Chapter 9 Brady #2
Collins nodded excitedly. “Our number one export,” she said. “If you go up to the Sweetwater River, you can see the change, especially if it’s a sunny day—fresh water until a certain point, and then once it passes the crack in the peak, the water takes on a more yellow hue.”
“What about the fish?” I asked. I’d only ever been to the main Sweetwater River lookout point, but I knew there were fish swimming through the whole thing. There were multiple fishing guides in town—I think Dex Cartwright even led fishing trips during the summer if I was remembering correctly.
Collins shrugged. “They’ve had over a hundred years to adapt to the salt water. Nature is kind of crazy like that—resilient.”
“How do you know all of this?” I asked.
Collins took another puff of the joint. “I have very reliable sources,” she said. “It should be in the town archives, but we don’t have an archivist, so the archives are just a bunch of piles in a cellar somewhere.” She sounded disappointed at that.
“Clarke told me you don’t like it here,” I said, and Collins arched a dark eyebrow at me.
“I don’t,” she responded.
I gave her a look. “For someone who doesn’t like it, you know an awful lot about this place.”
Collins slid a little farther down the pew and leaned backward, so her head was resting on the back of it. “Knowing and caring are two different things.”
“Really?” I asked as I did the same thing, so I could look at the stars. “I don’t think that’s true. At least, not in this case. I think knowing always comes with at least some sort of care.”
“Agree to disagree, then, Cooper.” We sat there in silence for a while, passing the joint back and forth until it was gone.
My head got lighter, but my body felt heavier, and I suddenly became very aware that Collins and I were side by side—nearly touching.
I would only have to move a little bit for my arm to brush hers.
I stayed where I was.
“It’s so quiet,” she said after a while—she sounded…sad? “Tell me a secret.”
I turned to look at Collins, and her eyes were already on me. “Not a fan of the quiet?” I asked.
“Not this kind of quiet. Not here,” she said.
I didn’t understand. “When has it ever been loud here? Out in the middle of the woods?”
Collins sighed—the type of sigh that made my chest ache for her, even though I didn’t know this woman or what she was thinking. That sigh and the past five days I’d spent with her were enough for me to know that Collins had something going on—something that hurt.
“I gave my Nintendo Game Boy to a girl in fourth grade,” I said, not wanting her to have to answer my question and wanting her to have some sort of distraction for some reason.
Collins huffed a laugh. “That’s hardly a secret, Brady.”
“I told my parents that it got stolen,” I said, smiling. “And they made me like file a police report and all this shit. But really, I just gave it to Lauren Babbit because I thought she was cute, and I wanted her to like me.”
“Did it work at least?”
“Not even a little bit,” I said. “She had a crush on a fifth-grader, but she took the Game Boy with no hesitation.”
“Honestly, good for her. But ouch for you,” Collins responded.
“Right? But I never told my mom. To this day, they think my Game Boy was the victim of a crime. She brought it up at Christmas a few years ago.”
Collins laughed. She had the most literal laugh I’d ever heard. I could hear every “ha.”
“Do you have siblings?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Three older brothers. I’m the baby,” I said.
“I’m technically the baby, too,” Collins responded. “By like thirty seconds.”
“I can see that, actually. Clarke gives off oldest-child energy.”
“She really does. I sometimes used to wonder if there was only supposed to be one Cartwright kid—that Clarke was supposed to exist, and I wasn’t.
That our cells split by mistake, and I was stuck in her shadow,” Collins whispered.
“I wish I were more like her sometimes. Responsible. Steady. She’s always been so sure of herself—of what she wanted to do and who she wanted to be. ”
“You seem sure of yourself, too,” I said, and I meant it. She was authentic and genuine, but in a different way than her sister. Collins felt rougher around the edges.
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t quite fit in with my family,” she said. “But then again, I also don’t think I fit in anywhere else, and they’re where I fit best—even though it’s not perfect.”
“Why do you think that?”
“They’re all so…good, I guess.”
I nodded. “They are,” I agreed. I thought Collins was good, too, though. Whatever that meant.
Collins dragged her hand down her face. “It’s so annoying.” That made me laugh—she truly looked so put out that her family were good people.
“Your turn,” I said. “For a secret.” Silence fell in the church. The type of silence that felt heavy and made me wonder if even a falling tree could penetrate it. I thought about how far out of town we were—how secluded.
“I talk to ghosts. And they talk to me,” she whispered. “Or at least they used to.”
I laughed. “Are you sure that isn’t the weed talking?”
Collins smiled at me, and my eyes got stuck on her mouth for the second time tonight. “I’m serious,” she said. “There are at least three in the church right now and more outside. We walked past like a dozen to get in here. You felt them; I know you did.”
I thought about the way I felt like something was watching me. “I think that’s just like…the vibes of this place.”
“Vibes don’t just come out of nowhere,” she said. “They’re influenced and determined by something.”
“Ghosts?” I said sarcastically.
“Usually, yes,” Collins responded.
I sighed. For some reason, I felt compelled to throw this woman a bone. “So why aren’t they talking to you?”
“Excellent question,” Collins said. “I wish I knew.” Her voice was quiet. Maybe it was the darkness or maybe it was the fact that both of us were looking up at the Sweetwater Peak night sky or maybe it was how close we were, but the moment felt…vulnerable.
This whole ghost thing obviously meant something to her—even if I didn’t believe in any of it.
“When did it stop?”
Collins took a deep breath. “A little less than a year ago,” she said.
“Is that…significant?” I waited for a second, but Collins didn’t respond. “Ah.” I nodded. So it was significant.
“I just miss the voices,” she whispered. “I hate feeling so alone all the time.” I understood that. Loneliness was a hell of a mountain to climb. Personally, I just kept telling myself that I enjoyed solitude. It was a good lie, but its effectiveness had recently started to wear thin.
“Can’t you get them back?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how the whole ghost thing worked, obviously.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve tried—tried cleansing my aura, meditation, hypnosis—I even went to a medium I found on the internet. She had great reviews. She was actually an animal medium, but I still gave it a go.”
“If you can talk to ghosts, wouldn’t you be a medium?”
“My abilities are different—at least from what I understand. Ghosts don’t come to me when I call.
They exist parallel to me. They’re on the same plane.
I can see them. I can feel them. They’re just as real to me as you are, and I’ve lived my entire life alongside them,” she said. “So I don’t really know what I am.”
“You don’t know anyone like you?”
Collins hesitated for a second. “Not really, and it’s not like it’s something easily researchable or whatever. Every Reddit thread says I have some sort of, like, block, but I don’t know what that means, and no one can tell me how to fix it.”
“Well, if Reddit can’t help…”
Collins sat up and gave me a glare. I tried not to smile. “Where else would you recommend I go searching for information? Just call up my general practitioner?” She stood up and started pacing back and forth in front of me.
“Point taken,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender. I sat up and watched her. I narrowed my eyes at the floor she was walking on, which seemed more pliable than it did when we walked in.
Collins’s dark eyes shot to the back corner of the church. “What are you looking at?” she said to no one—at least, no one that I could see when I turned to where she was staring.
Her eyes widened after a second. “Wait,” she said, “say that again.” She sounded desperate.
The floor creaked underneath her, and I instinctively stood and grabbed her hand. She took a heavy step toward the back of the church, and almost in slow motion, I watched the floor give out underneath her feet.
I fell to my knees and without thinking, I caught her with my arms under her shoulders. The look of pure fear on her face nearly did me in.
I pulled her onto the stable part of the floor that didn’t now have a Collins-shaped hole in it.
Her head fell onto my chest. I kept one of my arms wrapped tightly around her torso and moved the other hand to the back of her head.
My heart raced against my rib cage, and I swore I could hear hers doing the same thing.
“Are you okay?” I breathed. I felt her nod against my chest. “What the fuck happened?”
Collins pushed back from my chest to look at me, and I brushed her hair out of her face.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. When she leaned back to look at the hole that appeared a few seconds ago, I held on to her tighter.
I wanted her to be as far away from it as possible.
“How did I not know this place had a basement?”
A stunned laugh bubbled out of me. “You just had a near-death experience in a church ruin, and that’s what you’re thinking about?” If that part of the floor went with the weight of a person on it, I didn’t feel good about the rest of this place—so much for well-preserved.
“God.” I shook my head. “You are something else.”
“I wonder how we can get down there,” she said, relaxing back into me.
I felt her shaking a little. I squeezed her waist—trying to reassure myself that she was okay.
The sound the floor made as it gave way underneath her played in my head over and over again.
All it took was a split second for things to change.
I didn’t know how far the fall would’ve been, but I knew I wouldn’t have ever forgiven myself if she got even a minor injury.
“We are not going down there, trouble,” I said—my thoughts about Collins slipped out as a nickname. I mindlessly rubbed my hand up and down her back. “Not after that.”
“Boring Brady,” she muttered, but she didn’t push back. I took a few deep breaths, trying to get my heart rate to slow down, and I noticed Collins breathing in time with me.
I replayed the past few minutes in my head—trying to remember what she was doing before the floor gave out. “What happened before you fell?” I asked—recalling her anger, her shock, and her determination to get to the back of the church.
“I—I heard something,” she said, as she looked up at me, eyes wide. “I heard them.”