3. Nix
3
NIX
That was close. For a second, I thought for sure she recognized me.
That’s stupid. How would she, with my face covered? Somehow, deep down, I get the feeling she would know. The connection we have—our ugly, dirty connection—would ensure she knew I was the one watching from a distance, lurking in the shadows, watching her every move and trying to understand what she was whispering.
I should stop. I know I should. That’s probably what every addict tells themselves before their next drink, their next pill, or the next time they slide a needle into a vein. Just one last time, and then I’ll stop. I keep telling myself the same thing. But there’s a difference between me and those addicts. I don’t believe myself. I know I’ll have to see her again.
She gets into Colt’s car, and they pull away. He’s in a hurry, like he can’t wait to get out of here. I can’t blame him. I don’t like coming here either, especially knowing there’s a headstone with my name on it up ahead.
It’s too bizarre. I’m dead to the world. A ghost walking the streets night after night. Watching her, watching him, watching life go on without me. Like now, stepping out of the tree line only when I’m sure no one will see me. Stepping into sunshine that doesn’t touch my face, thanks to the hood pulled over my head.
There are flowers at Amanda’s grave—and mine. I step closer, almost surprised to see white roses sitting at the base of the marble slab that bears my name and the dates of my birth and supposed death.
In a way, I did die that day. The Nixon Alistair the world knew ceased to exist once the house went up in flames. He’s miles away from the man I am now. The old Nix is barely a memory that gets fainter every day. I can’t remember being him when my current life is so completely different.
Why did she leave flowers for me? Her mom, sure, but me? After everything I did to her? Even now, months later, my body responds to the memory. I should be repulsed; I know I should. But the opposite is true. My pulse races, hunger slithers through me, and my dick hardens when I remember the dark pleasure I took from Leni’s body. Again and again.
Maybe I deserve to be dead.
I can’t hang around here too long. This is a newer part of the cemetery, meaning there are more visitors here than in the older sections. The grief is fresher. Over time, it fades. People forget. Graves get overgrown.
What about the people nobody mourns? Because I’ll never mourn my father. I don’t even think of him as my father after what he did.
That’s why Bradley and I went to the house that day and set the fire.
It was his idea. That’s the one piece of truth I cling to, the way I cling to everything else as I leave the cemetery on foot. I’ve done a hell of a lot of walking these past months, ever since I snuck out of the hospital where everybody knew me as John Doe.
I’m supposed to be dead, so I can’t just go out and buy a car. Still, I’ve made enough connections to pick up a used model with cash sometime soon. I doubt Colt could trace my bank activity, so there’s no danger in withdrawing cash. He hasn’t noticed it so far.
But I can’t keep this up forever. I know that. Eventually, Colt will find me, or I’ll take one risk too many and be discovered.
He already knows I’m not dead—he keeps emailing me, updating me on his life. Not every day, but a few times a week. I access the messages at the public library. Of all the things I miss from my old life, a smartphone might be the hardest to live without. But it’s too traceable. I can’t take that risk.
For so many reasons.
For starters, there’s Bradley’s charred remains lying in my grave. Nobody would believe me if I told them the fire was his idea. I still see his wicked grin in my mind’s eye. “ You can teach the bastard a lesson.” I never told Bradley the details of the shit Dad made us do or what he did to Mom, but he knew I hated the son of a bitch.
Even now, knowing Dad’s dead and gone, just thinking of him makes my fists clench in my pockets as I walk with my head down and my shoulders hunched. It’s become a habit, hiding myself from the world, making it so they don’t have to look at me.
If it weren’t for the constant craving to see Leni again, I might never leave my apartment. It’s not worth risking people seeing me—wincing, immediately looking away. That’s the thing about people trying to be kind: they end up being the most hurtful. Someone like me, someone who used to take good looks for granted and revel in the attention he got from girls… the ultimate punishment is people feeling too sorry for me and too disgusted by me to stare too long at my face.
“You’re lucky to be alive, young man. If you hadn’t been found out there, there’s no telling what might have happened.”
I’ll never forget the agony as I stumbled away from the burning house, fumbling my way through the woods. I had to get away. That was all that mattered—getting away. There was no feeling. I didn’t even register my injuries, no more than I noticed the branches whipping against me or the uneven ground that made me stumble and fall to my hands and knees more than once. I just kept going, some instinct telling me to put as much distance between myself and that house as possible.
Looking back now, I know I was in shock. I could barely string two thoughts together after apparently getting out of the house before the explosion, though not soon enough to avoid the fireball that burst from the windows and blew out the back door. I got lucky, even if I didn’t feel lucky in the days that followed.
Dark now. So dark. Lights up ahead, traffic sounds. I can barely breathe. Every breath feels like fire in my lungs. And my face, there’s something wrong, I know there is. Every breeze that moves across my skin is like a thousand knives slicing into my flesh. I don’t want to see it—I don’t even want to touch it, afraid of what I’ll find. All I can do is keep moving, dragging myself forward, forcing one footstep after another.
It was only when I reached the road that I let myself rest. I had no choice. I collapsed in the dirt along the shoulder, my last conscious thought hoping someone would find me before I allowed exhaustion to win out.
Someone did find me, someone I was never conscious enough to speak to. I woke up in the hospital without any idea how much time had passed until one of the nurses told me the date. It had been two days since the fire.
And according to the news, I was dead.
By the time I reach the sketchy part of town that is now my home, the sun is sinking. Broken glass crunches under the soles of my boots, and a stray cat darts out from between a pair of trash cans as I approach. What was a warm breeze earlier has turned colder, sending ripples of goosebumps over my skin and making me hunch my shoulders higher, my chin close to my chest. Walking around with my hood pulled up gives me tunnel vision. I can’t see what’s happening on either side of me, which makes it all the more important to listen carefully to my surroundings.
This is my life now. Hiding from the world, protecting myself, wondering how much longer it has to be this way.
The old brick building where my apartment sits is about as grim and depressing as I can imagine. It always stinks of piss, and the walls are paper-thin, meaning I can hear every damn thing happening around me at all hours. But everyone minds their own business. That and a couple of working locks are all I need right now.
A pair of guys who I’m pretty sure live on the front steps day and night jerk their chins in my direction as I walk past. I give them my usual grunt in response before walking through the plexiglass door into the narrow space where rows of mailboxes sit. There’s no name on mine—not that I get any mail anyway.
“He came to us with no identification and doesn’t give any answers when we ask about his identity. And nobody has called in looking for a missing person.”
They think I’m asleep, in a drug-induced haze, which is the only way I can be sure they’ll speak honestly while I can hear.
I’m supposed to be dead. Bradley must’ve been killed, and they figured his body was mine. They haven’t said anything about him on the news, so that’s the only thing that makes sense.
Dad is dead. Amanda, too. I didn’t mean to kill her. She wasn’t supposed to die. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for Leni. One more way I destroyed her.
I take the stairs slowly, as usual, listening for anyone hiding out further up in the stairwell. Sometimes, a guy who lives here will wait around, hoping to score a little something out of the pockets of someone coming in or leaving. Considering I helped kill my father and stepmother, I can’t really give them any shit over it. Everyone does what they have to do to get by.
They probably see me and figure I came from a shitty background, addict parents or something like that. It’s easy to make assumptions about a person’s past based on the way they look and act today.
I wonder what any of them would think if they knew how I really grew up. The comfort and privilege. I had every opportunity to be better than this, at least on the surface. The rot was underneath, out of sight.
Not that I owe any of them an explanation. Nobody asks questions—and nobody looks too long at me if we happen to pass in the hall. I might as well be living on the moon, away from humanity, even if I can hear them through the walls.
I unlock both bolts on the scarred front door of my third-floor apartment, glancing to the right and left one more time before opening the door and quickly closing it behind me. Once the locks are flipped again, I release a long breath and touch my forehead to the cool wood.
That was a close one back at the cemetery. I need to be more careful, which means not venturing out in the daytime. It would be too easy for Leni to spot me and maybe recognize me.
The thought makes me laugh—softly, bitterly—before lowering my hood and running a hand through my short hair. It’s longer now than I used to keep it, covering the random bits of damage to my scalp.
Turning the lights on only makes everything look bleaker. If I cared, I’d get some actual furniture, maybe lamps, to make it warmer and more homey. But who needs comfort? Who needs to pretend life is anything less bleak than it is? Anyway, it’s what I deserve. After what I did, the bare minimum is all I should ever have.
Not that I’m super upset about what happened to Dad. Fuck him. It’s the memories of everything I did to Leni—and how I ended up destroying her life—all because he wanted me to.
Though really, thinking back on what I saw at the cemetery, she doesn’t look like her life has been ruined. And she did leave those flowers for me. Does that mean she’s forgiven me? A brief smile touches the corners of my mouth. That’s rare nowadays, with pretty much nothing to smile about most of the time. It would be just like her to forgive me. Somehow, that’s who she is. Life has handed her so much pain, disappointment, and shame, but she’s still Leni.
I don’t understand that kind of person and can’t pretend to. I carry grudges. I hate, I resent, and I want to inflict pain on those who have hurt me. Sometimes, imagining inflicting that pain is all that gets me through the worst of my solitude—the long, lonely nights spent doing absolutely nothing. Back in the day, there was always something to do: a party, a night out with my brother, maybe someone to hook up with. There was never a shortage of ways to distract myself or reasons to keep going.
Now, all of that is gone. And I have to wonder why I’m still alive while Bradley is dead in my grave.
As far as I know from the internet searches I’ve done at the library, there haven’t been any big stories about him going missing. The family must be keeping it quiet, which, of course, they’d do to keep their name out of the media. Not like they’re anything special, but they think they are. In our world, that’s enough.
No, not our world. Their world. I have a world of my own now, where what might have once been a big bedroom now serves as an entire studio apartment. A tiny sink, a two-burner stove, and an oven barely big enough to fit a plate inside serve as my kitchen. The bathroom is so small I can barely turn around without bumping into something, and the sofa doubles as my bed. I’m a lifetime away from the sprawling house I blew up seven months ago.
And I’m not the person I was back then, either. Going to the bathroom and catching a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror over the chipped, permanently stained porcelain sink is always a stark reminder. Not that I could ever forget—I can’t move my face the way I used to. It really sucks when I forget, and the tightness of my scar tissue reminds me I’ll never be normal again.
There’s no point in trying to avoid the sight of myself. Instead, I stop and stare straight at my reflection. The left side of my face is mostly what it used to be, but the right? It’s a map of twisted scar tissue, still a pale pink that I guess will eventually turn into a ghostly white. A monster, in other words. But then, I always was. Thinking back, going over every ugly thing I did at Dad’s command, it all helps me understand that my outside now matches my insides.
And it’s even worse than that. I can’t kid myself. When I look into my blue eyes, I see the eyes of someone who, if given the chance, would do everything the same. Because as much as I crave something to do, something to make me feel alive again, I crave Leni twice as much. Ten times as much. The feeling fills me, consumes me, makes me toss and turn in a cold sweat. Knowing where she is—with my brother—and that it would be so easy to go to her, to have her again, to satisfy every dark yearning.
Which is why I need to stay here. Away from her. Always.