Chapter Five: A Jog A Day Keeps The Thoughts At Bay
Sophia Crawford

It was Sunday today, making it almost an entire week since River had the panic attack in the boys’ bathroom, and even after a week has passed, I still couldn’t get the image of his bleeding knuckles and the bloodied shards of mirror lying in the sink out of my head.

It was a grotesque image, but nothing could beat River’s face when he turned to look at me when I caught him hitting that mirror numerous times.

He looked completely vulnerable and weak with the tears streaming down his face and when he gasped for air as he was struggling to breathe made my entire stomach drop to the ground.

It was a feeling I knew so well.

When the nurse came into my hospital room and told me that Daniel didn’t make it, I felt the exact same way River felt when he was gasping for air. When the nurse told me that Daniel died, it felt as if my breath was knocked from my lungs.

I couldn’t inhale another breath because it physically pained me.

It’s then when I realised that something might have happened to River.

Panic attacks are usually triggered, so something must have triggered River after the support group session.

But the question is what?

What triggered River to have that panic attack?

I guess I will never really know.  

River has been avoiding me ever since the bathroom episode, and to be honest, I was busy avoiding him too. It was hard to avoid him in Biology when he occupied the seat right next to mine, though, but he only spoke when he was spoken to, making it easy for me to avoid him, and vice versa.

I didn’t tell anyone about the episode—and by everyone, I mean Ana and Cole—because it wasn’t my place to tell them and I know for sure that if I were in River’s shoes, I wouldn’t want him to tell anyone about it, either.

It’s a very vulnerable state to be in and definitely not something people should joke or gossip about, and it wasn’t something to share over a cup of coffee, either, so I kept what I saw to myself even it was difficult to keep what I witnessed to myself when Oliver was literally a phone call away.

River needs serious help. Oliver’s help.

He needed help in that bathroom when he used a mirror as a punching bag, multiple times, but I don’t think River is the kind of guy who would admit that he needs help. River seems like the kind of guy who would rather suffer in silence than bother someone with his problems.

I wanted to do something. I wanted to go to someone. His aunt, maybe, or even Oliver during my free period, but the icy stares I have been receiving from River the past week was enough for me to keep my mouth shut, so I ignored him as much as I possibly could and kept my distance from him.

A shiver descends down my spine just thinking about all the blood River lost when he punched that mirror in the bathroom more than once. It also makes me wonder if River pictured someone inside that mirror, someone he wanted to punch badly, but I don’t think I would ever know why he did it.

River is secluded and is very irascible for a reason: as a defence mechanism so that people won’t try to talk to him, or interfere in his personal life, but it still made me curious to know what happened to him to become like this.

Like Ana said the other day, no one knows what truly happened to him, and that there’s only rumours going around school. I would lie if I said that I didn’t want to know what those rumours were. I was curious, after all.

“Is everything okay, sweetie?” My grandmother asks, snapping me out of my train of thoughts.

Her eyes were full of concern when I looked at her standing in the archway of the kitchen. I would have been concerned too if I was stirring coffee with a spoon for over ten minutes, doing nothing else but that.

I nod at her. “I’m fine.” I say, “I just have a lot on my mind, I guess.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie because I did have a lot on my mind.

I was thinking about how broken River looked when he turned to look at me when I caught him punching the mirror. I also saw how hard he was trying to control himself, like how I always try to control my breathing. I chant the words ‘in and out’ in my mind, but River was all over the place.

He punched a mirror and when he realised that he was cutting his knuckles in the process, it made him forget what hurt him inside for a brief second. So he punched it again, and again, until the entire sink was a bloody mess.

There were a lot of times when I wanted to punch something too, like a mirror or a brick wall, but I realised that punching my hand against a hard surface until it breaks won’t bring Daniel back and that I would have a bloody and broken hand for nothing, so I chant ‘in and out’ inside my mind until my life is a little more bearable to live instead. It works, sometimes.

“Are you sure, Sophia?” My grandmother asks me.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, hugging the cup of coffee between my hands. It has long turned cold and I haven’t even taken three sips of it yet. Thinking about River and the bathroom made me lose my caffeine addiction for today.

“Yes,” I smile reassuringly at her.

 “Okay then.” She walks over to the warm water I boiled a half an ago and turned the stove on to heat it up again. She then turns around and looks at me. “It has been a week and I haven’t heard anything new yet. Have you met any new friends? Is everyone treating you well?”

For the first time in a very long time, I tell her the truth.

I tell her that I did meet two new friends, Ana and Cole, who are the loveliest two people on earth. I also told her that no, not everyone has been treating me well because I still spot people gossiping about me and talking about me behind my back, but I ignored them the entire week and acted like their gossiping and their laughs hasn’t affected me at all. In a way, it didn’t affect me because I had Ana to fend them off for me, and while they reminded me that I had an ugly scar across my cheek, Ana kept reminding me how beautiful I was and that I shouldn’t listen to those ‘fake ass bitches’.

I leave out the part where I ran into River on the first day of school and how badly he has been treating me since. I also leave out the part about him getting a panic attack on the first day, and I was the one to comfort him.

Like I said before, nobody needs to know what happened in that bathroom.

I also don’t want her to worry about me if I tell her that not everybody has been treating me very well, especially River.

I just ignore him and only talk to him when I need to, like in Biology when we have to discuss experiments or worksheets, but he never paid me much, if any, attention. He’s always writing in his notebook and to this day, I still couldn’t catch a glimpse of what he was writing and drawing in there because he places his elbow on the desk and rests his chin on his hand, covering the notebook and whatever he writes in there from my eyesight.

I guess when he noticed me trying to figure out what he has been writing and drawing in there made him feel like he was being watched, so he hid whatever he was writing and drawing in the notebook from me ever since.

“Tell me more about Ana and Cole, too.” My grandmother says.

I smile, widely.

There were so many things I have learned from both of them in just one week, like how Ana is originally from Venice (she did have an accent, not quite a thick one, but it was evident). Ana’s mom is Italian and met her husband, Ana’s father, when he was in Venice for a business trip that year.

The two of them were in love ever since they laid eyes on each other and then they had Ana in Venice and decided to move to America with her.

Cole’s story, on the other hand, was a little more complicated, and quite sad. He lives with his dad. His mother left the two of them when he was really young and he rarely speaks about her, if ever. He says that there isn’t really anything to tell because he doesn’t know her like his father did and that she’s basically just a random person and he wouldn’t even know if he would pass her in the streets. He can’t remember how she looks like and he never bothered to ask his dad about her because that would just upset him.

Cole was in another school a few miles from here when he met Ana at a party. He fell in love with her, literally love at first sight, and loved her too much to do long-distance, so a lot of convincing later, his father agreed for them to move closer to our present school so that they could be together.

Cole told me that his father agreed to move because he wanted to see his son get his happy ending with the girl he loves more than anything in the entire world, a happy ending his father never got to have because his wife, Cole’s mother, left them when Cole was very young.

The story absolutely shattered my heart into a million pieces, but it was so cute of his father to do something like that for his son.

“They sound lovely.” My grandmother says.

“Yes, they are lovely people.” I agree with her, nodding.

The water on the stove was boiling and my grandmother took off the kettle and got the things ready for the cup of coffee. Three sugars, two coffees, a lot of water, and a splash of milk. Steaming hot; just how she loved it.

She offers if I want another cup when she eyed the cold cup of coffee in my hands, but I declined her offer with a gentle shake of my head.

I wasn’t in the mood to drink another cup, not after I have spent almost a half hour drinking the same cold coffee and stirring it. I left only a little bit of coffee in the cup, only because I couldn’t stomach drinking cold coffee.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

There’s nothing worse than drinking cold coffee.

“I’m glad you met new friends,” my grandmother’s smile grows even wider, “I knew you were going to adjust to the new environment just fine, and that you were going to meet new people. I told you it wasn’t going to be so bad.”

I smile at her and silence fills the kitchen. Comfortable silence.

“So,” she breaks the silence and I look at her, “are you going to go back to the support group on Monday?”

I inhale deeply before I reply to her question. “It wasn’t so bad last week.” I admit. I loved Oliver for being so understanding and that he didn’t force me to talk. The only part that was unbearable was River drilling a hole in my forehead with his deadly gaze, but other than that, it wasn’t entirely bad, and I could relate to many of the students there. “So I guess I’ll go back on Monday, yes.” It’s to make you proud, grandma. “I’ll definitely go, Grandma.”

She looks at me with a gleam inside her eye. “Did you meet a special someone? Because last week you were dead-set on not going, and now you’re suddenly in a mood to go? What happened while you were there?”

I frown at her. “Grandma… It’s support group. Not a place to meet a boyfriend.” I take a sip of my cold coffee just to avoid the conversation before it decides to take a turn for the worst, but she continues.

“I was just asking whether or not you met a boy when you were there.” She defends, taking a sip of her coffee. “I wasn’t planning a wedding, gosh.”

She realised what she has said and her smile immediately disappears.

A string of apologies came next.

“Sophia… I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to mention, the— I didn’t think.”

I take another sip of my coffee to hide the fact that I was trying harder to breathe than a moment ago before she mentioned the word wedding, but she caught it on. She always did when my mood suddenly changed like this.

I get up from the chair and throw the remainder cold coffee out into the sink. I rinse the cup and turn to face her. “It’s okay, Grandma.” I force a smile her way, not wanting to make her worry more than she already did. “You didn’t upset me.”

“I’m really sorry, Sophia.” She says again.

She knows what happened that night, that Daniel asked me to marry him someday and that we were planning on running away, and that’s why she quickly apologized after the word left her mouth. She knows it’s triggering.

But then again, I couldn’t be upset with her for it because she’s the only person I have ever laid myself bare too and she never judged me. She didn’t judge me when I told her that I looked away from the road to kiss him. She didn’t judge me when I told her that I was the one who caused his death.

So it would be unfair toward me if I were to be nasty to her.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, honestly. “I just need to get some air, if that’s okay?”

She nods. “Alright. Just be home before dark.”

I grab my earphones from the bowl on the small table next to the front door where my grandmother’s set of car keys always were and leave the house.

I look up at the sky, seeing little to no clouds in the sky and that it was safe to go jogging today. I don’t want to return home soaking wet from rain.

I place my earphones in my ears, place my phone in my back pocket and start to jog with calming music playing inside my ears.

The wind washes through my hair as my feet glide over the sidewalk .The sun warmed me right up despite it being a little colder today and with the music in my ears, the jog was much needed to rid my mind from the thoughts that always threatened to make me feel bad about what happened.

Jogging brought me a sense of relief. The same relief I desperately needed when I was hauled up in my room, crying my eyes out about what happened to Daniel, but I didn’t want to leave the house. I didn’t want to jog anymore because it felt like nothing made sense anymore at the time.

I remember wanting to jog, but I was physically and mentally drained.

Ten minutes into my jog, I stop to catch my breath.

When I glanced around me, I noticed that I was very far away from my neighbourhood. Everything seemed quieter here somehow and not because I was drowning out the world by listening to music, but because the place looked so unbothered and untouched here. There were no cars in sight and there were no people walking around or jogging on the sidewalk like I did.

I take out an earphone from my ear and train my ears to listen to my surroundings.

Faint clapping and cheering comes from an abandoned barn or warehouse of whatever the place was just behind the grove of trees to my left side.

Curiosity gets the better of me and the next thing I know, my feet has a mind of its own and drags me into the grove of trees, towards the abandoned barn where the clapping and cheering was coming from.

It smelled like a barn—I caught a whiff of hay, wood and straw in the air, and when I rounded the corner, it was, in fact, a barn.

There were tall double doors to my front and wooden walls, and the smell of hay was stronger here than it was at the back. The only difference was that there weren’t any animals in pens or pitchforks, or even tractors.

There were people inside. Loads of people.

And music. Faint music.

I enter the barn slowly, hesitantly, and notice that there were more than a hundred people, if not more, in the barn cheering and clapping their hands. Most of the people were crowded around something I couldn’t quite see.

“Are you here to fight or to watch, girlie?” A loud male voice asks from the left entrance of the barn right when I entered.

I nearly jump out of my skin at his loud voice, but manage to shake my head at his question. “I’m just here to watch.” I reply to him, and then mutter, “I guess.”

Thinking he’s going to expect payment for whatever I came here to watch, he just nods and beckons for me to go on ahead with the jerk of his chin.

The further I walk into the barn and squish through the bodies of people, I spot an empty seat on a medium-sized bleacher at the back of the barn and make my way towards it.

I was too short to peek over anyone’s shoulders here, so standing on the bleachers was the only option if I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

I had to squeeze through the crowd of people just to get to the empty seat on the bleachers, but when I finally managed to get there in one piece, I prop my phone into my jean’s pocket—out of the hands of criminals—and look toward the middle, to where the people were cheering and clapping.

There were people fighting in a make-shift ring in the middle of the barn.

The fighting ring was made out of four metal beams with a rope tied around every beam to make the rope fit around them without falling to the ground whenever someone would climb into it, and there was a tarp of some sorts lying in the middle of the ring, covered with droplets of dry and wet blood.

I wince when blood spurts from the guy’s mouth when his opponent throws a hard punch straight to his jaw, but instead of stumbling backwards, the guy punches his opponent in the gut, sending him flying to the rock-hard ground, grabbing his stomach while he groans in pain as he went down.

The scene in front of me was horrifying, but something made me want to keep watching—and weird enough—I stayed where I was.

The crowd goes wild when the guy on the floor never gets up to fight again, not even after the ringmaster counted down from one to ten.

He didn’t get up at all. He had to be hauled out of the ring by two huge looking men with scary tattoos on their arms and necks.

“Next up we have River Jenkins and Kane!”

I feel my heart dropping inside my chest when I spot River—the guy who had a panic attack just last week—climbing into the makeshift ring with tape wrapped around his hands. He must’ve busted up his knuckles trying to wrap his hands because the tape was red with blood.

He didn’t seem to mind it, though.

He flashes a white-teethed smile to the crowd to get them hyped up while I tried so hard to make myself small where I was standing. One turn of his head and he can easily spot me through the crowd seeing that I was the only student here.

Kane, his opponent, climbs into the ring after the ringmaster announced his name, but the crowd didn’t go as wild when his name was called. They were more hyped up when River’s name was called.

“Now, let the fight begin!” The ringmaster yells loudly.

The crowd goes wild yet again when a bell chimes, indicating that the fight was about to start.

River charges at Kane first, throwing a punch to Kane’s face when he neared him in the ring. Kane shrugs it off and throws a punch River’s way, but River dodges it in one swift movement, smirking at his opponent when he missed. Kane throws a punch at River’s face again, but River steps out of the way before Kane makes contact with his face and returns the punch to Kane’s face when Kane straightened himself.

“Jenkins is on fire today.” Someone in front of me says, and the guy standing next to him nodded his head.

“He’s always putting up a good show.”

They focus on the fight again but I lean closer to the guy next to me and tap his shoulder. He turns to look at me, frowns when he sees that I was a girl but he chooses to keep it to himself.  “Yes?” He asks.

“How long has this been going on?”

“What are you referring to?” The guy asks me. “The fight overall or…”

“I meant Jenkins… When did he start fighting here?”

The guy shrugs, shaking his head at me. “I don’t know. All I know is that he’s the champion, so he must’ve been fighting here for a while now.”

I nod at him. “Thank you.”

He turns to the fight again and I hiss when River was punched in the stomach.

Instead of groaning like the fighter before him, he laughs it off and charges at Kane. River roundhouse kicks Kane in the face, and hard, sending Kane flying to the floor completely passed out from the blow.

River didn’t look like the guy who seemed so weak in that bathroom last week. Here he was someone else. He had a façade, a mask to cover up what he was truly feeling. Like I said before, he tried to hurt himself physically to forget about the internal pain he was feeling.

The ringmaster announces that River was the winner yet again and everyone in the crowd goes wild—hands start to clap and people cheer him on in the barn.

That’s when I step down the set of bleachers to leave the barn before River notices me and accuses me of following him.

When I reach the exit, the same guy who asked me if I was a watcher or a fighter sees me approaching.

This time he had a cigarette between his lips, the smoke leaving his mouth in small clouds and evaporating into thin air again.

“Leaving so soon?” He asks me with a smirk.

“Yes.” I tell him.

“Come back soon.”

I place my earphones in my ears again, drowning out the world, but as I started to jog, I came to realise that River likes pain. Punching the mirror last week wasn’t the first time he has ever harmed himself trying to forget whatever it was he wanted to forget. He needed the pain to forget.

He finds peace in having a bruised face and busted knuckles.

He doesn’t fight his demons mentally, he fights them physically.

The only problem with that, though, is that they were the wrong demons.