| Chapter Twenty: Smoke |

//August

"My loneliness is killing me. And I-I must confess I still believe." Malia belted out, throwing items into a small suitcase. "When I'm not with you I lose my mind ..." As annoying as she found Ms. Spears' voice, the song struck a chord. "Hit me baby one more time!"

Counting the stack of bills again, she drew a long sigh. Brian hadn't left her with a way to contact him, so she was forced into finding her own way to New York. Not exactly her idea of fun. She'd drive, but no one in their right mind would be stuck with a car. Which made her wonder if she even was in her right mind.

The whole thing did seem fairly ridiculous. She hadn't seen him in six months. Lives changed in six months. An international smash and graduation. Nominations for the Video Music Awards and a 4.0 Grade Point Average. TRL publicity blitzes and the Billboard awards. And now she was just buying a plane ticket to some 'foreign' city because of a few hurried sentences.

Everything she had down was for the right reasons, but it just didn't work out the way she wanted it to be.

* * * * *

"Four days, Frick."

"Four days too many."

"FREE."

"No more tour!" they screamed together.

"What's the first thing you're going to do?" Nick asked as he shoved a pile of dirty laundry in with a tiny pile of clean clothes.

"Oh gee, that's a thinker," Brian responded sarcastically.

"'Oh Malia, I love you, will you marry me?'" Nick swooned, grabbing a pillow and dancing with it.

Brian laughed. "No way!"

Moving forward, using all my breath
Loving you was never second best...

//New York City

Brian ran, no 'ran' wasn't the word for his motion, it resembled a 'scamper' far more, so he scampered down a side alley in The City. The place demanded capitals. It was vast, huge, and crowded. Even someone with his limited factual knowledge knew that at any given second people were losing thousands - millions - of dollars on the stock exchange, burying loved ones, bringing new life into the world, and basically, people were being alive. And they all collected in one place.

As he glared at the "don't walk" sign he realized how much Malia would love New York. "I want to be someplace where I can be part of 'the whole' and be invisible at the same time," her voice whispered. A flush crept up Brian's neck. That was the night they'd told each other their secrets; confessed things that they'd confessed to no one else. He wished he could take back those words now. Or what he didn't say - he'd laughed at her. She had the strangest way of making him recall buried feelings all over again.

Saturday, I'm going nowhere
All the lights are changing green to red
Turning over TV stations
Situations running through my head
Well looking back through time
You know it's clear that I've been blind
I've been a fool..

* * * * *

“You came.”

“Of course I did.”

“A few months ago you hated me.”

“Living in the moment."

“Are you still?”

“No.”

“Then this is real."

“Yeah,” she smiled. “This is real.”

And Brian led a smiling Malia outside into the night, with no need to talk.

* * * *

Brian stared at the patterns the rain was forming on the glass and sighed. Florida’s stability had taken a hiatus and the sky had decided to unleash its fury on the ground. It was a typical rainy day thunderstorm; containing all the key ingredients: the bad guy - the menacing thunder; the angry droplets; the streak of lighting here and there. Oh yeah, it was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

After a blissful few days in undisturbed solitude at the hotel, where they’d literally lived on popcorn and crummy cable movies, Brian had flown back to his ‘house’ in Florida. Malia had agreed to come down later in the day, until classes started for her. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it would do. So far, they had avoided the serious and the melancholy, namely the past, focusing only on the future.

Come to think of it, that sounded a lot like what they had done the first time around.

* * * * *

Brian watched as Malia lay in the sand, her hair fanning out around her. One hand spiraled over her stomach, the other one lay flippantly above her head. One foot was pressed on top of the other, which was buried in the sand. Brian thought she looked just like a little kid. He told her that and she laughed.

“I'm just looking at the stars,” she replied. “Haven’t you ever done that?”

“Sure. Just not with my eyes shut.”

“Love you too,” she said half-heartedly as she tried to swat him with even less enthusiasm.

“I don’t care what you say, I'm cold. I'm going inside.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll be back in a minute.”

As soon as Brian was out of earshot, Malia rolled up her stomach to look at the scarred flesh. “Well,” she whispered to herself, “I think it’s time we had a little talk with Brian, don’t you think?”

* * * * *

Knowing full well it was cliché, Brian had indeed bought property on the coast of Florida. The whole area was quite pleasant, and by locating himself far away from mainland and most of the ‘big cities,’ he had managed to find a way around fans.

The whole house was completely “open.” All the rooms were connected, and decorated in the same color scheme, making it confusing to navigate. The downstairs room ‘made’ the house, with a wall of open windows that faced directly to the sea. In their lazy state, Brian and Malia had neglected to go upstairs, unpack, and actually “settle in” to the house. Couch cushions lay all over the floor as makeshift “mattresses” and their suitcases sprawled their contents nearby.

Click your heels, I feel her come for me
Carefree, she's got something big to tell me...

He heard the glass door slide back on its track and Malia appeared from the darkness. He opened his mouth to speak, but she raised her hand to stop him. "Brian, you know things aren't ... honestly okay. I'm going to talk, and I need you to listen. If you don't, that's your problem," she started, immediately on the defensive.

"Okay ... "

"Sit down. You need to."

"Right," Malia began again. "Okay. How to start this?" Brian was ready to tell her to just forget the whole thing, but she stopped him with a look. "I'll start at the beginning. After we were separated, I wasn't very happy. I know it sounds stupid, since I was the one who broke us up. I'm sure you thought I was out laughing and partying and having fun without you, right?"

Brian didn't say anything. He'd always envisioned her never changing, just laughing at his suffering.

"Okay. So ... I was really lonely. I made friends with someone I shouldn't have ever gotten involved with ... " She shuddered. "I made some dumb mistakes. In any event, I became the local 'party girl.' I'd never done anything even remotely close to wild in highschool. I got to college on a scholarship, so Saturday night, while everyone else was out partying, I was five chapters ahead in the chemistry test, doing the work. Suddenly, I was surrounded by 'cool' people and 'fun' things every night. I didn't have a clue."

Brian tapped his foot. He'd heard this all before - the good girl gone bad. He didn't see why her tale would be any different.

"So I started getting drunk a lot - big surprise. It must have been quite a show," she laughed bitterly. "In any event, I met a guy. He was an asshole and I was too blind to notice it. He took things too far, I got pissed, I dumped him. That was the only smart thing I did that year.

"I still wasn't in a great state of mind. It was Christmas, I was alone, and I wanted to be with someone." Her voice wound down to a whisper. "I was alone on Christmas Eve, and I using a knife to cut something ... and my arm was on the counter, lying upturned. All I could see was the creaminess, and the desire to rip it into bits. So I did.

"I started realizing that cutting myself on my arm would show. I didn't want anyone to know and I got scared when someone asked me about it. We were doing chemistry, like I said, and since we had to push our sleeves up for class ... you get the idea." Her voice grew strained, but increased in volume as she reached the climax.

"It was a Saturday, and it was snowing. I'd cut myself on the side of my rib cage, and it was bleeding too much. It was going to show, and I was getting annoyed at myself. So, when I reached to get something to fight the stain I found a lighter. I know it sounds crazy - everyone's afraid of fire. Well, I stopped being scared.

"And I made nice, neat, clean little burns all over." Bit by bit, she exposed what her shirt had been covering.

Brian recoiled into the couch, letting it envelope him. This was disgusting; this wasn't real. This was not his life, his girlfriend. Those were not her scars, and he certainly had nothing to do with her pain.

Why, bleeding is breathing
You're hiding, underneath the smoke in the room
Try, bleeding is believing
I used to...

She started speaking again, in that same warm tone. "After awhile, I figured out that is wasn't you-" Brian sighed-"but the past that I'd never learned to let go.

"I never was accepted in school. I was a freak, an outsider. The idea of Leighanne and I being best friends was more of a joke than anything else. I never told her or Megan anything. When I was in grade school, I learned that books made better friends than people. All my 'friends' and classmates would be running around, playing, laughing, and I'd be walking around, buried in some story. High school and middle school were the same way. Every day I'd come home and cry, wondering why people had to say such mean things to me. I'd stare myself down in the mirror, thinking that I wasn't even worth the title of 'human being.'"

She took a deep breath and continued. "So I had all these emotions, and nothing to do with them. That's why I started burning." Gliding towards the door, her face caught in the moonlight. "I know I'm asking a lot of you ... but can you understand, and still love me?"

"No."

Melt With You // Modern English
Babylon // David Gray
Ten Days Late // Third Eye Blind
Smoke // Natalie Imbruglia