Chapter 17: 14.

Yuri's eyes held mine. I nearly stumbled over my own feet in my hurry to get to the bed.

- Yuri.

Lunging forward, I grabbed his lifeless hand around mine. He wouldn't speak. His eyes were red-rimmed and blank of all emotion. The vitality had seeped out of his face, pronouncing the dark circles under his eyes. His energy felt diluted to a hundredth of mine. I don't know how to describe it other than that I felt it. I felt his condemnation, his rejection. It was like a block of ice sliding down the length of my spine. He didn't want to speak to me.

Yuri's hand was uncharacteristically hot. I gripped it with all my might. I wanted to force some expression back into his face. Please, I wanted to say. Please forgive me. Please don't look at me like that.

- Ru.

I tore my gaze away from Yuri to meet his father's voice. Did he know what I had done? Krié stood at the foot of the bed together with his wife. His face looked apprehensive, if not slightly tired. I was struck by how he looked his age for once. The wrinkles around his mouth folded in on themselves. Yuri's mother had taken off her surgical mask. Her hands were being held, much like I was holding Yuri's, by her husband's larger ones. She leaned her head on the side of his arm in exhaustion.

- I don't think the Boy is feeling up to a conversation right now. Why don't we give him some room to recover? Krié's voice was calm, soothing, the exact antonym of what I was feeling inside.

When I turned my attention back to Yuri, I saw that he had turned away, looking out the windows. Slowly I untangled my fingers from his limp ones. I stepped away from his bed. It was only as my weight had left the side of his body, that Yuri glanced my away; a brief dart of the eyes, too brief to make sense of the thousands of emotions clouding my thoughts.

With heavy steps, I went over and sat on a chair beside the windows. Mister and Madame Karamov were standing up and talking in Brommin. The television was turned to a cartoon. Bright, animated gestures filled the screen. I don't remember what the room looked like. It keeps changing every time I try to recall it. The few times I actively think back on that day, I find myself filling the gaps with fiction.

Besides, what was there to take in when my heart was wailing inside my chest? When it felt like every cell in my body had been cinched and smothered to death?

I don't recall anything with clarity except the side of Yuri's head. His matted hair, disorderly from the friction against the pillows, his skin which was paler than usual, his avoidant posture. He had on a baby blue hospital shirt, a matching blanket covered his legs. There was a machine next to his bed from which a tube disappeared into his nostrils, and an I.V drip on the other side, but it didn't look like it was in use.

His eyes refused to meet mine. I knew then for certain he hated me. He would never forgive me.

I blinked away the tears pooling in my eyes and washed down the stiffness lodged in my throat with unshed tears.

I considered walking out the door. I wondered if it was possible to make it home on foot. I wondered what I was doing there, in that room, when it was clear I wasn't wanted. Why had I been stupid enough to believe that Yuri would forgive me? I recalled the way his screams had pierced the sky. The way he'd looked at me with panicked eyes, and how his sobs had vibrated through me as I had held him in my arms. I remembered how it had felt like my spine would curl in on itself.

My feet stood up of their own will. I thought they were guiding me to the door, but I stopped halfway there. Straight within Yuri's field of vision. He looked at me, but he might as well have been looking through me. His eyes were blank, glazed-over in thought. I blinked away tears that threatened to spill over.

- I'm sorry okay. I'm sorry. But it's not my fault...it's not.

A tear escaped its confinement and streaked down my cheek. I wasn't in the mental state to spare it any thought. Why bother hiding my agony?

My lie hurt on its way out. It hurt even after the words had faded into the surrounding quiet. It was so obvious, looking at us, that I was the one choking on my guilt—unable to even bring myself to admit to what I'd caused. Anyone who spared us a glance in that instance could tell that I was the perpetrator and Yuri the victim. I was sure his parents knew. Yet, I still said what I said, and I realise now, that my need to provoke Yuri was greater than the words with which I provoked him with.

- It's your stupid fault...I'm sorry...I'm sorry. I'm so—

Wails bit off the end of my words until all that was heard was an unintelligible blubber. Deep down I wanted Yuri's sympathy. I wanted him to look at me and see the emotional distress I was in, see that he'd caused it. I wanted him to forgive me. I wanted us to be friends, and to forget the accident at the Tree had ever happened. But when he said nothing, when he turned his head to the other side, and his mother's arms came around my shoulders in consolation, I knew that none of that was within the realm of reality.

Yuri's mother hushed my agonised cries. I can't tell you how long we stood there, only that it was for some time. The soles of my feet started to prickle from insufficient blood flow. Yuri's mother's polyester jacket became stained with tears. She patted my hair and soothed me with soft croons and words of comfort that drowned in the billows of my self-pity.

We left Yuri in his hospital room. During the little time his mother and I had been in there, he hadn't spoken once. The possibility that he hadn't been able to, has hit me more than once. That I knew nothing about his injuries at the time, and that I ought to have reserved my judgement, did as well. But that's the kind of clarity that comes afterwards—when it's too late. When the heat of the moment dissipates, and you're left alone with nothing but your ailing thoughts.

Something happened on the drive home from the hospital to Ljerumlup. Something that I, to this day, can't explain. I forced a smile to Madame Karamova and said my thanks for the ride home. As soon as her scooter disappeared down the hill, I felt the muscles in the corners of my mouth relax. The change in me felt something like that, as if it manifested itself in a small shift in my expression. It was the first sprout of a flower. Une fleur du mal. Its roots, long and deformed, encircled my heart like vines.

Yuri's birthday came and passed the following day, on a Sunday. I threw his birthday present out of my bedroom window. I caught it later the next day by accident. The wrapping had soaked through from the morning dew and was wetting the VHS-tape of our favourite animated series. The time and money I had spent on it stopped me in my tracks and almost made me reconsider leaving it where it was. I recalled the rush of excitement when I had stumbled upon it; the next instalment of what we both assumed was a long-ago discontinued series. Yuri would have liked it, but none of that mattered in that instance. Looking at it, at the spoils of what remained, I felt stupid, so stupid.

Tuesday rolled around, much like its predecessors. The clouds were dark and thick like the first sign of a bad omen. I imagined that Yuri must have been discharged by then, but I didn't go over to his house to verify it for myself.

On Wednesday, Katka came around to the residence with a basket of freshly baked bread. They were from her mother, addressed to Ljerumlup. Katka had said nothing about whether Yuri was out of the hospital, all she did was pass-along words of well-wishes from her mother. I hadn't dared go downstairs to personally greet her, instead; I had Mjinska tell Katka that I couldn't come down to the door.

Mjinska brought the basket up to my room, together with the news of what Katka had to say. I was ashamed of myself, but I pushed all sentiments I held towards Yuri and his family down. I spent the rest of the day locked inside my room, reading and pretending to do homework.

Little by little, I built up walls. I used to lie in bed after school and imagine white walls, four of them surrounding me. I was clad in white, the floor was white, everything was white. That was the safe space I resided in to protect myself from the onslaught of recollections that the thought of Yuri Karamov's being brought on.

I hardened. Deep inside I was slowly withering. From what little life remained in me, I birthed forth a Ru Konstantin I hardly recognised. Someone who sneered and who thought everyone was below him. Who thought himself incapable of being a friend; undeserving of it. My laughter, the few times I did laugh, sounded like dissonant shrieks—fake even to my own ears.

Yuri came back to school two weeks after the accident with a bandage on his arm, and a sling across his shoulder. Our classmates knew by then the reason for his absence. Prior to his arrival, there had been a short-lived rumour that I had caused his injury. But it quickly died down when no one gave it much attention. I suspected Yuri's best friend, Millin Ibranov, must have said something to the Flatlanders that had caught on.

By the end of his first day back, Yuri had half our middle school peers' names scribbled on his white bandage. Yuri hadn't approached me and I, in turn, hadn't bothered giving him attention. I shut out our classmates' get-well wishes, the questions of where, and how, he was hurt, and his answers.

As much I tried to ignore him, there were still times when I would catch him from my homeroom windows (now in the west wing of the school building). My antennas were still fine-tuned to his frequencies, and I would often catch his frame, still so recognisable to me, as he walked and talked with his Brommian friends. Those were the only times I let myself mourn what we had lost.

Yuri retreated behind the stocky backs of the Flatlanders. He got a haircut a few weeks before winter break and it transformed his face. He looked mature. Perhaps it was our distance, or maybe just something about the way his forehead was now visible, either way, it made him look older. There was also a sort of swagger to his person; self-assured and less apologetic.

The bandages and sling were gone by his second week in school, and Yuri returned to showing off on the football pitch. His popularity skyrocketed. He drew admirers from both older and younger peers alike. Girls lined up to talk to him during the breaks. Everywhere he went there seemed to be a group of girls in his vicinity.

Everything had regressed to the way things had been before we knew each other. Only now amplified by Yuri's sudden popularity. It had made me wonder, more often than I would like to admit, if our friendship had been holding him back from becoming this popular, or if there had been something about the injury that had exasperated the inevitable.

I reached out to the Arash in our class. I refused to be a burden to Adriana (now in my parallel class) and hide behind her skirt like a child. I squared my shoulders and forced myself to become bolder. I initiated conversations with classmates. Once the nervousness of our first conversation was laid to rest, I realised that I had been shutting them out on purpose all these years by spending all my time with Yuri Karamov. The Arash friendship dynamics favoured me because I was Bikjaru, and made it all that much easier to squeeze myself into tight-knit groups.

A new normal set itself into the rigid motions of everyday life and forced itself into a routine. Life without Yuri was much like tea with no sugar; bland but tolerable. I did my best to fake it till I made it. That was till I made the whole of Dronesk believe that I wasn't as distraught and shattered on the inside as I was. I would spend most nights crying myself to sleep while in the mornings I pretended that I was above that sort of childish behaviour.

I pushed Yuri's existence to a place in my mind where it evoked no feeling when his name was mentioned in my presence. No spontaneous recollections, no guilt, and no remorse.

I thought I had rid myself of him, I really did.