Broken Knight by L.J. Shen

Knight, 9; Luna, 10

Idrove a fist into the oak tree, feeling the familiar sting of a fresh wound as my knuckles split open.

Bleeding helped me breathe better. I didn’t know what it meant, but it made Mom cry in her bathroom when she thought no one could hear. Whenever she glanced at my permanently busted knuckles, the waterworks started. It had also earned me a trip to talk to this guy in a suit every week, who asked about my feelings.

My earbuds blocked out the sounds of birds, crickets, and crispy leaves under my feet. The world sucked. I was done listening to it. “Break Stuff” by Limp Bizkit was my designated ruin-shit anthem. Fred Durst might look like a ballsack in a cap, but he had a point.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Most kids liked fighting each other. Not me. I only wanted to hurt myself. When my body ached, my heart didn’t. Simple math, and a pretty good deal.

A pinecone dropped on my head. I squinted up. My stupid neighbor, Luna, sat perched outside our treehouse, bouncing another pinecone in her hand and dangling her toothpick legs from a thick branch.

“What was that for?” I tore the earbuds from my ears.

She motioned to me with her head to climb up. I made no move. She waved me up.

“Nah.” I tried to gather phlegm, spitting sideways.

She arched an eyebrow, her way of asking what my problem was. Luna was nosy, but just with me. It sucked.

“Vaughn stole my bike,” I announced.

I’d have beaten the crap out of my so-called best friend, Vaughn, if I wasn’t so sure I’d kill him by accident. He’d said he wanted me to lose my shit. “Get it out of your system.” Whatever that meant. What’s a system? What did he know about mine? About anger? His life was perfect. His parents were healthy. He didn’t even have an annoying baby brother, like Lev.

Luna threw the second pinecone. This time I caught it, swung my arm like a baseball player, and threw it back at her, missing on purpose.

“I said no.”

She produced a third pinecone (She kept a stash in the treehouse in case intruders came upon us, which was honestly never.) and made a show of throwing it at me.

I finally snapped. “You’re so dumb!”

She blinked at me.

“Stop looking at me that way!”

Another blink.

“Goddarn it, Luna!”

I didn’t care what Vaughn said. I was never going to want to kiss this girl. God help me if she ever asked me to.

I climbed on the tire swing and up to our tiny treehouse. Vaughn thought he was too cool for treehouses. Good. It was one more thing that was Luna’s and mine that he wasn’t a part of.

Luna jumped from the branch. She rolled on the ground, straightening up like a ninja and patting herself clean with a satisfied smile. Then she started running toward our neighborhood. Fast.

“Where are you going?” I yelled as if she was going to answer.

I watched her back disappear into a dot. I was always sad to see her go.

This was all so stupid, anyway. I didn’t know anyone who could talk Vaughn into doing anything. Luna couldn’t even talk, period. Plus, I didn’t need her help. I’d walked away from him because if not, I knew he’d get what he wanted from me—a dirty fight. I wasn’t like him. Pissing off my parents wasn’t a lifetime goal.

Sometime later, Luna came back riding my bike. I stood up, shielding my eyes from the sinking sun. It always burned brighter when the ocean was about to swallow it.

She waved at me to come down.

I threw a pinecone at her shoulder in response. “Rexroth.”

What? her quirked eyebrow said. She could tell me a thousand things with her eyebrows alone, this girl. Sometimes I wanted to shave them off just to spite her.

“I always get even. Remember that, cool?”

Cool, her eye roll huffed.

“Now, come up.”

She motioned toward my bike, stomping her foot.

“Leave the stupid bike.”

We huddled inside the treehouse. Instead of thanking her, which I knew I should, I pulled out the pages I had printed earlier and arranged them on the wooden floor between us. Our foreheads stuck together with warm sweat as we both looked down. I was teaching her profanityin sign language—the stuff her father and therapist never would.

“Says here dick is a ‘d’ handshape tapping the nose,” I mimicked the picture on one of the pages, then flipped it on its back. “Oh, look. If you want to say fuck you, you can just give the person your middle finger and pout. Convenient.”

I didn’t look at her, but I felt her forehead resting against mine. Luna was a girl, but she was still really cool. Only downside was sometimes she asked too many questions with her eyes. Mom said it was because Luna cared about me. Not that I was going to admit it, but I cared about her, too.

She tapped my shoulder. I flicked another page.

“Waving an open hand on the side of the chin, forward and back, means slut. Dude, your dad will kill me if he ever finds out I taught you this.”

She tapped my shoulder harder, digging her fingernail into my skin.

I looked up, mid-read. “’Sup?”

“Are you okay?” she signed.

She didn’t use sign language often. Luna didn’t want to talk. Not in sign, and not at all. She could talk. Technically, I mean. Not that I’d ever heard her say anything. But that’s what our parents said—that it wasn’t about her voice. It was about the world.

I got it. I hated the world, too.

We just hated it differently.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“Friends don’t let friends get upset over small stuff,” she signed.

Whoa. An entire sentence. That was new.

I didn’t understand the point of speaking sign language if she was planning not to speak at all, but I didn’t want to make her feel bad and stuff.

“I don’t care about the bike.” I put the page down and scooted toward our branch, leaving. She followed, sitting beside me. I didn’t even like riding my bike. It was cruel on my nuts and boring to the rest of my body. I only rode it so I could hang out with Luna. Same reason I colored. I loathed coloring.

She cocked her head to the side. A question.

“Mom’s in the hospital again.” I picked out a pinecone and threw it at the sinking sun, over the edge of the mountain our tree was rooted upon. I wondered if the pinecone made it to the ocean, if it was wet and cold now. If it hated me.

Luna put her hand over mine, staring down at our palms. Our hands were the same size, hers brown, mine white as fresh-fallen snow.

“I’m fine.” I sniffed, choosing another pinecone. “It’s fine.”

“I hate that word. Fine,” Luna signed. “It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s nothing.”

She dropped her head down and took my hand, gave it a squeeze. Her touch was warm and sticky. Kind of gross. A few weeks ago, Vaughn told me he wanted to kiss Cara Hunting. I couldn’t even imagine touching a girl like that.

Luna put my hand on her heart.

I rolled my eyes, embarrassed. “I know. You’re here for me.”

She shook her head and squeezed my hand harder. The intensity of her gaze freaked me out. “Always. Whenever. Forever,” she signed.

I breathed in her words. I wanted to smash my stupid bike on Vaughn’s stupid face, then run away. Then die. I wanted to die in desolate sands, evaporate into dust, let the wind carry me nowhere and everywhere.

I wanted to die instead of Mom. I was pretty useless. But so many people were dependent on Ma.

Dad.

Lev.

Me.

Me.

Luna pointed at the sun in front of us.

“Sunset?” I sighed.

She frowned.

“Beach?”

She shook her head, rolling her eyes.

“The sun will rise again tomorrow,”she signed.

She leaned forward. For a moment, I thought she was going to jump. She took a safety pin from her checkered Vans and pierced the tip of her index finger. Wordlessly, she took my hand and pricked my finger, too. She joined them together, and I stared as the blood meshed.

Her lips broke into a smile. Her teeth were uneven. A little pointy. A lot imperfect.

With our blood, she wrote the words Ride or Die on the back of my hand, ignoring the state of my knuckles.

I thought about the bike she’d retrieved for me and smirked.

She drew me into a hug. I sank into her arms.

I didn’t want to kiss her.

I wanted to zip open my skin and tuck her into me.

Hide her from the world and keep her mine.

Knight, 12; Luna, 13

I was named after the moon.

Dad said I’d been a plump, perfect thing. A light born into darkness. A child my mother didn’t want and he hadn’t known what to do with. He’d said that despite—or maybe because of—that, I was the most beautiful and enticing creature he’d ever laid eyes on.

“My heart broke, not because I was sad, but because it swelled so much at the sight of you, I needed more space in it,” he once told me.

He said a lot of things to make me feel loved. He had good reasons, of course.

My mother left us before I turned two.

Over the years, she’d come knocking on the doors of my mind whenever I least expected her—barging through the gates with an army of memories and hidden photos I was never supposed to find. Her laugh—that laugh I could never unhear, no matter how hard I tried—rolled down my skin like tongues of fire.

What made everything worse was the fact that I knew she was alive. She was living somewhere under the same sky, breathing the same air. Perhaps in Brazil, her home country. It really didn’t matter, since wherever she was, she wasn’t with me. And the one time she’d come back for me, she’d really wanted money.

I was five when it happened—around the time Dad had met Edie, my stepmom. Val, my mom, had asked for joint custody and enough child support to fund a small country. When she’d realized I wasn’t going to make her rich, she’d bailed again.

At that point, I had made it a habit to tiptoe to the kitchen at night, where Dad and Edie had all their big talks. They never noticed me. I’d perfected the art of being invisible from the moment Val stopped seeing me.

“I don’t want her anywhere near my kid,” Dad had gritted out.

“Neither do I,” Edie had replied.

My heart had melted into warm goo.

“But if she comes back, we need to consider it.”

“What if she hurts her?”

“What if she mends her?”

Experience had taught me that time was good at two things: healing and killing. I waited for the healing part to come every single day. I sank my knees to the lacy pillows below my windowsill and cracked it open, praying the wind would swish away the memories of her.

I couldn’t hate Valenciana Vasquez, the woman who’d packed up her things in front of my crib while I’d cried, pleaded, screamed for her not to go, and left anyway.

I remembered the scene chillingly well. They say your earliest recollection can’t be before the age of two, but I have a photographic memory, a 155 IQ, and a brain that’s been put through enough tests to know that, for better or worse, I remember everything.

Everything bad.

Everything good.

And the in-between.

So the memory was still crisp in my head. The determination zinging in her tawny, slanted eyes. The cold sweat gathering under my pudgy arms. I’d racked my brain looking for the words, and when I finally found them, I screamed as loud as I possibly could.

“Mommy! Please! No!”

She’d paused at the door, her knuckles white from holding the doorframe tightly, not taking any chances in case something inspired her to turn around and hold me. I remembered how I didn’t dare blink, too scared she’d disappear if I closed my eyes.

Then, for a split second, her motherly instincts won, and she did swivel to face me.

Her face had twisted, her mouth parting, her tongue sweeping over her scarlet lipstick. She’d been about to say something, but in the end, she just shook her head and left. The radio had played a melancholic tune. Val had often listened to the radio to drown out the sound of my crying. My parents hadn’t lived together, but they shared custody. After Val had failed to answer Dad’s many phone calls, he’d found me some hours later in my cot, my diaper so soiled it outweighed my tiny body.

I hadn’t been crying. Not anymore.

Not when he’d picked me up.

Not when he’d taken me to the emergency room for a thorough checkup.

Not when he’d cooed and kissed and fawned over me.

Not when hot tears had silently run down his cheeks and he’d begged me to produce a sound.

Not at all.

Since that day, I’d become what they call a selective mute. Meaning I could speak, but I chose not to. Which, of course, was real stupid, since I didn’t want to be different. I simply was. My not speaking wasn’t a choice as much as it was a phobia. I’d been diagnosed with severe social anxiety and attended therapy twice a week since babyhood. Usually, selective mutism means a person can speak in certain situations where they feel comfortable. Not me.

The nameless tune on the radio that day had been burned into my brain like an angry scar. Now, it popped up on the radio, assaulting me again.

I was sitting in the car with Edie, my stepmom. Rain slapped the windows of her white Porsche Cayenne. The radio host announced that it was “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode. My mouth went dry at the irony—the same mouth that refused to utter words for no apparent reason other than the fact that when I’d spoken words aloud, they hadn’t been enough for my mother. I wasn’t enough.

As the music played, I wanted to crawl out of my skin and evaporate into thin air. Hurl myself out of the car. Run away from California. Leave Edie and Dad and Racer, my baby brother, behind—just take off and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. Somewhere people wouldn’t poke and pity me. Where I wouldn’t be the circus freak.

“Geez, it’s been a decade. Can’t she just, like, get over it?”

“Maybe it’s not about the mom. Have you seen the dad? Parading his young mistress…”

“She’s always been weird, the girl. Pretty, but weird.”

I wanted to bathe in my own loneliness, swim in the knowledge that my mother had looked me in the eye and decided I wasn’t enough. Drown in my sorrow. Be left alone.

As I reached to turn the radio off, Edie pouted. “But it’s my favorite song!”

Of course it was. Of course.

Slapping my window with my open palm, I let out a wrecked whimper. I shuddered violently at the unfamiliar sound of my own voice. Edie, behind the wheel, sliced her gaze to me, her mouth still curled with the faint smile that always hovered over her lips, like open arms offering a hug.

“Your dad grew up on Depeche Mode. It’s one of his favorite bands,” she explained, trying to distract me from whatever meltdown I was going through now.

I struck the passenger window harder, kicking my backpack at my feet. The song was digging into my body, slithering into my veins. I wanted out. I needed to get out of there. We rounded the corner toward our Mediterranean mansion, but it wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t unhear the song. Unsee Valenciana leaving. Unfeel that huge, hollow hole in my heart that my biological mother stretched with her fist every time her memory struck me.

Edie turned off the radio at the same time I threw the door open, stumbling out of the slowing vehicle. I skidded over a puddle, then sped toward the house.

The garage door rolled up while thunder sliced the sky, cracking it open, inviting more furious rain. I heard Edie’s cries through her open window, but they were swallowed by the rare SoCal storm. Rain soaked my socks, making my legs heavy, and my feet burned from running as I grabbed my bike from the garage, flung one leg over it, and launched toward the street. Edie parked, tripping out of the vehicle. She chased after me, calling my name.

I pedaled fast, cycling away from the cul-de-sac…zipping past the Followhill house…the Spencers’ mansion darkening my path ahead with its formidable size. The Coles’ house, my favorite, was sandwiched between my house and the Followhills’.

“Luna!” Knight Cole’s voice boomed behind my back.

I wasn’t even surprised.

Our bedroom windows faced each other, and we always kept the curtains open. When I wasn’t in my room, Knight usually looked for me. And vice versa.

It was more difficult to ignore Knight than my stepmother, and not because I didn’t love Edie. I did. I loved her with the ferocity only a non-biological child could feel—hungry, visceral love, only better, because it was dipped in gratitude and awe.

Knight wasn’t exactly like a brother, but he didn’t feel like less than family, either. He put Band-Aids on my scraped knees and shooed the bullies away when they taunted me, even if they were twice his size. He’d given me pep talks before I’d known what they were and that I needed them.

The only bad thing about Knight was it felt like he held a piece of my heart hostage. So I always wondered where he was. His wellbeing was tangled with mine. As I rolled down the hill on my bike, toward the black, wrought-iron gate enclosing our lush neighborhood, I wondered if he felt that invisible thread attaching us, too, if he chased me because I tugged at it. Because it hurt when one of us got too far away.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Knight screamed behind my back.

Edie had caught up with him. It sounded like they were arguing.

“I’ll calm her down.”

“But Knight…”

“I know what she needs.”

“You don’t, honey. You’re just a kid.”

“You’re just an adult. Now go!”

Knight wasn’t afraid to get confrontational with adults. Me, I followed rules. As long as I wasn’t expected to utter actual words, I did everything by the book—from being a straight-A student to helping strangers. I picked up trash on the street, even when it wasn’t mine, and donated a selection of my gifts every Christmas to those who really needed them.

But my motives weren’t pure. I always felt less-than, so I tried to be more. Daria Followhill, another neighbor my age, called me Saint Luna.

She wasn’t wrong. I played the role of a saint, because Val had made me feel like a sinner.

I pedaled faster. The rain slushed in sheets, turning to hail, pelting my skin with its icy fury. I squinted, passing through the gates of the neighborhood.

Everything happened fast: Yellow lights flashing in my face. Hot metal grazing my leg as the vehicle tried to swerve in the other direction. A deafening honk.

I felt something hurling me back by the collar of my tweed jacket with a force that almost choked me, and before I knew what was going on, I’d collapsed into a puddle on the side of the road.

Just then, the sound of my bike exploding rang in my ears. The assaulting car shattered it to pieces. The seat flew inches from my head, and the frame glided in the other direction. My face hit the concrete. Dust, wet dirt, and blood coated my mouth. I coughed, rolling around and fighting what felt like the weight of the entire world to find Knight straddling my waist with his legs. The car careened to the end of the road, taking a sharp U-turn and zinging back past the gates of the neighborhood. The hail was so bad I couldn’t even see the shape of the vehicle, let alone its license plate.

“Butthole!” Knight screamed at the car with ferocity that made my lungs burn on his behalf. “Rot in hell!”

I blinked, trying to decipher Knight’s expression. I’d never seen him like this before—a storm within a storm. Although Knight was a year younger, he looked older. Especially now. His forehead was wrinkled, his pink, pillowy lips parted, and his soot-black lashes were clustered like a heavy curtain, damp from the rain. A drop ran its way down his lower lip, disappearing inside the dimple in his chin, and that simple image sent fire tearing through my heart.

It was the first time I’d realized my best friend was…well, beautiful.

Stupid, I knew, especially considering the circumstances. He’d saved me from certain death, pounced on top of me so I wouldn’t get hit by a speeding car, and all I could think of was not Val, or Edie, or Depeche Mode, or how fragile life was, but the fact that the boy I’d grown up with was about to burst and bloom into a teenager. A handsome teenager. A handsome teenager who would have better things to do with his time than saving his awkward childhood friend or teaching her how to say douchebag in sign language.

I’d thought the memories of Valenciana nicked my heart, but that was nothing compared to the violent rip of it when I looked at Knight, realizing for the first time that he was going to break that piece of my heart he held hostage. Not maliciously, no, and definitely not intentionally. But it didn’t matter. Hit-and-run or struck by lightning—a death was a death.

A heartbreak was a heartbreak.

Pain was pain.

“What the fudge?” he screamed in my face.

He was so close I could smell his breath. Sugar and cocoa and boy. Boy. I still had a few years before it all started. Transfixed, I couldn’t even bring myself to wince at his anger. How had I never noticed the graceful angles of his nose? The color of his eyes—so vividly green with flecks of dark blue, a shade of viridian I’d never seen before? The regal slopes of his cheekbones, so sharp as they outlined his mischievous face like pop art inside a thousand-dollar gold frame?

“Answer me, goddammit.” He punched the concrete near my face.

His knuckles were as swollen as golf balls by now. He’d recently started cursing for real. Not a lot, just enough to make me cringe. I stared at him, steadfast, knowing he’d never hurt me. He wrapped a hand around his injured fist and let out a frustrated howl, then dropped his forehead to mine, panting hard. We were both out of breath, our chests rising and falling in the same rhythm.

“Why?” His voice was a soft growl now. He knew he wasn’t going to get an answer. Our hair matted together, his penny brown mane mixing with my dark curls. “Why’d you do this?”

I tried to wiggle my arms from out of the confines of his thighs so I could answer in sign language, but he pressed his legs against my body, locking me in place.

“No,” he growled, his voice thick with threat. “Use your words. You can. I know you can. Mom and Dad told me. Tell me why you did this.”

I opened my mouth, wanting so badly to answer his question. He was right, of course. I could speak. Physically, anyway. I knew because sometimes in the shower, or when otherwise completely alone, I would repeat words I loved, as practice. Just to prove I could, that I was capable of uttering them aloud, that I chose not to talk. I repeated the words, the sound of my voice sending small shudders of pleasure down my back.

Old books.

Fresh air (especially after the rain).

Watching the moon watching me back.

Seahorses.

Dad.

Edie.

Racer.

Knight.

Now, for the first time, Knight was demanding my words. I wanted to say them. More than that—I knew he deserved to hear them. But nothing came out. My mouth hung open, and the only thing flashing through my mind was, You don’t just seem to be stupid, you look it, too.

“Say it.” Knight shook my shoulders.

The hail faded into light rain, and my visibility cleared. His eyes were red-rimmed and tired. So tired. Tired because of me. Because I always got into stupid trouble he had to pull me out of.

He thought I’d tried to hurt myself. I hadn’t. I kept opening and closing my mouth like a fish, but the words wouldn’t come out. I tried to rip them from my mouth, my heart escalating, beating everywhere behind my ribs.

“Ahh…I….hmm…”

He stood up, pacing back and forth, threading his fingers in his thick, wet hair and tugging it in frustration.

“You’re so…” He shook his head, letting the drops fly everywhere. “So…”

I got up and ran toward him. I didn’t want to hear the rest of his sentence. I wasn’t keen on finding out what he thought of me. Because if he believed I’d driven straight into the car, hoping for a collision, he clearly thought I was way more screwed up than I was.

I grabbed his shoulder and twisted him around. He scowled.

I shook my head, frantic. “I didn’t see the car. I swear,” I signed.

“You could have died,” he screamed in my face, pounding his scarred knuckles over his heart. “You could have left me.”

“But I didn’t.” I used my hands, arms, fingers to reassure him.

My lips trembled. This was about so much more than us. This was about Rosie, his mother, too. Knight didn’t like people disappearing. Not even for a few days, to get better in the hospital.

“Thanks to you,” I signed. “You saved me.”

“Remember always, whenever, forever? What happened to that bullshit? Where’s your side of the bargain?”

He repeated my promise to him all those years ago, his voice dripping disdain. I opened my arms for a hug, and he stepped into it, melting into my body. We molded, like two distinct colors mixed together into something unique and true—a shade only we could paint with.

Knight buried his face in my hair, and I squeezed my eyes shut, imagining him doing it with someone else. Despite the chill, my blood ran hotter.

Mine.

I wasn’t only thinking it. My lips moved, shaping the word. I could almost hear the word. I tightened my hold on him.

“Ride or die,” he whispered into the shell of my ear.

I knew he meant his promise.

I also knew how unfair it was, because I didn’t know if I could save him if I had to.

If someone like Knight would ever need saving. Knight was a normal kid. He talked. He was athletic, outgoing, and oozed confidence. Edie had said he was so handsome, modeling scouts stopped Rosie at the mall and thrust their business cards in her hands, begging her to let them represent him. He was funny, charming, well-heeled, and rich beyond his wildest dreams. The world was his for the taking, and I knew one day he would.

I started crying in his arms. I wasn’t a crier. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d wept since Val left. But I couldn’t stop myself. I knew, then, that ours would not be a happily ever after.

He deserved more than a girl who couldn’t tell him how she felt.

He was perfect, and I was flawed.

“Promise me.” His lips touched my temple, his warm breath sending shivers down my body.

Shivers that felt different—like they filled my lower belly with lava. Promise him what? I wondered. I nodded yes anyway, eager to please him, though he hadn’t completed his sentence. My lips moved.

“I promise. I promise. I promise.”

Maybe that’s why he didn’t trust me.

Why he’d sneak into my bedroom that night—and every night, for the next six years—and wrap his arms around me, making sure I was really okay.

Sometimes he smelled of alcohol.

Sometimes of another girl. Fruity and sweet and different.

Oftentimes, he smelled of my heartbreak.

But he was always making sure I was safe.

And he always left before my dad knocked on my door to wake me up.

For the next six years, before jumping through my window, Knight would drop a kiss on my forehead in the exact same spot where shortly thereafter Dad would kiss me good morning, the heat of Knight’s lips still on my skin, making my face radiate.

I’d see him in school, his cocky swagger and whiplash-witty comebacks making girls drop their guard and panties. Tossing his shiny, thick mane as he showed off his pearly whites and endless dimples.

There were two Knight Coles.

One was mine.

The other everyone else’s.

And although he always spent recess with me, continuously protected me, forever treated me like a queen, I knew he was everyone’s king, and I only reigned in a small part of his life.

One night, when the moon was full and peering in at us through my window, my Knight kissed the sensitive skin beneath my ear.

“Moonshine,” he whispered. “You fill up the empty, dark space—like the moon owns the sky. It is quiet. It is bright. It doesn’t need to be a ball of flame to be noticed. It simply exists. It forever glows.”

He’d called me Moonshine every single day since.

I called him nothing, because I didn’t speak.

Maybe that’s how he knew, all those years later, that I’d lied—by omission. He wasn’t nothing. He was my everything.