Edge
Page 19
But I'll have eternity to see nothing. I have to take it all in now, seep it all up with my vision.
“Are you scared?” I ask him, praying that somehow, he doesn't realize how close death is.
He shakes his head, a bit. “There's no use in being scared of the inevitable.”
“I guess.”
He looks me up and down, speculatively. “Are you scared?”
“Out of my mind,” I breathe out, a pathetic, nervous laugh escaping my lips.
Screech latches on to me, hugs me tightly, broken fingers around my head, cradling me to him. “So am I, Freckles,” he whispers into my hair.
It's coming. I see it coming. Too close, too close. My heart is escaping my mouth, my body, and my body's a pale sack of shaking flesh clinging onto a child and we're both about to die, and we're going to nowhere, and there's nothing anymore, and I know we're not going to wake up, not in our real lives, because the staircase has no end or beginning – the staircase just is, and we've always been stuck here, and we always will be.
I think I'm going to be sick, but I don't have time to be. My breathing becomes labored and quickened and I can't see or move or feel or anything and –
“I love you, Screech,” I tell him.
He hesitates. I don't think he wants to say that, because it implies an eternity that we don't have. “You too, Freckles,” he finally allows, and I feel like it's funny that he can't say it.
Inches away. Milliseconds away. My arms are holding him tighter and tighter, and he's beginning to moan against me in fear or in pain I don't know, just in something, and I can't help but start to shout.
My body is burning, and I realize, as the sea is close enough to taste on my lips, with my entire world in my hands so securely and firmly that I feel sick, that never in my life have I felt more alive.
And then we meet the water.
Screech is first, I realize slowly, a luxury I always allowed him on the staircase except for the beam, and he hits the water like it's made of the concrete of the world I've always imagined. It's only as I'm watching him die that I realize I don't want to look at this. I don't want to see this happen.
His body breaks beneath me. He used to bleed from his back and his hands after we swung and from his lip and from his bruised eye but now he bleeds from his pores, from his entire skin, and he breaks. Not just his bones, but his skin rips and tears apart like a porcelain doll laid to rest. As his back comes in contact with the water and breaks, he makes a sound – his last sound – and it's a choked screech as the red of his blood mixes with the red of the water beneath him, and for a startling moment, his eyes turn crimson, just as he feared earlier, before the pressure is too much and the balls roll into the ocean beneath him. I can see the cracked, ivory structure of the face I once cradled and kissed slip beneath churning cold waters made of corpses, of which he is now one.
The brokenness of my arms is nothing to what I feel in my soul. It happens so instantly, only in seconds, but as I stare at his body, so soft and breathing beneath me, turn into nothing but shreds and pieces of flesh, it feels like I'm caught in an eternal hell.
My mind is begging him back. One more word, Screech! For me!
The last thing he said was my name.
The name that he gave me.
“Now it just sounds like 'frick',” echoes my head as his arms are stolen from his corpse, popping out of their sockets. “That's a baby word,” as his head rolls away from me. “You're eight!” as his skull turns to bone shards.
“We're good, you and I.” His jagged bones begin to pierce me, sharp jabs of pain into my already decimated form.
“Yeah. Two peas in a pod, or something.” My dead arms are pinned into his broken back, mingling with his own bones, and everything's digging to me and I'm shouting, endlessly, because I wish I could hold even his pieces now, because now I wish I didn't have to die with him, because I'm the only one left to remember him.
“Scr – ” I begin, my voice desperately looking for something it cannot find, but I never have the chance to finish.