by Monty Jay
If I tried hard enough, I could close my eyes, sink deeper into his hoodie, and it would feel like he was there.
I just—I just.
I wish I knew the last time touching him was the last time.
That the Monday after the rave party when he’d shoved me inside the back of my car in the school parking lot was the last time I would feel him against me. His hips between my legs, the smoke from his blunt, and our heavy breathing fogging up the windows.
I grab at my heart, fisting my hand in my shirt, trying to comfort the organ inside. The water had already been up to my chest, waiting hungrily for the dam to break so that it could sink me entirely. I’d been fighting all day, fighting to keep my head above the waves, but I’m so tired of fighting.
The pain of remembering was the dam, and it had just broken.
I can still feel his fingers running along my collarbone as his ear rested on my chest. His long hair tickled me, but I didn’t mind. I liked it, how warm he felt pressed into me, even though he was all sticky from the sweat we’d both produced.
“What is this scar from?” His hazy tone rubbed against my skin like velvet, the pads of his fingers brushing the raised skin.
I told him the story of me falling off a merry-go-round as a kid and how after, my mom stopped letting me play on the playground. She was afraid I’d cause permanent damage to my face, and God forbid you look anything less than perfect.
“Rosie thinks it’ll tell me who my soul mate is,” I finished. “I think she just tells me that to make me feel better about it.”
“Why does she think that?”
“Silas has a scar on his pinky finger in the exact same place her birthmark is. Soul marks. That’s what she calls them.” My hands raked through his hair, twirling a few pieces, and I pressed my nails into his scalp, knowing how much he loved it.
He moved suddenly, leaning back a bit so there was some space between us. With deliberate movements, he flipped the burning end of the blunt towards him, lifting it to my mouth so I could inhale.
I filled my lungs, and when I was finished, he drove the cherry into his skin. The sizzling of skin made my spine rattle. Even though I was high, I knew what he did was real.
Jesus, he didn’t even flinch. He barely moved.
My eyes widened briefly. “What the fuck are you doing?” I cursed, snatching his wrist to tug the heat away from his body, in shock that one person could handle so much pain so abruptly. He didn’t even think about it; he just did it.
A nasty, crimson burn was left behind, just above his collarbone. The angry mark was dusted with ashes from the smoke, and I knew it had to hurt, but he gave me no reaction.
He kept staring up at me, eyes blazing through the vapor.
“Proving Rose right.”
There is no number of deep breaths that would calm me. The water is rushing too high, too fast. I’m done for.
I frantically search for the hoodie, thinking that if I can just smell him, just a brief whiff, it might help the ache inside my chest. There’s the feeling of my skin splitting open, my nerve endings all exposed to the oxygen.
No one tells you how painful panic attacks can be.
I scratch at my neck, feeling how searing hot it is. My hand rolls across the scar on my neck, knowing I’ll never be able to look at it in the mirror the same again.
“Did you hear me?” Easton says with urgency, grabbing at my forearm only to have me try to jerk it from his grip.
“Stop touching me, Sinclair. I told you, I did what you asked. Now leave me alone.”
“Disrespect me all you’d like, Sage.” He tightens his grip, heaving me into his body, making my panic only increase. “In a few months, it won’t matter, because I’m going to own you. I’m going to turn you into a pretty little trophy, a submissive wife, and I don’t care if I have to break that bitchy mouth to do it.”
Saliva spews from his mouth, splattering across my face. I grind my teeth, glaring up at him and fighting against his hold, but he only squeezes me tighter.
A whimper tries to fall from my lips at the growing pain from the pressure.
“It’ll be a cold day in hell when you break me, but by all means, give it your best shot,” I grit out, struggling to keep my facade up with everything going on.
With my heart aching, my anger flaring, and the feeling of suffocation, I’m going to lose my mind.
“God help you if you didn’t break his heart, and I mean demolish it until there is nothing left.” Easton presses his forehead aggressively into mine, knocking our faces together harshly. “I will make sure my father takes care of Rose. It would take nothing for him to pull a little string and poof.” He wiggles his fingers on his free hand. “She is gone. Wiped from existence, never to be heard of again.”
I swallow bile, knowing that’s the exact reason I even agreed to do this in the first place. I’m not sure if Easton is bluffing, but would I be willing to bet Rose’s life on it?
I can’t. Not when I know how much money Stephen Sinclair makes. Not when I know how powerful he is. I can’t risk it. I can’t risk her getting hurt or worse, dying because of me being selfish.
I’d been selfish my entire life.
It’s best for everyone involved if I just shut up and did as I’m told. Rook’s life would be easier, and Rose would be happy.
That’s what matters.
“You don’t have the balls,” I hiss.
“Try me, cunt.”
My palm snaps across his cheek without a second thought, so hard that it forces his head to turn in the opposite direction.
“It doesn’t matter what you do to me, Easton.” I laugh in his face, just as I did to Rook today, but this time, I mean it. I mean this bitter, sour laughter that pours from me like venom. “It doesn’t matter how much of daddy’s money you have or his control. You will never be Rook. You will never have me like he did. Not even close. So go ahead, break me, because I will slice your wrists open while you try.”
My chest heaves up and down, pulling in air and releasing it faster as the moments tick by. Easton’s changed—I’ve changed. Even though I always felt he had this darkness inside of him from the second we’d met, he had once been a decent human.
High school, expectations, his father. They turned him into something else entirely.
It did the exact same thing to me.
We are the same, Easton and I.
Scheming, fake, ego-filled humans with no regard for others.
Maybe it was fate that we had ended up here together.
I had expected it. Honestly, I did.
I had pushed him too far over the edge, but even still, I gulp when I watch him elevate his arm, ready to strike me.
My body tenses, stiffening up to prepare for the blow, but it doesn’t come. Instead, I hear my door opening and my father’s voice.
“Sage, where are the keys to your car—” He stops. “Am I interrupting something?”
Easton clears his throat, putting his arm down. “No, sir.”
I retract from his space now that my father is here, wrapping my arms around myself.
“Why do you need my keys?”
He sighs, running a hand down his face. “I have to go to Portland, and your mother wants the car with her. Apparently, someone set the lake house on fire. The fire department is waiting for me to arrive so I can file a police report. Whoever did it obviously wanted us to know it wasn’t an accident.”
And it’s then that everything really falls apart. When my entire soul obliterates onto the floor in front of me.
I let the tears fall freely. I let them run past my ducts and layer my cheeks with their warmth.
He couldn’t even let me have this one thing.
I had broken him, so he took everything from me. He left me with nothing.
The lake house was mine before it was ours. If anyone deserved to burn it down, it should have been me.
I know I have no right to be upset. I said awful things to him; I sai
d what I had to to get him to believe me so that he wouldn’t try and come back.
But I thought…I thought I could keep the lake house. I could use it as a time capsule of us, going there when I needed to remember what it felt like to be with him.
And now I can’t even do that.
I have nothing left.
The last of us had been torched inside that house.
I hate him for doing that, for taking what we were and making it cease to exist. Burning all the evidence, all the laughter, all the memories.
As if they had never even happened in the first place.
I hate him for this.
I hate him.
I fucking hate him.
But not nearly as much as he hates me.
He doesn’t just feel like fire.
He is fire.
He is the flame, the flint, the burn.
Like the Egyptian god Ra, he encompasses all that is warm.
He is my fire god, and I live to burn for him.
Sage
“Open.”
I drop my tongue out, showing the nurse the inside of my mouth, swiping my tongue from left to right, up and down. She shines the small pen light around, nodding once she is satisfied.
After three weeks inside of the Monarch Mental Health Institution, I stopped refusing the medication.
The side effects, loss of appetite, constant fatigue, migraines, they’re better than the alternative.
Everyone has this image of what they think a psychiatric ward looks like. Pop culture and movies have given a pretty damning image. The stigma surrounding these places is pretty horrid. I mean, everyone and their mother watched season two of American Horror Story.
I’m sure there are facilities that focus on helping patients, treating their issues and giving them hope for rehabilitation and an eventual release back into the real world.
But this is Ponderosa Springs.
And this is my life, and anytime fate can throw me to the wolves, it absolutely will.
This place is everything your craziest nightmares could conjure up.
A gated prison with padded rooms and no doorknobs.
They tell you when you get here, willingly or in my case unwilling, that everything they do is to help you.
That the straps that held me down on the stretcher when I arrived were to protect me. Their job is to keep me safe with their white lab coats and clipboards.
Even when you refuse to take your medication and they drag you to solitary confinement, where three men will hold you down and inject you with antipsychotics. Even when they keep you there for three days without a word.
They will sit you down on their plastic couches and tell you this asylum, this place, was built to help you. All of this is for your own good.
All the while they ask you over and over, and over and over again, why did you try to kill yourself? Do you feel like harming yourself now? Are you sure? Are you absolutely positive you’re not having bad thoughts?
God help you if you say yes—even when I was first admitted, I knew better than to say yes to those questions.
Sadly, though, the doctors and nurses are right.
They are there to keep us safe and secure.
Not to actually treat us for our underlying mental health or do anything really that requires them to go out of their way to better our lives.
A crow soars across the morning sky, the grayish clouds tethering into its wings as it swoops close to the trees. My nose starts to run from the air that’s nipping at my skin. January is always the coldest here.
Beyond the steel gates that keep the grounds secure, there is a river that you can see from the garden. Well, it’s more dead weeds and broken fountains, but I’m sure at some point, there were flowers planted here somewhere.
“You have visitors waiting for you in the dining hall.” One of the nurses on day shift, Shonda I think her name is, stands above me where I sit on the moist ground.
The cold dew clings to my faded blue scrubs, but I enjoy the feeling. Inside, you don’t feel anything. Not even temperature. Everything is middle ground and numbing.
For a few moments in the morning, I sit out here and actually feel like a human being. I listen to the crows squawk, the river rustle slowly, and the wind howl as it makes the trees groan.
Inside those walls, there are no bad days, no good days.
Just days.
Purposeless.
Time is irrelevant. It’s either a blur or a racetrack. I never know when I’m sleeping or when I’m awake. The shitty thing is when I am awake, all I wanna do is sleep.
If senior year me could see the person I am now, she’d fucking stroke out. Nails bitten to the quick, permanent purple bags beneath my eyes.
I’m no longer who I used to be, and honestly, I never found out who I wanted to be. So that leaves me cemented in limbo.
Lost.
Forgotten.
All sense of self has evaporated.
I’ve become this sort of hollow well. The only coins dropped inside are pills that echo within the walls of my core, reminding me that the only thing that fills me is emptiness.
“Visitors? For me?”
I’d been here for eight months. two-hundred and forty-three days. thirty-four weeks. and five thousand, eight hundred and forty hours.
There has never been a single soul come visit me.
Not my arranged ex-fiancé, my mannequin friends, my father sure as fuck hadn’t walked through those doors, and my mom, well, last I knew she was states away engaged to someone with more money and a small life expectancy.
There’s no one who cared enough to stop by and check on me. Once I was thrown into this place, they threw away the key.
After what I’d found out, because of what I know now, I had mentally prepared to spend the entirety of my life here. They won’t let me out, and even if I do get out, they’ll kill me before I had a chance to do anything with my life.
The sad truth is, I’m actually fine with it.
While I’m inside here, at least I can convince myself that Rose is alive.
Death had snuck into our lives and severed the bond between us.
One second I was a twin, and the next, I wasn’t.
No one prepares you for that. For what it feels like when the other half of your soul dies. When the person you came into this world with leaves before you do.
It’s hard to explain, but it’s like there’s a phone constantly ringing inside my chest with no one to pick up the other line.
All I have left is the guilt. It’s what haunts me at night, keeping my insomnia working.
Incessant guilt for being alive while she rots in the ground.
I’m getting served cold oatmeal every morning, playing checkers with myself, while maggots consume whatever is left of her corpse.
“Sage, hello? Sage, are you feeling okay?” The nurse snaps her fingers in front of me. “I said yes, you have visitors. Your father and his friend. They brought you outside breakfast. You should be excited.”
My father? And his friend?
It’s almost a contradiction.
My father doesn’t have friends, and he knows better than to visit me. Even if he wanted to, he knew I would stab him.
It was the last thing I promised him. The last thing I promised Rose even if she hadn’t been alive to hear it.
If I was ever given the opportunity, I wouldn’t hesitate to end his life, and it would be brutal.
I’ve had a long time to think about how I’d do it. Those thoughts are the only thing that bring me real joy.
Thinking about the way he’d look, begging for his life as I press a knife to his throat. I’d give anything to see the way the light in his eyes would drift away as my hands tighten around his throat.
There are millions of ways to do it and narrowing it down is practically impossible. None of them feel right—death feels like too much of a reward for what he did to Rosie.
Although our access to the internet
here is restricted, we can read, and I’d done my best to use the facility library to find out what’s the slowest way of killing someone. The most painful, the most graphic, the most aggressive.
No matter how dark or how twisted it got, none of it seemed to be the answer to what he had done. Even being eaten alive by dogs felt too humane.
“Are you sure it’s my father and you haven’t gotten it confused?”
“There is only one mayor of Ponderosa Springs, and his face is plastered on a billboard downtown. There is no getting it confused with your family. Shouldn’t you be excited?”
To see the man who had my sister killed?
“Overjoyed,” I say sarcastically.
She leads me back inside, and my washed-out blue scrubs rub against my thighs as we waltz down the dull hallway.
It always reeks of sterilizer out here, the pungent scents of alcohol wipes and latex gloves. It pisses me off that out of all things, that’s the one thing I can’t get used to.
The hall is loud today, sort of chaotic for a place that’s meant to promote peace of mind.
Almost all of my fellow patients are more dangerous to themselves than to anyone else. This notion that mental illness is a warning sign of psychotic behavior was a myth debunked years ago. I read about it when I first got inside of here. I’ve read about a lot of things I never thought I would since leaving the outside world.
However, there are times when some tremors or hallucinations get out of hand. Usually always when one person is having a bad day, it triggers everyone around them.
I hear Hallmark Harry inside of his room, singing Humpty Dumpty repeatedly. He’d gotten his name for the same reason women cry on their couches during Christmas—he loves Hallmark movies.
One patient is banging on their door, demanding a shower; another is fighting a nurse about how the CIA is watching him through the radios, broken radios that don’t even have antennae, mind you.
Reagan in 3B is quiet this morning, sleeping off the sedatives they’d filled her up with last night. Some people never learn, and she’s one of them. She’s been here longer than I have, but every single night, I can hear her screams.