Gwen always used to say that hope is a contagious disease. If you’re not careful, you can catch it. I used to laugh it off at the time. I didn’t have hope because I didn’t need it. I had her. I had friends. I had a glowing future ahead of me. I saw the world through rose-colored glasses. I thought I had it all.
Today, I have nothing.
I don’t have any friends. I mean, I do. Of course, I do. But not real ones. I’ve pushed them all away.
I don’t have a glowing future ahead of me. I have a mediocre job I hold onto because I don’t want to leave this place.
I don’t have Gwen.
And I don’t have Remi.
That leaves me with spare time on my hands, so today I decide to do something productive with my life. I log on to my Amazon account and order what I wanted to order for her the day she showed up on my doorstep, soaking wet, telling me it was her birthday. Then, I drive to the nearest Safeway and buy Shelly her usual groceries fit for a kindergartener.
I’m trying to keep my world moving for no reason other than Remington Stringer. It occurs to me, as I walk down the aisles of the too-bright supermarket, that I have nothing to lose or to gain outside the game of winning her back.
After I’m done paying for everything, I drive over to Shelly’s place. I know she’ll be there, because unless she’s scoring, she’s at home. And last time I saw her, she was dope sick. Which means she hadn’t used in a while. Hopefully, she was able to keep that up.
If she is home, no issues.
If she is scoring, I know exactly where she buys her drugs. On which street corners to look. And I know that even if I don’t find her, she’ll be back to her apartment as soon as she can to stick that needle into a vein.
When I get to her apartment building, it dawns on me that I haven’t been here in the longest time. Since Remington and I got together. Revisiting Shelly was always about revisiting Gwen. And Remington provided the distraction I needed in protecting a woman I could actually save. I’m not sure Shelly can be saved. I doubt she even wants to be.
I knock on Shelly’s door two times, the loaded paper bags at my feet. I hear music from the other side of the door. Breaking Benjamin is on full blast. She wouldn’t be able to hear me even if I screamed to her from the other side.
Staring at this door takes me back to that time I looked at their bathroom door when I found Gwen. Everything looked so ordinary…until it wasn’t.
I decide on a whim to walk in. She always locks her door even though she lives in a dumpster not even a homeless person would rob. I walk in and examine the living room. Empty. The music comes from the bedroom. I dump the paper bags onto her small to non-existing kitchen counter. It’s already crammed with half-empty bottles of soda and torn chips bags. Then I proceed down the short, narrow hallway to knock on her door to make sure she’s still alive and breathing.
The door is open.
I look in and see Shelly on top of Ryan fucking Anderson. He’s sitting on her bed, his back against the headboard, as she fucking rides him with her shirt still on.
Ryan fucking Anderson who killed Gwen.
Ryan fucking Anderson who is killing Remi in an entirely different way.
Ryan fucking Anderson, who killed my hope, and when hope barged back into my life in the form of his sister, he made that go away, too.
Instead of thinking this through—which is admittedly what I should be doing—I act. I kick the door wide open and bolt in, fire in my eyes. My whole body is heaving with rage. I can finish this jerk in two minutes, I’m so furious right now.
“Shelly!” I scream, grabbing the stereo on the dresser by her closet and hurling it against the wall. The music stops. Shelly whips her head around and stares at me, her mouth agape, from pleasure, shock, surprise, or all three—I’m not sure. I don’t even care. I point at Ryan, panting hard, watching as his glazed-over eyes are trying to refocus and understand what’s going on. He’s wasted. She’s drugged up. Unbelievable.
“Get up right now,” I grit out, “and leave Anderson and me alone.”
“Whoa, whoa.” Anderson snaps out of whatever it is he’s on, pushes Shelly away so she rolls on the mattress, and gets up on wobbly feet. He tucks his dick back into his jeans, which he didn’t bother to take off when he started screwing my dead sister and his ex-girlfriend’s roommate. Class act. I cock an eyebrow, because more than it is infuriating, it is also pathetic. “What the fuck are you doing here? Are you following me, Teach? Get the fuck outta here.”
“Shelly, out.” I ignore him.
“Shelly, stay,” he counters.
Shelly looks between us and decides to unglue her ass from the mattress and leave after all. I’m much more commanding than this idiot, and if she fears someone out of the two of us, it’s me. That leaves me alone with Ryan. My head is a mess. I want to kill him—I can kill him, God knows I’m capable of it—but at the same time I really need to think this shit through for Remi’s sake.
“She chose me,” Ryan says nonchalantly, lighting a cigarette and puffing the smoke upwards. “Rem. She chose to come back to me. Like I know she would. She is my destiny, Teach. I’m hers. You can’t undo this. God wants us to be together.”
“Don’t talk on God’s behalf. You can barely form a goddamn sentence.”
“Tsk, tsk.” Ryan laughs, shaking his head. “I see that you’re still not over my future wife.”
“I’ve literally just walked in on you having sex with another woman,” I grit out. Ryan shrugs. My whole body is shaking. Fuck, I want to kill him.
“Remi knows the drill. But I’ll always go back to her.”
“You killed my sister,” I tell Ryan. “You fucking killed Gwen. You gave her those drugs.”
“No,” Ryan drawls out slowly, and suddenly, he looks a lot more sober. He takes another drag of his cigarette, and even though I’m dying for one, I will never, ever ask this bastard for anything. I hear Shelly setting everything in the kitchen.
“Gwen did it to herself. I gave her drugs to sample, but she overdosed. She took three times what she usually did. I know because I measured every single fraction of a gram before I gave it to her. And she used everything. Gwen wanted to die. Her usual fix wouldn’t have killed her. Put her in the hospital? Maybe. I’m not a killer. I didn’t know this would happen.”
“You’re a fucking liar,” I spit out. But Ryan’s face contorts in pain, and he shakes his head some more.
“I’m not a killer, man. I cared about Gwen.”
“You gave her drugs!”
“We all take drugs, motherfucker!” Ryan throws his arms in the air, exasperated. “What the fuck? I got her drugs like you’d get Remi dinner. This is our food. This is our lives. This is what we need to make it to the next fucking day.”
“No.” It’s my turn to shake my head. Just…no.
“Yes,” Ryan says. “Yes, I liked Gwen. But she was sad, man. She was sad all the fucking time. I was sad when she died. But I wasn’t surprised. And I knew it wasn’t an accident.”
I shake my head, feeling the tears stabbing at my eyeballs. I want to get out of here. I want to stay and hear more. I want to fucking kill him. I want to ask him more about my sister. A sister I didn’t know as well as I thought, but am starting to realize I have harbored resentment in quantities I’m not equipped to deal with.
“You’ll drag Remington down the same path if you don’t let her go, you know,” I say instead of screaming and fighting and taunting him like I desperately want to. “You want her to stay so you can bask in her light. But she’s going to end up a Shelly or even a Gwen if she doesn’t get out of this town, and we both know it.”
“No.” Ryan stubs the cigarette into a wall to put it out. It’s disgusting, but then again, this whole room is full of cigarette butts and smells of piss. “No, I’ll get better.”
“You won’t, and we both know it.”
“I will.”
“You can’t.”
“She’s mine.”
“She’s no one’s,” I admit. “But if she’ll ever be anyone’s, if you truly love her, you better hope like hell it’s not you she’ll belong to.”
“Shut up!” he screams, tugging at his hair.
“You know it’s true.”
Ryan falls to his knees and cries. I want to do the same but stop myself. Instead, I take a step back. I watch him. I feel sorry for him. Life failed him the way it failed my sister. Or maybe they both just failed at life and didn’t have the guts or strength to take another stab at the test.
“I don’t want Rem to turn into Gwen,” Ryan admits, sniffing. He looks like a boy like this. Sitting on the floor, messing his blond hair with his fist.
“Then you know what to do about it,” I say.
“Maybe,” he answers.
Maybe is better than no.