I laughed as I walked down the hall, turning to toss a goodbye over my shoulder. “See you next week, doc.”
“Until then, Brooklyn,” she returned, and I could hear the smile in her voice.
Maybe it was sad, because I was paying her and all, but I was pretty sure my shrink was one of the best friends I’d ever had.
Or, maybe I was crazy after all.
Chapter Sixteen
Blindsided
A week passed quietly, and I had the luxury of acting like I was a normal college student for a brief span of time. There were no more attacks, mysterious deliveries, or asthmatic phone calls. I went to my classes every day, which remarkably seemed only to be growing more boring and unchallenging as the semester progressed and my professors lost any of their prior academic verve. I completed my homework each night, which took me an hour at most, and occasionally I pulled out my textbooks and forced myself to study until my eyes were drifting closed; memorizing the names and details of every major Supreme Court case over the last five decades is enough to put anyone to sleep. Mostly, though, I just tried to take Dr. Angelini’s advice by enjoying the blissful ease of living in the present.
In time, my bruises faded, then disappeared completely. The scrapes took longer, but each day Finn helped me apply antiseptic and change their bandages; he was also a firm believer that his kiss-it-better approach had real healing properties, and he’d insist on running his mouth over each of my injuries at least once a day.
I think it actually had more to do with him getting me naked, but I wasn’t exactly complaining.
The police had completely ruled out Gordon’s involvement in my attack, leaving me slightly unsettled and more than a little confused about the identity of my mystery attacker. I’d been so ready to believe it was him – to tie a neat little bow around the case and remove all of the unease that came with knowing the person who’d tried to rape – or maybe even kill – me that night was still walking around, a free man.
Apparently, Gordon had been occupied – quite publically – at the exact time I was battling for my life in the alleyway, with his tongue stuck down the throat of a cheerleader in full view of numerous Styx patrons. There was no way it could have been him, unless he had a super power that allowed him to be in two places at once.
Somehow, I doubted that was the case.
Since the attack, a constant air of unsettlement had lingered around me, and I was left with the distinct feeling that I wasn’t a good victim – not that there was anything good about being a victim, but rather that I wasn’t processing my trauma in the normal, healthy way. I thought a lot about what Dr. Angelini had told me, and was forced to accept the fact that I was probably walking through life more than a little numb from everything I’d experienced in my relatively short twenty – nearly twenty one – years on the planet.
Twenty-one: one of the biggest rights of passage for any young adult, especially on a college campus. Somehow, it held no appeal for me. I hadn’t actually celebrated a birthday in years and I didn’t plan to even mention this one’s arrival to Finn.
Maybe a part of that was because I’d had a fake ID since I was seventeen. Or maybe it was because I’d never enjoyed or even understood the concept of birthdays. They had always seemed rather pointless to me – just another meaningless demarcation of life’s value; society’s way of portraying our headless march toward the grave as some great gift, rather than an inevitability.
I mean, when you really think about it, aren’t birthdays just an opiate for mortality? Our way of saying, Congratulations! You’ve survived yet another year in this mess we call life. Here’s a piece of cake and a few balloons for your trouble.
I’d probably felt differently as a kid. Back when my mother was alive, birthdays had been the highlight of my year – filled with color and laughter, frosting and presents. Piñatas strung up in the backyard if the weather was nice. A slightly lopsided pink princess cake, frosted to perfection. Presents piled high on the kitchen table. My mother’s voice soaring above the rest, as the partygoers chorused in time…
Happy Birthday, Dear Brooklyn…
Those days had come to a quick end after she’d died. I couldn’t remember my seventh birthday. I knew it had been spent in the foster home, but like so many of my memories from that time, it was locked somewhere deep and unnavigable within my psyche.
Dr. Angelini told me that I couldn’t force the memories to reveal themselves, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying. When I’d close my eyes and turn my thoughts inward, I could sense the memories there – as if they were hidden in the shadows of my mind behind a thick gauzy curtain. The answers I wanted lurked just out of reach, and sometimes I even thought I’d caught a glimpse of one behind that opaque mental drape – a flash of color, a faintly reminiscent scent, a vaguely familiar face.
I wanted to reach into my head and tear down that curtain. Hell, I would’ve taken a crowbar to my memories to pry them out, if I’d thought it would do me any good. But, since that didn’t seem like a viable option, they remained frustratingly inaccessible to me.
I’d taken a biology course during my first semester of college – an odious and inescapable science breath requirement – and I remembered the days I’d spent hovering over the microscope, turning dials and adjusting light intensities as I tried to bring the microorganisms on my slides into view. The other kids in my class hadn’t batted an eye at the task, effortlessly illuminating their samples. Try as I might, though, I could never get the damn thing to focus.
Sadly, looking into the contents of my own brain was strangely reminiscent of those infuriating days in the biology lab.
Finn would have understood – if I’d told him, that is. I think he knew there was something going on with me, something more than just the attack or Gordon’s supposed innocence.
He would have been kind. Sympathetic. Helpful, even.
But how do you tell the person you love that you don’t even know your own mind? That there are parts of yourself, aspects of your soul – your innermost thoughts and memories – that you’ve blocked out or simply forgotten? That your brain doesn’t function normally – and that maybe it never will?
Things were good between us – great, actually. I was happy. Even more shockingly, I seemed to make Finn happy too. And, perhaps selfishly, I didn’t want to undermine that happiness. I didn’t want him to look at me differently, to treat me differently. So I held back.
At least, that’s the reason I gave myself to excuse my nondisclosure.
Because, just maybe, if I were really being honest, there was the inescapable fact that I myself wasn’t ready to face the dark questions that had begun to swirl through my mind – a violent maelstrom of suspicion and foreboding and inconceivable possibilities.
Sometimes the mind puts things together in an instant; a hundred pieces of the puzzle that have been lying scattered across the floor suddenly snap together like magic and the whole picture comes swiftly clear. Until that moment of clarity, though, you stare at those goddamn pieces so long they begin to blur out of focus, feeling like you must be missing those vital pieces that hold all the answers.
The truth was, on all those quiet nights of normalcy, my mind had begun to wander over all of the things that had been happening to me recently. I stared at all those pieces of the puzzle, lying on my carpet with seemingly no connectable edges or even a discernable pattern amongst them. I thought about the things I’d dismissed as nothing at the time, shrugged off as no big deal or stuffed down into the corners of my mind that I avoid looking at too closely, for fear of their contents.
But I couldn’t ignore the fact that there had been entirely too many strange incidents lately to be merely coincidental. Not anymore.
I’d sat on my rooftop looking up at the stars – late autumn constellations had always been my favorite, though I wasn’t sure why – and thought about the attack. And then, almost involuntarily, my mind shifted to examine all the anonymous phone calls I’d rece
ived.
Then, the eerie sensation I’d experienced more than a few times of being watched as I walked home or made my way across campus alone.
Then, the bizarre and still-unexplained black rose delivery – an apparent harbinger of my death.
Then, finally, things I’d never even spent a second thought on began to pop into my head, as if my brain were making quantum leaps from one seemingly random occurrence to another, too fast for me to keep up or consciously seek out the next part of the puzzle.
Snap, snap, snap, the pieces flew together, and a picture began to form…
The time I’d come home from class about a month ago to find the books on my desk slightly askew, as if someone had bumped into the furniture and accidentally knocked them out of place.
The way my appointment book, where I’d meticulously scribed all of my academic assignments, social invitations, and random thoughts, had disappeared right out of my backpack while I was in the student center killing time between classes a few weeks ago.
And, lastly, a man standing in the dark, leaning against his motorcycle and smoking a cigarette. Watching me as I sat on my rooftop in the pre-dawn hours of a chilly August night.
Could it all be connected?
Alone, none of these instances seemed like a big deal, but together? If I looked at the whole picture, if I considered them as one linked series of events, rather than single, isolated incidents…
The puzzle, though still missing some vital sections, was beginning to come together as a single, clear image: Someone was stalking me. Watching me. Trying to hurt me.
Was I crazy and overreacting? Was I paranoid?
Probably.
But once I’d opened my eyes to the possibility that this was all the work of one individual, one person who might want to hurt or scare me, I couldn’t unsee the connections my mind had forged. I couldn’t escape the ever-building, unshakeable belief that I was in danger. I could feel it in my bones, like a sixth sense or some innate defense mechanism; every atom in my body was screaming at me to run, hide, take shelter somewhere far away.
I didn’t know what – who – I was supposed to be running from, but from that moment on, I began to live my life waiting for the other shoe to drop. Finn knew; he could read me too well. We were lying in my bed one night, about a week after the attack. The sheets were a tangled mess around our bodies and he was strumming his guitar softly, humming under his breath as he played.
“You okay?” he asked when his fingers had settled into stillness.
“Fine,” I lied, staring up at the painted stars on my ceiling.
“You can tell me, you know.” He set aside his guitar, rolling over so we were lying face to face. “Anything.”
“I know,” I leaned in to kiss him softly, possessively, as was becoming my habit. I’d never had the opportunity to be soft, unhurried, with someone before; never experienced that gentle intimacy and familiarity of routine. It was so new, to kiss just for the sake of kissing; a kiss that leads nowhere, with no further intentions than to meet that person’s lips with your own, simply because you can.
“I’ll tell you soon. Promise,” I assured him. There was no use lying and pretending that everything was fine. He’d see straight through me, as he always had.
His brow furrowed and he opened his mouth, as if in preparation of saying something important. He stared at my face so intently I began to grow uneasy. After a small infinity of silence, though, his mouth snapped closed and he swallowed roughly, his eyes as distant as his thoughts.
Whatever he’d been about to tell me, he’d evidently decided to keep to himself. And as much as I would’ve liked to pry the thoughts from his lips, I knew that would be utterly hypocritical. After all, I was keeping my own secrets – who was I to force him to share his own before he was ready?
“I have a surprise for you,” he said instead, reaching over to grab an envelope from the nightstand. The playful light came back into his eyes and the tense moment passed as soon as he placed it in my hands.
Finn’s ‘surprise’ consisted of two tickets to the Charlottesville County Fair, an annual mecca of amusement rides, food stands, and carnival games that passed through the area for two weeks every November. The passes were for tomorrow – my birthday.
He’d known, without me ever mentioning a thing. I shouldn’t have even been surprised.
“Lexi?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at him.
He laughed. “Yeah, she did me the honor of informing me that my girlfriend is a bit birthday-phobic. But I already knew it was your birthday.” His voice was smug.
“How?” I asked skeptically.
He shrugged, grinning in an infuriatingly cute way. “I know everything.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, but couldn’t hold onto my mock anger when he pounced on me and began assaulting my sides with relentless tickle torture. I writhed on the bed, desperate to escape and borderline hyperventilating at his onslaught. Only when tears were leaking from the corners of my eyes and my threats had escalated beyond simple bodily harm, to promises of fatal retribution did he release me.
“I…hate….you,” I gasped for breath between each word, rolling as far away from him on the bed as I could get.
“Liar,” he laughed, rolling on top of me so I was pinned beneath him.
I glared at him, my chest still heaving as I pulled in gulps of air.
He looked down at me and kissed the tip of my nose.
“Happy Birthday, Bee,” he murmured, before his lips descended on mine and I forgot all about being mad at him.
***
“Come on,” I begged.
“No.”
“Finn!” I huffed.
“Absolutely not.”
“Pleaseeee.” I tried out my best pleading puppy-dog eyes.
“Nope.”
“But it’s my birthday.”
“You hate your birthday.”
Clearly, my attempts to appeal to his soft side weren’t working.
“I didn’t realize I was dating such a sissy,” I scoffed, changing tactics. When in doubt, threaten the manhood; they crumble every time.
“Did you just call me a sissy?” He asked, incredulous. “I thought we were celebrating your twenty-first birthday, not your fifth.”
“HA! If anyone’s a baby, it’s you. You’re the one who won’t even go on the Ferris wheel!”
“I don’t do heights.” The finality in his tone was unmistakable.
“Wow, I’m seeing a whole new side to badass Finn Chambers,” I laughed.
He glared at me, then turned to stare at the massive Ferris wheel with apprehension clear on his face. It probably wasn’t helping my case that the ride looked like it had been built about a century ago, with rust staining the metal beams, and bolts that squealed with each rotation of the wheel.
“Okay, fine,” I sighed, resigned. “I’ll go by myself. You can watch me.”
Popping up onto my tiptoes, I pressed a quick kiss to Finn’s cheek, before turning and dashing for the entry line. Handing over three tickets to the man at the entrance, I stood on the platform at the base of the wheel, waiting for my turn to be loaded into one of the passenger cars. I’ll admit, I was a little disappointed that Finn had refused to ride with me, but I wasn’t going to miss out on my favorite ride just because I had to fly solo.
I’d always loved the Ferris wheel.
Since we were about sixteen, each fall Lexi and I had made it our mission to find a local fairground where we could pet goats and llamas in the petting zoo, overload on sugary cotton candy and funnel cakes, and ride the rickety, structurally-questionable carnival rides until we were ready to throw up. I’d always loved the rush of adrenaline an amusement park ride or roller coaster brings; they were almost as thrilling as my late-night motorcycle rides.
I couldn’t remember the first time I’d ridden a Ferris wheel. I knew my love of the contraptions dated back further than my trips with Lexi to the fair, but for the life of me I couldn’t
recall the exact details of that maiden voyage up into the air. I’d been young, I knew that much.
I’d always just assumed I had been with my mother.
Regardless, the prospect of getting back on one was too tempting to pass up, with or without my – sissy – boyfriend with me. And, despite my disappointment, I couldn’t possibly be upset with him after everything he’d done for me today.
I’d woken later than usual; the sun streaming through my windows was bright, indicating that it was well into midmorning. The first thing my half-asleep mind had registered were the rose petals scattered across the pillow next to my head, their drugging floral scent seeping into my consciousness and pulling me fully awake.
Pink, red, white – there’d been petals everywhere, strewn in a pathway that led across my bedspread, down onto the floor, and out through my doorway. Stumbling from my bed and rubbing the sleep from my bleary eyes, I’d followed the trail of petals out into the hallway and finally to the kitchen beyond.
The room had been utterly transformed.
Hundreds of multicolored balloons had been strung up from the ceiling and blanketed the hardwood floors. Red and white streamers had hung from one corner of the room to the other, so thick I couldn’t quite make out the skylights above my head. A huge sign was taped across the wall opposite the stove, reading ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY BROOKLYN’ in a familiar, sloping masculine hand. The kitchen island had been piled high with boxes, sloppily wrapped in striped blue paper with clumps of translucent tape sticking out in every direction – a clear sign that they’d been wrapped by a man’s unpracticed fingers.
An unstoppable, incandescent grin had spread across my face at the sight, even as tears began to prick at my eyes; it was more than anyone had ever done for my birthday.
“Happy birthday, princess.”
He’d been standing by the stove, leaning casually against the kitchen island. His smile had nearly matched my own – as if the excitement and near-childlike sense of glee emanating off me was infectious.
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