Chapter Eight
3 Years, 26 Weeks, 6 Days
There are three constants in the world: those who like pineapple pizza are criminals, death comes for all of us, and hospital wards never change.
It feels like ages since I stepped through the sliding door, the rush of sanitized air greeting me with a pungent ferocity only achievable by bleach and misery. The hospital looks the same as always—the same night-shift nurses scurrying to and fro, the same tired security guard pouring himself a third cup of lukewarm coffee. The oncology doctor I can never remember the name of walks briskly by, white coat flapping like seagull wings. Everything’s normal, so normal it nearly soothes my writhing angsty-filled teenage soul.
“Isis!” A nurse at the front desk smiles. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Hi,” I say. “It’s good to see you again, too. This time without a broken head.”
“The kids have missed you,” she insists. “Do you want me to take you to them?”
“I’m actually going to visit Sophia first, if that’s okay.” I hold up a bag of warm Subway sandwiches. “Delivery for two, her hands only.”
She waves me down the hall. “All right. Just let me know when you’re ready to see the kids.”
I shuffle warily toward Sophia’s room. Hopefully she’s in a good mood. Or a mood for sandwiches. I’d take either.
Thankfully, Naomi is coming out of Sophia’s room. She flashes me a weary smile when she sees me.
“And here I was, thinking our resident troublemaker was gone forever.”
“Nice to see you, too, Naomi.”
She laughs and pulls me into a one-armed hug. When we part, she sniffs the air.
“Is that a meatball sub I smell?”
“Good goddamn, Naomi. Not only are you beautiful and charming, you have a nose like a bloodhound. Your worth on the marriage market is astronomically high, I bet.”
My sass has little effect on her, as per usual. She motions to Sophia’s room.
“She’s just about to go to sleep. It’s been a long day for her.”
“What happened?”
“Just some physical therapy. Her muscles are—” Naomi frowns. “Not in the best condition.”
“Are they getting worse?”
“The tumors press down on a part of her nervous system.” She sighs. “It makes it very painful to move. The longer they stay there, the more damage they do.”
I’m quiet. Naomi puts a hand on my shoulder.
“It’ll be all right. Go in and see her. She’ll be thrilled.”
“Will she?”
“Of course. You’re all she talks about these days. You and Jack, of course. Thank you for texting with her, by the way. It just makes her day to have someone to talk to.”
Sophia and I’ve been texting, it’s true. At first I just sent her cat pictures I found on the internet, like I used to do when I was in the hospital. She’d respond with equally adorable dog pictures, and we’d have a sort of cute-animal war back and forth. But the cat pictures turned to talking about our days. I told her about the trial, and she told me about how much it hurt to just live, to exist, to breathe and wake up every morning. One of us was in more pain than the other. One of us felt guiltier about the pain than the other.
I clutch my guilt sandwiches to my chest and open Sophia’s door. She’s propped up on pillows, an IV of painkillers attached to her wrist. Her hair and skin are the same pale color, practically blending into the white sheets. She scribbles in a black journal, but closes it and tries to hide it when I walk in. She doesn’t smile when she sees me, but I can see her try to look happier. Healthier. Not in pain. It’s a brave, taxing front for an audience of one.
“Hope you like wads of meat on bread.” I hold up the bag. Sophia snickers, the sound so faint and low it’s like a cat’s hiss.
“You’ve found my only weakness.”
She’s weak all over. But I don’t say that. I sit on the chair by her bed and hand her a sandwich. She unwraps it slowly, eyes widening.
“It’s been a while,” she says.
“Since I’ve come to visit you? Yeah, definitely. Sorry about that, school and the trial—”
“I meant it’s been a while since I’ve had Subway.” She takes a delicate nibble of bread. “Not everything is about you.”
Humbled, I take a massive bite of sandwich to stop up my blabbering mouth.
“It feels like everything is about me all the time.” I swallow. “Is that bad?”
“No. It just means you’re alive—you, a single person with a single brain and a single life, with two eyes and one point of view. Everybody thinks they’re the main character of their own story. That’s just what being alive means.”
“When you put it like that, we all sound like assholes.”
“We are,” Sophia insists. “But you happen to be an asshole who brought me food not of the hospital variety, so you get a pass. And I’m the asshole who’s stuck here, who made you come out all this way. So.”
“You can’t be an asshole when you’re sick. Your body is hurting. You’ve got every right to be an asshole,” I say. Sophia gives me a pointed, half-amused, half-irritated look.
“That’s not how it works. Nobody has the right to be an asshole to people who care about them. And yet I keep doing it. I’m hooked up to a steady drip of pure morphine and I can still be an asshole. Because I choose to. Because even though the pain in my body is numbed, the pain in my head is still there. It’s always there. It infects every thought, everything that comes out of my mouth. And the harder I try to hide it, the worse it gets. The more it wants to come out and ruin everything.”
We eat our sandwiches in the long quiet. Sophia talks first.
“You know what’s the worst part?” She looks at her hands. “It’s not being stuck here. It’s not the pain. It’s the ‘why.’ It’s me asking why every day of my life. It’s me praying to every god we’ve invented, asking him or her or it ‘why.’ Why me? Why give me tumors? What’s so special about me? Does it like to watch me suffer? Did I do something awful in a previous life, and this is my punishment? Is this a test, to prove I’m worthy of its love?”
I’m struck silent, frozen and yet somehow also trembling. Sophia stares at the whitewashed ceiling like she’s looking beyond it, above it.
“And then I realized: there is no ‘why,’” she says. “Things just happen. That’s it. The gods have no plan. If they did, why would they make such a horrible one? If God really exists, the good and just God who rewards pious behavior and punishes the wicked, then why does pain exist at all? If he exists, that must mean I’m wicked. I must deserve this. Either that, or there is no God. There are only things, good and bad things, and they happen all the time, to everyone.”
She smiles at me, something about it sad.
“But no one wants to hear that. No one is brave enough to accept the universe is empty of meaning, or divine plan. We want to believe, so we make things up to believe in, because it’s easier. It’s less scary to think there’s a God out there, a sentient, omnipotent man watching over us, making everything happen for a reason. We want to believe, even if it isn’t true. So we make it true. We give it reason, when there is no reason. It’s as simple as that. If anything, we are the gods. We make things real by believing.”
Her laughter is faint, and she takes another bite of sandwich. I can’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. I’ve never thought about what I believe in. I’ve never given it much thought because I don’t have to. I’m not sick. Death doesn’t shadow me like it does Sophia. I’m lucky. Above all, I’m lucky I never had to think about it seriously.
“What do you believe in?” Sophia asks suddenly. “God? Buddha? Aliens? Or nothing at all?”
I’m quiet.
“Come on, there has to be something. Even people who don’t give it much thought have some belief in their hearts, buried deep down. Is your mom Christian? Do you—”
“Myself,” I say finally. Sophia closes her mouth, letting me continue. “I believe in myself.”
“That’s very magical-girl-anime of you.” She laughs.
“It’s not. At least, I don’t think it is. It’s just me. I don’t know anything about God, or gods, or aliens. I don’t know what happens in the afterlife or if there is one. I just know it’ll be a surprise. And until then, all I can do is be myself. All I can do is take care of myself. All I can do is live, until I can’t anymore.”
It’s Sophia’s turn to be quiet. She leans back and hoop-shots her sandwich paper into the trash can from across the room.
“Nice shot,” I say. She shrugs.
“It’s my grandmother’s birthday today. Or was, rather.”
“Happy birthday, Sophie’s g-ma.”
Sophia laughs. “She would’ve liked you. She liked Jack, so she’d definitely like you.”
“Here’s a bit of fun trivia: I’m nothing like Jack. I’m nothing like Jack!”
“Here’s a bit of fun trivia: just because you say things twice and louder doesn’t make it true.”
“Touché. But I’d at least like sourced footnotes on these accusations.”
Sophia counts down on her fingers. “You two never reveal how you really feel. You always try to make me feel better before making yourselves feel better. Both of you naively, masochistically insist on sticking around me, even if I’m terrible to you.”
She curls the last finger into her first. “And both of you can’t come to terms with my dying.”
“Soph—”
“But that’s all right,” she continues. “Since I haven’t come to terms with it, either.”
She pulls out the black notebook I saw her writing in.
“My grandmother left me enough money to get treatment,” she says. “She willed everything to me, to be signed over to me when I turned eighteen. But then they found the tumors, and her lawyer got a special exception for me to use the funds for my treatment. After four years, it’s nearly run out. Jack’s been picking up the slack, but I worry. I don’t know where he gets that much money or how. I know it’s not from his mom—he’s too proud. He wants to take care of me on his own. I’m terrified he’s doing something illegal for me. And that just makes me feel horrible.”
I knit my lips shut. I don’t know what he’s doing. What memories I’ve regained tell me it’s something people normally think is shady. If Jack hasn’t told her, it’s for a reason. He’s protecting her from the truth. If I told her what little I think I know, he’d hate me even more. But why do I care? So what if he hates me? I hate him. I hate his face and his eyes and his voice—
“You’d tell me, right?” Sophia looks at me, her deep blue irises more vast than the ocean. “If you knew, Isis, you’d tell me. Because we’re friends. Because I deserve to know the truth, even if Jack thinks he’s doing the right thing by not telling me.”
I hesitate, and Sophia pounces on it like a lion on a baby gazelle.
“Is it drugs? Please tell me it isn’t drugs.”
I struggle with words, my thoughts a jumble of torn morality.
“It’s not fighting,” she presses. “He’s always been good at fighting, but please, please tell me it isn’t that. Please tell me he’s not beating people up just for me.”
The pain on her face is obvious. How could Jack be so cruel as to keep this from her? It’s obviously causing her massive amounts of anxiety and guilt.
“I can’t—I can’t remember.” I make a half truth. “Everything about him is so fuzzy.”
“You’re lying,” she says instantly. “You know exactly what he’s doing.”
“I don’t, Sophia,” I insist. “Or maybe I do, but I can’t remember.”
She pauses, and then, “If you remember, will you promise to tell me? Right away?”
“Of course.”
She stares at me, judging my honesty. Finally she nods.
“It’s a promise.”
She scribbles in her black book while I think everything over. My eyes catch a line—it’s a list. Eat cupcakes from that fancy place in New York. The list is long, with scribbled-out lines and doodles. She sees me staring.
“It’s a bucket list,” Sophia says finally. “It’s cheesy, I know. People only make bucket lists in movies, but Dr. Mernich said it would help. Not that anything can help anymore. But it does make me feel better, planning stuff to do. I can’t travel, not for long, anyway. Even if none of this stuff happens, I can at least dream about it.”
She yawns, blinking sleepily.
“You can do more than that,” I say. “You can do all those things you want to.”
“Oh shut up with the hopeful stuff already.” She sighs.
She falls asleep so quickly after that I don’t have time to apologize. Feeling ashamed, I make for the exit. I open the door only to come face to face with Jack. I close it behind me quickly. The tension is instant, my neck hair prickling and my heart racing like I’ve seen a shark while diving underwater. My motormouth saves me.
“Why are you always here when I am? Let me guess—social media stalking??”
“No,” he says flatly.
“GPS chip in my tooth?”
“I’d never spend that much money on you.”
“I told you to stay away from me.”
“I’m not staying away from Sophia,” he asserts. “And apparently neither are you. So never being near each other again is statistically improbable.”
“Statistically, when someone asks someone else to leave them alone, they don’t talk to said person.”
“You’re the one who spoke to me first.”
“Why haven’t you told her about what you do?” I demand. “She’s torn up over it.”
His subzero eyes narrow. “I can’t tell her. She’d be disappointed in me. She’d hate me. She’d think I was disgusting.”
“You’re a lot of infuriating things, Jack Hunter,” I say. “But you’re not disgusting.”
“Really?” He laughs bitterly. “What world do you live in? Everyone thinks sleeping with other people for money is base. Dirty. Don’t pretend not to be one of them.”
My breath hitches. “Is that— Is that what you do?”
He doesn’t answer, looking at the floor instead. I study his face, and the memories come trickling in like water through a clogged sieve. A red and black card with the name Jaden on it, eating frosting as I watched him walk arm in arm with a girl in town… I paid him to take Kayla out at one point. His escorting was for Sophia—I remember finding that out, too. He’s paying her hospital bills with the money he makes, and he keeps it a secret from everyone—his mom, Sophia, everyone. Everyone except me.
“Part of me wished you wouldn’t remember,” Jack says softly.
“Why?”
“Because.” He sighs. “I told you. People are disgusted by it. You were, too, and now you are again.”
I set my jaw. “I used to be. I used to think it was gross and wrong. But then I realized I only thought that way because I hated you. Because anything you did was disgusting to me, back when we first met.”
“And now?” he snarls.
“Now I— It’s—” It’s my turn to be unable to look him in the eye. “Now I realize it’s your choice. And as long as you’re all right with it, as long as it isn’t hurting you or making you hate yourself, it’s fine. It’s what you want to do for Sophia. It’s what you want to do, period. So who am I to say it’s wrong, or bad? Only bigots think like that.”
“So you’re fine with it? You’re fine with me sleeping with people for money?”
“Trust me when I say I know sex isn’t anything special.”
His eyebrows knit, the wrinkle between them intense. “It can be, if it’s with someone you love.”
My face heats, my stomach burbling uneasily. “Then why do you do it with people you don’t love?”
“Because it’s not—” He exhales. “It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t have experience.”
The burbling in my stomach becomes a roiling. “Right. So I’m too inexperienced to bother with.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Jack’s voice lowers, still even and patient. “Listen, do you kiss your mother?”
“What? What kind of question is that?”
“Do you?”
“Yeah, duh. On the cheek. Or the top of her head, sometimes.”
“I kissed you,” he says without missing a beat. “And that was different, wasn’t it? It felt different. Right?”
It’s hard to hear through his careful control, but I swear his last word sounds unsure, anxious.
“Y-Yeah,” I admit. “It felt—”
I brave a glance at his face, and my skin prickles as I realize he’s looking at me. Not staring, not glaring, just looking at me; me, everything about me, and it feels like not a single thing in my heart is hidden from his gaze. The word I’m searching for is something I don’t know. It’s undefined, a blank where a definition should be. It’s elusive, just on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t say it. Frustration builds in me, exploding all at once.
“What’s the point of asking me this?” I demand. His ice-blue eyes dim, but don’t waver.
“I’m trying to explain to you there’s a difference. There’s routine affection, and then there’s something…something more. Something much more.”
The wildfire on my face burns hotter, a third of it shame, a third of it curiosity, and a third of it some deep, instinctual longing; a longing to know what he means, a longing to have him show me what it means.
I manage to douse myself in seven tons of imaginary frigid water and refocus.
“Even if you’re just…giving routine affection, it’s only okay as long as you aren’t hurting yourself by doing it.”
“Physically?”
“Or emotionally,” I add.
His eyes grow hard. “Why would you care about me? You told me to stay out of your life. You don’t get to pretend to care about me.”
I freeze. He’s right. Why do I care?
“It’s not pretending,” I grit out.
“You hate me,” he says flatly.
“You infuriate me,” I say. “You confuse me. Every time I talk to you, my feelings turn into a tornado, my stomach twists up. I don’t know how to feel about you, okay? I need space. I need time. I need to think without you fucking up my head.”
His angry expression cools to an impassive, deathly void. He moves behind me, opening Sophia’s door and closing it evenly in my face. Somehow the tornado inside me gets worse. Through the gaps in the blinds of Sophia’s window, I can see Jack sitting on the bed next to her, grasping her hand and smoothing away the hair from her forehead tenderly.
Something clicks into place. That’s where he belongs. I can feel it, see it, sense it. Holding her hand is what he should be doing, always, forever. They fit like pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know we were putting back together.
There’s no place for me.
There’s no place for a girl who doesn’t think about death. A girl who isn’t serious or deep or mature. There’s no place for a girl who only believes in herself.
Mira and James are a lot easier to be with. I don’t have to be serious or deep—on the contrary, they want nothing less than total lighthearted fun. God knows they’re bored as hell spending all their time in this hospital. A place for the sick and old is no place for kids to grow up. They deserve other kids their age, candy, school, and zoos and playgrounds and Disneyworld.
“Isis.” James’s voice brings me out of my thoughts. “Why do you look so sad?”
I smile. “Oh, it’s just teenage hormones. Don’t worry about it.”
“Teenagers sound extremely gross,” Mira says sagely.
“We are the grossest,” I assure her. “Have you seen a teenager lately? They’re absolutely covered in grease and sarcasm.”
“Like you.” James giggles.
“I’m negative seven grease, at least.”
“And plus a million sarcasm,” Mira says.
“Who gave you permission to be so sassy?” I pretend to look offended. They both point at me instantly, and I burst into laughter. James, sitting by the window, points out of it to the parking lot.
“Hey! Isn’t that Jack?”
Mira and I crowd the window beside him. Jack’s walking to his car. James pulls out a Nerf gun from under his pillow and aims at Jack.
“Do it, do it, do it,” Mira and I chant. He squeezes the trigger, and the little foam bullet goes flying. There’s no way it reached him, but at that same moment Jack stops and looks back up at the hospital. James and Mira and I duck under the windowsill.
“Did it actually hit him?” James hisses.
“No way,” Mira whispers. “He’s just staring and being a weirdo like he always is.”
“Weirdo is a really good name for him,” I agree. We poke our heads over the sill and see that Jack’s walking away again.
“Phew!” James wipes his forehead. “I thought I killed him.”
“You can’t kill people with Nerf guns,” Mira snaps.
“Unfortunately,” I say. “Also, if you killed him, you’d be the world’s youngest assassin.”
“Aw, I wanna be that! That sounds awesome!” James pouts. Mira flicks him on the head.
“Nuh-uh. You wanna go to space when you grow up, remember?”
“So?”
“There aren’t any people in space for assassining!”
I laugh so hard I surprise myself. Mira and James laugh, too, just looking a little more confused. I sit up and wipe my eyes.
“I s-swear.” I gulp air. “You two are going to end up assassining me someday.”
“But I don’t wanna assassin you!” James argues.
“Too bad. The wheels are already in motion.”
“Man, that sucks,” he grumbles. “You’re the only cool teenager I’ve ever met.”
“False,” I say. “You clearly haven’t met the Breakfast Club.”
“Who’s that?” He frowns. Mira’s eyes light up.
“There’s a whole club for breakfast?”
“Yup. It’s only for teenagers, though.”
Mira considers this, then frowns very seriously at me. “I’ve changed my mind. Teenagers are okay.”
I start laughing again, and James rolls his eyes and fires his Nerf gun at the ceiling.
I, Isis Blake, think Principal Evans is a nice guy.
By Disney villain standards.
By every other standard, he’s more or less a horrible jerk. And I know this, but I’ve spent so much time with him now I barely see it anymore. It just is, like the stupid watercolor of the school’s main building on his wall, or the fluorescent light above his desk that flickers sometimes, because, hello, public school funding. Summer is hot and I am hot and the sky is blue and Evans is just a straight-up jerk with a continual midlife crisis he likes to take out on me.
I put my feet up on his desk anyway.
“What’s up, man?” I ask. I know exactly what’s up. But I’m gonna make him beg for it. Evans runs his hand over his balding head.
“I was concerned about my favorite student.”
“Oh, you’ve gotten so much better at lying!” I clap my hands. “You could just say you wanna know what was in Stanford’s envelope. You know, be a little more honest with your feelings. I’m sure it’d save you in the long run from buying that inevitable red convertible or a couple years of therapy.”
Evans frowns. “I have been trying to make up for my mistakes. How much longer are you going to treat me like the bad guy?”
“As long as you’re alive,” I say cheerily. “You just want me to tell you I got in early, so you can brag to your other bald principal friends.”
“You did? Congratulations.”
“Ah-ah.” I wag my finger. “Don’t assume, and don’t try to get me to say it. I know how you work.”
“And how do I work, Isis? Please tell me.”
“Underhanded tactics and simpering lead-ons. You’d have done well in 1700s France. Except everybody there got beheaded for that stuff.” I pause and stroke my chin thoughtfully, then smile. “Yup! You would’ve done well.”
Evans is quiet. His eyes are set and hard, for once, instead of soft and evasive.
“Let me guess.” I lean forward. “You want me to tell you I got in, so that you can feel better, feel redeemed, that you entered me in their applications process, like getting me into a prestigious college will make up for the pictures and the bullshit.”
He doesn’t move or blink. I lean back.
“News flash, Evans—it’s called bullshit because it’s shit. Because it’s already been pooped out, and nothing can be done about it. It can’t be cleaned up. It’ll always be there. The stink will linger. It’ll always be something you’ve done. So no, I’m not going to tell you.”
Evans smiles. “You already have.”
I scoff. “Yeah?”
“You wouldn’t be nearly as arrogant if you didn’t hold the knowledge that you got in. If you didn’t get in, you’d have nothing to lord over me. You wouldn’t be dragging it out like this.”
I inhale sharply. He’s right. He’s fucking right. I learned how he works, but he’s been learning how I work all along. Clever little rat.
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad.” He smiles a softer smile. “I am glad you have the opportunity. I can rest easy knowing one of my brightest students has the opportunity to become brighter.”
I’m quiet. He gets up and stands at the window, watching the people at recess below.
“Because you are, you know. Bright. When you first came, I looked at your records and dismissed you as a troublemaker. But you’ve done so well. Your paper statistics were deceptive. And yet I judged you on that solely.”
“Don’t get all cheesy on me,” I say.
Evans shrugs. “I’m not. I know you dislike me, with good reason. And that won’t change. But I learned from you, Isis. I’d forgotten how to learn from students. Years of being principal, instead of a teacher, distanced me.”
He turns back to me and smiles.
“So, thank you, Isis. And I’m sorry for everything. You may go, if you wish.”
I stand and put my backpack on. At the door, I turn.
“I got in.”
Evans nods, faint smile still in place. Just nods, doesn’t say anything preachy or high-handed, and turns back to the window.
I leave, feeling a little stranger. A little sadder. I suddenly don’t want to hate him so much. Suddenly everything feels a little grayer, a little colder, the anger-fire burning low in my chest. People make bad mistakes, but so few of them ever apologize for it face to face. So few ever change themselves or try to make up for it. After what Leo did, I realized I couldn’t trust adult men to do anything right. I painted them all as villains incapable of doing the right thing. But Evans did this once. And for that and only that, I admire him.
Hiking up to Avery’s lake cabin has me pondering several things, one of which stands out brilliantly: there are approximately nine trillion cells in my body and every single one of them hates hiking. And walking. Just moving for extended periods of time in general, really. All nine trillion of us would rather be in bed. In the shade. With a parfait.
“I can’t believe I ran myself skinny.” I pant and lean on a tree. Kayla is yards ahead of me, pushing over the hill of the hiking trail leading to Avery’s cabin.
“We’ve all done things we regret!” Kayla calls back.
“Like living.”
“Or not keeping up with a healthy exercise regimen!” she singsongs.
I stare at an oak’s trunk, and it seems to share my incredulousness. Regimen? I mouth. The tree shifts in the sunlight—a planty shrug.
“Have you actually been…studying?” I call.
“We’re adults now. Adults have to know words.”
“And here I thought the only words they knew were ‘booze’ and ‘meaningless sex.’”
Kayla laughs as she waits for me at the top of the hill.
“Don’t forget ‘bills,’” she adds when I catch up.
“H-How could I?” I pant.
“I think that’s what I’m most afraid of.”
“Bills?”
She nods. “Bills are scary. College doesn’t scare me. It’s just like high school, probably, except you live there.”
“People drink a lot in college.”
“We drink a lot now.”
“There’s lots of STDs.”
“What do you think Marina keeps itching her crotch in gym for?”
“And your dreams of being a rock star get crushed.”
“I’m thinking more of a rock-et star.” She points up into the sky.
I sputter a laugh. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She grabs her boobs. “These guys would appreciate the zero G. Also there’s like, neato space rocks and stuff. And aliens.”
“There’s no Cosmo in space,” I warn.
“Yeah but there’s the cosmos!”
I smirk. I’m rubbing off on her.
We walk for a bit. Or, Kayla walks, and I wheeze. But even through my burning lungs and running nose, the woods are beautiful—dappled with light and fresh air—and the sound of the lake lapping close by is a lullaby only the birds get to hear every night. Kayla stops on another hill and points to the cottage. It’s huge, with French windows and marble terracing, but at least there are no cars in the driveway. We’re free to snoop around, and as long as we don’t get too close to the house itself, we won’t trip any alarms.
“Welcome to Château Avery.”
“Thanks, ass-tronaut.” I tap her butt. She squeals and chucks a pinecone at my head. It sticks to my hair, and I don’t bother taking it out, because she gave it to me. She’s given me loads of stuff—cake pops and lattes and smiles—but somehow this pinecone means more to me than any of those things. It’s a little scratchy, a little uncomfortable sometimes. But it’s still with me, and it looks fabulous. Just like Kayla.
“So where do we start looking?” she asks.
“I have zero idea,” I admit. “I don’t know what we’re looking for or where. This journey into Mordor may be completely for naught. But this is the only lead I’ve got to go on, Samwise Gamgee.”
“Ugh, why do I have to be the clingy hobbit?”
“Wren said it happened in the woods.” I change the subject. “Avery asked them to come outside, so it couldn’t have been too far from the cottage. It couldn’t have been too close to the road, though, otherwise she’d run the risk of being seen. We gotta think like Avery.”
Kayla makes a disgusted face. I thump her on the back.
“Sacrifices have to be made. The brain cells will regenerate in ten hours. No one will ever have to know.” I whirl around and point south. “That patch of woods looks perfect. Far from the road, but not too far from the cottage.”
“Okay, I know you’re, like, really smart or whatever, but I knew Avery way before you even got here. I know how she thinks and she would not go that way.”
“Pray tell why not?”
“Because there’s tons of mud. Ew.”
“News flash—mud dries up! There might not have been mud five entire years ago!”
“News flash—there’s always mud over there.” She looks around.
I sigh. “What if there’s nothing up here? I mean, honestly, what are we trying to find? Evidence? I don’t even know what kind of evidence we’re looking for, or even what it’s evidence of! For all I know this is a massive waste of time.”
“It’s worth a try,” Kayla insists. “If I were Avery, and I wanted to lure people to do something bad to them, I’d do it in that direction. That’s where she and her brother went to let off fireworks when they were kids. You can’t see it from the cottage, so their parents never busted them. It was like her secret hideaway.”
“I would kiss you right now, but currently it is six months too early to experiment with becoming a fabled college lesbian.”
Kayla smirks, and we start toward the patch of forest. The trees get thicker as we go in, the trunks so huge they block out the view of the cottage and the lake. It’s a perfect, insulated border around a half mile of dastardly evil-has-been-done-here ground.
“So what are we looking for?” Kayla asks. “Bullet shells? Blood? Human bones? Or—” She shudders and whispers, “Ruined clothes?”
“Probably not any of those. Five years is a long-ass time for nature to do its freaky thing. The best we can hope for is nothing at all, but if we gotta search, look for anything that doesn’t seem right. Anything that doesn’t look like it belongs in the forest.”
She nods, and we split up. My hands shake. I’m breathing shallowly. This is it. This is the place it happened. I’m standing where it took place. Jack became a cold, unfeeling husk on the outside here. Sophia got hurt here. Wren’s guilt was born here, and Avery started burning here.
I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Veronica Mars. This excursion is half insane, half wildly hopeful. The past is buried in the hearts of Jack and the others. My memories are back enough for me to recall how hard it was to pry any information about that night out of them. But now I’m here, where it happened. Now’s my chance to pry an easier target—time and weather.
I kneel on the forest floor, the layers of pine needles squishy. I dig. I turn over rocks. I look between roots and mushroom clumps and massive, rotting stumps. Kayla huffs and daintily inspects tree trunks and moves pine needles with her foot, but I can’t blame her. We’re not exactly CSI. She’s right. What the hell are we looking for out here? We’re just wasting our time.
After a half hour of silent concentration, my hands are smeared in dirt and blood around my nails where I dug too hard. Oops. It doesn’t hurt, but it will later. It’s then I feel something cold and wet on my ankle, and I summarily expire. Loudly.
“Get it off get it off GETITOFF! KAYLA! KAYLA! KAYLAGETITOFF!”
“What are you screaming—”
“GET IT OFF!”
“It’s a piece of moss, Isis!”
I stop flailing and look down. The slimy green offender peeks out of my jeans innocently. I pull it off, and Kayla rolls her eyes and goes back to searching.
“Y-Yeah?” I adjust my jeans as I stand. “Well, next time a flesh-eating zombie crawls out to eat you, I will just sit back and watch. From a safe distance. Which slightly impairs my ability to hear you screaming for mercy.”
“It was moss.”
“Well, it felt like a zombie, and who do we have to blame for that, hmm? Mother Nature?” I look up and shout at the trees. “Thanks, M-dawg! Next round can you maybe tone down the moss-that-feels-like-a-zombie-hand thing? Thanks, love ya, big fan otherwise!”
“Aren’t we supposed to be sneaky?” she hisses.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter! There’s nothing here. I fucked up, okay? My big plan that was supposed to answer all the questions backfired and here we are, scrabbling around in the dirt like Cro-Magnons who haven’t learned about fire! Or gloves!”
Kayla’s eyes are glazed, and she’s staring off into the distance. I wave a hand frantically in front of her face.
“Hello? Don’t go to space yet, dumbo, you’ve got work to do and degrees to earn and boys to break the hearts of.”
She grabs my wrist and looks at me slowly.
“I remember.”
“Remember what?”
Kayla looks over my shoulder. “One summer, tenth grade I’m pretty sure, because I had my orange tankini and that was, like, SO cute and in style—”
“Kayla!”
“Right, um. So that summer, Avery, Selena, Jen, and I went way far down on the lake, like, took a walk in this direction, which was weird because it’s really rocky this way and we usually went the other way, but that day we decided to go this way, and we got about this far, maybe a little farther, and Avery told us—”
Kayla inhales.
“Avery told us to stop. She got really freaked out. Weirdly freaked. She was almost panicking, and she told us we had to go back, and we all asked her why, but she just kept saying, ‘because I said so’ and ‘it’s my cottage, you morons, so we go back when I say.’”
My heart soars. I’ve only ever seen Avery panic like that, lose her porcelain-doll cool, when Sophia stuff crops up. Maybe this wasn’t useless after all.
“And that was this way?” I ask. Kayla nods and points over my shoulder.
“If we keep going, I can look over the edge of the cliff and down to the lake and tell you where she told us to go back.”
I follow Kayla. She’s faster than ever, but adrenaline pumps my legs just as fast, and I can keep up easily. The sun’s still high, and it glints off the massive, ice-kissed Lake Galonagah. Kayla peers over the edge of the forest, where the woods and dirt crumble into rocks and shoreline. She shakes her head each time and keeps going, until finally, finally, she stops.
“Right here. This is where she freaked out.”
I look around. There’s nothing here that stands out—just more woods. But if Avery got scared as they walked this way, that means she was afraid they’d see something they weren’t supposed to. Something she’d hidden way out here. Something that could definitely be seen from the lakeshore.
“Let’s keep going. Keep your peepers peeled for anything weird.”
Kayla nods and follows me. We walk slowly, taking in everything. Kayla sees it first and grabs my elbow.
“Isis.”
I look to where she’s pointing, and my heart sinks. No, “sinks” isn’t the right word for it. It falls out through my butt. It’s gone, a heavy leaden thing in its place.
There, against a tree and planted in the ground, is a wooden cross, and at the foot of the cross is a small pile of stones.
“Is that—” Kayla swallows, hard. “Is that a—”
“A grave,” I finish. “Yeah.”
She stays, frozen in place, but I move toward it with careful steps. I kneel at the gravesite. The wooden cross is shoddy—somebody just put two thick sticks together with twine—but it’s withstood the test of time. The bark’s eroded off; bleached white wood is all that’s left. You could easily see the white color through the trees and from the lakeside, if you caught the right angle. Whoever made the grave knew their stuff, though. The stones probably kept scavengers from digging up the body and eating it.
The grave is so small.
I already know what’s inside. I try not to know, the same way you try not to know about a car crash or a pet dying. You close your eyes and block it out, keep it at arm’s length, but reality is stronger than any bodybuilder. It pushes its way in, brute strength smashing the truth into my soul.
Even so, I have to see it with my own two eyes. I have to know. I have to finish what I started, what Avery and Jack and Wren and Sophia started all those years ago. I start moving the rocks.
“Isis! What are you doing? Stop it!”
“Go back to the car and wait for me.”
“You can’t just— You can’t just dig that up—”
I look over my shoulder at her. “The truth is in here, Kayla. And I have to know. So go back to the car and wait for me. Pretend I’m not doing it.”
Kayla squeezes her eyes shut, but she doesn’t move. I pull the rocks off, one by one, and use a flat one to start digging into the soft square of earth. As I get deeper, I can hear Kayla start to sob. Her cries echo in the forest, and somehow I know they aren’t the first human tears these trees have seen. My arms ache, my fingers burn, and the blood from my torn cuticles flows over and mixes with the dirt, but I can’t stop. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. It’s feet down. Two feet, three feet, and then—
And then the dirt comes apart, and there’s a tiny piece of pink blanket sticking out of the ground. I bleed on it. I dig faster but more gently, just around the bundle that’s starting to form. I dig until it comes loose, and then I pull it out slowly. Brush off the dirt. Put it on the pine needle ground and open it. It’s pinned, but the safety pin is long rusted and snaps easily, and the edges of the blanket fall apart like a crusted, ancient flower to reveal the center.
I feel Kayla’s heat to my left, her curiosity obviously overcoming her reluctance. But the second the blanket falls apart, she starts crying harder than ever and pulls away like she’s been burned.
“No. No no no,” she cries. “No. No no!”
A tiny, barely formed skeleton looks up at me, with eyes too small and too black to see anything. It never got to see anything. That much I’m sure of. It’s too small to ever have made it into the outside world. And next to the skeleton is a minuscule bracelet, with letter beads. My shaking fingers pick it up.
Tallulah
I stare at the name for what feels like hours. Days. Tallulah.
Tallie, for short.
As an escort, bars are an integral part of the job. It’s a place people go to drink, to ease the slog that is their lives. Clients always feel more comfortable meeting in a crowded place, and for good reason. Sometimes clients won’t even try anything physical with me—you’d be surprised how much rich, lonely women will pay to be listened to. That’s the part of my job I enjoy the most—conversing. Having a good conversation, a mindless conversation about work and people and life, fills me like a hearty meal. It reminds me people aren’t so different from me; they’re just as angry at the world, just as bitter, just as sad. Sometimes my clients have problems and pasts that eclipse even mine with their tragedy.
I’m not the only one suffering in this life.
And that is a sick, twisted comfort.
The sounds of the basement deafen me the second I walk in. Bull’s Tail isn’t a nice bar or even a tolerable one—sawdust and piss and vomit crusting in the corners—but it’s exactly what I’m looking for.
It’s exactly the place people’s hopes go to die.
On a Saturday night, it’s as packed as it can be. Men swagger and guffaw into their beer and whiskey, the smell of BO and stale peanuts overpowering. Rock music blares from the creaky jukebox in the corner and the flickering LED TV above the bar shows a game only a fraction of the patrons seem to care about. The bartender is an older woman with once-bright blond hair and beauty to spare, but years of wolf-whistles and ass-grabbing have worn her to a pale mockery of that.
“What are you having?” She flicks a half-second strained smile in my direction.
“Two shots of your best whiskey. And a gin and tonic. On the rocks.”
“ID?” she asks. I fish it out. Fake IDs are a necessity in the escort world—many of us working are under the drinking age. Blanche secured one for me as part of our contract.
The bartender studies it, nods, and goes to the bar. I wait. I’m the only one here without a potbelly, and the women are starting to notice. Good. That’ll make this much easier.
The bartender comes back with my drinks, and I down them as quickly as I can.
“Whoa there,” a man to my left says. “You’re awfully young to be drinking that hard.”
“You’re awfully nosy for someone that old,” I counter.
He laughs, but it’s not an offended laugh. It’s amused. I look over at him and realize it’s the man who was watching me in the crowd during the fight with the boxer. A tweed suit covers his considerably hefty frame. He isn’t fat—in fact, quite the contrary. He has broad shoulders and muscles gone slightly to pasture. He sits perfectly straight, but with an easy demeanor to it. His right index finger and the tendon attaching to it in his arm are very well defined, classic indications of trigger finger. Military, without a doubt. His hair is white-streaked and sparse and his mustache faint. Dark eyes glitter at me.
“People only drink like that for two reasons—to remember something or to forget something,” he says.
“Aren’t you just full of tautologies,” I scoff. The gin and tonic burns on my tongue. The women are moving, and I’m picking my target carefully. It has to be someone stupid enough to assume the worst of me. And that means any drunk man will do.
“It’s a girl, isn’t it?” the military man asks. I don’t dignify him with a response. “Is she pretty?”
I swirl the leftover ice in my glass and remain silent.
“So she’s ugly. Must be absolutely hideous.”
“No,” I snap. “Not that it matters, but no.”
“‘Not that it matters’?” he presses. I pause. He’s goading me into talking, but the alcohol is hitting me fast and I have nothing left to lose.
“She’s pretty. I suppose.” I wince. “It’s not that she’s pretty. She’s pretty, but that isn’t all she is.”
“Of course not. Otherwise she wouldn’t have you here, drinking and tongue-tied.”
I slide my glass back to the bartender and face the man. He’s faintly smiling, hands wrapped around a bourbon ice. His silence is somehow more irritating than his words, so I break it.
“Men like to categorize women.” I curl my lip. “Into convenient little boxes like ‘hot’ or ‘cute’ or ‘beautiful.’ It’s easy for them. But it’s never been easy for me.”
“So this particular girl,” the man leads. “She’s none of those?”
“She’s all of those,” I say, a little too quickly for my own liking. “And more than those, and at the same time she’s none of those. She is exactly herself, no more and no less. But saying that now is pointless.”
“Did she dump you?”
“She told me to stay out of her life.”
“And so here you are, stumbling into a backwater bar to start a fight with someone just to vent all that out.”
I narrow my eyes at him. His smile remains.
“I’ve been alive long enough to know the face of someone looking for a fight. And I know the face of someone who knows what it’s like to fight.”
The man’s dark eyes suddenly become unreadable.
“And most of all, I know the face of someone who, deep down in a part of himself he won’t admit to, enjoys fighting.”
I glare at the bar top, the polished wood reflecting my face. The man stops smiling at me and takes a sip from his bourbon before speaking again.
“You see it sometimes, in the guys. Most of us in the army don’t like what we do, believe it or not. We join for the camaraderie, the sense of belonging, of order. Not for the blood. But every once in a while, you see a real piece of work come through. And he likes the blood. Some of them are better at hiding it than others, but it always comes out.”
“What are you saying?” I snarl.
“I’m saying, son, that you’re a monster,” he replies evenly. “And you hate what you are.”
My fist connects with his jaw before I can stop it. The ice is gone. The poise and calm, rational demeanor I’d kept myself leashed with vaporizes in an instant, and he’s pushing back, shoving me by the shoulders outside, and the bartender is yelling something, and the drunk idiots are hooting and hollering, taking bets, following us as we stumble into the night air. I step in a puddle as I duck under the man’s right hook. It’s so powerful the air trailing behind it makes an audible thump noise. He’s huge. He’s taller and wider than Leo, and I don’t have a bat. He lunges for me, and I throw a trash can between us. He kicks it aside, and it crumples against the wall like a tin can.
And for the first time since I saw Isis on the floor with blood around her head, I feel fear. Real, true, cold fear that reaches into my lungs and pulls them up through my throat.
I put my fists up and step around another right hook, but he slams his knee into my chest and I can’t breathe, the world reduced to flashes of white and red and pain. I can barely hear the crowd whooping over the sound of my own surging heartbeat. Someone tries to break us up, but the man shoves him away and lunges for me, and suddenly my feet aren’t touching the ground, his fist in my collar as he lifts me above the cement. Our gazes meet for a split second, his curiously empty of emotion, and he throws me aside. Stars pop in my eyes, and my back hits the brick wall with a sickening thud. I try to scrabble to my feet, but my legs are pained jelly.
The man leans in.
“No one can tame the monster for you, son. Not your parents, not a girl. Not a college or an institution. Only you can do that.”
I spit at his feet, the saliva bloody.
“What do you know about me?”
“Blanche told me a lot about you.”
“Should’ve figured you were one of her goons.”
“Don’t mistake me. I’m not one of hers, and I trust her as far as I can throw her. Which isn’t far, with the way she drapes herself in that tacky jewelry.”
We both dislike Blanche, and that alone saps the heat from our fight. All of a sudden he drops his stance, his will to fight gone. The man offers me his hand up. The bar crowd departs, the excitement over for them. I glare at his palm and ease up onto my feet by myself. Every bone in my body screams for me to stop moving, to inject morphine, to roll in bandages, anything to stop the pain. The man dusts off his suit and smiles at me.
“I heard about what you did for the Blake family. Word travels fast in the criminal justice circuit.”
“So?”
“So you beat up a grown scumbag, kid.”
“It’s nothing special.”
“No, it’s not. You’re right. Beating someone up isn’t special. Beating someone up three times your size is. You’ve got a ferocity in you, a ruthlessness. You’ve got the bloodlust in you. And you’d just be letting it go to waste on civilian life. More than that, if you don’t get it trained right, it’s gonna backfire on you someday. You know that. You’ve always known that.”
The bastard is spouting half nonsense and half searing truth. Of course I’ve known. He reaches into his jacket and hands me a card.
“When you’re ready to use it constructively instead of destructively, you come see me.”
He’s gone before I can snipe at him, and I’m alone in the alley with my aching body and bewildered mind. The card is simpler than any I’ve ever seen—simpler than the Rose Club cards, even. And that’s how I know it’s seedy, underworld business.
Gregory Callan
VORTEX Enterprises
I nurse my wounds long enough to get up the energy to make it back to my car, and then I collapse. I welcome the warm relief and quiet. I drank too much. I took too many punches. I went looking for a fight. And now I’m hurt, and buzzed, and my mouth tastes like blood, and all I want to do is go back to that night at Avery’s, to that absurd sea-themed room, to the bed with Batgirl in it, to Isis, to an Isis who confessed to me with tiny, stuttering, shy words that she liked me, to a moment when everything was simple. Her and me. Her and me in a room, alone.
My phone rings. I wince as I answer.
“Hello?”
“Jack!” Sophia’s sunny voice says. “Dr. Fenwall says the last payment for the surgery came through! Thank you. Thank you so, so much.”
I push out the vestiges of the memories of that night and smile.
“Don’t thank me. It’s the least I could do.”
“You worked so hard. I’m really grateful. Remember when I said you could choose the place next time we went out?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Dr. Fenwall said he’d let me have a few days out next week. So.”
“I’ll see if I can’t find something fun for us to do.”
“Yeah! But Avery wants to throw me a surprise party. For my birthday.”
“That’s in March.”
“I know! But if I only have a few days out, she can only plan it then.”
“I thought we hate Avery?”
“We do! I mean, we don’t like her, but she’s trying really hard. And it just seems unfair. And plus, if I don’t make it—”
“Don’t talk like that,” I snap.
“If I don’t make it,” she says more sternly, “I don’t want things between us to be bad when I… You know.”
“You won’t.”
“Just, please. I really want to go.”
I sigh. “All right. I’ll ask her about it.”
“Okay. Thank you. I know it’s hard for you, but thank you.”
“It’s fine.”
“Say hi to your mom for me. Or, I guess I’ll say hi. It still feels weird, though, just popping up on Facebook and being like, ‘Hey Dahlia! It’s me!’”
“Don’t worry,” I assure her. “She loves you. She always will. You can say hi whenever.”
“Okay! I’m going to try to get some sleep.”
“Good. Good night.”
“Good night, Jack.”
When we hang up, Isis’s words ring in my head.
She’s dying, Jack.
Why haven’t you told her what you do?
I put my head on the steering wheel and pretend I’m somewhere else. Somewhere warm. Somewhere like that ridiculous sea-themed little room.