by Logan Fox
Jesus.
“Yeah, enjoy the hangover,” I mutter, turning on my heel.
I wander off into the overgrown woods pressing up against the dam. What was on this land before Happy Mountain decided it would be put to better use as a prison for juvenile delinquents?
Doesn’t matter now.
Probably didn’t matter back then either.
An hour or so later, the forest clears up. I sit down on a flat rock and then lay on my back, staring up at the few stars glimmering between the clouds. Thoughts like mine aren’t good company—especially when they revolve around Emma and Candy and all the friends I had to leave behind.
I shove up from the ground with a growl stuck in my throat, already wishing I’d just stayed at the fucking lodge in my fucking bed waiting for sleep.
There’s something sweet in the air—a night flower that’s only now opening its petals. I change course, meandering back toward the dam to find the source of that elusive scent.
That’s when I hear girls’ voices. Giggles.
Some of the girls are out too. Wait…could Candy be one of them?
I’m not allowed to talk to her—or any girls—back at the lodges. In fact, since Dad shipped us out here, I haven’t had more than two words with her, and been punished for them every time.
But not out here.
I storm back, now following laughter and splashing. The dam wall rises ahead, black and impenetrable, and the surrounding land I’m standing on is too low to see over the brim. I grab a nearby branch and start climbing a tree hugging the embankment.
A moment later, my head clears the bushy leaves, the dam spread out below.
I have no way of telling if Candy is any one of those shapes moving through the water—it’s too dark to make out faces down there.
But there’s a shape I do recognize.
Sylvester moves through the water like a shark, leaving V-shaped ripples in his wake. And, just like a shark locked to its target, he makes a beeline for someone climbing out of the water on the other side of the dam.
It only takes a glimpse of that pale leg before I know who’s trying to escape the dam wall. And her name is already on my tongue when Sylvester catches up with her and drags her back into the water.
My chest closes.
Candy’s name withers on my tongue.
Icy water snaps around me like a leaden sheet, stealing my breath and making me gasp when I break the surface. I absently kick off my shoes and drag off my shirt so I can swim faster.
Both of them are under the water.
All I can think about is that bottle of alcohol. How much of it is left?
If any.
Fuck.
I reach the spot where they went under just as Sylvester’s head breaks the surface.
“Where is she?” I yell, flicking wet hair from my eyes with a twist of my neck as I scan the inky water for signs of movement. “Where is she!”
“I took care of her for you, bro. Not gonna be your problem anymore.” Then Sylvester starts laughing.
The stench of whiskey hits me, and I’m not even that close to him.
I never thought anyone would dare break a cardinal rule like ‘no alcohol’ in a place like this. But Sylvester has nothing to lose.
I catch a breath and dive. Opening my eyes is useless—there’s nothing to see, and no light to see it with if there was. Bubbles stream from my lips as I let out a soundless yell of frustration and claw myself back to the surface.
Noise pours over me, and part of that is something I recognize intrinsically.
Screams.
I swing around and start forward before my mind’s fully caught up to my body’s instinctual motion. What’s important is Candy’s body bobbing motionless on the black surface of this godforsaken dam. Motionless while, all around her, there’s sudden frantic activity.
Not toward, but away.
Fucking cunts are all so terrified they’ll get into shit for this, they won’t even check to see if she’s still breathing—
Because she’s not, because she’s dead, that’s why she’s floating, not swimming, moron, and they know it, and they’re pissing themselves
—my darling.
I fumble in the wet, in the dark, before grabbing her arm. Her hair plasters itself over the back of my hand.
Everything’s moving so slowly, so peacefully, it’s like the universe has decided to send one final fuck you my way before it all ends.
My heart’s going to explode. The cold has seeped into my bones. My jaw locks, which is fortunate—if it hadn’t, my teeth would be clicking together like the reaper tapping out the Hemp Fandango on his piano.
“Help me!” I yell, swinging around as I drag Candy against me. “Sylvester, you fucking cunt, help me!”
His laughter trails off. Suddenly, the only sound is the splashing of choppy water. The slap as it hits the cement walls around us. My heart pounding a thousand times a second.
“Help me get her out.” This time, my voice is low. Steady.
Sylvester swims over. “I’s jus’ kidding around,” he slurs. When he lays his hands on Candy, he fumbles her. Her head splashes back into the water.
“Get away.” I kick out, more to distance us from him than anything else, but managing a strike to his thigh at the same time. “Get the fuck away from her!”
There’s something wrong with my voice. It’s rough, broken, demonic.
“Josiah, over here.” Someone bobs up beside me. A girl. Her voice sounds familiar, but her face is a black mask. “I’ll help.”
“Me too.” Another girl. I don’t know this one. I don’t know any of them.
Candy’s so heavy.
Motionless.
Dead.
A light flickers, and for a moment, I’m sure I’ve imagined it. But then it grows, floods.
Someone put on their cellphone torch, and it’s just bright enough to paint the surface of the water a dark gray and to cast a shimmer on some of the nearby faces.
To highlight the dark rivulets over Candy’s face.
Hair in her face. When I brush it away, my fingers only touch skin.
Not hair.
Blood.
Rivulets of blood that smudge away to nothing when my wet hands touch them.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Josiah
Someone’s crying. I grit my teeth and will them to stop. It’s already hard enough keeping count without having to contend with—
“Trinity, enough!”
Could have kissed the girl who just snapped that out like a bullet. But I’m too busy counting.
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
My dry lips against Candy’s cold, wet ones.
Exhale.
Candy’s chest rises.
Candy’s chest falls.
Exhale.
Rise.
Fall.
Exhale.
Ebb.
Flow.
One, two, three, four, five—
Brackish water floods my mouth. I wrench my lips away from hers, gagging as bile and dam water coats my tongue. When another retch threatens, I grab Candy’s shoulders and drag her onto her side.
Suddenly, there’s a huddle of girls around her, some more hysterical now that she’s showing signs of life than before when she could have been a department store mannequin someone had found floating in the dam after a wayward prank.
She’s gasping and gagging as I stumble to my feet. I force back the urge to hurl, and instead drag my hair out of my face and haul enough air into my lungs to push my chest out.
A hand lands on my shoulder. “Jo—I—dude, I’m so fucking so—”
My fist cracks into Sylvester’s jaw. His head spins to the side.
For a moment, I think I imagined everything. That I’m light headed from standing up too fast or some shit. But then someone gasps, and Sylvester stumbles, tumbles, falls with a
grunt.
My knuckles creak. I stomp closer, blood singing in my ears as my fist begins to ache.
But hands, arms, urgently low voices stop me.
“Josiah, don’t.”
“He’s sorry, man.”
“…Was an accident…”
“…get punished if…”
White noise.
A low drone.
My breath stops as my body solidifies, and a strangely calm logic floods my brain.
Not now, Jo. You’re so close. Keep it together, or you’ll be stuck here like them. Just another teenage reject.
I take a step back, and I could be moving through tar.
Another.
Another.
“Josiah.”
I wave my hand at the voice. I’m done. The anger’s fading. Everything’s coming up fucking unicorns.
“Josiah!”
That familiar voice lures me from a seductively dark introspection—a place I should never go back to, should never have been in the first place.
Candy.
I turn, see her sitting up. I think she’s naked, and my eyes drop on instinct before my brain can wrangle sense into me.
A pink shirt, that’s all. Pale pink, skin-colored, nude, whatever the fuck they call it. I can look.
I can look.
She coughs, and one of her friends helps her to her feet. She hobbles closer like she’s broken both ankles, the back of her dainty hand pressed against her mouth like she’s feeling nauseous.
Yeah, I’d be sick too, with all that shit in my stomach.
But…there hadn’t been alcohol. Not on her breath, no taste of it in her mouth.
Vodka. Barely leaves a trace, doesn’t it?
My face hardens, and I want to leave so I don’t have to keep staring at her confused, frightened, pale face.
Instead, I step forward and grab her elbow, steering her in front of me as I cut a swathe through the wooded area surrounding the dam.
Someone lets out a low whistle, but they’re shushed an instant later. Then there’s just silence.
“Where are we going?”
I’d been doing fine until she spoke. I’d even managed to forget how ridiculously stupid she’d been swimming at night with a bunch of boozed-up delinquents.
Like you, Jo?
Fuck that. I’m nothing like her. I don’t have fluff for brains.
“You’re hurting me.”
“What the fuck were you thinking?” I yell, turning on her so fast she walks into me.
Squelch.
A breath huffs out of her. She unbalances. I catch her absently and prop her up before she can land on her ass.
“Huh?” I prompt, shaking her for good measure.
Instead of whimpering, or crying, or complaining, her face twists into a scowl.
A fist comes out of nowhere, but the punch she lands on my jaw barely turns my head. It stings a little, but I doubt it will even bruise. I sigh, close my eyes, and rub my face as if the act can somehow wring energy back into my mind.
“Why didn’t you just let me drown?” she snaps, shoving uselessly at me before detouring around me and heading back the way we came.
Back to the dam.
Back to her friends, and her booze, and her irresponsible life.
“Because who the fuck do you think they’d blame?” I yell after her. “Huh?”
She stops, almost merging with the darkness.
“Who always gets blamed for your fuck ups, Candy?”
The moon has come out, but there’s a lot of foliage between us and its silvery light. Candy’s mostly still shadowed as she steps back toward me.
Still in her wet shirt. Me without shoes or a shirt, drenched.
We could probably have snuck back inside our lodges, but not without leaving traces behind. Damp footprints on the carpet, leaves, sodden clothes in the bathroom.
I’d been heading for the laundry room where, if luck was on our side, we’d at least have one set of dried clothes waiting to be ironed by someone unlucky to be stuck with laundry-room chores tomorrow after school.
“That’s what this is about?” she demands, stopping less than a foot away from me. “You’re pissed at me because your plan backfired? Because we’re both here, and not just me?”
I laugh, but I cut the sound short out of lack of interest. “You really are a crazy fucking bitch.”
This time, she slaps me.
The punch I could handle. But the moment her palm connects with my cheek, it’s as if I’m right back there in the kitchen with Dad.
What do you do when you don’t have enough balls to punch someone? You fucking slap them, or you backhand them.
Neither are meant to hurt—just to humiliate.
Candy gasps when I ram her against the closest tree. She squirms, trying to get a knee up, but I kick her legs open and slide between them, so there’s nowhere she can reach that’ll hurt enough for me to let her go.
When this doesn’t stop her fighting back, I grab her wrists and slam them into the bark, stretching her until she goes onto the tips of her toes.
“Stop!” she manages, breathless and frantic.
A breeze toys in the leaves above us, causing moonlit shadows to dance over her face. Her eyes illuminate—first one, then the other—but just long enough so I can see the stark fear painted over them before she’s cast in shadow again.
“You ruined my life,” I tell her in a furious whisper, my forehead touching hers as I try to see into her shadow-obscured eyes. “All I ever did was to try and help you, and this is how you repay me?”
She shivers under me, but stays quiet.
“Candy!”
Her body jerks like I’ve struck her. Something that could have been a sob escapes with her pathetic, “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. If you were, then you’d have put up more of a fight. You’d have done whatever you could to set the record straight with Da—” I cut off with a growl. “With my dad.”
She splutters, wrenching at her hands as if she’s strong enough to pull them out of my grip. “What? You know I tried to—”
I slam her wrists against the tree, and she cuts off with a hiss. “I underestimated you, darling,” I say.
Something’s wrong with me. I’m untethered. Somehow, I’ve lost touch with the thing that’s kept me calm and centered since I was a kid.
How is it that Candy always manages to unravel me and then acts like it’s nothing? She’s like a kitten toying with a ball of wool.
Moonlight plays over her face again. In stark contrast to the shivering wreck I’d expected, she looks morbidly fascinated with me.
So my lips move, and my throat works, and I start telling her things I shouldn’t.
“I thought you were just a silly little girl,” I murmur, ducking closer again as the moonlight snuffs out behind a screen of swaying leaves. “I never realized how much power you had.”
She lets out a bitter laugh, but I don’t let her cut me off.
“Oh my God,” she says quietly. “You think this was all part of some plan I had?” She struggles again, but not as strongly as before. More as if she’s testing to see if I’ve gotten tired since she last tried.
I haven’t.
I won’t.
Not again.
Not ever.
“This is all you, Josiah!” Her chest pushes against my ribs as she hauls in one furious breath after the other.
“You’re fucking unbelievable,” I murmur, pushing away from the tree, from her, from her lies.
“You did this to us!” she yells after me. “Not me. This is all you, you fucking psycho!”
I walk faster and faster, ignoring when I step on a sharp rock or burn my sole on a root when it slips out from under me.
The Bale men are cursed. What the hell else could explain how we manage to attract crazies one after the other like this?
But what if you hadn’t mentioned the boarding school. What if you hadn’t sent Sean that mess
age, Jo?
I push away that insidious thought.
Someone had to set her straight. Else she’d just have kept on drinking like Diana. Like Mom. She couldn’t keep hiding that—
She was hiding something, but it wasn’t her drinking.
Hiding, hiding, and not telling. You wanted to know, but she wouldn’t say. And that was bugging you, wasn’t—?
I yell out, slamming the heel of my hand against my head. Abruptly, I stop walking.
Christ, this place is giving me cabin fever.
Or is it?
I slowly unfurl my fingers, slide my palms over my head to smooth back my hair, and straighten from the Neanderthal-like slouch I’d been stomping around in.
It’s like that song.
I can think clearly now, my darling’s gone.
And, in two weeks, I’ll be gone. Gone for good. Back home where I belong. But Candy? She’s never leaving this place. I don’t know how, but I’ll make it happen.
She thinks I’m crazy?
She hasn’t even met me yet.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Candy
I hate Josiah Bale. Actually, hate isn’t a strong enough word to accurately depict how much I want to chop off his head, douse him with gasoline, and set him on fire.
I let out a quiet huff of a laugh, so I don’t wake my roommates.
Sure, he rescued me when I’d been attacked. And he saved my life out there by the dam.
But he’s just a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Guess he takes after his father more than I’d thought, because that’s exactly how it was with Mr. Bale.
One minute, Josiah’s father is literally the father I never had but always wanted. The next, I’m the scum of the earth. It was as if all those evenings we’d spent playing chess, drinking, and talking like old friends meant nothing to him.
If Josiah’s father thought I was such a fuck up, then why the hell did he bother trying to be nice to me? Why’d he bother treating me like a grown-up if he was convinced I was just some out-of-control kid who needed a place like Happy Mountain to sort me out?
I massage my temples. My head’s about to explode, and not just from trying to figure out men—I know this ache all too well. It’s the one that made me get up in the middle of the night at the Bale Manor, sneak downstairs, and raid the liquor cabinet. It was the one that had me sneaking vodka into my water bottle before school every morning, and wishing I could drink it straight when it ran out by noon.