Chapter Seven
The thing inside me has no name.
At the age of seven, after Father died, was when I first felt it. After his funeral, I didn’t speak to Mom for a long, long while. I didn’t speak to anyone. The beast demanded I be silent. The beast demanded I hurt others. I fought with my classmates in elementary. I bit teachers. And when there was no one around to hurt, I’d hurt myself, stabbing pencils into my hand. Mom took me to psychologists, of course, able and willing to shell out to keep her little boy from losing his mind with grief, even as she was losing her own. I was selectively mute after a traumatic loss, the doctor determined, and Mom was depressed. But with a lot of therapy and the good grace of passing time, we managed to pull through. I began speaking again. I made friends. With the help of Wren, Avery, and Sophia, my life began to feel normal again. I began to quell the anger with their friendship, and Mom’s unconditional love.
The beast, however, remained. I could only tamp it down for their sakes. They couldn’t kill it. I don’t know if anyone will ever be able to kill it. Perhaps I’ll die with it. Perhaps it’ll be the death of me.
Regardless, it waited, biding its time. It retreated deep inside me, bottled by my newfound adoration for the people close to me. Sophia, especially. When she was around, I felt the thing in me retreat so far away I could barely sense it anymore. She saved me from myself.
And I failed her.
The beast took my failure as a crack in the lid of its cage, and broke free, despite everything I did beforehand to keep it contained. I failed Sophia, and in doing so, failed myself.
And I failed that man, the one whose body haunts my dreams.
The beast hurt so many people, all in one night. The repercussions echo today, in Avery’s every avoidant glance, in Sophia’s lingering grief, in my own wounds.
Since that night, I’ve lost the friends who kept it bottled and caged. Mom tries, but she’s only one person, and the beast is voraciously hungry for more, always. It wants to fight, to scream, to inflict pain on someone, anyone. It’s a deep scar I’ll never be able—and don’t deserve—to erase. No one can help me save myself. And I swore to myself I’d never let anyone get hurt by the thing again. The farther people stay away, the safer they are.
And so, the “Ice Prince” was born out of necessity.
It worked. It worked for three years exactly, the beast only barely peeking out when the football team wouldn’t stop bullying me. They learned quickly, though.
For a while, a short, fleeting while, the war with Isis pushed the thought of the beast out of my head entirely. It was silent, not so much as rattling the bars of its cage. But then she forgot me, and its whispers have been turning to growls in the last few days.
So I’m here, at a seedy warehouse in a part of town where no one knows me, to try to quiet it. I know how it works, what it wants. And this is the safest way to keep it quiet—a controlled environment, with enough people watching so that it never bites too deep.
The roar of the crowd practically deafens me. The warehouse is dim and smells like rust and old cardboard. The place is packed with people I can’t see the faces of. All I can see is the man before me—twenty-two? Twenty-three? He’s college-aged and built lean and limber. He swims or does soccer. But on the side he takes boxing lessons. I can tell by his stance—square, firm, on the balls of his feet. Boxers always look like they’re about to tip over.
“Are you ready?” a man bellows, a microphone clutched in his sweaty palm as he paces between us. His salmon-striped shirt isn’t exactly official referee colors, but a match in an abandoned lumber warehouse isn’t exactly an official fight, either. The crowd’s shouting surges with the ref’s encouragement. The boxer and I meet in the middle, shaking hands cordially. Hollywood might like to paint underground fights like these rife with dirty tactics and shit-talking, but it rarely ever comes to that. And if it does, the crowd only roars louder. Do it too much, and they’d get bored or pissed the bets going around were being cheated by an illegal head-butt.
We part after shaking hands. I tighten the cloth belt of my loose pants. Tae kwon do demands fluidity and practice. Which is why I began to enter these a month ago.
The ref throws his hand up, and the fight begins. Our feet shuffle around the makeshift arena, pushing aside remnants of sawdust and dried bloodstains from past competitors.
My eyes are locked on my opponent. The boxer won’t strike first. They never do. Boxers excel at stalling—taking a beating and waiting for the enemy to run out of energy or get tired and lower his guard. I have to hit him hard, when he least expects it, or he’ll out-sustain me.
The boxer suddenly lunges in. I swing back but not fast enough to avoid his right hook. It clips my shoulder, sending me in a half spin to the ground. The crowd cheers, leering down at me like bloodhounds on a fox. I’m the new guy. I’ve won barely two matches out of the five I’ve entered. None of them have bet on me. They aren’t here to see me win. They’re here to see me get beat on.
I get to my feet. The boxer’s danced back to his original spot, a grin on his face.
Wrong move.
Boxers might be able to take a beating, but emotions make humans weak. Confidence makes us weak. I was so confident he wouldn’t strike first, and I was wrong.
My memories nag at me with barbed tentacles.
I was so confident, too, that Isis would always be there—always ready to fight me, always ready to snark at me, always ready to bring me down to size when no one else would.
And yet I lost her.
I step in, a quick and precise movement, and heel-kick the boxer square in the chest. He staggers, clutching his rib cage and blinking in soundless pain. His fury is immediate. He lunges for me with that right hook again. I dodge, but he’s there to meet me, all flying arms that pound my ribs, close and brutal, and I can’t get away until I catch my breath enough to duck out of his grasp. He’s still turning to face me when I lodge my fist into his back, just above his kidney. He howls, reaching for me, but I’m not there anymore. I’m on his other side, and he pivots just as I take his legs out from under him. He hits concrete with a fleshy thud, the sound reverberating among the crowd’s hysteria. People throw popcorn; someone sloshes a beer on the edge of the arena. The boxer is gasping for air, stunned. The concrete and gravity did most of the work for me—we are fragile little creatures.
I remember the scar on Isis’s forehead and wince.
The referee starts counting down. I watch the crowd. They move with a fevered hysteria the likes of which only violence can bring out. But one person—one out of the dozens—remains perfectly still. He watches me, hair streaked with white and his eyes serious. I can only give him a passing glance as the boxer struggles to his feet and throws a punch that nicks my lip. I taste blood. This man fighting me is not Leo; he doesn’t cower. Fear doesn’t cloud his eyes. Only cowards get scared when force is used against them instead of for them.
I duck another blow. That’s what Leo is. A coward. And tomorrow is his trial.
The boxer gets me with a hard jab to my stomach. I see stars, the pain sharp and leaving me breathless. The referee starts counting down, but his voice feels far away. All the voices of the crowd seem muted, underwater.
I came here to work out all the stress of the impending trial. If Leo isn’t put away, Isis and her mother will still be in danger. Leo isn’t the type of guy to learn his lesson, no matter how badly I beat him. He’s the type of guy to take revenge.
I couldn’t stop him from hurting Isis the first time, just like I couldn’t stop the men from causing Sophia harm that night in the woods. My own weakness hurt them. And I’d do anything to get rid of it.
I crawl to my feet, swallowing the blood on my lips. The boxer is too busy taking the crowd’s admiration with his arms up to notice me.
Boxing is a sport of punches, of outlasting an opponent. Tae kwon do is a sport of kicks, of forms, of landing one strong, good strike that puts your opponent out for good. He turns just in time to see my kick coming.
The blood from his nose flecks my cheek. He drops to the ground, unmoving. The thing in me sings, my own blood pumping hot and fast through my veins, begging me to sit on his chest and whale on his face until it resembles ground hamburger. He’s not the boxer anymore. He’s Leo. He’s the men in the forest. He’s everyone who’s ever hurt me, ready and waiting for me to give him my anger.
I stand over him, the referee trying desperately to push me away. I want to see more blood, to feel it on my knuckles, to douse it over the angry fire in my heart.
A part of me is terrified of myself. Of the thing. Of the fact that I’m even thinking of destroying him. Since when have I started losing control over myself?
I pull back, icing my heart with every emotionless, subzero thought I can conjure. The referee helps the man up and holds my hand as the winner. The crowd explodes, but I have no interest in their adoration. I only want quiet, somewhere I can gather myself. I slip through the crowd. The white-streaked man watches me the whole way out. What’s his deal? Warily, I push through the warehouse door, into the chilly night. I take a deep breath, letting out all the pent-up anxiousness in my chest. I don’t know who that guy was, nor do I care. I’m only here for me.
I am Jack Hunter. And I am not my demons.
In the car I wipe my face and pull on a clean shirt. I feel more grounded, but fighting that hard for that long leaves me ravenous. The highway is nearly dead, the city of Northplains nearly empty. The Red Fern is the only place open at this time of night. It’s where I took Kayla on a date Isis paid for, and she watched us here. It holds delicate memories of a time I miss, of a girl I miss.
I walk in and instantly recognize the girl talking to the hostess.
“Isis?”
She looks up, purple hair streaks windswept around her face. Her warm cinnamon eyes light up, then dim ever-so-cautiously, but her words are just as exacting as ever.
“You might wanna consider scaling back on the whole ‘eating at fancy places’ thing if you’re going to Harvard. I’ve heard the tuition is slightly life-ruining.”
“Hello to you, too,” I deadpan.
“Who am I kidding?” She sighs. “Your mom’s loaded. You’ll be fine.”
“And what’s your excuse?” I ask. She shrugs.
“Mom and I didn’t feel like cooking. And since the trial’s coming up, I figured I’d treat her to something nice, you know?”
“How is your mom doing, by the way?”
“She’s fine.”
Isis’s lips are curled down, her eyebrows knit. She’s trying her best to look unaffected, light, airy, but the truth is easy to see on her face.
“You’re a terrible liar,” I say finally.
“And you’re a terrible butthead,” she instantly counters. A laugh bubbles up from my chest.
“It’s when you resort to the uncreative ‘butthead’ insults that I know you’re really feeling awful.”
“Did a girl’s boyfriend find out she hired you and socked you in the face or something? Why is your lip all puffy?”
“A new serum,” I say. “To improve my pout.”
“You pout all the time. You’re like, the expert on pouting. They should be asking you to donate cells to make their serum.”
“That’s…rather disgusting.”
“You know what else is disgusting?” She wrinkles her nose and holds up a plastic bag with food trays in it. “Peanut sauce. But Mom loves it. So.”
“You poor overburdened thing.”
“Shut the hell up.”
We both smile at the same time, and I feel somehow more sheepish for it. How can I be smiling when she’s just barely remembered me and her mother’s trial is coming up? And then I realize that’s how it’s always been—she’s always been able to make me smile. No matter how cold I thought I was, how in control of my emotions, she always elicited humor. No one was ever able to do that for me, until her.
The sudden urge to thank her for it overwhelms me, but I master myself and keep my mouth silent. It would only confuse her, and I don’t think I can explain it well enough to her myself. The feeling is foggy, indistinct, but more powerfully bright than any sunrise. I have no words for it.
She would, I’m sure. Incorrect, entertaining words.
I always counted on the fact that she’d be around to make me smile. So I didn’t fight harder to keep her by my side.
“Anyway”—she rubs her nose, an adorable gesture I instantly talk myself out of thinking is cute—“I have to go. Mom’s waiting and texting me because she thinks I’ve been kidnapped slash sold to the human trafficking circuit. See ya later.”
“Isis!”
My call to her retreating back stops her. I hadn’t meant for my voice to sound that cracked, that desperate. That vulnerable. In the midst of the trial’s anxiety, Sophia’s surgery, and facing my own inadequacies, I forgot how rock-solid her presence was. Comforting, in a warm and sarcastic way. I want to stay in it, if only for a little longer. If only because it reminds me of the old days.
“What?” Her eyes grow confused. She takes in my face as I struggle for the right words, words that won’t betray how I feel too keenly. Finally, she rummages in her purse and hands me a hand wipe and a Band-Aid.
“Put that on your cheek, okay? It’ll keep it from getting infected.”
“Isis—”
“I’d hate,” she interrupts, “to have every girl in the world pissed at me because I let your pretty face contract gangrene.”
She turns away from me, but before I can think, my hand darts out and grabs her wrist. She goes stiff from the spine up, her eyes mahogany whirlpools of confusion.
“What are you doing?” she asks quietly.
Stopping you, my brain says. Taking you home with me, where we can talk in my room over coffee, where you can sit on my bed, my sheets, the same sheets I toss in every night at the thought of losing you again—
I let my hand drop, staring at it like it’s a monster.
“I-I don’t know,” I admit shakily.
Isis looks torn for a moment, a faint blush creeping up on her cheeks. God, she looks so good flustered. She looks so beautiful when she’s red-faced and out of breath. The fight must’ve flooded me with testosterone, because I can’t control my thoughts as they rampage toward the downright obscene.
No, I remind myself firmly. She barely remembers me. And I have Sophia. I have a duty to her. What I want is secondary, unimportant, and trivial.
“Drive safe,” I finally manage in a hoarse voice. She nods, still glowing with a badly disguised blush, and leaves through the front doors. I watch her go, lit by the bright saffron streetlights.
“Can I help you, sir?” the hostess of the restaurant asks. I turn to her, raking my hands through my hair.
“No,” I say quietly. “I’m beyond helping.”
Welcome to hell. Population: me, some idiots, and my mother.
Three days before the trial, Aunt Beth comes to visit. I’m grateful for the support—Mom’s flashbacks haven’t been bad recently, but she’s still been withdrawing into herself, barely eating or sleeping. Aunt Beth’s arrival has Mom cleaning the house, making food, and getting dressed in the mornings, and that’s all I can ask for.
We pick her up from the airport, her long, flowing tie-dyed dress somehow out of place in the dead of Ohio’s winter.
“Aren’t you cold, Beth?” Mom frowns. Aunt Beth just laughs from the backseat.
“Ice runs in my veins, Patricia.”
“She’s so cold she runs an underground crime ring,” I chime in. Aunt Beth jumps on my joke lightning-fast.
“Two underground crime rings, thank you very much.”
I smirk back at her and give her a high-five. Mom shakes her head and makes a left turn out of the airport.
“You two are incorrigible.”
We stop to pick up a pizza and then head home. I fill in Aunt Beth about everything that’s happened at school. I show off my cranium scar, and she suggests I get it tattooed into a snake, or a dragon, or something serpentinely badass. Finally, after I’ve worn out the conversation, she hugs me hard and murmurs into my hair.
“Thank you for watching after your mom all this time. I know no one tells you this, but it’s very mature of you. And very thoughtful. You’re a wonderful person.”
“Aw, Aunt Beth, you gentle liar!” I squirm. “How mature can I be if I still laugh every time I rip a fart?”
“Let me tell you a Blake family secret.” She leans in. “You never grow out of laughing at your own farts.”
“Dammit! Why did you have to crush my dreams of becoming a graceful debutante?”
She laughs and hugs me harder. “I missed you. The house is so quiet without you.”
“I missed you, too,” I agree softly.
“I was worried when you left. You seemed so sad toward the end. But you’ve grown up so much here,” she says. “And you look a little happier.”
“I am,” I assert. “I know it doesn’t look it, but I’m rapturously joyful at all times.”
Aunt Beth gives me a flat you’re lying smile.
“Okay, okay.” I sigh. “You got me. I’ve carved out a life here, sure. And it’s good sometimes. But it’s hard, too. I know no one’s said this in the history of ever, but growing up is hard.”
She chuckles and squeezes my shoulder. “Growing up is really hard.”
That night, she and Mom talk in the living room around tea and cookies. I announce I’m going out to the store to grab something for a school project next week, and I slip out. I want to give them as much privacy as they need, Mom especially. Aunt Beth is here for her, to talk her through things only two adult women could talk about. Pain, I guess, and how to deal with pain. They both have scars upon scars upon scars, and sometimes, just showing each other’s scars can help ease the dull ache of years of heartbreak.
There are no cafés open at this time of night, so I decide to go to the children’s park in midtown and spend some quality time with myself and every rusty swing I can find. Thankfully, there’re a lot of them. I pump my legs and go as high as I can and then jump off only to repeat the process, the squeaking so loud the previously sleeping squirrels come out to chitter angrily at me.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “But I’m trying to get to the moon.”
The squirrels politely point out that NASA has sort of figured out a way to do it, and I counter with the fact that their method is much, much noisier and involves a lot more fire. Finally, I get bored of the swings and head to the slide, the squirrels thankfully retreating into their tree mansions. I sit at the top of the slide, watching the stars glimmer.
When was the last time I came to a playground? I remember—we loved them in middle school. We thought it was the coolest shit to stay out late at the playground, defying our curfews even though the parks were only ever a few blocks from our houses. By “we,” I mean Nameless’s friends and me. Nameless was there, too. We used to play midnight hide-and-seek, the spring-bound horse rides ogling us eerily with their huge plastic eyes as we shrieked and ran from each other. We were so young. Nameless was so polite, so kind. He’d always find me the best places to hide my bulk, and he’d hide somewhere obvious nearby so he’d get caught and could tell the finder he saw me in the opposite direction.
We drank energy drinks we weren’t supposed to, ate candy we weren’t supposed to. One of Nameless’s friends, Ashley, was even cool. She and I got along as only girls who read a lot can. We talked about Gone with the Wind, Harry Potter, any and every book we’d read lately. She was the closest thing to a friend I’d had since kindergarten. Being a dumpling gets you more jeers than conversations, even as a child. But Ashley didn’t once jab at my appearance. Even Nameless would join in if his friends started joking about my weight, but Ashley never did.
I spot a shooting star and marvel at how fast it moves—here one second, gone the next. I hope Ashley’s all right, wherever she is.
And I hope Nameless is suffering, wherever he is.
Movies and books tell me revenge is always the way to go. They tell me revenge is what a girl should go for after a guy wrongs her. But every time I see it happen in fiction, I can only shake my head. That’s not how it goes. You don’t want revenge, you just want to get away from that guy. You don’t ever want to see him again. You want him to never be happy again, but you certainly don’t want to beat him up or lash out. Shame and terror floods you after it happens, paralyzing you. You can’t move even an inch toward that person. You walk the other way to avoid him.
It would be a perfect world if every girl wronged could take revenge. Revenge never even crossed my mind—I was too busy convincing myself I was ruined forever, that I deserved it for being so stupid and naive. That it was my fault, not his.
I was too busy lying to myself to even think about revenge.
If I saw him now, would I want revenge? Revenge implies you do the same thing to them that they did to you, but I realize I could never do that to another person. I could never inflict what he did to me on someone else. So I’d have to hurt him differently, but just as much.
I’m not sure there’s anything on this planet I could do that would hurt him equally, hurt him so badly he hated every inch of his body, hurt him so badly he’d build a shield around himself so thick even a cannonball couldn’t pierce it.
I don’t want revenge. I want to go back in time and stop it from ever happening.
But I can’t. So I keep going as best I can, in the only way I know how—by joking around, sniping retorts, acting dumb to make people underestimate me.
Back at the house, the windows are dark. Aunt Beth sits on the porch, smoking. I walk up casually.
“Has anyone ever told you you’re a bad influence?” I ask. Aunt Beth’s eyes twinkle.
“My mother. But our mother was diagnosed as a pathological liar. So, only you, Isis.”
“The one and only.” I puff my chest and sit beside her on the porch. The smell of her cigarette is odd, and I squint. “You’re still on that weed jam?”
“Still on that weed jam.” She smirks around another drag. “You know me—it’s only occasional.”
It’s true. Back when I lived with her, she’d smoke the odd joint when her knee pain got too bad—she’d broken it when she was young and it never really healed right. She’d tried booze, but didn’t want to become an alcoholic, and then opiates—the prescription kind—but she’d gotten addicted. She quit, and found a happy medium. After trying weed with Nameless, I realized I never wanted to smoke it again, and told her so, and she never worried I’d steal it or something equally teenager-y.
“Patricia’s asleep,” Aunt Beth says after a beat of quiet. “But we talked. It was good. I think she’s ready for the trial, at least more ready than she was before I came.”
“Yeah?” I hug my knees. “That’s good.”
“How many joints have you smoked here in Ohio?”
“Seven hundred.”
She whistles in an impressed way. “Incredible.”
“I go to parties and drink a whole bottle of scotch every night.”
“Well, shit. I’d better tell your mom to put a down payment on a coffin real soon.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m donating my body. The demand for alcohol-ridden kidneys is huge. They eat them as a delicacy in France.”
“Bon appétit.” Aunt Beth chuckles. I wrinkle my nose.
“I gross myself out sometimes.”
“Take my advice; if you don’t, something’s definitely wrong with you.”
“Phew. It’s so good knowing I’m wrong-free.”
We’re silent for a while, and then:
“How about you?” Aunt Beth asks. “How’re you feeling?”
“About the trial?”
“About anything.”
I recall Jack’s face. “Confused. A little sad. But I—I’m learning. I’m learning how to like myself again, slowly. And I never thought I would, you know?”
She nods, and I press on.
“But it’s not easy. There’s my dad, who doesn’t care about Mom or me anymore. There’s you, the only person who ever really got me, thousands of miles away. And then there’re my friends. We’ll all go to different colleges—oh God, college. I have to spend another four years cramming my brain full of minutiae while learning how to survive in a dorm with a roommate and shared showers and scholarships and essays and the massive ghost of a future unknown career pressuring me—what am I gonna do? How do you find an apartment or pay rent? How do I even make money?”
“Strip like I did when I was nineteen,” Aunt Beth offers.
“Obviously, stripping is the way to go,” I agree. “Don’t tell Mom.”
She mimes zipping her mouth shut with a wry smile, then immediately breaks it by talking. “Don’t strip.”
“Gotcha.”
The wind ruffles her skirt, and I offer her my jacket, but she refuses it.
“I’m going inside soon. Keep it for yourself.”
“What if I care about your well-being?”
“Don’t.” She turns her eyes to me, seriousness etched in her face. “Care about your own well-being.”
The way she says it is heavy.
She exhales softly. “I’m serious, Isis. You’ve got to start caring about yourself. Not me, not your mom, not your friends. Yourself. You are precious. There’s only one person like you in this whole world, and if you get run-down or hurt because you didn’t care about yourself enough, I’ll never forgive you.”
It’s not a threat—it can’t be when her eyes are shimmering with faint tears. I retract my hand holding my jacket to her and put it back on, the warmth welcome against the bitter air.
“I’m trying,” I say finally.
“No. You aren’t yet,” she corrects. “Not really. But if you are learning to like yourself again like you said, then it’ll come in time. And you have to let it happen when it does.”
Only half understanding, I nod.
“Okay.”
Aunt Beth’s stern face breaks into a smile, and she ruffles my hair.
“Thanks, kiddo.”
Aunt Beth leaves two days later, after forty-eight hours of Mom cooking delicious food for her and bingeing on a shitload of terrible Netflix movies we can all laugh at. It’s rejuvenating, having a third person in the house. Aunt Beth clears the air like an air purifier, a fan, something that keeps the energy moving. I can tell Mom loves having her around, and when she goes, we’re both pretty broken up about it. We don’t say that, of course, but on the way home from dropping Beth off at the airport, I squeeze Mom’s hand over the stick shift, and she smiles sadly.
“We’ll be okay,” I say.
“I hope so,” she returns.
Justice is basically a costumed farce. You learn that when you’re three and your parents tell you sharing is caring when quite clearly sharing is terrible and there is no caring at all involved, because no matter how loud you cry, no one seems to have sympathy for you and your doll that must not touch anybody else’s hands because everybody else is grimy and dumb.
A courthouse is essentially the same principle: a bunch of stuck-up, weary adults telling one another to share and care. With the added threat of jail time.
I sigh and re-button my hideous white blouse all the way up to my chin. At least Mom let me keep my jeans. I can’t morally support her when my butt is hanging out of tight black slacks for the world to see. I try to fix my hair—some big bun Mom made for me—but Kayla slaps my hands away.
“Stop it. You look good. For once.”
She sits beside me in the courtroom, a similar white blouse barely restraining her considerable chest. She wears a skirt and pearl earrings that are actual pearls and looks totally the part of first lady. If the first lady were seventeen and Latina.
The court isn’t exactly what I pictured; I was expecting CSI levels of crowded rooms and scowling judges and apprehensive jurors. But instead I get a room that looks straight out of the eighties—weird geometric-patterned carpets and a flickering fluorescent bulb in one corner and a judge who looks like a smiley grandma with purplish hair and bright red nails. The jury doesn’t even look serious. They talk and laugh among themselves. Mom sits two rows in front of us, her prosecutor at her table on the right. Leo, the scumbag, sits at the left table, his lawyer whispering to him. He’s got a cast on his arm and a bandaged nose.
“Ass,” I whisper to Kayla. “Leo’s nose is fine. He’s just wearing it for show.”
She sneers. “He’s so nasty. I hope he gets all that nasty delivered right back at him! Via FedEx! Express shipping!”
I keep my eyes on Mom as people filter in. I slept on the air mattress by her bed last night again because she couldn’t stop crying. After the Stanford hullabaloo deflated, all that was left was a sad remnant of reality, of the impending trial. Her shoulders are shaking under her two-piece suit and she’s wearing makeup to cover her dark circles, but she keeps her head high.
“Is Jack coming?” Kayla asks. I nod.
“Yeah. Why?”
She shrugs. “Just… It might be hard for you. You know.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Kayla’s quiet, before she says, “It was hard for him, too.”
“What? Who?”
“Jack. When you were gone, he was so different. I know I said that the day you came back, but—but he really, really changed. I’ve never seen him look that bored. It was almost like he was dead.”
“No one to call you names does that to people.”
She shakes her head and sighs. Leo’s eyes catch mine once, and I mime cutting my own throat to get the point across. He doesn’t look at me again.
“For once, your threats are deserved.”
The voice belongs to Jack, who slides into the seat next to me. He’s wearing a midnight suit—crisp, with a porcelain-blue tie that matches his eyes. His hair’s slicked back with gel, cheekbones defiant and profile haughty and regal as ever.
Kayla gives him a cursory glance. “Hey, Jack.”
“Kayla. Good to see you.” He nods at her. Their exchange two months ago would’ve been so different, but now it’s almost…mature? I shudder. Gross.
The image of his hand in the email picture won’t fade from my mind. He might’ve killed someone! Like, dead! Like, not-breathing or -eating! Not-eating sucks because A) food is fantastic and B) food is fantastic! And here I am talking normally to a guy who made people unable to eat. He could be a regular Ted Bundy for all I know, because I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him, except what my fragmented memories tell me. And it makes me feel like screaming. Or puking. Hopefully not simultaneously.
“Your mother looks better,” Jack leans in and murmurs. “She was wasting away while you were gone.”
“From the sound of things, so were you.”
He tenses minutely, his suit straining at his shoulders. Before he can open his mouth, the guard calls out, “All rise,” and everyone in the courtroom stands. The grandma-y judge settles in her chair and tells us to be seated.
“The honorable Judge Violet Diego will be presiding over case 109487, the State of Ohio versus Cassidy,” the guard reads from a clipboard. “Mr. John Pearson and Mrs. Hannah Roth will be representing their respective clients. Mr. William Fitzgerald is acting court stenographer. Your Honor.”
The guard nods to Judge Diego and then retreats to the corner. Diego clears her throat.
“It is my understanding this trial is to address Mr. Leo Cassidy’s alleged breaking and entering and assault and battery of Mrs. Patricia Blake and her daughter, Isis Blake. Prosecutor, if you’d like to make your opening statement now.”
Mom’s prosecutor, a pretty blond lady, stands and takes the center of the room. She makes a speech about Leo’s ruthlessness, about Mom’s history with him, and how she left Florida to escape him. She presents the restraining order Mom got against him before she left, my cranial X-rays, and the photos the police took of the ransacked house. Our house. Shattered glass and a blood smear on the wall and—
I flinch. A metal baseball bat. Kayla grabs my hand and squeezes.
The defense attorney argues Leo was in a fugue state and suffering from the effects of PTSD from his time in Iraq as a medic.
I lean in to Jack. “You’re a nerd, right? You know big words.”
He snorts. “Verily, forsooth.”
“What’s a fugue state?”
“It’s similar to the dissociative amnesia you have for me,” he murmurs.
“Aw, stalking my medical records? You shouldn’t have.”
“I don’t stalk, I understand basic psychiatric indications. Regardless, the argument of a fugue state in his defense is idiotic. It’s a rare occurrence, and he showed no symptoms of another outward personality. If the judge buys it, I’ll be very surprised.”
“Aren’t you a witness?”
He nods. “They’ll call for me, if they think my testimony can help more than it hurts.”
The defense suddenly asks for Mom to take the stand. She looks back at me, once, and I smile as encouragingly as I can and give her a thumbs-up. She grins wanly and walks to the stand. The guard swears her in on the Bible, and the defense attorney starts to grill her—where she was that night, what she was wearing, where I was, what Leo looked like, what he sounded like. Mom’s resolve wavers, her hands shaking and her lip bitten, but she doesn’t break. She keeps talking even though she looks like glass is ripping up her stomach from the inside out. When the defense is done, her own lawyer comes up, and Mom gives a full account of the story with the lawyer’s urging. I gnaw my mouth to stay calm and think about unicorns, but even rainbow-pooping horned horses can’t distract me from the way Mom’s voice trembles as she describes the attack. I want to clap my hands over my ears, or leave, but she needs me. She’s looking at me the entire time she’s talking, so I keep eye contact with her. I’m her anchor.
“And then Jack—” Mom inhales. “Isis’s friend from school, Jack, came in. I saw him over Leo’s shoulder.”
“Did Jack have a weapon on him that you could see?” the prosecutor asks.
“Objection, Your Honor, visual confirmation of the weapon at the moment isn’t relevant—” the defense starts.
Judge Diego shoots him a sharp look. “Overruled. Continue, Ms. Roth.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.” Mom’s prosecutor nods. “Mrs. Blake, did he have a weapon you could see?”
“Yes. A baseball bat.”
The prosecutor grills her about what went on—how many times Jack hit Leo and what happened after.
“And then he went downstairs, to where Isis was, and I went with him, and I started crying again when I saw her body so still. I was afraid. Terrified. You don’t know how— Oh God—” Mom cuts off, and the prosecutor looks to Judge Diego.
“That’s all, Your Honor.”
I get up to help Mom to her chair, but Kayla pulls me back down and I watch the guard do it instead. Mom smiles a watery smile at me once she’s seated, and she gives me a thumbs-up. She isn’t okay. But she’s not afraid. I can see that much.
They call Jack to the stand next. The defense attorney is startled at his lack of expression—it unnerves him. I smother a laugh. Welcome to the club, bucko.
“Did you, or did you not, break into the Blakes’ house without permission?” the attorney asks.
“Yes,” Jack says in a monotone. “I broke in. Through the open door your client left.”
A murmur goes around the courtroom.
Kayla pumps her fist and squeals. “Oh, he’s gonna kill this guy so bad.”
I twist my mouth shut. She has no idea.
“And what did you witness when you walked in?”
“I saw Isis Blake collapsed on the floor. There was a bloody smear on the wall and blood on the side of her head.”
“Did you see my client anywhere in the room?”
Jack narrows his eyes. “No. But I could hear him thumping around upstairs.”
“So you did not witness my client ‘assaulting’ Isis Blake?”
“No.”
The attorney smirks and paces. “And did you, or did you not, grab an aluminum baseball bat from your car and head upstairs to confront my client?”
“I did.”
“And was my client armed?”
“No. But that didn’t seem to stop him from trying to rape a terrified woman.”
I flinch. Mom is completely still, focused on Jack. The court rustles again, and the judge bangs her gavel.
“Order! Order in the court.”
When the murmurs die down, the defense attorney straightens.
“How do you know the Blake family, Jack?”
“Isis is an”—there’s the briefest pause as Jack thinks—“acquaintance. From school.”
“I’d like to present exhibit A.” The attorney walks up, holding a tape recorder and placing it on the table. It’s an interview with Principal Evans, who says Jack and I aren’t friendly, that we’re practically mortal enemies at school. The attorney tries to twist it like Jack came to my house that day to do something awful to me, out of anger. But Mom’s prosecutor immediately shuts it down.
Jack looks to me. If I strain hard enough, I can barely discern the tiniest sliver of worry in his eyes. The jury is looking at Jack like they’re suddenly suspicious. He returns to the seat.
“You…you all right?” I say. “I mean, other than the fact that you have a fat, arrogant tumor on your neck you call a head.”
“I’m fine,” he says softly. There’s a beat.
“I didn’t, uh, mean it. The tumor thing. It’s my instinct to be mean to you.”
A wisp of a crooked smile pulls at his mouth. “I know.”
And then they call for Leo. The defense attorney builds up his case—that he fought in Iraq, that he got a head injury there, that the army shrink had diagnosed him with PTSD. And with every little half-baked story, the fury in my guts burns hotter and hotter. It makes my stomach want to evacuate lunch onto his shoes. But I can’t do anything about it.
“Is it correct that you received a call from Mrs. Blake earlier that day, asking you to visit her at her home?” the attorney asks. Leo adjusts his cast and, with a mock-serious face, nods.
“Yes.”
“That’s fucking bullshit!” I shout, standing and jabbing my finger at him. “That’s bullshit and you know it!”
“Order!” The judge bangs her gavel. “Miss Blake, be seated!”
“He’s lying, Your Honor! He’s a lying scumbag who ruined Mom’s life—”
“Order!” she shouts. “You either sit down right now, young lady, or I’ll have you escorted out.”
I’m breathing heavily, and my blood sings hot in my veins. I’m ready to punch, to fight, to kick and bite and scream. But I can’t do that here. Mom’s counting on me, on this trial, to give her some peace of mind. I push through the row and storm out the door. The marble halls of the courtroom are too pristine. They mock me, clean and shiny when my insides are dirty and filled with caked hate.
“Hey!”
I ignore the voice and stride down the hall.
“Hey!”
“AGHH!” I kick a bench with the flat of my sole. “Pathetic shithead! Lying monkey-anus-faced bastard—”
“Isis—”
“If I ever get within five feet of him, there will be blood. Of the not-fake kind.”
“Isis, listen—”
“I’m sure they make pitchforks that can fit inside a human mouth. And down the throat.”
“Isis!”
Someone grabs my hand. I whirl around and pull it away. Jack stands there, slightly panting.
“Listen to me: you need to calm down.”
“Calm!” I laugh. “I’m perfectly calm!”
“What are you doing with your hands?”
“Practicing.” I wiggle my fingers.
“For what?”
“For when I get my hands inside his guts.”
“He’s not going to get away with it. Even a moron freshman in law school can see that. So don’t get worked up like this. It’s not helping anyone, and it’s certainly not helping you.”
“Oh, you wanna help me now? That’s weird, because last time we talked, you basically told me you’re going to make my life hell.”
“Do I? Make your life hell?”
His voice pitches down, low and deep and cracked through. The sudden change startles me.
“No.” I inhale. “You just make it a little harder.”
“Your mom needs you,” he presses.
“I can’t—can’t go back in there. Not for a while. If I see that Neanderthal’s face again, I’ll—”
Jack quirks a brow. “A word more than four letters long. I’m impressed.”
“You should be. I spent an entire year of middle school studying them. And their hairy crotches. But mostly them.”
“Would punching me again help ease your fury?”
I scoff. “Maybe. Probably not. It’s him I want to hurt, not you.”
Jack looks outside the courthouse window, to the playground across the street.
“There’re two things I know that calm you down—violence and sugar. Ice cream.” He points to an ice cream cart on the sidewalk. “C’mon. My treat.”
“Ohhh no. I know how this works. First it’s ice cream, then it’s marriage.”
“Marriage, huh? Tell me,” he says coolly as we both walk toward the cart anyway, “who’s the lucky sea slug?”
“Why sea slug? Why not, like, a sea dragon?”
“Because a sea slug doesn’t have eyes. Or a nose. Or any discernible intelligence beyond eating and shitting. You’d make the perfect match.”
I snort. The sun and clear blue sky are a sign February landed on its head when it got out of bed this morning. It’s too cold for ice cream, but we’re eating it anyway in an attempt to escape the stuffy courthouse. I pick a strawberry cone and Jack gets mint chocolate chip. There’s a bench, but I sit on the yellowed grass under the tree instead. Jack sits with me.
“You don’t have to,” I say.
“It’s comfy here,” he counters.
“Some butts are better off miles apart.”
“No.”
With that clarifying sentence, we enjoy our ice creams in the relative chilly peace shared only between two people who are complete opposites. Jack looks ridiculous in the wintery sunlight. Ridiculous and handsome and puke-worthy.
“Can you go back to Abercrombie?”
“What?” Jack looks at me.
“Just, you know. Crawl back into the magazine you came from. So I can hide it under my bed between two National Geographic issues on recycling elephant waste and never read it again.”
“You’re insane.”
“You know how people talk about being beautiful on the inside and stuff,” I start.
“Yes. And?”
“I just realized people don’t have X-ray vision,” I whisper in awe. “They can’t see your insides.”
He rubs his forehead tiredly.
“My zodiac sign is Cancer,” I insist.
Jack licks his ice cream, impressed.
“One time, when I was seven, I cried so hard I rehydrated a raisin.”
My babbling doesn’t scare him off like the other 99 percent of the population with dangly bits between their legs. He just grunts.
“Do you know the alphabet backward?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Fast?”
“ZYXWVUTSRQPONML—”
“Can you make cinnamon sugar doughnuts?”
“I can make cinnamon rolls.”
“Can you jump rope?”
“Yes.”
“A million times?”
“If you gave me cybernetic knees, there’s a slight possibility.”
I stare into his face. “You don’t have bright green eyes.”
“No.”
“And you’re not left-handed.”
“No.”
“And you probably can’t play an ocarina.”
“Unfortunately, no.”
I lean back and elegantly smash my ice cream into my mouth hole. “Good.”
“Those were awfully specific,” he says.
“Requirements of my dream man. Sea slug. Whatever. Are you even supposed to leave the courtroom if you’re a witness?”
“I already gave my testimony don’t change the subject you have a dream man?” He says it all in one breath and has to gulp air. I laugh.
“Didn’t think ice princes ran out of breath.”
“Your dream man is impossible.”
“Bingo.” I point at him.
He narrows his eyes. “So that’s what you do when you get hurt? You construct a dream man who can’t possibly exist, so no one will ever live up to your standards and you won’t have to look their way twice?”
“Yup.”
“You don’t face the pain? You put up a wall between it and you and pretend it doesn’t exist?”
The sun filters through the leaves. A dull ache forms above my stomach.
“Yeah.”
“You’re torturing yourself.”
I know. “I’m fine, bro.”
He snorts. “You’re the furthest thing from fine, and you choose to keep it that way.”
“What about you?” I snap. “What about Sophia?”
“What about her?”
“She’s dying, jackass. She’s dying and you’re here with me, buying me ice cream and asking me about my dream man! She’s dying and you kissed me—more than once, apparently! How fucking selfish are you? Are you just setting me up so you have someone to pity-fuck you when she dies?”
His eyes flash with an arctic chill. “Shut up.”
“All we do is argue. Sure, respect or whatever, but respect isn’t enough. What’s enough is tenderness, and love, and you have that with Sophia.” I feel something hot prickling in the corners of my eyes. “So fuck you, actually. Fuck you. Don’t try to get close to me. Don’t try to fucking fix me. I’m not the princess, I’m the goddamn dragon, and you can’t seem to see that. So stop! Stop being nice to me! Stop being not-nice to me! Just stay out of my fucking life!”
She comes like a storm, and she leaves like one, heavy steps and hands clenched and hair whipping behind her in the bare winter breeze, amber eyes molten with fire and resentment.
Something in me grows heavy, and then wilts.
I don’t go back into the courtroom. I wait in the park and listen to the chatter from across the street as people leave. Leo gets three years’ jail time for “assault and battery” and “breaking and entering.” Mrs. Blake waves to me. Isis ignores me and walks to her comically misshapen VW Beetle.
She ignores me. Completely. No sneers, no wicked little smiles, no flipping birds. Nothing. Just complete emptiness.