Remi’s heart plummeted into his stomach.
Ollie furrowed his brow, and Liam straightened up from his curled over laughing fit, turning to stare at Remi.
Pushing Jillian off, Remi stood from the chair.
“What?What’s wrong?”she asked.
“You didn’t give them acid?”Remi asked, fury in his voice.
Jillian threw her palms up.“No, I swear.What’s wrong?Who’s Emerson?”
Remi sprinted through the trashed hotel room, kicking over piles of clothes and blankets and random takeout bags.He fell to his hands and knees and started throwing empty beer cans and bottles, searching, searching, until…
There.
He got on his stomach and inched under the bed, reaching for the water bottle with a little bit of pink liquid in it.He brandished the bottle in the air.“Is this what you’ve been drinking?”
Liam nodded, his eyes clear, suddenly the most sober of them all.“Yeah.Levi gave it to us.”
“Did he tell you it was acid?”Remi asked.
Liam shrugged.“Just said it’d get us fucked up.We didn’t ask too many questions.Remi, it’s not like West actually sees your brother.It’s just a hallucination.Don’t get mad at him.”
“I’m not—” Remi took a deep breath.He twisted the cap off the bottle and chugged the remaining liquid.There wasn’t much left, but hopefully he’d get something.He slumped down on the floor with his back against the bed.
“I’m not mad,” he said, his usual darkness creeping into the edges of his vision, the depressive heaviness that usually meant he needed to do another line.He resisted this time.He may be drunk and high on coke, but he knew better than to keep mixing shit.
“Don’t let me do more coke,” he said, straightening his leg and fishing out the baggie, handing it to Jillian.
She bent down and nodded, taking it and walking toward the door.“I’ll go put this somewhere you can’t reach it.”
“Good,” he said, though his mouth was full of cotton.His words foreign to his own ears.
Jillian left the room.
Remi climbed onto the bed and laid next to West, who was still smiling at the ceiling with his hands resting on his stomach.
“I want to see him too,” Remi said, whispering into the ether.He stared at the swirls in the ceiling until they started turning into shapes.He squinted really hard and waited for the acid to kick in.For Emerson to show up.
Liam and Ollie were making a bunch of noise in the corner of the room, but Remi forced himself to focus, to look for his twin brother.
If West could see him, then Remi could too.
They shared blood.Identical twins shared, like, the same DNA, right?Skye was a demon for Christ’s sake.Maybe Emerson was a mystical being too.Or maybe he was just a figment of West’s imagination, but Remi didn’t care which it was.He just wanted a glimpse.
“What’s he saying?”Remi asked.
“He doesn’t say much,” West said.“Mostly he glares at me and tells me to stop doing drugs and makes fun of Liam for being an idiot.”
Remi nodded.“That does sound like him.”
“It’s like—” West broke off.His words dissolved into the air.Remi watched the way the words turned into blue butterflies and flew to the ceiling, then hung upside down like bats.
“What?Like what?”Remi prompted.
“It’s like…” West started again.“He almost looks…sorry?Like he wishes he could apologize but can’t.”
Remi licked his lips.West’s blue butterfly words fell from the ceiling like knives and stabbed Remi in the gut.“He is sorry, West.”
