by Tara Kelly
The commotion was enough to disrupt Fro and Alex’s shoving match. Zach was on his knees, completely checked out. His features twisted all up like he was about to cry.
“Where’d you get that—7-Eleven?” Fro asked me.
“Who cares? It works,” I said, pushing the button to activate it. The crackle of electricity sounded like a mini firecracker. I couldn’t feel my toes or my feet. Sheer willpower kept my hand from shaking.
Zach was rocking now, his breaths quivering and fast. A small part of me felt sorry for him. He probably couldn’t even process what was happening. In the morning, it would seem like a vivid dream.
Fro and Christian exchanged a look, but they didn’t budge.
An old pickup had pulled up to one of the station pumps. The gas station attendant came outside, his face turned in our direction.
I scanned the parking lot, looking for witnesses. A guy in a dirty red hoodie stood near the pay phone, having a cigarette. A couple was standing outside their car in front of the motel, groping each other.
“Someone’s going to call the cops,” I said. “If they haven’t already.” I’d be surprised if that were true. People came here to hide from the cops, and the attendant probably didn’t want to explain his bloodshot eyes.
After what seemed like another eternal minute, Christian and Fro each grabbed one of Zach’s arms, helping him up.
“Tell Jenika I said hi,” Christian said, his eyes fixed on Alex.
Alex watched him, his chest heaving.
They didn’t get very far before Zach sagged back to the ground, his palms hitting the pavement. He made a retching sound, and brown liquid poured from his mouth.
Megan had gotten out of my car at some point. She was watching him, her lips forming a snarl.
“You okay?” Alex asked, touching my arm.
“Get your sister home.”
I didn’t say another word. I just got in my mom’s car and left.
Chapter Sixteen
After I got home. After I let Mom squeeze me and whisper in my ear that she was never letting me out of the house again. After I’d given her the PG-13 version of what happened—the cakes were being asses to Megan. She wanted to go home. After I got in the shower and stood under the lukewarm water for a half hour, in a daze…I opened up Amber’s picture again.
She was exactly how I left her, horrific and beautiful, any useful detail obscured by phone-camera grain. Yet I kept staring, as if a hidden image would appear, giving me the key to everything.
Alex told me he’d picked up Megan from that party and went home. But going home didn’t mean he stayed there. He knew I wouldn’t think to ask that, though. Most people wouldn’t.
Chances were he was with Jenika, doing things I didn’t want to picture. But what if he wasn’t?
Despite everything I’d seen lately, Alex would always be that skinny nine-year-old who sat at my lunch table and offered his sandwich. A kid with a “heart too big for this world,” as his grandpa always said.
He might have a mountain of issues. He might be acting like someone else entirely. And they might say some psychopaths were made, not born. But Alex wasn’t a killer. He just wasn’t.
A knock sounded at my window, making me suck in my breath. One-two. One-two. One. Alex’s knock.
My muscles relaxed. It was like this every night now; even small noises made my hair stand up. I glanced at the time on my laptop—12:31. It was officially July 5,, Alex’s birthday. In the almost eight years we’d been friends, I’d never forgotten that. Until tonight.
The rain was coming down again, fat, sturdy drops that burrowed into the ground and made the air smell like soil and honey. Alex peered up at me through dripping wet bangs, his lips forming a weak smile.
“You got cameras,” he said, motioning to the roof above my room.
“They obvious?”
He shook his head. “Nah. You know me. I notice everything.”
“Come to get your hoodie?”
He looked down, his foot making dragging sounds on the grass. “I was hoping you’d talk to me.”
“Isn’t that what I’m doing?”
“Can I come in? Please?”
His gray pullover was soaked through, which meant he’d walked here. “You realize there’s a killer running around, right? Walking around by yourself in the middle of the night is a completely idiotic thing to do.”
He shrugged. “Killers break into houses, too.”
There was a part of me that wanted to step aside and let him in. Like always. But like always didn’t exist anymore.
The wind picked up again, blowing rain on my face, cooling my sauna of a room.
He came closer, putting his hands on the window ledge. “I miss you…”
A lump pushed at the back of my throat. Saying “I miss you” was so simple; it didn’t make up for what he’d done. But I needed to hear it from him like this, with fear in his eyes.
That was how I knew he meant it.
“If I let you in this room,” I said, “there’s no shutting me out.”
His eyes stayed on mine. “I know.”
I stepped aside while he hoisted himself up and climbed over the window ledge. Water from his cargo pants and pullover started dripping all over the carpet—good thing it was old and ragged.
His gaze traveled down my body and lingered on my legs. Long enough to remind me I wasn’t wearing pants and the old Filter T-shirt I had on barely covered my butt.
He averted his eyes when I grabbed a pair of homemade cutoff shorts from a pile in my closet and slid them on.
“It’s hotter than hell in here,” he said.
“Yeah, well. I haven’t really wanted to keep my window open lately.”
I grabbed a towel and threw it at him. “Take that wet crap off. I’ll get you something of Eric’s.”
I waited, scanning my room, as he stripped off his pullover and pants, leaving on a black T-shirt and a pair of blue-and-white patterned boxers.
“Um…” He held his clothes in a ball, his eyes darting from me to the floor. “What do you want me to do with these?”
“I’ll hang them up over the bathtub—the dryer will wake everyone up,” I said, grabbing them and hustling out of the room.
When I came back from tiptoeing in and out of my mom’s room, a fairly easy thing considering the volume of her snoring, Alex was standing in front of my nightstand with one of my “secret admirer’s” letters in his hands.
“How many of these have you gotten?” he asked.
“Four. I tossed one, though.” I threw a pair of black sweats at him. “Those two were taped to my window.”
“No wonder you got the cameras,” he muttered, setting it back on my nightstand and pulling the sweats on. “Have they been back since you installed them?”
I shook my head. “Haven’t gotten one since…last Saturday. They left it on one of the tables at the diner, while you were there.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Uh, you had your mind on other things.”
He turned toward my open window, staring out into the darkness.
I walked over and slammed it shut, yanking the curtains together. The breeze felt amazing against my sweaty skin, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Especially not with the cakes out looking for blood.
“We’re going to get heatstroke in here,” he said. It was something the old Alex would say—he never did like the heat much.
“So sit in front of the fan,” I said, settling on my bed and scooting up against the headboard.
He lowered himself to the floor by the window and leaned his back against my wall, draping his arms over his knees. He couldn’t have been more than a few feet away, but it felt like miles.
I swallowed back the ache in my throat. “The night of the first party, when Amber went missing. You said you picked up Megan and went home.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you stay home?” This was it. If I got even a whiff of a lie,
I’d probably lose it on him.
His lips parted, realization hitting his eyes. “You believe them?”
“Just answer me.”
He exhaled, looking down at his knees. “Jenika came by. She wanted to see how I was doing, after the fight with Matt.”
“How nice of her. She couldn’t do that before midnight?”
“She doesn’t sleep much.”
“Then what happened?” My words came out small. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what came next, but Megan said she’d heard him sneak out.
“What usually happened. We went for a walk on the Deception trail, got wasted, and finished off a jumbo bag of pretzels.”
“What usually happened?” I tilted my head back, rolling my eyes to the ceiling. “Wow. Okay.” This from a guy who, just months ago, preached to me about the effects of too much pot like he was filming a DARE commercial. “Do you have multiple personalities? I mean, how does a person change so much in a few weeks?”
“It’s not that I’ve changed…” He paused, his fingers playing with a loose thread on Eric’s sweats. “I’ve just stopped running away.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
He twisted the thread around his index finger, pulling tight. “There’s always been this part of me I don’t trust. Like, if I let it out, I won’t be able to stop myself…”
“From what?”
“From losing it…I don’t know.” He muttered the last part. “My mom never had any self-control. We’d be in the car with her and something would set her off. Me and Megan talking too loud. Someone on the road. It never took much. She’d step on the gas and drive crazy fast, like she wanted to hit something.”
He’d talked about how his mom took anything she could get her hands on and how she’d run hot and cold with them, but he’d never told me this. I couldn’t imagine what that must’ve felt like, not knowing if she’d stop. Not being able to do anything about it.
“Sometimes I feel that way,” he continued. “I want to keep going until I crash.”
Fear knotted up my stomach. “But you don’t… Something inside you must click.”
“So far. Yeah.”
“That’s the difference between you and your mom. You have that voice. I don’t think she ever did.”
He rested his head against the wall, his gaze going somewhere else. “There’s stuff I buried so deep it’s like it never happened. And then Grandpa died, and my mind wouldn’t turn off. I’d be up all night thinking.” His fingers banged an erratic beat against his knee. “Remembering all this shit…”
A shiver ran down my arms, despite the air in my room growing thicker by the minute. I waited, letting him decide if he wanted to say more.
“Most of it I can deal with,” he continued. “Move on. Hopefully forget again. But there’s this one memory… I didn’t get what was happening then. But I do now.”
My hands clutched my sheet, a million worst-case scenarios running through my mind. “What is it?”
“I can’t…”
“Why?”
He didn’t respond for a few seconds, but his lips remained parted.
“Alex?”
“If I tell you, you’ll wish I didn’t.”
“I’ll worry about me, okay?” My fingers throbbed with my pulse.
He ran his hand back and forth through his damp hair. The more he hesitated, the faster my heart pounded.
“It was when we were living with Tim in Reno. Right before Mom…dropped us off here.”
I didn’t know a lot about Tim. Only that he had a horrible temper, and he’d been busted for assault a few times. Alex said his mom always chased the bad boys, hoping one would treat her right and protect her from the world. As if that guy existed outside the Western romance books she apparently liked so much.
“Mom was working graveyard, so she was gone most nights.” He focused hard on his hands. “Tim would watch TV all night, drinking. Usually he’d pass out. But a few times…he came into our room and woke me up.”
I held my breath, hoping this wasn’t going where I thought.
“He’d make me go out into the living room, saying Megan was having nightmares. Then he’d lock the door.” His expression twisted with disgust. “When he let me back in, she’d be curled up in a ball, buried under the covers.”
He was right. I wanted him to take his words back. Tell me he wasn’t a hundred percent sure it actually happened.
“She said he told her stories about his horses. He grew up on some ranch in Sparks.” Alex shook his head, his mouth tensing. “I remember asking him if I could stay once. He laughed and said I was too old for bedtime stories. Called me a pussy.” His tapping fingers went still, and the muscles in his forearms tightened. “He was right. I never argued. I sat out in that living room like he told me to, every time.”
“You were a little kid,” I said. “You didn’t understand what was going on.”
“I knew something wasn’t right. I remember thinking it was weird he shut the door.”
“He probably would’ve hurt you, or worse.”
“So?” His face scrunched up, a shine in his eyes. “She’s my little sister.”
Everything I thought to say seemed wrong. There was just the dull thump of his fingers hitting his knee again. The wind moaning through the gaps in the window.
I got up off the bed and joined him on the floor, sliding my fingers between his. His hand remained stiff, like it was frozen solid.
“How could I forget?” he whispered.
“You said you buried a lot of things. You had to cope somehow.”
“I promised I’d take care of her. No matter what.”
“Whatever happened to Megan in that room wasn’t your fault.” I stared at his profile, hoping some part of him heard me. “It wasn’t.”
His dazed expression didn’t change. I wasn’t even sure he blinked.
“She’s never said a word about it,” he said after a minute.
“Would you?”
His eyes searched the room. “What if she doesn’t remember? If he did what I think he did, I can’t make her relive that.”
The same questions were running through my head—should he bring it up? Should he let her come to him? I didn’t have any answers. Fact was—whether she remembered or not—Megan may never tell a soul what happened in that room.
I wasn’t sure I would.
“Do you think your mom had any idea?” I asked.
“I remember telling her about Megan having nightmares and Tim going in there and kicking me out,” he said, his voice turning bitter. “Not too long after, we were on Grandma and Grandpa’s doorstep.”
Anger filled my chest. “So she knew?”
“Running was the best thing she ever did for us.” His tone was flat, like he’d rehearsed it a million times.
“No, it was the best thing for her. She could’ve—”
“Nova…” he broke in. “I can’t talk about this anymore, okay? Not tonight.”
I kept my hand in his, my mind still scrambling for the right thing to say. Why did we do that? Try to fix everything with words, despite knowing it was impossible.
I was here. That was all that mattered.
We stayed on the floor, listening to the rain fade in and out, in and out. Until it stopped altogether and the silence became overwhelming.
“Music?” I asked.
“You read my mind.”
I set my laptop on the “desk” I’d made out of cardboard boxes—the only productive thing I’d done in the weeks after Zach and I broke up—and plugged in my speakers. “Shoegaze mix?” I asked.
“Whatever you want.”
I hit play. The dreamy, rhythmic guitar of Chapterhouse’s “Autosleeper” whispered out of my speakers, just soft enough not to carry through my walls. It was like a dark lullaby. Creepy, yet oddly comforting. I’d been falling asleep to it almost every night.
“You got Chapterhouse,” Alex said, his voice close behind me.
> I pulled the Whirlpool album from a stack of import CDs I’d bought last month and turned, handing it to him. “Happy birthday.”
He took it, a flicker of a smile crossing his lips. “You always know what to get.”
“Glad that hasn’t changed…”
We stared at each other, no more than a foot apart. He had that intense look in his eyes again, like he was daring me. My stomach knotted up. I wanted to run. Hide. Stay. Touch him.
“What?” I asked.
He reached out, his fingers drawing a line down my forearm. My body jolted with an embarrassing shiver.
“Come here,” he whispered.
I let him pull me into a hug, his arms wrapping lightly around my waist. I closed my eyes, listening to his heart. It was forceful and steady, unlike mine, which was racing again.
He stroked the nape of my neck, his fingers combing through my hair. My muscles relaxed, even with the stifling heat, but I fought the urge to press closer, to tilt my head up and face him. Everything I missed about him, every bit of anger rose up in my throat, forming a tight ball.
It was hard to breathe. But it was harder to let go.
His fingers tensed against my skin. “You’re a better friend than I deserve right now,” he whispered.
It was true…and it wasn’t. I edged out of his grip, but he took his time letting me go, his hands lingering on my waist.
“Post-breakup me was pretty brutal,” I said.
“Nah. Just your nightly chocolate peanut butter milkshakes.”
“Shut up. You loved those.” I brushed past him and leaned against my wall, too keyed up to sit.
“The first ten or so. Yeah.”
I smiled because, for a few seconds, everything was normal. Our normal. Then the awkward silence returned. His fingers drumming against his legs. Me still trying to process what he told me. The day. The week.
“Do you have plans for today?” It felt so strange to ask him that. His birthday had always involved the three of us.
“Depends if you let me stay.”
“And if I don’t, you’ll what? Go over to Jenika’s? Haley’s maybe?” I regretted my words as soon as they came out. It seemed silly to bring that up now. But the hurt hadn’t gone away. Not even a little.