by Minard, Tori
“It’s not safe for you to be out here by yourself,” she said in an ominous tone. “And you could do a retreat at a nice resort on the coast.”
“Mom, I know how to take care of myself. I’ve got my mountain woman knife and everything. Plus I’ve got the pistol Dad gave me.” And I knew how to use it. Dad and I had spent many hours at the shooting range practicing.
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” she said, giving me the look again. “You know how I hate guns.”
Nothing I said was going to make her feel good about this. “You’re going to have to trust me. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“We’re going to visit you every weekend, you know. Otherwise we’ll worry too much.”
I set my case on the faded, brown couch and turned to make another trip to the car. “Just call first to make sure I’m here.”
With any luck, she’d get royally sick of driving up here every single weekend and give me some distance. It would probably take her a few months to reach that point, though.
She took my hand as I passed her. “You don’t have to quit school, you know. You could go closer to home.”
“Yeah, I know. But this is what I want. I need some time to think about things.” I drew away.
She trailed after me. My parents still thought I was going to graduate pre-med and go on to some prestigious medical school. They were doctors and that meant I should be one as well. Growing up, that had been my dream too, but now it was one more thing I wasn’t so sure about. Maybe it had never been my dream, just one I’d taken on out of guilt.
Art, you know, is only for flakes. Sensible people make sensible plans, like becoming a doctor. They go to prestigious, private colleges like Pioneer and when they graduate, they’ve already been accepted into a well-regarded medical school. They sure don’t hide out in an old cabin on a mountainside. They don’t need to find themselves because they already know who they are.
I was not a sensible person.
“I hope that fiasco with Barry didn’t make you doubt yourself,” she said. “You’re a bright girl and you have a great future ahead of you. Don’t let the stupid things he and Skylar did ruin your chances for your career.”
“Mom.” I heaved a sigh an awful lot like hers. “I’m not ruining anything, okay? This is temporary.”
Right. Temporary. And it wasn’t guilt or shame or even worry I felt. Nope. I had every confidence this cabin experiment would turn out well and I’d prove my parents wrong.
Chapter 3
Overdose
Gage:
I didn’t take my mother’s warning seriously. That Deal was fifteen years old already and I saw no reason to think it was coming due tonight. Why would it? There was nothing special about this evening, nothing unusual about the party we were going to or the people who’d be there. Just business as usual.
Except maybe that the party had a Bollywood theme and there were rumors they might have a Bengal tiger there. Maybe an elephant. And dancers, lots of Bollywood-style dancers. It sounded like a cross between a three-ring circus and an Indian epic movie.
But so what? Extravagant parties weren’t that remarkable in my world.
The goal for this evening was to put in an appearance, make the rounds, then go cut loose with Jer. A fairly standard night for both of us.
Yet when I pulled up in the underground parking lot of Jeremy’s place, something dark and uneasy moved through my belly. I took the stairs up to the courtyard garden, where I paused and stared up at his apartment building for a moment, trying to shake off the mood. He’d once owned a house, but his career had hit a low point with all his using, and he was renting an apartment now.
It was a nice enough place, but not even close to the luxury of the house he’d owned. The rooms were smaller and not as high-end. Jeremy didn’t seem to care. He’d trash the place just like he had the house and every other home he’d ever occupied as long as I’d known him. His home was a party pad, and that was the extent of it.
I could see his apartment windows through thick fringes of palm fronds in the landscaped courtyard. The lights were on in his place and everything looked fine. Normal. My mom had just freaked me out with all that crap she threw at me.
Straightening my shoulders, I dashed up the stairs to his door on the second floor and rang the bell. No-one answered, so I rang again. Heavy metal thundered right through the walls into the outside air. Someone had to be home.
But my second ring went unanswered. I banged my fist on the door. Nothing.
Maybe he was on the toilet. Pulling out my phone, I dialed him. His phone seemed to ring forever before finally sending me to his voicemail.
Damn it. We were going together so we could do the rounds later, when we’d gotten suitably bored and needed to find a better time. He knew I was coming over to pick him up. What the fuck was he doing up there?
Knowing him, he was banging a couple of chicks and had forgotten about the time. I shook my head and tried the doorknob. It was open. That was weird in itself. I tried to tell myself there was nothing ominous about it; he’d just forgotten to lock up.
“Jer?” I stuck my head in the foyer.
The music was so loud he wasn’t likely to hear me, so I shut the door and walked into his living room. Empty beer bottles littered the carpet. No Jer and no girls.
That cold, heavy feeling snaked through my gut again. Even with all the noise from the music, there was something quiet about the place. Something unmoving and still. Empty.
I strode through the first floor rooms, all of them unoccupied. Take-out containers all over the place, still half full of food. The place smelled. Stank, actually. He had a cleaning lady, but apparently she hadn’t come by yet.
Taking the stairs two at a time, I charged up to his room. The door stood open; the lights were on. Dirty clothes covered the floor and the chair by the window. Clean underwear and T-shirts spilled out of his dresser drawers. The room stank of old sweat and alcohol. It smelled just as bad as downstairs, although I couldn’t see any rotten food laying around.
“Jer? You here?” I called.
No answer.
The door to his bathroom stood open and the light was on inside. I could hear this steady drip-drip-drip sound, like someone hadn’t turned the tap all the way off. Drip. Drip. Drip. And for some reason I can’t explain, that sound told me everything. It told me things I didn’t want to know.
My hands felt like ice blocks hanging from the ends of my arms. I forced myself to walk into the bathroom. Part of me was hoping, almost begging Fate that my worst suspicions weren’t true as I moved with stiff legs through the open doorway.
His apartment had one of those modern sculptural tubs, a freestanding white one in an oval shape. It had always reminded me of a serving dish, the kind you fill with vegetables.
Jeremy lay in the tub. His eyes were half closed like he was going to sleep, but his face was blue. Greasy, unwashed blond hair lay flat on his scalp. The sculptural tap sticking out of the marble wall over the tub dripped water into the basin, one drop at a time. Drip. Drip. Drip.
One arm sprawled out over the edge of the tub, a piece of surgical hose still tied around his bicep. On the marble floor under his lax fingers lay a syringe. Empty. Next to it was an open bottle of expensive Scotch whiskey with half the liquor gone.
I rushed to him, as if hurrying could save him. But I already knew he was dead. I knew it before I touched his cold skin, before I felt the chill of the water, before I felt the side of his neck for a pulse.
“Jesus, Jer,” I whispered. “What the fuck did you do to yourself?”
I pressed my fingertips to his neck again, just in case he did have a pulse and I’d missed it. But there was nothing. His body felt strange and I couldn’t hear him breathing. How long had he been sitting there? It had to have been a while, considering how cold the water was. Jer wasn’t the kind to sit in a tub of cold water on purpose.
I glanced at the counter. A small, orange prescripti
on bottle lay on its side, the cap off, a couple of little white pills spilling out onto the gray marble counter.
Memories flooded me. All the times we’d partied together. The first time I’d ever shot heroin into a vein—Jer had shown me how to do it. Long nights talking and drinking, when secrets came out, ugly secrets I sometimes wish I’d never heard.
My skin prickled all over. There was this strange, heavy feeling in the air, almost like it was thicker than normal or pressing down on me. My head seemed to tingle inside.
Someone was in the room with me. I didn’t feel alone anymore. The sense of dread I’d had before entering the bathroom intensified until it was almost unbearable. I swallowed hard and glanced reluctantly at my friend’s corpse.
Naturally, he hadn’t moved. Not at all. His cold blue eyes stared at the wall, glazed over and gone. There was nothing alive in him. Nothing at all. The sense of presence didn’t come from Jeremy’s body. It was something else.
An eerie sort of whispering came from the air, just beyond the edge of my hearing. As if someone were muttering one or two rooms over. The air seemed colder, too, as if the air conditioning had somehow dropped the temperature twenty degrees in an instant. I went back into the bedroom, but it was empty.
I needed to call someone about Jeremy. 911 or something. But not in the bathroom. Not in the bedroom, either. The atmosphere up here was growing denser and colder by the moment.
The presence seemed to watch me as I descended the stairs. I could feel its gaze on the back of my head. Was it him? Was my mother right?
Warm California air engulfed me as soon as I left the apartment, yet it brought little relief. I hate to admit it—I like to think I’m pretty much able to handle anything—but my hands shook a little and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I dragged my phone out again and called 911. Maybe my mom was right for once. Maybe he had been here.
Was this my fault, then? Was Jeremy dead because of me? Maybe if we’d never been friends, he wouldn’t have OD’d. Maybe he’d never have used at all.
He used for reasons that had nothing to do with you.
Still. If it weren’t for me—for The Deal—he might still be alive. Maybe the people who’d hurt Jer when we were kids would have hurt me instead. Maybe Jeremy would have been okay.
The thing, the presence, had followed me out into the night, yet it seemed weaker outside. I breathed easier and the hair on my neck settled.
I finished my call and stuck the phone in my pocket, glanced around, tried to get my bearings. Jeremy was dead. Dead. My best friend was dead and there seemed to be some kind of supernatural element to his death.
If my mom wasn’t crazy, then whatever had killed Jer was after me and anyone close to me.
Jesus. What about my other friends? I had to find a way to protect them.
Chapter 4
House Party
Gage:
Central Oregon is dry. I’d heard that but didn’t really believe it until I attended this house party in Sunriver and saw it for myself. Nothing but rolling red hills covered in sagebrush, rabbit brush, and juniper trees. The only grass showed up in anemic little clumps, the blades thin and wispy and barely-green.
House parties are supposed to be non-stop raucous fun, at least among those people I used to hang with. I wasn’t having any fun and I needed to decide what to do about that.
I stood in my shirtsleeves on the flagstone patio of my host’s rented vacation house and stared at the thin dusting of early November snow draped over the arid landscape. My breath made white clouds in the air in front of me. I should have been cold but I couldn’t really feel it. Too wasted.
Jer would have been proud. Here I was, getting higher than the space shuttle, hanging out with a bunch of people I didn’t even like, in classic Jeremy Lindstrom style. Party on, dude.
For somebody stoned out of his mind, I was feeling remarkably bitter. Jeremy’s death had left me like that. I couldn’t get past the fact he’d left me. I couldn’t get past the fact I hadn’t saved him. I’d let him go, let him drink and drug himself to death and if I were honest with myself I’d helped him on his way.
Blaming his death on the devil was a sad cop-out. The fact was, I was responsible.
There were times I’d loaned him some shit from my own stash when I should have withheld it. Times when I should have found something else for us to do. But I’d been too busy doing my own partying to pay enough attention to Jer’s problems.
Yeah, I had tried, along with some of his other friends, to intervene. But none of us had tried hard enough. Especially me. I was his partner in crime, so how hard was I going to push him to stop? Now he was gone and I knew it was my fault.
Maybe it was my fate to hurt anyone who got close to me. Jeremy had been the first, but that was probably because I was only now really getting established as a star. He had told my mother he would only take me—or those near me—when I was at the height of my fame.
I liked to think I had more fame, more work in me, but maybe not. Maybe this was it, and now I had to pay the price for my success. Or my friends did, at any rate. Others would probably follow Jeremy. And how was I dealing with his death-by-partying? By partying some more. Drinking and doping were the only ways I could seem to forget.
Why should innocent bystanders have to pay for my dumbshit mistake? It hadn’t even been my decision. It was my mom’s. Why should Jeremy die because she was too ambitious for her own good?
Why couldn’t I forget this shit no matter how much crap I dumped into my body?
Maybe it was because ever since Jeremy’s death, that thing had followed me around. It would turn up at odd moments, invading my sense of solitude, ruining my peace of mind. What little peace of mind I had, at any rate.
I could sense it now. Watching me.
I snorted. Whatever. It wouldn’t find anyone to kill here, as long as it was only picking on people I cared about. No-one here fit that description. Not even me.
Maybe, just maybe, that was the real reason behind all the current partying. Avoidance. These were people I didn’t care for, people who weren’t really my friends. They were safe. As long as I stayed wasted, stayed with people who didn’t matter to me, nobody would get hurt.
Behind me in the sprawling contemporary house, music thumped and people whooped with laughter. I wasn’t feeling it. I’d had all the fun at this party that I could stand.
The sliding glass door slid open and a girl tottered out on heels so high they could double as stilts. Her skirt was so short every time she bent over you could see her pussy. She wasn’t wearing any panties. I knew all this because all yesterday and last night, she’d made sure to bend over as often as she could manage, usually pointing her ass at me when she did it.
Her name was Violet something-or-other, a model and aspiring actress with five pounds of make-up and fake eyelashes that would have looked more realistic on a giraffe. She batted them at me and leaned on my arm, licking her glossy upper lip as a cloud of her perfume rose up to choke me.
“Hey, Gage. What’re you doing out here all by yourself?”
“Getting some fresh air.” Getting away from her pussy displays.
She was only one of many women who’d been throwing themselves at me ever since I’d arrived. A couple of years ago, I’d have been all over that. Now I just wanted to get the hell away.
Something in me had broken when Jeremy died. This shit wasn’t fun anymore. So what was I doing here? Why was I hanging around with a bunch of assholes I didn’t like, didn’t even really know, didn’t want to know? There had to be something better than this.
Jeremy was gone, and...fuck. The only person in my life who really meant anything to me was my mother. I didn’t have any real friends. Not these assholes, for sure. You know something is severely wrong with your life when your only friends are people you can’t stand.
It was safer for everyone if I kept away from people I could truly care about. Kept myself distant from everyone,
relating only through booze and drugs. Sometimes, though, the emptiness of this shit just got to me and I couldn’t take it anymore.
All at once, the only thing I could think about was getting away. Going somewhere I could be alone—really alone. Somewhere people weren’t totally wrapped up in their next high.
“We missed you in there.” Violet pressed her abundant, possibly fake, tits against my arm.
I didn’t say anything. It was around noon, I guessed, although I wasn’t sure. I’d been up since some time the day before and my sense of time was hazy. But if I left now, I should be able to make it back to the Willamette Valley before dark. Maybe.
It was worth a try, because I didn’t think I could stand spending another night with this crowd. I could hole up in a hotel for a day or two before catching a flight back to L.A.
“Come back inside. I’ll show you my room.” Violet grabbed my crotch.
“Jesus, Violet.” I shoved her hand away.
She pouted. It wasn’t attractive. “Everybody said you like to have a good time. They said you’re fun. But you’ve been totally boring all weekend.”
“I am completely and utterly boring,” I said.
“Let me show you how to have a good time.” She went for the crotch again.
“No, thanks. Maybe some other time.” I swiveled and made for the house.
Pot smoke filled the air of the huge living room. There was a cloud of it clinging to the thick wooden beams of the cathedral ceiling, and that was the mildest of the substances people were passing around. Two guys and a couple of girls were doing lines of coke laid out on the chunky stone coffee table, and someone in the corner was shooting H into his femoral artery. He had his jeans down around his knees and didn’t give a shit who was watching.
I couldn’t feel the bitterness anymore. A weird sense of detachment had come over me, like I was somewhere outside of the scene instead of in it. My body felt far away, my consciousness sort of floating over my own head.