They come toward me the way Aric had gone toward the windshield. Unhesitating. With a weird macabre grace. Like a dance. A dance that doesn’t need a partner. A dance with screams and cries for the music. Crumpled metal for the ballroom. Blood for the floor.
“So you like it rough, eh?” I hear the voice. It comes, not from this messed up world I’m stuck in, but from within. From my memories. It’s Keith’s voice. Slightly winded, excited, hungry. I feel his hands on my thighs, smell his breath in my face, the scent of his cologne surrounding me like a cloud. “So you like it rough, eh?”
“It wasn’t my fault!” I scream.
All of it.
None of it.
None of it is my fault.
Not the accident, not what happened between me and Keith—I let the word into my mind for the first time since it happened.
Rape.
Not the rape.
None of it.
None of it is my fault.
For that one instant I know it. What’s more, I believe it, and it’s as if the hand I’ve felt pressing down on me for all these months is lifted and I can stand straight again.
And I can breathe.
That moment of absolute clarity, of peace, becomes a weapon in this world which seems to thrive on people’s pain and suffering. Not a physical weapon, like a sword or a gun, but a weapon just the same. I feel it. I am it.
I yell again, “It wasn’t my fault!” And, powered by that knowledge, the weapon the truth has become, my voice is a Klaxon alarm echoing through the entirety of this nightmare world, loud enough to wake even the most determined dreamer.
All the glass, the fragments of Mom, the moths, the chair, the stars, they freeze in mid-air, and then drop straight down to the ground. The noise is so loud, so discordant, the screams of rubber on ice, glass on metal, meat on pavement, that I cover my ears. I cover my ears, scrunch my eyes shut, and scream and scream and scream.
When my screams stop, a tranquillity is upon me, a peace I wear like a cloak, and I know without looking, without understanding how, that my serenity, my peace, has destroyed whatever prisons the cursed camera had forged. I have freed whatever people it had trapped. Made them whole again. At least for now.
I open my eyes and discover I’m alone but for the magpie and a door. The door is the opposite of the one which I’d used to enter this world of nightmares and chaos, an inky undulating dark against the field of milky white, a dense fog within which shadows move and lights flicker. Ghost sits on the ground before me, regarding me with his shiny black eyes and head turned to the side.
It wasn’t my fault.
I smile at the bird, offer him my arm, and smile wider when he swoops up into the air and lands, with a tail flip, on my forearm. I move toward the doorway. Back, I hope, to real life. To a normal life where the people I photograph aren’t trapped in torment and conflict.
As I walk toward the door, off in the distance, I have time to think. It wasn’t my fault, I think once again, and then, except . . .
It wasn’t my fault, except—
The peace that had filled me cracks like a porcelain cup. Except.
No, no, no! I think, but it’s too late. I can feel the crack spreading, the doubts returning, the guilt circling, waiting to land, to push me back down into the ground.
Ahead, the doorway wavers, becoming less defined, the darkness feathering to grey around the edges. No no no!
I run.
I run like I’ve never run in my life. My arms pumping, legs straining. My hair flies out behind me in an impossibly long stream, and yet I don’t move. Ghost flies up, keeping pace right beside me, at my left shoulder.
Running helps.
I focus on the way my feet feel as they land, the one-two, one-two of my steps. I let the count expand in my mind, forcing all other thoughts to the side. One-two, one-two.
I’m near the door, then at it, and pushing through. I’m back in the hospital, bent at the waist, head down, running full speed, right into a wall.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I DON’T KNOW how long I was unconscious. It only feels like a moment, but by the time I stumble, dizzy and nauseous from the haunted hospital, the sky is fading to violet and there are police cars in front of my house and in front of Sevren’s. I barely make it out of the hospital yard, dragging my backpack behind, under Ghost’s watchful eye from where he’s perched atop the chain-link fence, when one of the cops intercepts me.
Then there’s a lot of commotion. Hugs and tears from my family, a knowing look from Amy, and a trip to the hospital. I have a minor concussion, the doctors say, before finally letting me see Sevren.
When I see him, sitting on the hospital bed, hair bloodied, nose in a splint, surrounded by machine and nurses, his parents murmuring softly in the corner, I’m overcome. I rush to his side and throw myself into his hug with enough force to make him cry out in pain, but he doesn’t pull away. He never pulls away.
As we hug, crying, the grown-ups all mutter things, excusing themselves from the scene and into the hall. And that’s when I tell him.
I tell Sevren. Right there in the hospital room.
I didn’t mean to. I opened my mouth to apologise, to tell him how it was all my fault he was hurt, my fault any of this happened, but instead of an apology a confession spills out.
I tell him all about what Keith did to me. The words tumble one after the other like a rockslide, gaining momentum from each other as they roll off my tongue. I tell him everything about that afternoon in his car, apologise for not tell him sooner.
And I cry.
And he hugs me.
And he says the words I needed to hear most in the whole world: “I believe you,” he says. “I believe you.”
WE’RE BOTH ALLOWED to leave the hospital that morning, Sunday morning, which is far more freedom than Keith and Simon will see. They are in police custody and expected to stay that way for a long time. Still, they are lucky—the police caught up to them before Boris did. Barely.
My dreams that night are empty. No screams, no shattered glass, nothing. In fact, if I dreamed anything I don’t remember it, which is fine with me.
When I’d gotten home from the hospital, I’d gone around the house and opened all the curtains. All of them. Because it was time. As a result, sunbeams warm my cheek, but seem to focus, like a magnifying glass on an ant, on my closed eyelids.
When I open them, however, when I surrender to the sunlight, I’ll have to face reality again. A reality I can’t change. Aric is still gone, Mom is never going to be the same, and Keith had still raped me. Whether or not any of it is my fault doesn’t change the fact it happened, and I still carry guilt for it.
I’d had that moment of clarity in the white, an instant filled with confidence and the absolute knowledge it wasn’t my fault, that none of it was my fault, but that moment has passed.
I’d tried to cling to it, to remember how it felt to be so sure, but I couldn’t. It’s gone. Gone like Aric, like the camera I’d shattered, like yesterday.
Still, that moment was more than I’d had in all the days before I’d gone into the white. It was significant. It mattered.
And I can’t help but wonder how far gone Aric is, really. We read a story in English class about pychopomps—creatures who guide people’s souls from this world to the next. Some people think ravens can be pychopomps, moving from one world to another. If a raven could do it, why not a magpie? If the past week has taught me anything it’s that nothing is impossible.
As for what’s going on with the hospital, with the camera, perhaps I’ll never figure that out, but when I overheard the police saying they thought the buildings were going to be torn down soon it didn’t make me sad. Whether they remain standing or not, one thing is for sure—I’m never going back in there. Not ever again.
The sun seems to turn the intensity up a notch, and I consider rolling out of its way and getting a few more hours of sleep. I suspect Mom and Dad would even let me today
. But I don’t. I get up.
I get up because Amy needs me, and Sevren too.
And I get up because, despite what the camera influenced him to say or do, Marcus is out there somewhere. And Stacy. And Ghost. And I have a life to live.
And besides, I think as I lace up my shoes. When all else fails, running helps.
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Acknowledgements
This book is important to me on both personal and professional levels, and it wouldn’t be what it is without the help of a lot of other people. I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of them.
Danica, Sevren would not be who he is without you and I couldn’t tell this story without him. Thank you for helping me discover who he is and bring him to life on the page. I hope you feel like I’ve done him justice even if you can’t get behind some of the other character decisions I’ve made ;)
Thank you to all my early readers, especially Beth and BD. Your feedback and encouragement really helped me see this book through to the end, I don’t know where it would be without you but the answer is probably not ‘published’.
Jennifer Lee Rossman, your sensitivity read helped shine a spotlight into some areas of the story that were hidden in my blind spots. Your feedback not only informed revisions on this story, but I will keep it front of mind when revising all my work in the future as well. Thank you.
To my developmental editor, Stacey Kondla, you were a dream to work with, thank you. You helped highlight the things I’d done right and recognise the things I could do better. I appreciated the way you helped me discover how to emphasize the former and improve the latter without being instructive or prescriptive. You made the story better and I will forever be thankful for that.
Margaret, not only do I owe you thanks for having faith enough in this book to publish it, but your line edits really helped smooth out my sentences and pulled everything together. I appreciate the dedication, integrity and skill you’ve shown in all our professional undertakings together and I hope we get to work together on many more books to come.
And, as always, thank you Jo. Your love and support everyday is what makes it possible for me to be who I am and do what I do. Meep moo.
About the Author
Rhonda is good at some things, but focus is not one of them. Professionally she enjoys editing anthologies and writing pretty much everything . . . except biographies.
Hollow is her first YA novel.
Her website, updated regularly, is at http://www.rhondaparrish.com
Hollow
Copyright © 2020 Rhonda Parrish
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.
Published by Tyche Books Ltd.
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
www.TycheBooks.com
Cover Art by Guillem Marí
Cover Layout by Indigo Chick Designs
Interior Layout by Ryah Deines
Editorial by Stacey Kondla
First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2020
Print ISBN: 978-1-989407-14-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989407-15-8
Author photograph: Cindy Gannon Photography
This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Hollow Page 17