Homesick
Rogue misses Mississippi in the summer. She thought she'd miss it worst in the winter, but Westchester is so pretty when it snows, just like she always dreamed of on humid green Christmas Eves. It never snowed for Christmas there, but here the snow comes obligingly down and she runs screaming through it throwing snowballs at Logan like she was a little girl. Bobby laughs at her when she wraps up in a blanket to do her homework, a cup of steaming hot chocolate close at hand, but she likes it. She's warm and among friends, watching the snowflakes drift lazily down outside.
But when summer rolls around it gets hard to take. The trees are green and pretty but just a little wrong. When it gets hot, it's still not hot enough to make the road smell of asphalt and shimmer with heat haze. Scott's teaching her to drive, out on country roads where the traffic is light, and she gets him to stop at a roadside stand. There's fresh corn and tomatoes that look like they'll bleed warm juice if she touches them, but no peaches and no peanuts. No one says "y'all come back, now" in a warm Southern drawl.
She goes into the Professor's office one afternoon, late enough after class that the halls have emptied; everyone's upstairs studying or playing noisy video games in the rec room or outside enjoying the weather.
"I want to go to Mississippi," she says. "I can take the bus."
Professor Xavier tilts his head to one side a little and looks at her searchingly. She doesn't look away, even though she wonders what he's seeing in the inside of her head. It makes her feel like if she tries to turn her head it'll be too heavy to move.
"If you like, you can take one of the cars instead," he says.
"You never say Logan can borrow your car."
"I've seen how Logan drives."
She thinks about it. She'd imagined just taking the bus home, slipping into her old self like a shell for a few days. This feels different. But it's more practical, and probably safer, and anyway buses are a terrible way to travel; they're slow, and they always smell funny, and the air conditioning never works right.
Sliding behind the wheel of the car feels strange. She'd expected to get the old clunker Scott uses to teach Driver's Ed, but Scott said he'd better keep that, because the Professor would kill him if he let Bobby strip a sports car's gears. He'll probably kill her if she strips the gears of this one, or scratches the mirror finish, or breathes on it the wrong way. It's a beautiful car. She takes off her gloves just to run her hands over the leather seat.
Her head feels heavy again for a moment as she backs very carefully out of the garage, and it occurs to her to wonder how long it's been since the Professor sat here. His own car is large and black, with hand controls and a back seat scuffed by the metal of a folding wheelchair. This car is silver and sleek and meant just for two. Or just for one. Pretty soon she's driving fast down the country roads with the top down and the radio turned up high, trying not to get lost and wondering how far it really is home.
She spends the night in a run-down motel, where they look her up and down but seem to figure she's a rich girl running off with Daddy's car and an overgenerous allowance. It's close enough to the truth to make her smile. She gets a cold Coke from the machine at the end of the hall and drinks it in a chair by the window with her feet up on the air conditioner, watching cars pull in and out of the parking lot and wondering who they are and where they're going.
It's hard to sleep alone in the bed with its scratchy comforter, and she spends a while curled up staring at the vinyl wallpaper as if its shapes were going to start moving like in that creepy story she had to read in English class.
Do you feel walled in, then? Just a little smothered by Charles's kindness?
I'm not 'walled in,' Rogue tells the mocking voice in her head. I'm here, aren't I?
Charles doesn't need to keep his pets on a leash. He trusts that they'll come back to where they're fed.
I'm nobody's pet.
That's what they all say, Erik says, and she can almost see him lighting a cigarette and smiling at her.
Rogue sits up and reaches for the remote control and flips between things she's pretty sure Erik will hate, although there's only so much Oprah she can stand. It's as good a way as she's found of banishing her ghosts. She watches TV until it's really late, falling asleep in the middle of an old horror movie with bad special effects.
She dreams she's walking in a city with high gray buildings and railroad tracks. The streets are full of people in old-fashioned clothes, and there's a door at the end of the street, a very plain door, with one crack in the first of three brick steps leading up to it. She knows that because she's bounced a ball on those steps, up and down, catching it in one pale freckled hand and slamming it down again.
There's nothing really bad about the dream, she guesses, only that she waits and waits for the door to open, for her mother to step outside and call her home to dinner and bed, and the door never opens; the light fades, and the street grows dark, and no one ever calls.
When she wakes up crying, she reaches without thinking across the bed and then shakes her head at herself, scrubbing her face with a corner of the sheet. There's nobody who's supposed to be there.
It's late afternoon when she pulls down the street where she grew up. She pulls up by the curb at the corner, biting her lip as she tries not to nudge the curb, and stops. The green light through the trees that bend low over the street is just right. The air smells of grass and sand and heat. When she rolls down a window, she can hear the scraping drone of cicadas rise and fall.
The house is down at the other end of the street. The curtains in the big bay windows are pulled tight against the afternoon sun. She might be able to walk right up into the yard without anyone seeing her. Stand under the window and look in through the cracks in the curtains at the curved leg of an armchair or a sliver of the bookcase that still holds the books she was supposed to read for tenth grade English.
She's not going to stare though the glass like pressing her nose to a storefront window. She's going to march right up to the front door, ring the bell with a gloved hand, and say--
--what?
Mama, I'm all right. Mama, I found a school for kids like me. Mama, I got kidnapped by a terrorist, and now I hear his voice in my head late at night when I can't sleep. Mama, I dress up in black leather and fight crime.
She's going to have to say one of those things, eventually. It's way too big for a letter. But she can't stop thinking about what happened at Bobby's house. She'd probably better bring Logan with her when she goes to knock on that door, even if that makes her family figure she ran off to get married to a biker. That's maybe not such a bad thing for them to think, anyway.
If she's not going to talk to them, she ought to go. Hanging around here is dangerous. It's time to go home. She doesn't exactly know what she means by that until she finds herself pulling away from the curb instead of opening the car door and walking up the cracked sidewalk.
There's one crack by the big oak tree. She knows that because she used to play hopscotch there, chalking shaky boxes on the cement and leaping over the crack as she played.
"I'm really sorry," she says quietly, and there's a silence. Maybe she's surprised the ghost of Erik in her head, or maybe he just has nothing to say.
She gets home in the late afternoon, two days later, and drags her suitcase back up to her room before anybody really notices she's there. She wants to throw herself down on her comfortable, familiar bed, but instead she goes down to tell the Professor she's back, even though she figures he already knows.
He looks up at her without surprise when she comes in. "So. Did you find what you were looking for?"
"I'm a little less homesick," Rogue says.
Professor Xavier smiles, a more genuine smile than Rogue thinks he usually lets anyone see. "I'm glad."
"I just want to know ... do you ever feel like you're trapped here?"
He smiles more wryly. "What I feel is that this is my home."
"I'm not sure I really believe you," she dares to say.
"You're free to believe what you like." He's still smiling, but she thinks the conversation is probably over.
That night she can't sleep, even with the quiet sound of Jubilee's breathing in the other bed reminding her that she's not alone. She slips out and pads downstairs in bare feet, but rather than turning on the TV, she heads for the library. There's something that's itching at the back of her head, and she can't sleep until she finds it.
She starts to lift down a leather-bound literature anthology, and then lets her hand move to an old paperback collection of poems. It's in there, of course, on a page that might have been dog-eared on purpose or might just be crumpled with age.
'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.'
The ghost of Erik snorts. Only because there's nowhere else for you to go.
"No. Because that's where you're really supposed to be."
Not where I'm supposed to be.
"I'm not sure I really believe you."
Believe what you like, Erik says, and she can imagine his wintry smile. I won't come knocking on Charles's door.
When she glances down, though, her hands are moving slowly over the open book, as if they're trying to feel the yellowing paper through her gloves. She strips one glove off, and watches her fingers move to brush against the weathered pages like a kiss.