We ride in silence, driving out of town, taking the winding roads toward Rusty’s lake house in the woods.
“You know you’re gonna have to give it back,” she tells me.
The gun.I feel my limbs seize at that and my breath catches in my lungs. I don’t reply. I keep my trembling eyes forward, focusing on getting us around the next corner instead.
“Hmm?” she prompts.
I don’t look at her, I press my foot harder on the gas, telling her, “You don’t need it anymore.”
She laughs, pulling the sleeves of her hoodie over her knuckles. “You don’t know what the fuck I need.”
I shrug. “Maybe not, but I know for sure it’s not a fucking gun.”
When she doesn’t bite back, I turn to look at her. She stares ahead, tongue in cheek.
I shift the stick again, speeding up. “Where’d you get it? Do you even know how to fucking use it?”
She’s not as impervious to the questions as she wants to be. I see her bottom lip tremble, watch her bite into it, never meeting my gaze.
“Get out of my business, Chase,” she says, voice low.
I tsk, shake my head. “Hate to break it to you, Laik. But I’m all the way fucking in it, so, you better start talk?—”
She drops her legs and turns in her seat, tearing at the seatbelt when it gets stuck, pulling her back. “You want me to talk, fine…” She raises her voice, starts to laugh. It cools my blood. “Let’s talk about how I’ve thought about blowing my head off like the guy…”
I slam my palm against the wheel and she stops talking, then I’m jerking the truck off the road, ripping up the stick.
You didn’t tell someone you wanted to kill yourself unless you were prepared to tell them first what drove you there.
My voice is loud in the cab, and I turn in my seat, chest falling heavy. I’m white knuckling the steering wheel, palms slick. “What do you really want to say, Laiken!?”
Laiken slumps back in her seat, stares ahead, the expression on her face blank…dead.
“Tell me, fucking say it!” I shout.
She flinches at the volume of my voice, though she doesn’t look afraid.
Laiken reaches toward the dash casually, her fingers wrapping around my box of cigarettes. She taps one out and bites it between her teeth, taking a light to the end.
The bones in my fingers are beginning to tire. A maelstrom of feelings that I’d softened with too many lines of snow burns in my chest—the biggest of all,guilt.
She doesn’t look at me when she says so quietly I barely hear her, “You fucked me up, Chase Keller, and you didn’t even have to touch me to do it.”
I turn away, suck on my bottom lip, drop my chin.
Her words strip me to the core.
Laiken pushes herself deeper into my passenger seat, drawing both legs to her chest, returning the fabric of her hoodie around her knuckles. She settles her chin to the top of her knees; her shell wreathed in smoke from the burning cigarette still smoldering between her fingers.
I reach for it, take it, push it between my lips and let the nicotine fill my lungs.
She doesn’t look at me, in fact, she turns away, resting her cheek to her knees, gazing out the window.
I speak on a cloud of smoke, “I’m not a good person.” I take another pull, dart the roach out the window, slamming the stick into gear.
And that was the goddamn truth.
I failed my sister.
