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Entry — In transit, six hours out
I keep starting sentences about this and stopping them. That's not new. The difference is that this time, at the end of the journey, there will be people who remember me and I'll have to be a person they remember.
I'm going to write them down. All of them. That's what this journal is for.
Orvell
The oven mitts. Even in my head, after all this time, I see the oven mitts first.
I feel something complicated about Orvell that I've never fully sorted out. We were both kept back, but for opposite reasons — him because he was too precious, me because I was too unpredictable. I always thought there was something quietly awful about that for him. Being told you're too valuable to risk. Being the thing on the shelf that everyone is very careful not to knock over. I don't think he saw it that way. I think he wanted what the rest of us had, which was the chance to do something.
I wonder if he ever got there. I wonder if the desperate part of him has softened or sharpened in seven years. I never asked. That's on me.
Luca
I watched the unmasking on a television in a pub in Leeds. Didn't know it was about to happen. Nobody did, that was rather the point.
Luca was made to spy on us. He had notes on me. Years of them. Everything I did that I thought was private — the sessions I didn't perform well in, the arguments, the nights I sat in the corridor because I didn't want to be in my room — Luca was somewhere, writing it down.
I don't blame him. He didn't choose the job. But knowing that doesn't fully resolve the feeling, which is something like being watched in a room you thought was empty.
The rock band. The mob. The boy Reginald kept masked so the world couldn't see his face, and now here he is, a front man. I think that's either the funniest thing or the saddest, and I can't decide which.
Crystal Nova
She left at sixteen. I left at seventeen. The year between those two facts has always felt significant and I've never been able to explain why.
She filed for emancipation. Officially, legally, on paper. She didn't slip out through a crack in the rear wall in the middle of the night. There's something I respect enormously about that.
She rejects contact. I'm not going to be the one who presses. She earned the right to decide who she lets back in. I'll be in the room if she decides to look.
Alexander
He sent letters to the mansion after I left. I wasn't at the address anymore. So there were no letters for me.
I've thought about this more than is probably sensible. It's not his fault. He was doing the thing he's always done — trying to hold the family together from whatever distance he was at. But there's still a small, unreasonable part of me that registers: he sent letters, and there was none for me, and that's just a fact I carry.
Tyrant. The papers called him Tyrant. I remember how people reacted to the transformation and I remember thinking that was deeply unfair and I still think that.
Bayangan
I don't know Bayangan well. That might be the most honest thing I can write about him.
What I do know is the particular quality of someone who has spent years chasing approval that doesn't come in the shape they need it to. I know it from the inside. I recognise it from the outside.
I hope he came through it better than I did or at least as well.