Page 10 of Heartless Heathens

Well,theywerebrothers, and they would never hear it come out of my mouth, but they were the only people on this damned Earth I loved.

So yeah, I called them my brothers too.

They were all I had.

I’d never gotten close to anyone else, and I never had the desire to. Understanding others wasn’t something I was good at, it wasn’t something Iwantedto be good at. People weren’t for me. They were entirely too manipulable and held zero accountability.

Half the time I was just thinking about what they would look like if I took a cheese grater to their face. It soothed that kind of deep itch I just couldn’t scratch myself.

But I kept that shit to myself.

It’dbeenawholeweek since I’d last seen Father Frollo.

I perched over the balcony in the belltower and heard the conversation with the boys who were now taking residence right below me. Without a moment’s notice they claimed my home as their own, and I knew Father Frollo would say it was imperative for me to stay hidden. It was an exhilarating, petrifying, heart quickening thought to know that there might be an adventure waiting just below me.

He hadn’t returned, but I knew he would want me to wait for him, to keep myself hidden from these men. The majority of the week was unbearably loud. I couldn’t get any reading done with all the noises, and without being able to ring the bells, my melancholy grew each day. They tore apart the chapel, completely gutting it and making it into something unrecognizable.

It was dark and gloomy, nothing like the piece of history it once was.

And I ran out of food two days ago.

I’d snuck down through the balcony both days. I’d long memorized which bricks were missing from the outside walls so that I could use them as holds to scale up and down the chapel on my own. So far, I’d only taken ice cream and the grumbling in my stomach was warning me that it was time to eat something with real sustenance.

I rolled from my back to my side, reaching out desperately for my stony friend Laverne, who mocked me from her perch before the resident crow found his way into her mouth.

“Help me,” I whispered to her, my voice hoarse and dry from not having a drink of water in nearly a day. She returned a gray look that said I shouldn’t have shoved breadcrumbs in her mouth for the birds.

She wouldn’t have helped me regardless. It wasn’t her style.

It’d been a week now since I rang my bells.

Not that there was even a soul who cared.

I doubt anybody noticed.

“Did you eat my ice cream?” I heard one of the voices I was beginning to familiarize myself with, shouting from below the floorboards of the attic.

“When’s the last time you’ve seen me eat ice cream?” The colder of the three voices answered, wrapping my chest with an icy hold.

They yelled a bit more until I felt like I was going to faint from hunger, bickering back and forth until they eventually left the chapel together. I waited my usual five or six minutes before grabbing my cloth tote bag and hanging it across my chest before scaling down the wall. The mossy ridges of each brick were smooth and familiar to me now.

I slid through the window that led inside a room with a bed, the strong scent of something woodsy but spicy invading my nostrils. I looked around, it looked so cozy in here now, there was a lavish bed with plush pillows and the softest looking black blanket I’d ever seen in my entire life.

Much better than the rags I’d been sleeping with for the last ten or so years. I’d really only gotten it when my previous blanket had grown too small and I’d complained to Father Frollo that my feet hurt from the cold during the winter nights. He said the pain was supposed to bring me closer to God but a few years ago the heat stopped working all-together and he brought me a bigger blanket the next week. Bigger but not soft.

I dropped to the bed, nuzzling on top of the sheets and getting that warm, cozy smell all over me so I could enjoy it later when I was forced to retreat upstairs into my hiding place. It was as soft as it looked, and now I was afraid I’d never get up again. But if reading taught me anything, it was that Goldilocks always got caught, and I wasn’t going to be sticking around long enough to find out just what these heathens would do to me if they caught me in their things.

I’d overheard their threats to Frollo, warning him to stay away from the chapel and that it now belonged to him along with anything in it.

Well, I was in it.

So what did that mean for me?

I made my way to the kitchen, opening the cabinets and grabbing whatever I could recognize as easy to eat food, shoving it into my tattered tote bag. I opened the fridge, practically tearing up at the sight of the bottles of water. I filled my bag until it was too heavy, before turning toward the sink.

That was later water.

I needednowwater.