“Not tonight, not again,” I whisper, because last year—and the one before that—I locked myself away for weeks.
This year, I refused to hide. I refused to make my past my present. I refused to live in fear of what could happen to me, and what might just be waiting for me.
I blink away the tears, squeezing my eyes closed when a shredded wheel of pictures and short clips carousel behind my eyelids.
The car, the scent of mint strips, the ominous sound of an omen at the speakers, the forest flying past me as we ran, gunshots ringing in my ears, the pool of blood, my best friend's guttural cries and her neck, the way it?—
I race to the sink and retch the contents of my stomach into the steel bowl, then I dip my head between my shoulders, both palms curled around the sink as I keep my arms above my head and crouch down.
Deep breaths,I tell myself and when my heart has settled slightly in my chest, I rise to my feet, suck back another lungful of air, moving toward Nan.
She stands, steadying herself on her feet and when I’m close enough, she reaches toward my face, cups the side of my cheek with one quivering palm.
“Oh, sweetheart…” she breaks, a tear rolling down her rubbery cheek.
I whisper so quietly, “If death is meant to be mine, it will be. I can’t live like I have been anymore.”
She steps back and nods. “You’re brave, Laiken. You got that from your mother, and your father, so brave.”
I curl the right side of my hair behind my ear, and she reaches for the left, doing the same.
“I sawhimthis morning.”
I knew whohewas, I didn’t have to ask, and I sure as heck didn’t have to confirm. I stay quiet, choosing to hear what she tells me next.
“I was on my way to the store to get ingredients for this.” She pauses and jerks her chin toward the now cold bowls, sitting uneaten at the table. “He was cutting across that old graveyard, walking toward…” She doesn’t finish.
Devil’s Tunnel.
“Have you spoken to him?” she asks warily, and I shake my head, staring in a stupor at a loose piece of cream carpet.
She reaches for my hand, curls her other around it.
“What happened between you two?” Her green eyes are a little more open now. They feel warm, yet so sad.
He stabbed me, Nan, then he left me to bleed out.That’s what I wanted to say, only I don’t. I spare her the morbid details.
She begins to speak again, “Do you think?—”
“It doesn’t matter what I think anymore, Nan, we aren’t friends…” I say quietly over the top of her, pause, then whisper, “I was stupid to think we ever were.”
She sighs, pinching my hand a little tighter. “Everyone handles grief differently, sweetheart, maybe he just needs a little more time.”
Time.
As if three years wasn’t enough.
The only thing I knew for sure was that time wasn’t on our side, and that we were strangers now.
When I see him around town, he looks at me as though I'm a ghost, like he can see right through me, or he doesn’t so much as see me at all.
Losing his sister killed him, and killing his mother hacked him to pieces. The shadows of our past had folded over him.
Harlen and I have stayed in touch, but we aren’t as close as we once were, as I’d like us to be, but I always knew that would be the case. He still checks in on me though, often visiting me at the diner. Sometimes he’ll even go as far as driving me home, so I don’t have to walk in the dark alone.
Life is just different now.
I’m not the girl I was when I was sixteen, and Chase is no longer the eighteen-year-old boy that I thought I knew.
