“Why the song?” I blurted. “Do you play the piano?”
“No.” His mouth hardened, but I could see the hint of amusement that flashed in his eyes. He thought it was funny that I was already ignoring his warning. “I used to, a little, but not anymore.”
“What’s the other song?”
“That’s not important right now.”
“What do they mean?”
“Whatever I want them to mean.” The smile was back on his face. It was sharp and disarming, cutting right through me until my hand rose of its own accord, pressing against the ache in my chest.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Tell me anything.”
“Who I am isn’t important, but I will tell you what I am, because that has everything to do with you.” He paused, waiting for something.
“Anything,” I repeated. “Just tell me anything.”
“I’m your new shadow, Mika. I’m the hand that’s going to smother every match you decide to light. I’m the harness you’re going to feel at every bridge you decide to jump off. I’m the shield between you and every wall you try to hit your head against. I’m your new conscience, because your old one is fucked.”
It was time to go. I could hear the bell ringing and Trip was still waiting outside. I was sure that I had stolen his appointment. I forced myself to my feet, holding onto the arm of the chair for support before I managed to muster enough anger to straighten my spine.
I was terrified. Not of the depths he was obviously willing to go to in his mission to save me, but of the concept of being saved. I wasn’t ready. I probably never would be.
“You’re nobody to me,” I said, staring directly into his eyes, relaying the message that needed to be relayed. Tossing all of his beautiful words straight back into his beautiful face. “You’re just a passing train, tumbleweed in the breeze, a face in a sea of faces. I have no future, and nothing you do is going to change that fact. I’ll destroy whatever I want to destroy, burn whatever I want to burn, jump off whatever I feel like jumping off, talk to whatever boy I want to talk to, fuck whoever I—”
He was suddenly before me, his hand wrapping over the lower half of my face, his body pressing mine into the door.
“Stop,” he murmured, his eyes a frightening shade of molten blue, as though there was a metal inside that melted in blue flame. “If you think I’m doing this for no reason, you’re delusional. If you think I’m going to let you spit in my face and climb into the back of someone’s truck …” he dipped forward, his head lowering beside mine, his words whispered over my ear, “you’re about to learn your second lesson.”
“What’s that?” I was surprised that my words had sounded unaffected, because the feel of his breath on my neck was pooling heat through my body, making my breath sound uncomfortably loud to my own ears.
I shouldn’t be reacting like this.
“There’s no point in giving it all away.” He sounded amused again, and I felt, for the first time, an answering spark of satisfaction.
I wanted to push forward, to wrap my arms and legs around him and force as much emotion out of him as I could. It seemed fair, since he was the only person capable of pulling emotion out of me.
“Well then, it seems you’re all talk, Mr. Fell.” I sucked in a quick breath and slid away from him, opening the door and slamming it behind me.
Trip was gone, but I didn’t linger over that fact. I hurried to Spanish, keeping my head down to mask the fact that blood had flooded to my face, singeing my cheeks. I slipped into my seat, ignoring Mrs. Ruiz, who was trying to divide the class into study pairs. When someone fell into the seat next to me, I turned my face toward the window, intent on replaying every single one of Nicholai’s words in my mind until they started to make some kind of sense.
“Hey triste chica,” a male voice murmured, an arm landing over the back of my chair.
I turned my head, finding my face a few inches from Marcus’s. He was grinning, and I couldn’t help my answering smile.
“Hey,” I said, as he eased back slightly.
“Why is Trip staring at you?” he asked, jerking his head to the side.
“Trip?” I glanced in the direction that Marcus had indicated, finding the boy with the collar-tattoo sitting a few rows behind us. He was ignoring his partner, a small girl with olive skin and dark eyes. He looked pissed, his eyes burning as they moved from my face to Marcus’s face, and back again.
“See?” Marcus poked my side, swinging in his chair to face the front again, giving Trip his back. “I wasn’t even aware that you two knew each other. I wasn’t aware that you really knew anyone. You’re kind of the resident zombie, these days.”
“I know all these kids,” I defended, waving my hand around the room. “I just don’t remember meeting you before. Or Trip, for that matter.”
“Hate to break it to you, Grey, but we’ve been in the same class since the start of the year.”
I rolled my eyes, turning my back on Trip as well, facing the board again, where Mrs. Ruiz was scribbling a list of activities. “The year only just started, Marcus.”
“Oh yeah?” He grinned. “You wanna play it that way?”
“I’ll play it any way I want to play it.”
“Balls of steel.”
I frowned. “Ovaries of steel?”
“I was referring to myself,” he returned, puffing his chest up and causing me to laugh. “A guy needs balls of steel to talk to you. Anyway, now that the nice-talk is out of the way …” he allowed the sentence to trail off.
“I have no idea why Trip is staring at us.”
“You.”
“Us.”
“So it has something to do with Duke, then?” Marcus mused, tapping his chin. “I wouldn’t get in the middle of that sandwich, chica. Duke is bad news; Trip is bad news … two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“What does make a right?”
“Me and some cool people, Friday night. I’ll invite Jean, too. You like Jean, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I like Jean,” I admitted.
“So you’ll come?” He picked up a pen, copying the exercises from the board in a way that seemed to be deliberately casual.
“I guess.”
He grinned, still looking at his page. “Good. Give me your number, I’ll text you the address.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“You can just come with me after school then.”
If you think I’m going to let you spit in my face and climb into the back of someone’s truck … you’re about to learn your second lesson. Nicholai’s words rushed back to me, and despite the fact that I was determined to fight his self-appointed command over my life, I still didn’t want to land Marcus in trouble … But Marcus didn’t have a truck. He had a sedan. And it was yellow. Hardly threatening.
“Sure,” I said, finally making a move to copy down the exercises on the board.
9
Dark Hearts
I was putting off seeing Duke, wary of Nicholai’s warning, though I didn’t allow him to think that he was the reason. I made a point to mention that the guy who sometimes picked me up was getting his truck fixed. It was a lie, but lies were made to be told to people like Nicholai. At least that’s how I saw it. Since it was Wednesday—his last day of the week at school—he didn’t push the issue. I wanted to spend the whole hour pelting him with obnoxious questions, but he put a stop to that in his own unique way. Every time I opened my mouth, he reached into the bag beneath his desk and handed me a book.
When I asked about his strange tattoos, he handed me Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.
When I asked about Jennifer, he handed me The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
When I asked about his fellowship at Stanford, he handed me Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
When I laughed about his ‘old-man’ book collection, he handed me The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
I read only a page of each, until Th
e Trial by Franz Kafka. I couldn’t put that one down, and I didn’t want to leave it behind in his office once the bell sounded. He glanced up from his laptop at the sound, blinking at me as though only just realising that I had been quiet for the better part of half an hour. His eyes flicked to the cover of the book clutched to my chest, and he burst into sudden laughter. I didn’t understand the joke, but I didn’t need to. All I needed to understand was that he was laughing at me.
“Of course you’d pick that one,” he muttered, shaking his head. “You help your own case about as much as he does.”
There was a genuine spark in his eye, appreciation and exasperation mixed together. I wanted to shove his book into my bag and leave, as though stealing it would teach him a lesson, but he reached over the desk and plucked it out of my hands before I had the chance. He slid it onto the bookshelf behind him, between the pamphlets on suicide and pregnancy. I’d have to go to his stupid advice shelf for salvation. I was sure that he did it on purpose.
I fled his office, pressing my teeth together until my jaw began to ache. An itch was sparking in my limbs, crawling up to the back of my neck and building, forming a tight ball of tension. I wanted to break something, or fight someone. Nicholai was trying to keep me in line, I knew that. He was even stepping outside of the lines to do it … but it wasn’t going to work.
It wasn’t enough.
There was something inside me. Some kind of disgust, or contempt. For myself, or for the rest of the world—I wasn’t sure which, but I knew that I needed to do something about it. I needed to let it out, otherwise it would consume me. I ran to my Chemistry classroom and waited by the door for Mrs. Hawkin, cornering her before she could enter the classroom.
“I feel sick,” I blurted. She only blinked at me, so I tried again. “I feel really sick. Can I go and see the nurse, please?”
She nodded, her eyes flitting over my face nervously. I was sure that my eyes were brighter than usual, shining with the mania that I could feel kicking up inside my chest. The restless feeling was building with every second. I muttered a thanks to Hawkin and then turned on my heel, hurrying back down the hall. I made it out to the parking lot just as Nicholai exited the building, a soft-cover briefcase hanging off his arm. I quickly ducked behind the nearest vehicle—an open-top sports car, old enough to have been affordable by someone who had any kind of mechanical skills. I watched as Nicholai unlocked one of the larger cars and got behind the wheel. For some reason, I had expected a BMW, or a Mercedes. Instead, it was just a big, black Ford. It wasn’t even a new truck.
I watched him drive out of the lot before I straightened, and then something pressed against my back, forcing me to stumble into the sports car. I quickly turned, not as surprised to see Trip as I should have been.
“Hey,” I said blandly.
His eyebrows arched a little, his arms folding over his chest. I watched as the muscles in his forearms bunched and released. He was angry about something.
“I just caught you messing with my car, and that’s all you have to say?” he growled.
“I was just …”
He shook his head, visibly shedding the anger right there in front of me. “I meant what I said before, pup. The more Dick takes from me, the more I take from him.”
“Okay.” I was getting a little bit sick of everyone talking about Duke. Not that I was feeling defensive of him, I was just sick of everyone mentioning him, like I needed to know all of their opinions about him. Like it was my business for some reason. “And?”
“And …” he smirked, his Adam’s apple bobbing against the tattoo that coiled around his neck. “I’m curious … why are you with Dick, huh? You seem like a good girl.”
I flicked my eyes to his tattoo, examining the design for a moment. It looked like a few lines of script. A poem, a saying—but I couldn’t make sense of it without moving closer and I didn’t feel like doing that.
“I’m not a good girl.” I pushed him roughly out of the way and walked out of the lot, not even bothering to check if he followed or not.
I walked the rest of the way back to Summer Estate, the itching in my legs only growing worse despite the fact that I was exercising. I wasn’t exercising enough to outrun this particular demon. I would need the burn for that, and walking wouldn’t do it. Maybe I knew that on some level, and so I refused to run. I told myself that it was too hot for running. I’d only make myself sick. But the truth was …
I wanted the demon to stay for a while.
“Duke!” I shouted, banging on his trailer door.
He opened it seemingly naked, which didn’t shock me at all. His top-half was leaning into the opening, his eyes hazy. “What? Grey-girl?”
I looked over my shoulder, and then back at him. There wasn’t anyone else there. “Yeah.”
“Come in, babe.”
He stepped back, revealing that he was, indeed, naked. I followed him inside, letting the door fall closed behind me, and watched as he walked back towards the bedroom.
“Miller!” he yelled, rapping on the wall beside the door. “You gotta go now!”
The door cracked open, revealing a girl who was somewhat recognisable. I thought she might have been the one to insult me at Duke’s party. She definitely looked like she wanted to insult me again. I shrugged at her, walking over to the fridge and pulling it open. It was mostly stacked with beer, but I had expected that.
I pulled one of them out, and then another—because the girl was still staring at me. I offered it to her, and she scowled, disappearing back into the bedroom and slamming the door.
“I mean it!” Duke pounded on the wall again.
Her head popped out once more: she reached a bare arm out this time, grabbing Duke and pulling him to the door opening. She was whispering to him, and I saw her hand move down his chest, to his hip, and then lower. She wrapped her hand around his dick, drawing an immediate groan from him.
“… didn’t even finish,” was all I caught of her whispering, before I decided I should probably wait outside.
I grabbed two more beers, letting the door shut behind me before curling up onto one of the fold-up, cloth chairs. Only a minute later, Miller was moaning. She seemed to be moaning pretty loudly, too. Not that I knew anything about proper moaning etiquette, but it definitely seemed over-the-top.
I finished the first beer and started on the second—I paused halfway through that one, tipping my head back and closing my eyes. I had to concentrate a little bit to drown out the dramatic noises from inside the trailer, but after a while it all seemed to fade away. My mind flitted from surface thought to surface thought, restless energy triggering each transition.
Why did everyone have a tattoo these days?
Where was Nicholai?
What did Jennifer do for a living?
Was she at college?
Did she live with him?
Did they want children one day?
What would their kids be like?
Would their kids have a good life?
Would their kids ever see the red, like I did?
And then, bidden by my thoughts, the red came flooding back. It seared every corner of my mind in a painful assault that caused me to cry out, the bottle tumbling from my fingers and cracking against the ground. I could feel cool liquid spreading over my feet, and my breaths were coming harder and faster as dark spots flashed before my eyes.
“Mika! Mika-baby! Wake up!”
Mom’s scream had torn me from a deep sleep, wrenching me from one world to another, leaving everything disjointed and blurry.
I had never experienced real terror until that moment, but I was suddenly surrounded by it. It shivered along the walls of our home and penetrated my lungs, poisoning everything. Everything that existed and everything that I had ever believed in. It poisoned my past, clouding memories and stealing moments, and it poisoned my future, ripping apart a life I hadn’t even had the chance to live yet.
I followed the screams, my heart pounding faste
r and faster. Eventually, I realised that I didn’t want to go any further. I didn’t want to see. I wanted to turn around and run back to my room. I could climb out of the window, go across the street … and just keep going. I wouldn’t ever have to see or experience what was happening at the other end of the house.
“MIKA!”
I kept going, my feet walking without my permission.
Run, the voice in my head tried to warn me. That little coping mechanism that kicked into motion whenever I heard the screams. I started sobbing, trying to convince myself. Go the other way.
“MIKA!”
I couldn’t go. I couldn’t turn around. I couldn’t escape. It was too late.
The sound of Duke’s trailer door banging open dragged me back to the present, and I watched with sweaty palms and blurry eyes as Miller—now fully dressed—kissed him noisily goodbye and flounced past me, apparently pleased with herself.
“Grey?” Duke appeared before me, wearing pants, but no shirt. “Are you—are you crying?”
I was struggling, each breath as sharp as a blade going down my throat, my chest constricting tightly and my lip trembling. I pulled myself to my feet, grabbing onto him to remain upright.
“L-let’s g-go,” I managed, watching the world spin around me. “Let’s go d-do something.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I took s-something,” I lied.
He blinked, apparently surprised, and then he was laughing. He grabbed my face, his lips pressing hard against mine. “You beautiful fucking mess.”
He left me then, saying that he would get dressed and then we could go to a party. I stepped over the broken glass on the ground, grabbing the third beer and moving to another chair to wait. When he reappeared, he pulled me up and grabbed my chin, forcing my head up so that he could see my face.
“You’re not upset about Miller, are you?”
“Miller?”
“Babe, you should know who Miller is. She just came like ten feet from where you were sitting. She made sure you’d hear it too, the crazy bitch.”
“Oh. I know. What about her?”
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