Breaking Butterflies Read online

  “There’s more,” he said softly, noticing me staring. “I’ve got bruises everywhere. Do you want to see, Sphinxie?” He got up and moved to stand close to me. Too close.

  “No,” I said shakily. “That’s, um … that’s okay.”

  He smiled down at me, then quickly stepped away, his eyes flashing brightly. He grabbed the painting shirt off the bed and pulled it on, buttoning it up. I swallowed, unable to erase the image of his pale body from my head. Did it terrify him when he looked in the mirror? If I could see the fact that I was dying written all over my body, I would be scared. So very scared.

  He was sitting on the bed now, leaning back slightly, with his arms out behind him, his fingers splayed out across his bedspread. It was white, everything on the bed was white, and everything in the room was either white or made out of dark, shiny wood. Except for the walls — he had painted on the walls in every hue imaginable, and he had painted everything he could think of. Animals, flowers, water, mountains, trees, cars, clouds, houses. Planets, stars, swirling galaxies. He must have started when he was little; some of the paintings were done more crudely, and were situated at a height much nearer to the floor than the rest. My eyes darted over the walls, searching for something. I didn’t realize what it was until I figured it out: There were no people. He had painted everything except for people.

  “I like your walls,” I said, trying to distract myself from thinking about his body. I looked up. Even the ceiling was covered with paintings: fish and sea creatures, mostly. “Why did you put fish on the ceiling?” I asked.

  “Why do you think?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “You tell me.”

  He sighed. “Lie down.”

  “Lie down?”

  “Yes!” He seized my shoulders and forced me down onto the bed, then lay down next to me. “There!” he said firmly, as though that explained everything. I stared up at the ceiling, unsure of what to say, and then suddenly I understood.

  “Oh, I get it!” I exclaimed. “You put fish on the ceiling so that when you lie in bed and look up, it’s like you’re underwater, watching them swim around above you.”

  “Exactly,” Cadence said. I stared at the ceiling for a moment in silence, realizing that he hadn’t admonished me for not knowing why the fish were on the ceiling. He’d simply shown me the answer. I turned to look at him, feeling a small smile making its way across my face, but that didn’t last long. Turning to face him made me realize that he was too close to me again. I shifted backward slightly, needing to put some distance between us.

  The top few buttons of his shirt were undone, and I found myself staring at the harsh line of his collarbone, jutting out from his body like a mountain ridge. After a moment, I tore my eyes away. One corner of his mouth quirked into an almost imperceptible smirk.

  “Sphinxie,” he said, breaking the silence with his softer voice. “When you first came, I told you my secret. I told you that my doctors said there’s something wrong with my mind.” He paused, looking thoughtful. “But I never told you what it was.”

  “Oh,” I said uncomfortably. The back of my neck was suddenly alive with chills, and I wished that I could rewind time and leave the room before he started talking about his secret again. I had shoved what had happened between us on the swings that day to the back of my mind, refusing to allow it to take over my thoughts. “What is it?” I managed to say when he didn’t continue. He was looking away from me, his head tilting back to gaze up at the ceiling fish.

  Then he turned back to face me, and his eyes were shining.

  “They think I’m a sociopath,” he said, in a voice so soft that I could feel it on the air.

  Sociopath? I stared at him. The word made me think of crime shows, serial killers, grainy photos of Ted Bundy, stringy men luring children into their basements. Instantly, my mind placed Cadence in a line next to the television killers and the rapists on the news, and he looked so out of place, with his smooth blond hair and striking eyes, and his voice the way it sounded right now — a gentle breeze against my skin. I shook my head.

  “They didn’t say that,” I said. Denying it was instinctive. I thought he was trying to scare me, to impress me in some twisted way.

  “They did,” he said calmly. “It’s my diagnosis. They told my mother. And she didn’t tell yours, Sphinx, because she was afraid you wouldn’t be allowed to come if your mother knew.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Had Leigh really kept what was wrong with Cadence secret from us, and had me walk unaware into her house? Was that true? I shook my head again, still firmly denying it, but inside, I already knew it had to be true. There had always been something wrong with Cadence. My father had known it when the butterfly died. We’d all known it when my cheek was split open. And here it was, named at last.

  “Are you scared, Sphinxie?” he was whispering, his eyes still fixed on me. “Are you scared of me?” He laughed, so softly, so lightly. “Remember what I told you. When doctors don’t understand something, they have to label it just to make themselves feel safe.”

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I was shrinking into myself next to him, thinking about the knife, thinking about all the times that I had wondered just why he’d done that to me. My fingers grazed the comforter on his bed and gripped it. Next to me, Cadence ran a hand back through his hair.

  “Sphinx,” he said, almost casually, as though there was nothing wrong. “Don’t just lie there. I’ve told you my secret now. It’s your turn. You have to tell me yours.”

  My head was spinning, and my mind gladly seized the distraction of having to think of a secret for him. I swallowed and tried to clear my thoughts. Then I quickly scanned through the collection of embarrassing moments and hidden crushes on boys in my head, trying to find something that sounded vaguely secretive but wasn’t too revealing. My mind rebelled against my intentions, giving me the exact opposite of not too revealing: I thought about the way my scar was a wall between my friends and me, about how Cadence was a secret of my own, about how my old best friend Kaitlyn had picked up his photograph and thought he was cute, about how she ended up being the first person I ever explained my scar to. After a few minutes of fervently pushing unwanted thoughts to the back of my brain, I settled on telling Cadence that I had never had a boyfriend. That wasn’t really a secret per se, but it sounded like one, in my opinion.

  “I’ve never had a boyfriend,” I said, in a tone of confession.

  Immediately, I regretted my choice of secret. I shouldn’t be talking about boyfriends with him, I shouldn’t. It was a risky subject; there was a possibility of the conversation veering off in a dangerous direction. And he’d just told me that there was something terribly wrong with him. I considered getting up and leaving the room. But how could I? I was supposed to be there for him.

  Cadence seemed entirely unmoved.

  “I knew that, Sphinx,” he said seriously.

  “How?” I asked him, thinking that he had probably overheard my mother talking to Leigh about the subject before she left for home.

  “Because of us,” he said, as though it made perfect sense.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were made for each other, Sphinx. It’s only natural that you’d be waiting for me.”

  I recoiled. “What?”

  “Waiting for me. Hoping you’d someday find a way to be good enough to fulfill the plan.”

  When I only stared at him, wide-eyed and silent, he added, “You know. Our mothers’ plan.” He raised his eyebrows briefly and then shrugged, shifting into a more comfortable position. “Our children,” he said, in a softer tone.

  “Our children?” I said, louder than I intended to.

  “Calm down. We were supposed to have children. You knew that, Sphinx.” He was quiet for a moment, then he rolled onto his side and faced me, resting his head on his hand. “Imagine that, hmm?” His lips parted and drew back into a smile. “They’d probably look just like their moth
er. They’d have hair like yours.”

  He reached out toward me and I jumped. “God, Sphinx,” he said, in a mild tone. “You’re so jumpy.” He extended his hand again and I stayed still, hearing my own heartbeat pound in my head as he tucked a loose strand of my hair back behind my ear.

  “There. That’s all,” he said lightly.

  That’s all? When he’d fixed my hair, he’d been so gentle that he might have been a breeze passing over my skin — I almost hadn’t even felt it. I swallowed and reminded myself that he could be dangerous. The fact that he was being so gentle didn’t mean anything — you didn’t feel anything when you watched the swirl of a hurricane push its way across a weather map on the television. Just because it felt like nothing didn’t mean that it was nothing. But I was questioning myself. Was this really somehow the reason that I’d never had a boyfriend? Did I have some kind of an air about me, was I taken on the inside without knowing it? Was I waiting for children with a terrible, shining father? And did he really think about those children, did he really picture them in my image? … No. That was idiotic. That was terrible. He was sick, he was all wrong, he’d said the doctors had diagnosed him. And this was exactly why I shouldn’t have brought up boyfriends.

  I took a deep breath and managed to roll my eyes dismissively, like I just thought he was ridiculous and I was over it. Now he was staring at me, looking at me like a cat watching a piece of string being dragged across the floor. And I found myself torn between the lingering echo of Cadence’s hand tucking my hair behind my ear and the instinctive feeling in my stomach that told me to be wary. Danger was all around.

  “Okay, then, what about you?” I asked, forcing the words out of my dry mouth. To have him staring without saying anything was too unnerving. “Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

  “Of course,” he said dismissively. “But none of them were right for me.”

  “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It sounded to me as though he’d always ended the relationships, after the girls undoubtedly failed to live up to his expectations. I was wondering what those girls had been like. I was wondering if he’d ever compared them to me before deciding to throw them away.

  “Well,” said Cadence after a few moments of silence, “this is getting a bit boring.”

  “What do you want to do, then?”

  He rolled over onto his stomach and hung one of his arms down over the side of the bed, reaching under it. He dragged a box out from under the bed and up onto it, sitting up as he did so. It was a chess set.

  “Let’s play chess,” he said, and took the board out of the box, unfolding it.

  “I’m terrible at chess,” I said. When I sat up to make room for the board, I realized that I was shaking slightly. I wrapped my arms around myself to try and stop it.

  “I don’t care,” he told me. “Chess is one of my favorite games. It always has been.” He stood the white queen and king up in their places on the checkered surface of the board. “Start setting up the pieces, will you? I’ll be white.” Obediently, I collected the black pieces and stood them all up in their proper locations. “White moves first,” he reminded me.

  “I know that,” I said as his elegant hand hovered over the board, making its decision. He moved one of his pawns forward. Then it was my turn, my little soldiers facing off against his. I moved a pawn, too. And so on it went, until he beat me in seven moves. The fact that we had started with essentially the same move didn’t seem to matter. He had thoroughly trounced me.

  “Good game,” I said politely. “You’re a really good player.” Chess, it seemed, was another one of those things he could do seemingly effortlessly.

  I reset my black pieces and took back the one bishop that he had captured, but then Cadence swept the pieces back into the box, put the lid on it, and lowered it down to the floor, shoving it back under the bed with a flick of his wrist. There, done. The game was over. For a moment, his eyes had lit up, the corners of his mouth curving in a self-satisfied grin. All of that was gone now, receded back into the smooth wall. He looked toward his desk, at a little digital clock placed in the center.

  “It’s almost time for dinner,” he said. “I’m going downstairs.”

  He swept out and left me in the white, white of his room, surrounded by the colors and the swatches of paint and the fish swimming in streaks above my head, and not a single person to be found. I slid off his bed, my neck prickling with chills again, my feet padding softly across his sterile white carpet. And then I closed the door behind me, sealing the crack, leaving behind the world where there were no others.

  That night, before I went to bed, I asked Leigh if I could use her computer. She was sitting on the sofa in the living room, but I didn’t approach her, choosing to voice my question from a safe distance. I didn’t know what to think of her anymore. There she was, putting down her magazine, smiling, saying yes, getting up from the sofa and fetching her laptop for me from another room. And there I was, my brow furrowing, wondering how she could keep what was wrong with Cadence a secret. Was it really true that she would keep something like that from me, from my mother?

  Leigh held the laptop out to me and I took it slowly. “Thanks,” I mumbled, avoiding looking directly at her.

  “No problem, Sphinxie,” she said, and then noticed the look on my face. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m okay.” I turned and walked toward the stairs, holding the laptop tightly against my chest.

  When I got to my room, I put the laptop down on the bed. I knew exactly what I was going to do with it, but I had a terrible sinking feeling that this was going to be similar to when I was little and had listened to my mother’s phone conversation. I was going to learn things that I did not want to learn. Instead of opening the laptop, I procrastinated by going through my suitcase, pulling out all of my clothes in a giant heap, and throwing them into the laundry hamper in Leigh’s room. I had run out of clothes by then, since I’d brought only enough for a week. The shirt I was wearing at the moment was wrinkled, the edges of the sleeves turning up in a funny way, the result of stuffing the shirt into the bottom of my suitcase at the beginning of my visit. I should have kept my clothes neater, I thought ruefully. I don’t want to look like a mess. I shut the hamper and changed into my pajamas, feeling a lump of apprehension and discomfort forming in my stomach.

  Then I finally sat down on my bed and turned on the laptop, because I couldn’t put it off forever. It was the first time I’d been on a computer since I’d been there. It hummed to life, loading up much faster than my old desktop at home. The home screen came into view and I saw that Leigh had a picture of Cadence at the piano as her wallpaper. Quickly, I opened an Internet window. Sociopath, I typed into the search engine, and clicked on the first result. The glow from the computer screen made my hand on the touch pad look alien as I scrolled down the page, feeling my breath catch in my throat.

  One in every twenty-five people is a sociopath, the first line of the website declared. Sociopaths are born, not made.

  So it wasn’t Leigh’s fault that he’d turned out the way he did. My mother had been right all those years ago on the phone; some things couldn’t be helped. It was a mere accident, a mistake of genes and chromosomes and sperm and egg, the one egg that had happened to be at the front of the line, at the right time. No one’s fault.

  Characteristics of a sociopath include pathological lying, superficial charm, a lack of remorse or guilt, a grandiose sense of self-worth, a complete lack of empathy, and behavioral problems from an early age.

  I shivered. This was everything that Cadence was, in one sentence. The doctors had said this was what was wrong with him. And after reading that sentence, I knew they had to be right.

  Many people who have had encounters with sociopaths will mention their piercing eyes. Sociopaths often stare because they are trying to discern and understand the emotions of people around them.

  I understo
od, at last, the significance of him crying after he had watched me closely, the day he crushed the butterfly. He had had to take the cue from me first.

  Sociopaths do not have true emotions; they only imitate them. They can never be truly happy. What little pleasure they can gain is derived from harming others around them. A sociopath can never truly experience love.

  After this, there were pictures, two scans of human brains, the active parts alight with red and orange, the resting parts soft with mingled blues and yellows. I exited the Internet window and closed the laptop, my hands trembling.

  What did it feel like, I wondered, to have no true emotions, to go about imitating them forever? I couldn’t imagine it. If I had faked everything, from the first day of my existence, slunk through life with a fake smile, fake tears. Never felt my heart leap with absolute joy, never felt it sink with grief — just felt it remain still and cold and unmoved by anything. Would I try to jar it, perhaps, by stirring the emotions of others? By arranging them like game pieces, making them laugh and then tearing them to shreds, hoping that when they cried, so would I? Would I even feel hope at all? It was impossible to imagine: I’m one of those people who gets laughed at because she cries too much at sappy movies. I couldn’t picture myself going through each step of my life in such a level of constant detachment.

  And to never experience love. Never look up one day and see my perfect match looking back at me, feel the warmth fly between us and rise in my head, dizzy and bright? Instead, I would stand there, my eyes piercing, staring, staring into the depths of everyone’s souls, not knowing why they smiled and clung to one another. Who doesn’t want to find their soul mate? Who would want a fairy-tale wedding if they weren’t going to feel it in their chests? It made goose bumps break out over my skin to think about it.