by Eva Chase
“It’s easy to say that,” his brother said, raising his chin defiantly. “Somehow you didn’t figure that all out when you were actually here. You didn’t care about us at all, just getting high and messing around with your friends. What makes you think I’d ever want to talk to you again, no matter what you say?”
Ryo deflated even more. “That’s totally fair. I’d never force you to talk to me. I know I can’t force you to forgive me, if I even deserve that in the first place.”
“You ripped apart this family, lied to us, stole from us, threw everything we offered you back in our faces.” His father crossed his arms, frowning down at him. “How could you ever have thought that was acceptable?”
“I wasn’t thinking at all,” Ryo said. “I just—I wanted to add something different to my life, and I picked the wrong thing. Something really stupid. And then once I got started, and my friends were into it too, and it hit me in a way I liked so much… I didn’t know how to stop.”
“We did everything we could to help you,” his mother said, her tone getting sharper. “We’d have paid for all the counselors and programs and whatever else you needed to get clean, but we couldn’t make you go. You didn’t even try to fix the mess you’d made.”
“I know.” Ryo’s voice became very small as he hung his head. “I’ve got no excuses. I was a shitty excuse for a son and a brother—for a human being—and I can’t take that back now. All I can say is how sorry I am and that if I got the chance, I’d give everything I have to make it up to you.”
I could hear the honesty ringing through his ragged words. Why wasn’t it enough for the vision to release him? He was taking all the blame, accepting their judgment of him—what the hell else did Roseborne want from him?
There must have been something, because his father started laying into him again. “How can you possibly believe there’s any way to make up for what you put us through? The second you had a chance, you’d probably go straight back to the drugs.”
At Ryo’s wince, the frustration that’d been churning inside me flared into anger. Before I could think better of it, I marched up beside him and glared at the conjured images of his family.
“What the fuck is wrong with all of you? He obviously feels horrible about how he acted back then. He’s telling you that in every possible way. How is beating him up for it over and over helping fix anything?”
Their gazes turned to me for the first time, as if they hadn’t registered my presence until I’d spoken. “Who have you brought into our home with you?” Ryo’s mother said with a faint grimace. “Is this one of those friends?”
“Trix,” Ryo said like a protest. Like he believed he couldn’t have expected anything better than the hostility they were throwing at him. So, what, he should end up stuck in a loop of his supposed family berating him and him apologizing over and over, for the rest of eternity? Hell, no.
I ignored his mother’s comment. “Maybe you need to just leave,” I said to him. “I don’t know how you could show how sorry you are beyond what you’ve already said. I can see it. Roseborne’s pushing for something else.”
Ryo glanced toward the house’s front hall, his stance tensing. “I can’t just leave with them still thinking I don’t care.”
“They know you care. They’ve decided it’s not good enough.”
I paused, taking in his fraught expression, the guilt still holding him rigid. The people in front of him weren’t really here other than as projections of his past—of how he pictured them. How he imagined they’d react. It could be the staff or the dark powers that lurked within them and the school had decided he was falling short no matter what he did… or it could be that he’d decided that.
I knew that feeling. It echoed through me, taking me back to the moment when I’d confessed to him and the other guys about my messed-up relationship with Cade and how that had led me to the most horrible act of my life. I’d been so sure they’d walk away from me if they knew the whole truth.
But they hadn’t. Ryo was the one who’d come to me first. Come to me, held me, and told me he didn’t just accept me, he loved me, as I was.
A swell of emotion overwhelmed my anger and the pain of seeing him so downtrodden. I could give him the same thing he’d given me, couldn’t I? I hadn’t let myself even think the words before, hadn’t thought I could trust anyone other than Cade enough to really let them into my heart, but Ryo had proven me wrong. He’d brought a joy into my time at Roseborne from my very first cycle on campus. He might have made a mess of his life before, but he made things of beauty now.
I stepped around him to stand between him and his family and took both of his hands. Ryo blinked at me, his expression puzzled. I squeezed his fingers and forced the words past the lump still lodged in my throat.
“I know what it’s like to feel you can never make up for the ways you’ve screwed up, for how horribly you’ve treated people. All you can see are the bad parts of who you’ve been. But I’ve seen who you are now, I know who you are, and I—I love you. If you can forgive me, you’ve got to believe people can forgive you too.”
Ryo’s eyes widened. Then a glorious smile stretched across his face, beaming so brilliantly it could compete with the sunlight streaming through the windows. It occurred to me then that Jenson had been able to talk truthfully inside his vision. The curses didn’t follow the students into the realm the apparitions conjured. Which meant Ryo could feel full happiness now for the first time in three years.
He tugged me to him and kissed me hard, and that was all the answer to my declaration that I needed. I kissed him back, absorbing the sensation of being loved by this man for the first time when he could completely feel that emotion, completely enjoy this display of affection.
Then a sudden surge of energy yanked me away from him and tossed me into a whirl of darkness.
Chapter Ten
Jenson
A low wind whipped up across campus, tugging at my clothes and howling through the trees. Night had fallen completely, but the sky was still clotted with clouds. The only light was the pale streams drifting from the school’s lit windows, the faint glow on the mist still drifting by the stone wall, and hazy spots here and there where the ghosts that had emerged from that mist now bent over their prey.
With every passing minute I spent out here, searching for some kind of safe haven felt like more of a lost cause. The ghostly apparitions roamed everywhere. Now and then I caught a flash of light at the corner of my vision that told me the staff in their new supernatural forms were still flitting around campus. No doors or walls could hold any of them back.
The only place I wanted to be was beyond that gate, and I wasn’t sure anymore how safe it’d be even out there. Not that the answer to that question mattered, since I wasn’t going to find out anyway.
I meandered through the darkness across the overgrown lawn, giving the fallen students a wide berth just in case their ghosts decided to branch out and take on other targets. The wind licked cold past my jacket collar. I was coming around the north side of the school when I nearly tripped over the sprawled arm of a figure I hadn’t noticed among the shadows.
It was a guy—face down, nothing distinctive about him that identified him to me at a glance beyond his gender. No glowing form hunched over him. He was just… lying there, as if he’d been tackled and then abandoned.
Was he even alive? Or had his rose split apart into browning petals as limp on the ground as he now was?
A trickle of nausea collected in my stomach. I backed away, hesitated, and then hurried around him. If he was dead, there was nothing I could do. If he wasn’t dead, I still couldn’t do anything. We lived and died by the school’s whims and maybe our own actions, no one else’s. Otherwise Trix would have saved us all twice over with the strength of her will alone.
I couldn’t go back to her empty-handed. The longer I spent out here, the more pathetic it would look if this mission turned out to have been in vain.
I glanced
toward the scattering of nearby trees. An urge tugged at me to stop this pointless rambling altogether, to find some place to hide out on my own—maybe the gazebo over there, not that it’d offer any real shelter—and weather this disaster as well as I could without worrying about anyone else. There might not be anywhere safe on all of campus, but at least then I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about not protecting anyone other than myself.
The impulse passed through me, and I shoved it away with a jab of a different sort of guilt. I’d promised Trix I’d come back. I’d meant to try to do something useful for her and, well, Ryo and Elias too, I supposed, even if they were much lower on my list of priorities.
I’d told myself I was going to be different. I wanted to be someone different. Or at least, a different version of me. The guy I’d felt like in the moments when Trix had seen past my lies and banter, in the moment when she’d opened herself up to us and I’d come to her alongside the other guys to show her I’d stand with her no matter what she’d done in the past.
It was just hard to hold on to that feeling while I wandered in the dark on my own.
By the time I made it the rest of the way around the school building, the last few students had given up on the gate. I headed down there to test the bars myself, just in case.
The latch didn’t budge at my heave. The wrought-iron structure simply let out a dull creak. I peered down the road on the other side, wondering if the view was even accurate. Roseborne was stuck in this constant damp mid-spring weather, but the rest of the world wouldn’t be. For all we knew, in reality the trees out there were bright with autumn colors or laden with snow.
The right thing to do was go back, admit I’d come up with nothing, and see if the others had some new strategy I could help with. And keep the hell away from our new ghost friends so Trix didn’t have to jump in and watch me at my worst again. If she’d even be all that happy to see me after my recent performance, that was.
I propelled my heavy feet toward the school’s front doors. Halfway up the path, my legs stalled.
One of those ghosts was gliding across the lawn toward me. I knew that face, didn’t I? My shoulders went rigid.
Yes. Yes, I did. Both from my regular memories and Roseborne’s conjured images in the counseling room of the people I’d wronged. His case hadn’t been the worst, but it’d been a harsh one.
I could have run for the school building and bought myself a little time. But as I watched him approach, a sense of deeper resolve came over me.
I’d probably have to face him eventually one way or another before Roseborne let go of me. If I took what was coming to me here on the lawn, there’d be no need for Trix to get involved at all.
If I was going to make something of myself other than the manipulative prick I’d spent most of my life being, I had to find my way there on my own, not just when she was looking over my shoulder.
I stayed where I was. The ghostly guy drifted faster. As he reached me, I closed my eyes and braced myself.
A tingling rippled through my chest when he shoved his hands into me. Then I was falling away into a thicker darkness—and out again into a narrow, stuffy office that smelled like old sneakers in a different high school, one that wasn’t mine.
The guy I’d just seen as a ghost was in front of me now in full color, laughing and spinning in the chair at the one large desk in the office. My eyes caught on the metal box at one corner of that desk. The club he was president of operated out of this room. They kept their treasury in here. And a couple of weeks ago, this dude—I couldn’t even remember his name, for fuck’s sake. Matt? Mike? Something generic like that—had mentioned in my hearing that they’d fundraised over a thousand dollars for some initiative they planned to put in motion next month.
Easy pickings. That was all I’d seen. Ever since I’d gotten old enough to pass as a teenager, I’d trolled the high schools around the city, watching for opportunities, for marks. Just like Mom and Dad used to take me around playgrounds and elementary schoolyards when I’d been little, before Dad had been locked up. Although back then I’d been more like bait or a side part placing the seeds of the larger con. These days I ran the whole show.
Matt-Mike had been simple to read. He was overly eager for acknowledgment, wanting to think he was accomplishing great things but afraid he was actually a putz. Which he was. But I’d chatted him up and acted impressed by his stories, and he hadn’t questioned why he’d never seen me around the large school before. I fit in well enough. He’d invited me over to his house to play video games. Helped me pull a prank I’d suggested. And once I’d warmed him up sufficiently between the other cons I was running here and there, I’d set him up for the real fall.
In reality, I’d left the room with all the cash in that box within the hour. Matt-Mike had never seen me again. I’d set up enough crumbs of evidence that no one had believed him when he’d protested that someone else had stolen the funds. He’d been accused, convicted as much as any high school administration could, and expelled.
According to the counseling room’s playbacks, the expulsion on his record had stopped him from getting into the dream university he’d babbled to me about a gazillion times. He’d always looked kind of broken whenever the white walls had shown me his image.
Because of me. I’d broken him. I could see it now as he stopped the chair and grinned at me—all he’d wanted was a friend. Maybe he’d have been a good one if I’d given him a chance. I’d simply never considered it. Never looked at him as a human being with needs as legitimate as mine, just like I hadn’t with Penny.
“I know it doesn’t look like much,” Matt-Mike was saying now. “But the stuff we’ve got in the works—I bet they’ll write us up in the newspaper. Might even get on TV. You’d better believe everyone’ll be signing up for the club next semester.”
“I can’t wait to see it,” I said automatically. “It sounds awesome.”
No, that wasn’t what I was here for. Roseborne wanted something out of me, wanted me to give this guy something… He’d never had a chance to curse me out. I wasn’t sure he’d even been certain I was the one who’d screwed him over, even though he should have been able to guess. Was the school waiting to see if I’d go through the motions all over again? How stupid did it think I was?
What would have made this situation better for the guy? If I’d just walked away, I guessed. Of course, then he’d have felt like shit in a different way, because his new best friend had ghosted him for no apparent reason.
I wet my lips. I could be honest in here. After all the time I’d spent lying to dorks like this, it could be that the truth really would set me free. And hell, after a year of being unable to speak it, in some ways even painful honesty should be a welcome change of pace.
The fact that every part of me balked at the idea of confessing only made that theory more likely. There was nothing Roseborne liked more than putting us through the wringer from every possible angle.
While I’d been thinking, Matt-Mike had started rambling about some meeting the club had organized yesterday. I cleared my throat at the first lull. Just get it over with.
“Hey,” I said, with a prickle of frustration that I hadn’t even managed to keep his name in my memory. “Look. I—You shouldn’t be telling me all this stuff. You shouldn’t have let me in here at all. I’m not really your friend.”
He stared at me, his forehead furrowing. “What are you talking about?”
My throat tightened. I waved my hand vaguely. “It’s nothing about you personally. I’m not really anyone’s friend. I’m nice to people when I want something out of them. Which is a shitty way to live, but that’s just how I operate. I’m telling you for your own good.”
He still looked more bewildered than anything else. “So, you’re saying you don’t want to hang out anymore? We could do something else if you weren’t really into—”
“It’s not like that. I just… don’t really do friends. At all.”
“Why not? Wh
at kind of person doesn’t ‘do’ friends ever?”
A reasonable question. I opened my mouth and closed it again. A deeper, sharper truth dug into my chest behind my collarbone. For a second I was afraid if I tried to spit it out, it’d slice me open from neck to chin on the way up.
I swallowed hard. If I could own up to being an asshole, I could own up to this too. Give the fucking school what it wanted.
“I’m a total fraud,” I said. “Everything I show you is made up, designed to make you happy to be around me. It’s not me. I don’t—I’m not even really sure who ‘I’ am outside of a con. Who the hell would want to be friends with a guy like that?”
Matt-Mike shrugged. “You haven’t given me a try.”
“Why bother?” My fingers curled around the edge of the chair back I was braced against, letting the plastic dig into my skin. “I know you’d never want to be around me if you saw the way I think and the things I’ve done to people. Why the hell would I want to put myself through confirming that?”
“Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Yeah. One I’ve fulfilled by being a prick on a regular basis.” I looked away. “I’m just saying. Be a little more careful who you trust. It’ll save you a lot of hurt. And—I know you don’t know about it yet, but I’m sorry for the ways I hurt you. I don’t even remember what I did with that twelve hundred dollars. It couldn’t have been that amazing.”
A pang had spread through my chest, jagged around the edges. It stung my lungs when I inhaled. I closed my eyes against the discomfort, just for a second—and when I opened them, I was sitting on the cold grass of Roseborne’s lawn outside the college building.
I stared up at the Victorian mansion in a daze. Getting out of that vision hadn’t taken much, had it? But at the same time I felt as if I had dug a knife through my innards to dig that honesty out.