by Bryan, JL
“Not much.”
“Did you make any new friends in the hospital?” Cassidy asked, feeling more annoyed every second.
He hesitated. “Uh, what do you mean?”
“Sometimes that happens in the hospital. Meet interesting people, hear interesting stories. Anything like that happen?”
“No. What are you talking about?”
“What have you been up to since you got out?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just hanging out.”
“By yourself?”
“Mostly. Cassidy, are you on the rag or what? What’s with the drilling here?”
“Who’s drilling?” Cassidy asked in the sweetest voice she could muster, which wasn’t particularly sweet even at the best of times. “I just want to know if you’ve made new friends or you’re hanging out with anybody new.”
“No. What are you talking about?”
“Nobody? No blond girls with eyepatches spending the night at your place?”
Cassidy heard him draw air through his teeth.
“Sounds like a yes,” she said.
“Cassidy, I can explain that.”
“I just gave you like seven chances to explain and you didn’t. You weren’t going to mention her to me at all, were you?”
“Hey, listen, Cassidy, I don’t know what you heard, but there’s nothing going on there.”
“Then why’s she sleeping over?”
“She insisted.”
“And you refused, and she pulled a gun and forced you,” Cassidy said.
“She’s this crazy church chick. She’s trying to save my soul or something. She’s pushy.”
“Tell her to call me,” Cassidy said.
“Who?”
“Reese!” Cassidy snapped. “The girl you’re sleeping with.”
“I’m not sleeping with her. Cass, we need to get together, talk this over—how do you know Reese?”
“I don’t think I want to speak to you anymore,” Cassidy replied. “Just tell Reese to call me. She and I obviously need to catch up. It’s been years.”
Cassidy ended the call, and she didn’t answer when Peyton called her back.
Chapter Twenty
Peyton tried to call Cassidy back a few times, but she never answered. He texted her to say they should get together and talk.
She was clearly pissed at him. Peyton wondered how she even knew about Reese—maybe somebody had seen them together at the blues festival.
He’d made a mistake letting Reese hang around. She was hot, but she was a different kind of person and Peyton wasn’t sure he was ready to leave Cassidy for her. All of Reese’s apparent interest in him could have just been part of how she recruited people for her little cult. She’d said that every moment of her life was missionary work.
Peyton was back home when his phone gave three annoying beeps, the sound of someone paging him from the front gate of the loft complex.
“Yeah?” he answered.
“Hey, Peyton, it’s Reese!” The girl said her name as though it were the thrilling announcement of the century. “Buzz me in?”
He sighed and pressed the 9 button, which sent a signal to open the gate.
She walked through his front door in her professional wear, with her very realistic glass eye in place. Peyton wondered if she kept the eyepatch around just for attention.
“How are we doing today?” Reese asked, laying a hand on his chest. Her fingers brushed down his rib brace and across his stomach. “Feel like eating yet? The steak will go bad if I don’t cook it.”
“I don’t know. Listen, we can’t keep doing...whatever this is.”
“What do you mean?” She looked as though she’d been slapped. She seized Peyton’s hand and towed him toward the couch. “Come talk to me. What’s wrong?”
Reese sat down on the long green couch and patted the cushion beside her. Peyton stood over her, shaking his head.
“I have a girlfriend,” Peyton said.
“I’m okay with that.”
“But she’s not. Somebody saw us together and told her about it.”
“There’s nothing to tell, though. Not so far.” Reese gave him an inviting smile. “Want there to be?”
“I think she’s breaking up with me.”
“Then she doesn’t appreciate you. She doesn’t see what I see, or she wouldn’t do that.”
“What do you see?”
“Talent. Intelligence.” Reese took his hand and pulled it toward her, uncrossing his arms. “Beauty. A bright soul lost in the darkness.”
Peyton laughed. “That’s all of us. Look, I’m sorry, but we shouldn’t hang out like this. Also, my girlfriend says she knows you...”
“She does?” Reese let go of his hand and dropped her own into her lap. “What’s her name?”
“Cassidy Dolan.”
“No!”
“So you know each other.”
“Only from high school. It’s been years. Can you give me her number? I want to call her and apologize.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Peyton said.
“Please, Peyton.” Reese stood and leaned against him, rubbing her hand against his hip. She whispered, “Don’t throw me out of your life.”
“You just got here. How attached can you be?”
“More than you know.” Reese looked up at him, traced her forefinger along the black roses on his neck, moving in as if she expected him to kiss her. “I’ll call Cassidy and settle things down. We’ll all be friends. You’ll see.”
“Maybe we should just leave things here, instead of trying to fix it.” Peyton said. “I think you should go.”
“No, Peyton, listen—”
“I mean it.”
Reese glowered up at him, her face twisted in a look of hate that was almost inhuman.
“Don’t ever say no to me,” she hissed.
“Are you serious right now?”
“Look at this!” Reese held up her left hand, palm out. The stone on her ring finger was turned inside to face him—a large black opal, trimmed in blue, in a white gold ring. For half a second, he could have sworn it was Reese’s missing eyeball, plucked from its socket and mounted on her finger.
The deep darkness inside the opal drew his gaze with a magnetic pull. He couldn’t help staring into it. It seemed impossibly dark, a lightless abyss extending into eternity. Somewhere in there, he thought, was an immense galaxy of stars, every one of them as black as death.
Peyton grew cold and weak as he stared into the bottomless darkness, but he couldn’t turn his eyes away.
“Do you see?” Reese asked.
“Yes,” he whispered, shivering. Fear was setting in now, but still he couldn’t turn away from the alluring darkness within the stone. “I see it.”
“You will trust me from now on,” Reese told him. “I know what we must do.”
“Trust you.” Peyton was shaking, the fear filling him up, and he was desperate for something he could grab for security. Reese seemed to be the right thing—she was smart, she was wise, she was here for him. “Of course. I trust you with everything.”
“And you’ll do what I say. All the time.”
“Yes.” This made him relax. If he just did whatever Reese wanted, he would be fine. He could give up all worry, doubt, fear, all the stress of making decisions, and be entirely free. It sounded like what he needed. He continued staring into the darkness, enjoying how clear his mind was becoming.
“Good boy, Peyton.” Reese lowered the ring and turned his head toward her. She kissed his lips, long and slow. “That’s a good boy.”
* * *
When her phone rang at eight p.m. on Thursday, Cassidy didn’t recognize the number, but she answered anyway.
“Hi, Cassidy?” a familiar voice said on the phone. “It’s Reese Warwick, from high school.”
“Hi, Reese,” Cassidy replied, her tone flat and hard. “You actually called.”
“Of course! I haven’t talked to you in years.”<
br />
“I thought it was by choice,” Cassidy said.
“I think we both know things got a little weird,” Reese said. “I don’t want to talk about that, okay?”
“I agree.”
“But it’s been six years! I’d really love to see you again.”
“Really?” Cassidy didn’t know why. They had never been particularly close in the first place. Reese probably just wanted to apologize in person for sleeping with Cassidy’s boyfriend, if she had a decent bone left in her.
“Of course! We have to get together. Right?”
“We don’t have to...” Cassidy said.
“My treat! I insist. Okay?”
Cassidy sighed. “I’m back at my mom’s right now. I’ve got a broken leg.”
“Oh, no! Are you all right?”
“Well, I have a broken leg, so not really.”
“Aw, you poor little...I’ll come see you! I bet I can still remember the apartment number if I try.”
“No, that’s okay,” Cassidy said. She didn’t want Reese seeing her here, looking pathetic with a broken leg and recuperating on her mom’s couch. Beneath that, she knew part of her was afraid of Reese coming back to the place where it had happened, afraid that somehow a new horror would unfold if she did.
“I really want to get together, though,” Reese insisted.
Cassidy shrugged. If she could get Reese to buy her dinner, why not? She was down to her last couple of dollars until she started working again.
“There’s a Cantonese place next to my mom’s apartment complex,” Cassidy said. “They have a really great bar. We could meet there.”
“Perfect!”
“Your treat, right?”
“Sure! You can get the next one.” Reese giggled, and Cassidy wanted to punch her through the phone. “Tomorrow night? Hey, it’ll be Friday!”
“That’s fine.”
“It’ll be so much fun! I can’t wait.”
I can, Cassidy thought as she pressed the END button.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kieran left his apartment complex by the squeaky, rusted pedestrian gate, which opened onto the sidewalk along Shallowford Road. He passed a strip mall with Cantonese, Colombian, and Indonesian restaurants, plus a supermercardo and a Vietnamese herb shop. He wore a hat pulled low over his eyes. Kieran never wore a hat, and he’d had to dig through his closet to find a rumpled Atlanta Braves cap that had belonged to his dad a lifetime ago.
He kept to the shadows as he approached the sprawling Big Village Shopping Plaza, made of several buildings scattered around an enormous parking lot. The place was half-blighted. The lighted end included a Cuban deli, a McDonald’s, a laundromat, an Indian clothing store, and other little businesses. The dark end of the shopping plaza included a hollow building with empty holes for windows and doors, which had been abandoned during construction and left alone for a couple of years. The parking lot behind the empty building was gravel instead of blacktop.
The unlit gravel parking lot was a good place to hang out. Kieran, Devin, and a couple other guys from school usually met there at night. Nobody hassled them while they drank beer and got high. They talked mostly about girls—the girls they liked, the girls with whom they’d allegedly had sex, the girls they were going to hook up with in the future. No girls ever hung out with them, and none of the guys had ever been known to have an actual girlfriend, but they pretended to believe each other’s stories rather than point out that maybe they were all just losers.
The guys would be there tonight, but Kieran didn’t want them to spot him as he passed. He had other plans.
He waited anxiously at the bus stop, trying to keep himself in the shadows, until the bus finally arrived and took him away.
Kieran brought out the pamphlet from his jeans pocket and unfolded it, looking it over for the billionth time just to keep his nervous mind occupied. Are You The Messiah? it asked. According to the questions at the back, it was possible.
He’d received the pamphlet the week before, on his way to meet the guys at the gravel parking lot. The missionaries had stood at the busy intersection in front of the shopping plaza, handing out information to pedestrians as well as motorists idling at the red light.
Kieran had watched them from a long distance as he walked toward the plaza. They didn’t give the pamphlets out to everyone, but seemed to pick and choose. A group of adolescent black guys got their attention; they skipped an elderly Vietnamese couple and a fortyish Brazilian woman with two toddlers, but ran across two lanes of the road to give a brochure to a pair of young Latina women in an old convertible before the light changed.
Kieran had kept his eyes down as he approached their corner, intending to ignore them and hurry on to meet his friends.
“Hi there,” one of them had said to him.
The missionaries were a man and woman about eight or ten years older than him, probably in their mid-twenties. The man wore a starched white shirt and a dark suit with a tie, the woman a long summer dress. They were both healthy, fit-looking people with warm smiles, exuding energy, and Kieran almost shriveled, feeling somehow pale and sickly compared to them. He knew he looked like a little gutter punk to them, with his baggy jeans and facial piercings.
“What’s up?” Kieran replied, glancing furtively between them.
“We’d just like to talk a second, if that’s okay,” the young woman said. She had longish brunette hair and a few freckles on her nose, and Kieran thought she was kind of cute, but in a pleasant way, not in a haughty I’m-far-too-hot-to-speak-to-you sort of way.
“About what?” Kieran asked. He stopped walking. Life was boring, and maybe these nutjobs could entertain him for a minute.
“We’re looking for the messiah. We think it might be you,” the young man said pleasantly. He had sandy hair, obviously styled with gel, and a carefully groomed goatee. He held out a brochure to Kieran.
“‘Are You the Messiah?’” Kieran read aloud. “Is this a joke?”
“I know it sounds wild, but it’s not,” the woman said. “The founder of our faith says the new messiah has already been born, but he or she doesn’t know it yet, and we don’t know who it is. It could be any of us.”
“Any who are young,” the young man added.
“Okay, this is a new one on me.” Kieran unfolded the brochure, glancing over the questions, the golden-spiral logo. “The Church of First Light? Never heard of it.”
“We’re a small faith, and an exclusive one,” the young woman said. “Not everyone is invited to discipleship. Only those who are called. Maybe that’s you.” She gave him another warm smile. “My name’s Deena. This is my husband, Matt.”
“I’m Kieran.” He accepted their handshakes, feeling a little weirded out by the whole situation.
“So what are you up to tonight, Kieran?” Deena asked.
“Just hanging out with my friends.”
“What does ‘hanging out’ mean for you guys?” Matt asked.
“Just...sitting around, hanging out, you know. It means there’s nothing to do but we don’t want to sit at home by ourselves like a bunch of losers.”
Both of them laughed, and it sounded genuine, and Kieran felt himself warming up to them. They just seemed nice, really nice, and it was kind of a relief to be around people like that. It made him want to be nice to them.
“Yeah, I know that feeling,” Matt said. “In high school, I did all kinds of stupid things trying to impress my friends. And girls. One time I rode my bike down the stair railing at my school, broke my arm. A lot of bad choices. A lot of things you regret later.”
“Yeah,” Kieran said, feeling a little uncomfortable.
“But that’s life!” Deena added. “You look like something’s worrying you, Kieran. Is there anything on your mind?”
“Do you ever feel like people don’t appreciate you?” Matt asked, saving Kieran from answering Deena’s question. “Do you ever feel like you have a much bigger purpose in life, but you just don’t
know what it is yet?”
“I guess,” Kieran said.
“I used to feel that way,” Matt said.
“Me, too,” Deena added, with a loving look up at her husband.
“But then somebody gave you an ad for a church, and everything changed, right?” Kieran asked sarcastically, waving the brochure.
Instead of getting angry, they both laughed again, Deena grabbing Kieran’s forearm as though for balance.
“Sorry,” she said, releasing him. “You’re so funny, Kieran.”
“He’s smart,” Matt told Deena. “You can tell.”
Kieran had ended up spending fifteen or twenty minutes talking to them, and would have stayed around even longer but he didn’t he want his friends to see him hanging out with the freako church missionaries.
They had somehow gotten him talking about everything—how he hated school, how his mom was always yelling at him, and how most people, even his own family, acted like they didn’t even see Kieran at all, as if he were a ghost.
Kieran didn’t know why he spilled so much to them. He would have never talked about this crap with Devin or anyone, but these people really seemed to care, they seemed very sympathetic to everything he said. No judgment, no lecturing him about how his problems were his own fault. He felt wrapped in warmth as he spoke to them, and strangely safe, like they wouldn’t hurt him—not something he usually felt around his family or friends.
As he finally walked away toward the dark side of the shopping plaza, Kieran found himself thinking: That’s what it would be like if I had two parents and both of them cared about me.
He didn’t want to cry, so when he reached the parking lot he immediately snatched the forty-ounce beer bottle from Devin’s hand and chugged half of it, ignoring Devin’s whining protests.
He drank as much as he could get that night, feeling dark and depressed. He kept remembering something Cassidy had said to him, when he was a toddler and she was about six or seven. They’d been having one of their frequent fights, and Cassidy had finally screamed it out of nowhere, her face red and her eyes full of tears:
“It’s your fault Dad died,” Cassidy had said. “He died because you came. Everything was good before you were born.”