Jim, his mother screamed, her voice echoing across the sea. Again and again and again, quieter, and then not at all. She was the only one who called him that, had liked having a name that only she was allowed to use.
Everyone else called him James.
Matt Baldridge stared questioningly at Lee, who felt like a city crumbling to ashes.
Lee’s father had killed his mother, and he’d known the whole time but done nothing about it. Never before had Lee wanted so badly to be just as insane as his mother, unable to tell reality from dreams. He wanted to be wrong, he wanted to bebroken, because it was better than the alternative, of knowing his dream was real.
He shoved past Matt and ran back to his room, grabbed a suitcase, and started throwing all his things inside.Tell me it was a dream, he would say to his father the moment he saw him. Lee needed to see his father’s eyes. He knew when people lied, and if he asked his father, he would know the truth.
He was breathing so hard that he thought he might throw up, his hands trembling uncontrollably. He tried to open his Ativan and spilled half of it across his desk because he couldn’t hold the bottle steady. He’d already taken too much today and it was supposed to be his Last Resort medication, but the walls were collapsing on top of him and his mind was a forest fire and the truth had its hands around his throat, squeezing and squeezing and squeezing.
He choked down three pills dry and lay on the floor, the ceiling light flickering above him.It was a dream, he whispered to himself, drooling out of one side of his mouth.
It was all Matt’s fault. Matt and the stain on his shirt that had triggered the memory he’d tried so hard to bury. Lee had been so careful to build a world he could tolerate, and Matt had ruined it all in one moment. Lee wished he could go back in time and shove Matt down the stairs before he’d seen the stain, or smash his face against the railing. He should have covered Matt’s whole shirt in blood so there was no more stain, no more memory, no more of this feeling like the entire universe was dying inside him. It was Matt’s fault, it was Matt’s fault, all of this was Matt’s fault, and Lee had made him pay. Lee had cut Matt up and shoved him in the suitcase and buried it in the woods. Of course he had—Lee Turner was someone to be afraid of. Too strange, too quiet, too tall and thin and pale, he could never be the son of someone perfect like James Turner. Lee was the onewho could never get it right, could never be normal. Lee was the murderer. A man, a murderer, a stain.
He threw his things into a bag and ran off before anyone could spot him, could catch him and send him to jail, even if he deserved to die there for what he’d done.
And that brought him here, to this moment, in the house behind the sword ferns, one hand on the gate in the front yard.
As the pain faded from his head, he quietly closed the gate and walked back to the kitchen, where he stared at a stain that was almost certainly soy sauce, but reminded Lee all too much of another stain he had seen many years ago. And this time, even as his blood ran cold and his heart beat so fast he was sure he would die here and now, he remembered.
“Back already?” his father said.
Slowly, Lee turned to face his father.
His eyes were brilliant green, just like the sword ferns beyond the windows. Just like Lee’s eyes.
Lee knew the answer he should have given.
Yeah, I just forgot my phone.The words floated up to the surface of his mind and then evaporated, something he might have said in another life, one where he still lived in the dark.
His father was looking at him likeLeewas the strange one, the one who was broken, the one who had taken their life and crushed it in his bare hands. His father always winced at him like he was staring directly at the sun. His watch was broken, ticking incessantly on his wrist, the hands stuck at 11:44, and Lee’s face twitched with annoyance at the sound. His father let out an awkward laugh at the motion and turned away rather than keep looking at something so strange.
But of course Lee Turner was strange.
For almost a decade, he’d slowed his heart with sedatives until he was so numb he could barely speak. He’d floated through theworld like a balloon running out of helium, dragging across the sidewalk, slowly dying. For so long, he couldn’t even remember why he’d done it at all, why he was living half dead from fear.
But now, he remembered.
He remembered pressing his ear to his bedroom door at night while his mother sobbed in the hallway.
I think I should go away for a while, she said, each word trembling like the thinnest branches on a dying tree.There’s something wrong with me, Jim.
And he remembered his father letting out a long, slow, disappointed sigh.There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t need help, he said.You need to go to bed earlier and start exercising again. And stop acting strange in front of Lee. He deserves a normal mom.
A normal mom, Lee thought. Just like how James Turner deserved a normal son.
Let me out, Lee, she said.Let me out of the suitcase, out of my own mind, out of this life that burns to the touch. No one else can see me but I knowyoucan. So please, let me out, Lee. It’s so dark in here and I can’t breathe.
“Lee?” his father said, setting his coffee cup down on the counter.
Lee clenched his jaw so hard that he was sure his teeth would shatter from the force. His father had never cared for how he or his mother felt, only how they looked to the rest of the world.
“Lee?” his father said again.
A normal mom. A normal son. Your life will be easier this way. People can be very judgmental.Everything is back to normal. His father’s words wound tighter and tighter around his throat.
“Lee?” his father said, clamping a hand on his shoulder.
