the end of the eighth grade. We laid together on a blanket behind her apartment building, listening to music from her phone in early autumn when school had only just started. We sat back-to-back, sharing a pair of headphones. My eyes came across the fading lines in the flesh on her wrists and at that moment, she seemed more beautiful than ever to me. She caught my gaze and her hands retreated into the sleeves of her old sweater. She probably thought I was judging her, but all I could do was love her. Without saying a word, she got up and headed home. The sun was starting to set, and so the princess ought to return to her castle. I loved her for the first semester of eighth grade. Until the scars on her wrists started to fade.

In high school, I would fall in love every couple of days. I had loved our literature teacher, as she would look at me suggestively while telling the class about Vronsky. I had loved Max, Paul's classmate, who was on the basketball team. On the same occasion, I had loved basketball as well. For two days, I had fallen in love with our history teacher in the tenth grade. Shortly, intensely and covertly. In thought, I would sneak into their houses and take refuge in their beds. I would sleep with each of them, one by one, moving from lover to lover. In thought, I was a whore. In thought, I was never alone and I was never home.

For a few weeks, I had been living with my father alone. The apartment on Magnolia Street gave more room to breathe, yet somehow felt smaller. The mold angle on our bathroom ceiling was turning my father against me. It was telling him that I should be there for him to lean on me, that I should feel what he felt. That I should suffer more.

There was a week left of eleventh grade, and only three things echoed in the minds of my colleagues: driving school, senior parties, and sex. Our grades were finalized. I didn't fail any classes. Not that it would matter. I wouldn't be coming back for the next year. But I didn't know that then.

Unlike my colleagues, I didn't care about drivers' school. I didn't need a license. I had Paul. He was a year older than us, and he had a black, beat-down Fiat that he got from his father. The car speakers didn't work, and neither did the air conditioning. Lia was playing the music on her phone in the front seat. I was sat in the backseat as we rode through our warm, gray town without a purpose or destination, with only the wind to graze our cheeks.

We would always chip in for cigarettes and gas. I would close my eyes, lay my head back and smoke. We'd pretend we were characters in an artistic coming-of-age movie. Paul would park his Fiat on the outskirts of town, on a hill. We'd sit together on the rusted hood of the car, watching over the lifeless town and waiting for the sun to set.

"Have you ever had sex, Eric?" Paul asked on one of the first nights of the summer.

"Leave him alone, stop being such a jackass!" Lia had always felt responsible for my protection. In her eyes, I was a helpless child. I had never told her that I loved her in preschool and the eighth grade.

My silence answered his question and stirred him up further.

"Don't you want to try it? It's awesome, right Lia?"

Lia lit a cigarette, took a long drag, and spoke:

"I hear so."

Paul smiled. He was fairly new in our lives, but she had kept him around longer than she did others. His thick, dark beard masked his unpleasant features and brought out his eyes, large and captivating. He knew there had been others before him, and that she wasn't giving him any more than she had given them. From the backseat, I could see that Lia wasn't capable nor willing to give them much. A hand on the thigh, a kiss on the neck. Sex, when I wasn't in the car. Nothing more, though. Her presence in their lives was strictly physical. Cold and somewhat vulgar. In the end, she would always get bored. Sometimes they would get bored first. But Paul was still here, along with his Fiat. He adored Lia and settled for any crumbs he could get.

"It's Max's birthday. You had a crush on him, didn't you, Eric? He's turning nineteen, he asked me to bring both of you to his party. It's in some old building, I have the address. It's tonight. We don't have to get him anything either. Politician parents, filthy rich."

Lia spoke first:

"We don't have plans. No one invites us to any party anyway."

"Well, what do you say, Eric? This could be your chance to- "

"Paul, stop teasing him!"

"Okay. I'm in. I'll tell my dad it's a birthday party, might get some gift money out of him that way."

"Cool. I'll take the car home; I feel like drinking."

They dropped me off at my apartment building and drove away to Paul's house with a screech. I sat down on the pavement and smoked my last cigarette. My father was waiting for me inside. He had spent too much time with the mold angel, so a spat was due. I was biding my time, I wasn't ready to face his gaze, crippled by pain and anger.

As I blew smoke circles, my eyes shot through them towards the hospital across the street. I knew from my father which window was the one to mom's room. Visiting hours had long passed, but the light was still on. I also knew that her bed was next to the window. For a few seconds, I tried to conquer my poor eyesight, but I couldn't quite make out her shape. The window was only one among the countless white eyes of the monster that had swallowed my mother whole.

I sat up and put my cigarette out, digging through my backpack for keys. Unlocking the door to the building, I pushed my body against it and opened it with a grating screech. In the darkness, I felt my way along the wall to the light switch, pressing it shortly and filling the staircase with a dim, yellowing glow. The hallways reeked of smoke and old age. Scared of the elevator, I took the stairs to the fourth floor.

The door to the apartment was unlocked. My father no longer had anything to hide, protect, or lose. I took my shoes off in our tiny hallway and saw the light coming from the kitchen. As I entered, my father closed the book he was pretending to read and pushed it to a far corner on the table. I felt estranged from the room I was in. I couldn't remember the last time I had had a meal there. The silence clenched around me like a vise. I hung on to the sound of water drops hitting the sink. I counted. Thank God he never fixed that faucet!

We sat facing each other, at opposing ends of the table. He was wearing his navy-blue robe that had never seen a washing. A white beard hid away his dry cheeks. He was looking at the microwave, the oven, the black locks of hair on the floor. Anywhere but my way.

One hundred and thirty drops later, he spoke to me:

"It's been three weeks since you visited her."

It wasn't a question. He wasn't asking for an explanation. I had no right to one.

My father had the irritating habit of never getting angry. I had taken after my mother. I needed him to scold me, yell at me. I wanted his words to burn me, but he served them to me cold, lifeless. I was begging for an opportunity to bark back, but he knew me too well. He knew that his silence was all he needed to disarm me.

I remained still with my hands on my lap. The mold angel had guided him well. He was speaking volumes to me without making a sound, and I was too withered by guilt to get out of the chair.

Your eyes are wide and black, just like hers. They have the same feral sparkle that I fell in love with thirty years ago. You don't deserve her eyes, and I can't stand to see them jammed in your petty, selfish skull. I knew those were the words he was thinking. But these things are meant to be screamed, and not just thought. In this sense, he was the petty one. I was starting to get mad; I felt my blood begin to boil. It felt good. I could finally move.

I opened the window. Without asking for permission, I lit a cigarette from his pack. I was right next to him now, shoulder to shoulder. It had gotten dark. Carved across the moon was the face of a fat child, laughing. I remembered Max's birthday and sighed in relief. I desperately needed to leave.

"Can I have some cash? I'm going to a birthday party and I have to chip in for the gift."

He didn't answer, instead getting up and searching through a drawer. He took out a 50 and laid it on the table. He only spoke right before leaving the room. He was facing the door, right hand clutching the handle.

"She's in your room... if you want to see her."

And then he left.

For a few moments I couldn't - no, I didn't want to understand what he was talking about. I threw the butt out of the window, put the 50 in my pocket, and followed him into the hallway.

"What do you mean, she's in my room?"

"Be quiet. It's late."

He went into his bedroom and turned on the light. I followed him, trying not to look towards the open door on the other side of the hallway. He sat on the side of the bed, looking at the ground.

"What do you mean, she's in my room?" I repeated.

Indignation was quickly distilling into blind fury. He wanted to punish me, to humiliate me. I was the victim of a robbery. He was depriving me of the one corner of the house that was still mine. First, her hair had plagued the entire apartment like black ivy. And now, she had taken my room. She was drenching it with the pressing imminence of death. I knew I had no right to feel this, but I hated both of them.

At last, my father mustered up the courage to look me in the eyes. He came face to face with my hate but didn't try to tame it. Instead, he whispered:

"There's nothing we can do anymore. We stopped the treatment. Now we wait."

I wanted to poke at him, to make him hurt. A cruel feeling sedated me. So, I asked:

"What are we waiting for?"

He didn't answer, but his eyes trickled a tear. His pain didn't make me feel better like I thought it would. Instead, a dagger was twisting in the center of my chest, cutting my breath short. A barbaric horror was crawling through my insides and clotting my blood. I didn't know what I was afraid of. All of the anguish in the universe took over my body and turned it to stone. I was sinking.

I crouched next to my father, leaning on his legs. I felt his rough hands on my shoulders and managed to cry. We cried together for minutes on end, wailing, like children. The tears had cleansed my body of any hate that was left, and I went completely dry. I felt lighter. The dagger was still lodged in my chest, but at least it wasn't moving anymore.

"Please bring my stuff here. Laptop, charger, clothes, all that."

I knew he wanted me to do it myself. He wanted me to go into my room and meet the gaze of the bald woman. He wanted to share the yoke of her pleas with me. But didn't have anything bad to say to me anymore. He held on tight to my shoulders. Much like Lia's lovers, he was feeding on what crumbs I could manage to give him.

I got up and walked out into the hallway. I yelled out to him as I grabbed a hoodie from a hanger:

" I'll be home late, don't wait up!"

Lia and Paul were waiting for me at the Patrion Hotel, a few blocks down. The building had been decommissioned for years. The grey walls had long shed most of their plaster and a few windows had fallen victims to a cruel winter. According to Paul, the hotel belonged to Max's uncle, a businessman gone abroad. He had bought it after the privatization and maintained its authentic style that somehow did not bring about any hint of nostalgia. It was hideous and sad, but it was private property, which meant that police could only enter with a warrant.

Paul knocked on a metal door three times, waited a few seconds, and knocked twice more. A few more seconds passed before he knocked again three times. A clean-shaven Goliath of a guard opened the door. He had gel in his hair and was wearing a navy-blue tracksuit that stretched over his swollen muscles like a sheet over a mattress. The smell of One Million cologne quickly began to choke me. Goliath pulled a list from his pocket and spoke in disgust:

"Names?"

"Paul plus two!"

He squinted at the paper and glossed over every entry with his finger. Eventually, he found our names and let us in, closing the door behind us and twisting the key a suspicious number of times. The disgust in his voice from a few moments ago had apparently vanished.

"Past the hallway, up the stairs, an' to the left, where the music is coming from. Have a good time an' all that but do not leave the premises unannounced. Respect each other and do not take any photos. And don't open any windows. Ya' got me? First strike 'n you're out the door. Ya' got me?"

A few strategically placed colorful lanterns offered a minimal amount of lighting to the rooms. The place was crawling with hordes of drunk teenagers. Some of them I had seen around school, others I had even fallen in love with at some point. With their hands behind their backs or dangling limp around their thighs, they were all mechanically bumping their heads to the electronic beats that were piercing my eardrums.

We followed the guard's instructions and entered what might have been a conference room at some point in time. A girl was dancing seductively in front of a dirty mirror that was distorting her shape. A DJ was playing music on a set of speakers scattered throughout the immense room. A table spanning across an entire wall was full of water bottles, all kinds of liquor, and plastic cups that had been used and reused.

After a while, we found Max. He was making out with a blonde girl that none of us recognized. One of his hands was firmly placed on her ass, the other was trying to sneak its way under her white tank top, toward her breasts. When he noticed us, he whispered something in the blonde girl's ear and broke loose from her. The girl stumbled toward the table and drank directly from a bottle of gin.

Max made his way through the crowd and came closer to us. Running his hands through his sweat-drenched hair, he yelled over the music:

"Hey, you guys made it! Most of us are wasted already but there's still booze left."

"Happy birthday, dude!" Paul answered, before hugging him swiftly.

"Thanks!"

Lia and I smiled at him, but made no verbal congratulations. We weren't really friends; we had never talked before. We had only watched him on the basketball court for a few months. We were more familiar with his bare torso than his voice or personality. In spite of that, he leaned closer to Lia and spoke:

"I didn't think you'd come! Are you okay?"

Lia didn't answer. Her eyes drained of any expression and her body stiffened. After a few seconds, as if snapping out of a trance, she smiled at the host and said:

"I'm good. I'm gonna go pour myself a vodka."

With that, she disappeared into the crowd.

Paul slapped Max's shoulder softly and told him:

"It's barely been a few days, dude. Leave her alone."

"The entire school saw that livestream though! I don't get how she's so chill after all that shit. If I were her, I don't know if I could even leave my house anymore."

"I didn't see it," I intervened. "I'm gonna go check on her. I'll see you around."

Lia sat cross legged at the corner of the table. A few boys were dancing around her. From time to time, she would take another sip of her vodka. I sat down next to her. At first, she ignored me, then she offered me some of her drink. I took a few sips and gave her the cup back. The speaker next to us annihilated any chance at a conversation, but I didn't know what to say to her anyway. All these years, the two of us had each kept our demons in our own apartments. I had the bald woman. She had the man that flung himself out of the tenth-floor window.

That previous Sunday, Lia had decided to show the demon in her apartment to the whole world. It was her right to do so, but our school was never a monolith of empathy. The video went viral in a few hours. The police tried to take it down, but it had spread around school and the rest of town like a nasty flu. Everyone was talking about Lia Goode.

She put her lips close to my ear and yelled:

"Come with me!"

She jumped off the table, took my hand, and began making her way through the guests. After climbing a few sets of stairs, lanterns became few and far apart, and so did the people. Some of them sliced through the darkness with the flashlights on their phones. The electronic music was now farther in the background, and Lia's voice was clearer:

"I made friends with that blonde chick that Max was all over. Got some cigarettes out of her. And the key to the roof hatch. Just making use of my fifteen minutes of fame. You've got a lighter, right? I forgot to ask her for a lighter and I'm craving a cigarette and some fresh air."

She was talking while climbing a rusty ladder that led towards a hatch in the ceiling.

"Give me some light!" she ordered.

I held my phone light towards her as she struggled to get the key into the lock. After a few tries, there was a click. Lia pulled a chain and slammed her shoulder into the door, which opened with a noise of discontent.

I followed her up to the roof and closed the hatch behind me. Technically, we weren't breaking any of the rules: didn't open any windows, didn't leave the premises. But it wasn't like we cared anyway. We sat on the edge of the rooftop. It was dark enough outside that we couldn't quite tell how high up we were, but we dangled our feet off the edge like toddlers. The moon resembled a stray cat's eye. For a few minutes we just stared over the silent city, now tranquilized by the night. In the distance, we managed to spot our school, Lia's apartment building and the Church that aunt Doreen would force me to go to as a child. A few hundred meters from it stood the hospital. In the eighteen years that Lia and I had roamed that town, not one tree had been planted, not a burnt-out lightbulb changed, and no building was reconditioned. And in the saddest display of disinterest, Christmas decorations were up throughout town all year long.

Lia was walking on the edge of the building with her arms extended, like a schoolgirl on a train track. As our eyes met, she spoke in a defensive tone:

"Chill out, I'm not gonna jump too."

That was the first time she had ever talked to me about him. I was curious to know more. All I knew was that last Sunday, her father laid flat on the pavement next to her ten-story building. His head was smashed, almost merged with the concrete. That Monday, his daughter didn't go to school. She gave a statement. The cops were probably most interested in the livestream she did briefly on Sunday morning. All she sent me at first was a selfie and a message about the cute cop asking her questions. She was there for a few hours though, enough to send me a few songs to listen to as well. Later that evening, she just texted:

Home safe.

Tuesday, on the day of the funeral, she was back in school. We skipped our last class and spent the entire day on the hood of Paul's car, on the outskirts. Conjoined by the wire of her headphones, we danced in the heat of the summer sun, threw off our sweat-soaked shirts and smoked. Neither of us spoke about the shattered head next to her building. Or about the video. I'm sure Paul kept it in his phone, but he didn't say anything either.

As Lia sat back down on the edge of the building, her heels hit the outer wall. Putting a cigarette between her lips, she asked me for a light, then said:

"I'm not so glad I live streamed that, but I'm glad he jumped. And I'm glad everyone knows why."

Her voice was calm and content. I wasn't the most popular kid in the school, but I had heard about what happened in the video. I remembered the slits across her left arm from eighth grade. Another thing she never spoke to me about. We each had our demons, and hers sometimes happened to follow her to school inside her sleeves.

After a few moments of silence, I spoke up:

"You know, I still haven't watched it."

She looked at me blankly. The moonlight bounced off of her brown eyes and through her short, bleached blonde hair. The lack of sleep gave her a sickly allure. She was more beautiful than usual, but somehow less real, like a pencil sketch. I found it hard to take my eyes off her.

She eventually processed what I had said and smiled.

"I didn't even think you would," she said under her breath.

Silence took over once again, as she continued to kick her heels harder into the edge of the building.

"My mom's back home. They stopped the treatment," I told her.

She looked toward the hospital. She didn't dare ask if that was good or bad news.

"She's in my room," I whispered.

In the cool air of the night, our thoughts and feelings mixed with each other. We did that often. We would look at each other, share a touch, or get tied together by the music on her phone, and words would become fruitless.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

I didn't answer.

She got up and spoke firmly:

"I need to get out of here! Get on a train and never come back..."

She would say that almost every day. We were planning on leaving together. We didn't know where to yet. Maybe college in another town, maybe another country. We didn't know how we'd get money. Maybe from Paul, who would probably come with us. Maybe from Mrs. Goode and my father. We'd get jobs, we'd figure it out. All we knew was that this town was trapping us between the decrepit walls of its buildings a little more every day.

But we had never actually got on the train.

"Everyone's gonna forget about that live video in a few days," I mumbled.

She kept staring at the hospital.

"The train leaves at nine past six in the morning. The ticket's a hundred with student ID. Get the money and I'll see you at the station at a quarter to six. I'm gonna suffocate here before I finish high school."

She had a plan this time around. She spoke in whispers, like an accomplice. A strange enthusiasm took hold of her tone. Her words stuck together at a pace too fast for my tired head. I could only manage to mumble one question:

"Where are we going?"

She took my face between her palms and said:

"To Vado. We belong in Vado!"