Keaton doesn’t know a thing about me. I’m just a ghost of the girl I used to be,the sister he thinks he knows.
Twisting the wet fabric at my knuckles, I bite back the quiver that rattles my bottom lip. I can’t tell him about the past seven days—the very depths of what Iwent through—because that, I know, will kill him. However, I can tell him what happened to me tonight.
Well, at least part of it.
Staring at the blurred trees flying past us, I say, “A bunch of assholes on their motorbikes tried to run me off the road.” My voice is croaky and deep,exhausted.
The echo of the engine below us draws louder when Keaton’s foot falls heavy on the accelerator. I snap my head toward him and watch him grind his molars together. The flex in his jaw is sharp, his blue eyes turning murky.
“Did you see their cut?” he asks, his voice void of every emotion, except the heat of revenge.
“No,” I whisper, and it’s not a lie.I didn’t. I was too shocked, too terrorized.
Keaton white knuckles the steering wheel, and it reminds me of our father. I shiver again.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” He snaps his gaze to mine.
I already am, Keats. Open your eyes.
Shaking my head, I don’t reply, instead I find myself staring right out the front window in some sort of stupor, and when I close my eyes, images from that grim night years ago immediately scroll. Sharp lights try to steal my vision again, only it’s all in my head.
An eerie phantom picture.
I wipe my nose, taking another shaky breath.
My body trembles harder. I am bone-tired, but my demons don’t seem to care.
The careening headlights from over a decade ago are still there, behind me,chasing me. The deathly light follows me when I’m awake and stalks me through my dreams, and tonight was just a reminder that escaping my past is an impossible feat.
I’m haunted.
Bringing my hand to my throat, I clench it, feeling my desperate cries push through the base, and this time, instead of swallowing them, I let them fall…the way I did.
“It was me, Keats.” I swallow hard, hugging my legs tighter when one lone tear rolls down my cheek and pools right between my chapped lips. “I killed our parents.”
The car slows, the orange glow of the indicator snagging on the distant trees when Keats pulls the car off the road and cuts the engine. He doesn’t say anything, just hangs his left wrist over the wheel and drops his chin to his chest.
So, I continue, “I had a panic attack when the guy hit us the first time, and Dad pulled the car up in the middle of the road to help me when he disappeared.” I start to panic all over again, my words choppy, rushed. I just want to get it all out before he tells me to stop, or that he can’t take any more, or that hedisowns me. “It was all my fault, Keaton. If I held it together, Dad wouldn’t have stopped, and the truck probably wouldn’t have come back. And then Dad wouldn’t have died from impactand then…” My teeth chatter, trying their best to break out of my gums while my legs jolt up and down.
“Blainey,” Keaton attempts to settle me with a hand to my upper back, and I shove it away. Those same bright lights have me jumping out of my skin, my eyes stark and wide and hollow.
“Wait, just wait, let me get this out.”
He exhales. It’s strained, riddled with pain. I think he knew this conversation would happen one day, but he did his damndest to avoid it.
However, you can’t outrun your past forever, and it was time Keaton finally sat in the corroded debris of our very blood. I was tired of suffering, and too goddamn weak to continue carrying the weight on my own, especially after what I just went through.
I swallow the sour taste of bile. “And then I wouldn’t have driven us right into that lake.” As I finish, my crimson fingers curl around the chrome handle. I haul open the car door and almost fall out. My legs are weak, my entire body brittle as I collapse to my knees. Only before my skull hits the dirt, Keaton’s arms are around me. He drags me right into his chest as I sob. I cry for our parents, for the fifteen-year-old girl I once was, and for the girl I am now.
I’m a broken, fragile little moth disintegrating in the dark.
Keaton’s lips come down on the top of my head. “You didn’t kill Mom and Dad, Blainey. Don’t you ever think that,” he rasps, his heartbeat punctuating his words against my ear. I lift my chin and stare into his hard eyes. “The motherfucker in that truck did, and you, sis…” He places another kiss to the top of my head and breathes over my scalp when he holds me to his chest tighter. “You did everything to save them.”
“Where are you staying?” Keaton asks when LA’s lights twinkle brightly in front of us. The night's cool air whispers through the open window at my side, twirling through the strands of my messy, greasy hair.
I try not to inhale its distant hope.
The peace it could bring.
