Eve Week #3
The most difficult thing to deal with at first is the idea of permanence. She can’t stop shaking her head as though to clear her ear of water. Sometimes she finds herself absentmindedly snapping her fingers next to her ear like she used to to test it if it started buzzing. Usually after things are bad with her father, she focuses on the material features of recovery. The fading of the bruise after the day when she takes her makeup off, the decrease in pain when she delicately touches her ribs. A daily comparison, a log. How much less are you hurting today than yesterday. The concept of improvement, steady and reliable. She does not think: you are always going to wince when someone raises their voice. She does not think: you will always be formulating a plan for escape. She’s aware of all of that in the back of her mind, but that’s where she tries to keep the thoughts, carefully organized and stored to be considered at a later date, at a time when survival is the one and only imperative. The truth, and she knows it very well, is that she won’t be able to make it through each individual day if she thinks about the fact that her dad will still be fucking with her head in twenty years. It’s possible to ignore. The fact that she can’t hear out of one ear isn’t.
She’s frustrated by the seeming arbitrariness of it, that some sounds, some pitches, are harder to understand than others. That she can understand Gansey when she’s talking in the parking lot but not once they get inside Monmouth. That she always feels like she’s missing half of any conversation that involves more than three people. She’s frustrated, too, by the kindness of the others, and that makes her crazy. It makes her feel like Ronan, who bristles at any affection that isn’t given forcefully. She can’t sort it out. Before, she’d always assumed that she resented Gansey’s generosity because it made obvious their difference in class, like Gansey was showing off her money and the ease with which she could give it away. In her mind, she refusal always had to do with the fact that she didn’t need charity, that she worked plenty hard herself and that was enough. Her theory of the universe is falling apart, and it’s all because of her fucking ear. No. That’s not true. It’s also because working three jobs still isn’t enough and she’s struggled all her life to believe that it would be. It’s also because the permanent damage done by her father is becoming obvious in other ways, too, and it’s getting harder to ignore: the way she just leaves her body for hours at a time, the panic, the paranoia. But there is also the fact that she can’t hear out of one ear and the kindness of the others grates and grates at her, and it’s not about money. It’s about a failure of self-sufficiency for which she would blame no one, except herself. She hates too the elaborate prison of her head, the fact that every kindness has to be suspect because there could be strings attached, the cringe of shame that flares up in her uninvited every time someone does something for her. It’s exhausting not being able to have anyone be sweet to her without her insides doing gymnastics to figure out a way to make it into torture. Sometimes she thinks she wants to be someone other than herself, but then she stops being herself and she wants anything but that.
Lying in Leah’s bed at Monmouth, she knows she isn’t going to be able to sleep. The room, despite being tiny, feels enormous to her and she pulls the blankets over her head to create the illusion of an enclosed space. If she’s being honest with herself, she knows it’s not the space that’s throwing her off, though she’s never slept well in new beds. What’s keeping her up is the thought of Cabeswater and Whelk, of Gansey refusal to act, of her certainty that Eve would obey. She wants everything in her mind and heart to be clear and simple and straightforward, for her motives to be pure. But she knows that’s never going to happen, because even as she begins toying with the idea of sneaking out, of taking the Camaro (she could hotwire it, she knows she could) she’s aware that it wouldn’t be entirely for the protection of Cabeswater or to keep Whelk from her goal. It would also be to prove that she, Eve Parrish, could do what Gansey had told her not to do. She wants that more than she can say, and that’s a problem because despite her immense ability to ignore pain, to ignore exhaustion, to ignore frustration, she’s never been any good at ignoring desire, and so the desire to go out, to stop Whelk, to save Cabeswater and the ley line grows and grows in her like a fever until it becomes irresistible.
Her feet find the wooden floor and her toes curl against the cold. She has plenty of practice in being silent so it’s easy enough to shrug into her clothes, pull her door open soundlessly and creep past Gansey, asleep in bed, no moon to light her still form. As she hurries down the stairs, she tries not to think of Ronan doing just this on every night she’s ever gotten a call from Gansey begging her to come and help find their friend before it’s too late, before she’s past hope. She wonders if Ronan was past hope a long time ago. She wonders the same thing about herself. This isn’t the time to think about that, though. Right now, she has to focus on taking the Camaro (borrowing, she tells herself, not stealing) and getting far enough away fast enough that the others won’t be able to catch her before she’s done what she needs to do.