The Elven Awkward Phase | An Apartments of the Damned Story

Rebellion's easy when someone's watching. Harder when the audience goes home.

Painting by Ira Robinson

Helping a young elf get through a bit of growing pains—especially if that elf is a punk with more weight on her shoulders than spikes—can give you a lot to chew on, and it’s been with me for a week now.

I almost walked past the fire escape on the second floor, but the light was wrong.

Too silver. Too still.

When I leaned out, Chloe was sitting on the grating in bare feet, holding one of her jacket studs like she was trying to decide whether to put it back or throw it into the alley.

She knew I was there. She told me once, with those long Elven ears of hers she could hear a footstep 2 floors away, even with The White Stripes pushing through her speakers.

Her ear twitched a little, but she said nothing, staring at the silver stud pinched between her fingers, rolling it slowly, over and over.

I’ve seen Chloe hurting before, though she did her best to put on a “fighting front.” You get to know things better, though, if you spend even a little time with her. She’s not a bad kid... just going through a lot.

Kid. It’s such a strange way to put things for a being who is over 130 years old and has seen more than I ever have, but that’s just the awkward teens for her people.

It took me only a minute of watching her through the opened window to know she was maybe not in trouble, but maybe also didn’t really want to be alone.

So, I climbed through the window, the fire escape giving its best groan under my feet as I stepped closer to her.

She didn’t look my way, but scooted over a little. I took that as an invitation.

It was still a while before either of us spoke. I didn’t want to broach anything, because I didn’t know what things were about, and she seemed to still want to hold whatever was in her mind at arms-length for a bit longer.

When she finally opened her mouth, the words fell out like they were from a distance. You know? Almost-bored, in the way you finally spit out the cud you’ve been chewing on for weeks because you’re just so tired of chewing it.

“How do you know if you left because you wanted to, or because you just didn’t know how to stay?”

Oh.

That.

So, I think I wrote to you before, back when Chloe first came to The Wickery, about how she was doing the whole elf version of the Amish Rampashpring-a-something-or-other, right? The Amish send their teens out into the rest of the world to give them a chance to confirm that they really do want to remain Amish.

I guess the elves have something similar, but for them, it’s to go out and “be a human” for a little while so they can get a feel for how we are supposed to be “handled.” Makes sense, I guess, if you’re a species who is long-lived but short-on-population, sharing a world with another species who has more people than sense and tends to have less regard for others-not-them than a piece of gum.

The thing is, she’d been on her own particular one for, I think, longer than they usually allow, and that, maybe, was starting to weigh.

I let my hand rest on the metal bar in front of me, the peeling black paint cool to my touch. “You want me to answer that? Or did you just need to say it out loud?”

I caught the slight curl of her smile before she took a deep breath. “Yeah. Maybe a little of both.”

She spent the next few minutes telling me it wasn’t that she was homesick or something along those lines. It was in that kind of way someone is just a little too much; you know? Defensive about it. But I didn’t push her on it.

When she finally got past that, though, she said it’s more that the rebellion had lost its audience, and what was the point of being a rebel without someone to watch you do it? What’s the need for a costume when the rest of the party has stopped caring you’re wearing one and has moved on to the next piece of cake?

The jacket. The buttons. The boots she had kicked off and set aside when she came out to sit. Were those her? Or were those just the “her” she thought others needed to see?

She came here to be something she never had been before, and, at first, back home, that felt like it was exactly what she needed most.

Now?

Now, to her, it only felt like another day.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Chloe speak so many words in one sitting in the entire year I’ve known her, and I wasn’t really sure how to answer.

In ways, it made me think of my own time at The Wickery.

I couldn’t really tell you then, or even now, whether I really chose to be here. Was it a door that opened and I stepped through? Or had the door been waiting all along, and I never really had any other option?

You remember what things were like when we were kids. Neither of us had a choice about getting stuck in Meadowbrook Academy. My mother getting...

Well.

My mother passing away was not a choice.

But The Wickery? I’ve always told myself this place was my choosing.

But...

Sitting on a fire escape at three in the morning with a 130-year-old punk elf whose existential crisis left her wondering if she was running away from something or towards another, I realized I was not as sure of my own options as I used to be.

So I just said, “I’m not sure the two things are as different as we want them to be. Maybe you left because you were never told you could do otherwise,”

We both went silent then, and kept that way for a little while, two beings from drastically different worlds sharing a cold metal grating two stories up in a city neither of us had been raised in.

When she eventually broke her silence again, it was with a tip of her head to the side.

“You know, it’s strange... but sometimes, when I’m sitting here, I can smell lavender.”

She took a deep breath.

“Did I ever tell you there was a big patch of lavender just down the road from my house growing up? I’d smell it in the night. Kinda cool.”

Chloe was still sitting there when I went back inside and headed down to the basement. The stud was still in her fingers, but maybe since then she’s put it back on the jacket.

I don’t know. But she didn’t answer her question that night, and neither did I, and even now, a week later, I still haven’t faced my own version of it.

How do you know if you stayed because you wanted to, or because you just didn’t know how to leave?

That kind of question is a little less like a weight, and a little more like just... something you carry.

I think there’s a difference.

Probably.

Write again soon,
Gary

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