chapter forty-four

My morning began with a guttural scream ripped from my cracked lips.

It's usually the nightmares that elicit that kind of response from me lately. An empty barn in the vastest expanse of darkness imaginable. Two monsters littered with deadly bullet wounds, rotting in the ground. My best friend rotting in the ground.

The nightmares are quick and forgettable; easy to recover from. Well, mostly.

But this morning, I didn't wake violently or abruptly from a nightmare. Instead, I woke slowly and peacefully to my window bringing in the early-September sun rise, heating my skin and caressing my face like warm feathers.

For a moment, I knew my dream was real. Greyson was alive, sleeping beside me. His face was full and rosy. The light brushed against stubble on his jaw. I eased him awake with my hands, running them through the chocolaty brown locks on his head, touching him until his long lashes fluttered open, revealing the two most breathtakingly blue eyes, just for me to drink in.

"Morning, Fluffy," he whispered, voice low and scratchy. I could only stare and move my hands through the strands of hair falling into his eyes, desperately trying to memorize everything about him.

"Grey," I whispered, my face breaking into the biggest smile. "You know how much I love you, right?" I took his hand from its place on my waist to rest it against my chest—my steadily beating heart. "Do you feel it? It beats for you. Always." Then I leaned in, aching to feel his lips on mine.

I was so close, so heartbreakingly close.

I awoke to life as it is now, without my beautiful blue-eyed boy. For a moment—a gorgeous, fleeting moment—I thought I felt his arms around my waist. I turned over, expecting to see him lying there next to me, but my eyes landed on a picture frame turned face-down on my desk—the one of Grey and I in the treehouse at sunset that I can no longer bear to see.

Then, as if I had been shot through the heart, a sound the epitome of pain came from my mouth as I doubled over in my bed, clutching the sheets in painful fists, throat croaking and body convulsing.

It was like losing him all over again.

It was like answering Steven's call when he said no one had seen Grey all night. Like Serena telling me he'd fallen down the stairs and was in the hospital. Like the doctors telling me he'd tried to kill himself, and them saying there was nothing left to do but wait.

And it was like hearing Pat's phone ring in the night with the news that he was just...gone.

No one heard my screams in the empty house. My pillows held my head, my blankets held my body, and my wall of pictures—memories, people, ghosts—echoed the sounds of my pain back around to me over and over and over.

✿

Today is my last day at home. When tomorrow comes, my world will shift. I ache to spend the day in bed. This is what regression feels like.

Raveena comes over and paints my fingernails for me. The dark blue-black colour I used to love. She trims an inch off my waist length hair, wanting to cut more—says I need a change—but I stop her. Greyson loved my hair. My lion's mane.

Pat comes in a few times as Raveena works on me, plucking my brows, sorting through my makeup, and he smiles at us. His eyes fill with pride. They shine in the light streaming through my window, grey and old and tired, but hopeful.

Once Pat leaves, I turn to Raveena as she plans to cut curtain bangs into my hair. "You're in love with my uncle."

She freezes, then retreats, taking the hair cutting scissors to her tight white vee-neck shirt that shines bright against her deep brown skin. "I..." she trails off, high arching brows coming together.

"It's okay," I say, no emotion to be heard in my voice. "I'm...glad he has you. I don't want him to be alone...when I leave."

Raveena sets the scissors to my vanity and steps back from my chair. She fiddles with the makeup bag I filled with cherry lip balm and mascara, opening and closing it like she's searching for something invisible.

"I didn't think he'd lie to me about it," I whisper, staring at my unhealthy reflection.

"He wanted to tell you," Raveena murmurs, eyes downcast. "Believe me, he did. But there was always so much going on and he was concerned it would...he didn't want to worry you."

I tilt my head, watching the blank expression become more and more permanent on my face. "I just need him to be happy. Don't...break his heart. I won't be here. I can't help him anymore."

"Ember? What—"

"I won't be here to help him through it, Raveena. You can't hurt him." I turn and stand up, towering over her short, curvy frame. "Don't hurt him."

She nods, cupping my cheeks. "Of course, hon. He means too much to me. You both do." She brings me into her body, wrapping her arms around me. It feels...motherly.

I break away. "I'm tired. I'm going to sleep for a little while."

Raveena nods, swiping under her eyes. "Yes, yes, good idea. Big day tomorrow." She helps me into bed, brushing my hair from my face as I lay down. "I'll be downstairs with Patrick, alright?"

I nod, staring ten thousand miles at the wall ahead.

✿

I sleep all day. It's one o'clock in the morning by the time I turn over in my sheets and find my phone in the dark.

Clink!

I'm upright before I can blink. I fling open my window. The darkness is starless, nothing but grey cloud cover and the vague suggestion of a moon somewhere far, far away.

What did I think I'd find out here? Did I—

Clink!

I'm not imagining that. I better not be.

After staggering around the house in my black leggings and Grey's blue hoodie—the clothes I fell asleep in—I gently exit through the front door in the blackness to walk around the house.

Clink! Clink!

Where is that coming from!?

I stand right below Greyson's window and then the same sound comes from below my feet. I jump back when a mouse squeaks and moves against the side of Greyson's house. I take out my phone and turn the flashlight on. The grey mouse's tiny foot is trapped under a brick. Each time it tries to move, it runs sideways into a broken glass pane, which rattles against the concrete slab between the houses.

Clink! Clink! Clink! Clink! Clink! Clink! Clink! Clink!

I reach down, illuminating the terrified thing, and lift the brick. The creature scurries away like the world is splitting apart behind it, which it is.

With the red brick in my hand, I feel tempted to biff it into the sky as far as I can.

I set it back down, away from the house this time.

Then I begin stumbling blindly through the darkness. For at least twenty minutes, I walk down streets I haven't in a long time. I haven't had the nerve to. But I'm leaving tomorrow morning, and this is my last chance.

I am lost, but I know where I am. The air smells like old plastic. A playground. An old, weathered jungle gym. This is exactly where two sleds were found three and a half years ago. The last place Greyson was before the horror began.

He walked here for me. He was here because of me. He was here without me—instead of me.

I walk over to the small silver slide, shining in the midnight light. Ever so slowly, I lower myself down until I'm flush against it, facing skywards as the dark grey clouds move in ominously. Maybe the humidity will break soon, and the skies will cry until no teardrops are left.

For a while, I stay. I breathe in the smells of my childhood. Maple trees leaking sap, freshly cut grass, and that terribly reminiscent scent of playground wood chips and sun-blazed plastic.

What if I stayed here? What if I waited long enough that time began to flow backwards and I saw Greyson again? Maybe I'd see him trudging through three feet of snow, carrying two sleds in his lanky arms, trying to brush the shaggy brown hair from his eyes as he goes.

"Turn around," I'd say, running to him. "Go back. Don't stop here. This is where it happens."

Then we'd join hands, each take a sled, and go home. And that would be it. Or maybe, if the monsters appeared, I'd fight for him and have my life stolen instead. Could I do it? For him?

I would and I could and I wish I had the chance.

With tears flowing readily from my eyes, falling onto the slide below as I stare up at the sky, I begin to wonder.

If Greyson and I were both here and nothing bad had ever happened, I wonder what we'd be. I wonder if I'd be content to just sit beside him, be his friend. Would I want more? Would it eat away at me? Oh, but there isn't anything I wouldn't do to have that right now.

I wonder. And I can't stop.

✿

The walk back to the house is grim, even as the dawn begins to break over the horizon, sending a dark orange haze across the world. I've been gone for a few hours at least and I know I'll have to face what the morning will bring when I walk in that door. All the goodbyes and the tears and the future.

As I shuffle my feet onto cracked sidewalks, I can't find it in my heart to care all that much. I feel...locked. My feelings are all tucked away into wooden chests in my cobwebbed mind. With each step I take, I lock a box. By the time I hit my street, it's not as dark and I feel almost altogether numb.

There's a black car, another shadow in the dark, parked right in front of the abandoned Scott's house.

I cross the silent street in time to see Steven Scott hop out of the driver's side. He's dressed in black pants and a red hoodie, straining against his stomach which could only be described as a beer belly. Even his face is puffier and unhealthier than it's been the whole time I've known him.

Steven weakly closes the car door and drags his feet towards the trunk.

"Mr. Scott?" I venture, prompting him to turn around. "What are you doing?"

He ignores me, patting his pockets down. He then returns to the front of the car and retrieves the keys from the ignition.

"Where's Mrs. Scott?" I ask, feeling my heart pick up. "Where's Serena?"

Steven closes the door again and stops. He stares at the ground with dead eyes. "Bed."

I blink and shuffle my feet impatiently. "Bed? What's going on?"

"In bed," he repeats, and it's then that I smell hard liquor on his breath. "She hasn't left her bed. Never leaves," he slurs.

I glance to the keys he's shoving in his pocket, then back at him. "You drove here?!" My voice is too high and slightly panicked.

"I have to do the thing with the thing," he tries to explain. "The thing—" belch! "—with the sign."

Steven walks over to the trunk and sways slightly, struggling to open the hatch. When he does, he pulls out a large sign with one white, sharpened wooden post.

FOR SALE BY OWNER

I rush over and take it before it threatens to bring this broken man falling to his knees.

"Put that up for me," says Steven, pointing to the dry, yellow front lawn. "Right there. Or there. Wherever."

"You...you're selling the h-house," I stammer, never believing this day would arrive. "Why are you selling the house?"

Steven rips the sign out of my hands roughly. "I'll do it then."

I watch helplessly as this drunk man ambles over and sticks the pointed end of the wood into the Earth. It's horribly crooked and facing the wrong way, but I'm not about to correct it.

When Steven walks by me and back towards his car, he reaches into his pockets, fishing for his keys.

"What are you doing?" I rush out, going after him. I reach for his keys, but he pulls his hand away, squinting at me.

"I'm going back to the hotel," he informs me, blowing his breath into my face.

"You—you can't drive," I state, gesturing to the car.

Steven glances around, his head swivelling in an unstable fashion like he's just seeing where he is for the first time. "Then how'd I get here, hm?"

Luck, I don't say. Plain, stupid damn luck. He could have hurt himself, even taken someone else down with him.

I steal the keys from his hand in a flash, using his inebriated state against him. "I'm calling you a cab," I say plainly. "Sit inside the car and wait."

Steven swings for my face suddenly and I duck backwards just in time, stumbling a few feet away from him.

"Give me my fucking keys," he slurs angrily. "I'm driving, not you."

"Mr. Scott, please—"

"The keys!" he demands, spit flying around his mouth. He swings an open palm towards my head.

I stumble back again, tears forming in my eyes. "You can't drive drunk!" I cry weakly. "You'll hurt some—"

He catches Greyson's blue sweater on my frame, pulling me towards him. I hear the fabric tear.

"Don't fucking touch me!" I snap, trying to pull away, but his grip is too strong.

So much for being numb, I think.

Steven fixes to hit me. I watch the anger—the pain, guilt, hurt—flash through his eyes, or maybe mine, and then I do something I've never done in my life.

My right fist swings to strike him square in the jaw.

His body falls in slow motion, knees crunching on the road first, eyes rolling back, then he crumples onto the sidewalk in a mess of heavy bones and swollen flesh.

Pure wrath pulses through my veins and poisons the tears pouring from my eyes. I crouch down to his level. He's still conscious, but barely, so I flip him onto his back. He groans, reaching up to cup his jaw.

I grab the collar of his red sweater and bring his face to mine. My words find a way through clenched teeth. "My cousin was hit by a drunk driver and he died," I seethe. "You know that!" My voice cracks. "You know about Henry! Why did you make me do that?!" I choke out. "Why?!"

I drop him back onto the road and his head bounces off the asphalt.

Oh God...I think I broke something.

The pain seers from my knuckles through my wrist. I take a second to cradle my right hand to my chest. Then, I find Steven's cell phone in the pocket of his hoodie and unlock it with his finger, cringing at the dirt under his long fingernails. I try Serena first since she blocked my number, but hopefully not her husbands. She doesn't pick up. I try twice more and then give up, opting for a cab. I quickly get hold of a company using my own phone.

After tapping Steven in the face a few times to get the address of this supposed hotel, the man on the line tells me a car is on its way.

I wait on the curb in front of the Scott's house, hoping Pat doesn't choose to peer outside. He'll be up soon, with the sun, and firing on all cylinders to drop me off at the place my father studied. To watch me start my life of education—the life he never had.

It's almost five o'clock in the morning when the cab driver, a woman somewhere in her fifties with short grey hair, pulls up in a bright yellow car. She eyes the scene suspiciously when she sees Steven still laying on the ground, clutching his face like I broke him. I think it's more likely I broke myself with the radiating pain living in my right hand.

"He had a bit too much to drink," I laugh, staring the driver in the eye through her open window. "He took a spill off the front lawn."

She squints at me under the harsh car light. "Was he driving?" she asks, glimpsing the black car beside us. "I have to report drunk drivers."

I wait maybe a beat too long. Part of me wants him to pay for this. I want him to understand what he did. I want him to suffer for it.

He's already paid for this ten times over, my mind berates me. Just lie. He's been through enough. Lie. Lie, lie, lie.

"No," I say to her. "Just trying to dance in the middle of the street again. I need to get him home for some coffee."

She steps out of the driver's side into the misty early morning and bends down to Steven, who I just hope will keep his mouth shut. "Family?" she prompts, regarding me with pity. "Need help, honey?"

I must be a mess. From all the crying I've done tonight, the flush of anger on my cheeks, and my torn blue sweatshirt.

"Yes," I barely whisper. "I need help."

The short, round woman crouched on the ground helps me heave the broken man from the asphalt.

✿

"I'll just be a second," I tell the driver.

I huff and drag Steven into the place that's certainly not a hotel. It's a motel with a half-lit red neon sign reading VACANCY hanging over a sketchy entrance with cracked doors.

Vacancy? No doubt.

With one of Steven's arms slung across my shoulder, I stumble through the front doors and come face to face with a lanky teen boy with bronze skin and shaggy, dark brown hair. His eyes go wide and he stands up from behind the desk.

"Oh, uh...can I—can I help you, miss? And...and sir?" His voice is high and crackly. He can't be older than fourteen.

I struggle to breathe with half of Steven's weight crushing my lungs. "Can you point...to the Scott's room...please?"

He nods hurriedly and flips through a book behind the desk I can't see. The lighting in here is ridiculously dim, giving off come here to be murdered vibes. "Down the hall, take a left," the boy informs me. "Number twelve."

I mumble a thank you and nod as the boy opens the door to the hall on our right with a bent key card.

Down the narrow orange and red patterned halls, I almost drop Steven several times. He grumbles incoherently, complaining that I'm hurting his arm. Too fucking bad.

When I reach room twelve, I kick the door forcefully eight or nine times. It takes way too long before it opens to reveal none other than Serena Scott, wrapped in an off-white, floor length robe. Her eyes are so red I think she might just be about to explode. The skin under her eyes is puffed and rubbed raw and her hair is an oily black and grey mess tucked behind her ears.

She doesn't even flinch at the sight in front of her, just moves out of the way. I shuffle in and deposit the helpless body onto the only bed in the dingy room.

The fan light above is burning bright but flickering. A tiny TV is set on a short wooden dresser, playing only static. There are cardboard boxes everywhere, filled with clothes and dishes. Suitcases are shoved into a corner where a door opens to reveal a compact, dirty bathroom.

I turn around to face Serena, who's staring at her husband like he's vermin that invaded her space, but she can't bear to kill.

"He drove drunk to the house and put up a sign," I begin, still breathless. I take out his keys and offer them to her. "Your car's still on the street."

Before I'm out the door, she takes my elbow. I stare at her face, framed by stray pieces of oily salt and peppered hair, and I wait. Enough time goes by that I turn and walk out the way I came, closing their door behind me.

Numb, I tell myself. Just block it out. Lock it up.

I nod to the boy at the desk as I leave, heading back into