eight
Duke Dolce
Time passes like a fever dream back in Wonderland.
Nothing changes from hour to hour, day to day, month to month.
Ingredients go in, pearls come out, sliding down the chutes in warm, loud rushes.
I still hear them falling when I lay down in the silence at night, in the charming little place I decorated with Mabel.
I smell them in my clothes, my nose. I taste them in the back of my mouth when I go to sleep, in the thirst in my throat in the morning.
I see them cascading in shimmering waves when I close my eyes. All I see is blue.
Blue.
She doesn’t come back, but she haunts me anyway. If she was okay, if she was alive, she would go back for Olive. I check in with Crystal, ask her about the kid more than I should. She probably thinks I’m a pedo, like everyone else.
But Mabel doesn’t think so, and she knows about predators, so I tell myself it’s okay if I ask, if I check to see if Blue came back for her.
Maybe Baron damaged her brain and she forgot about Olive.
Maybe he cracked her skull and she got amnesia like Colt did when Royal beat his head in. But how could anyone forget Olive?
She haunts me as much as her sister. Sometimes, when I’m sitting on the cinderblocks in the dead grass, smoking a cigarette and debating whether I can take one more trip with Alice before they come to get me, I see her instead of Dad.
She’s standing in the corner of the yard, in the corner of my eye, a little girl ghost who melts with the smoke tendrils curling from my mouth when I turn her way.
Sometimes I think I’m imagining it, but sometimes I’m sure someone was there.
I know it’s not Olive. I’m not stupid. But is it Blue?
Or the Black Widow Killer, finally come to collect?
Even if I don’t like kids, I hurt people.
Mabel and Harper and Lo.
Dawson.
Dad.
I see him almost every day now, standing with hands on hips, disappointment on face.
I hear him say, “How long has this been going on?” and “The priest will take care of this.”
I feel the impossibility of refusal, the helplessness, the shame—for what I do and can’t stop doing, for allowing him to bring me back again and again, for not standing up to him or the priest. I let it happen, so why does it fuck with my head so much?
It’s not Dad outside the barred windows of Wonderland or in the overgrown back lot, of course.
It might be Mabel’s stalker, though. Or the FBI.
Maybe they know what we’re doing here, what I do here all day every day.
Maybe they’re watching, like Baron watched Mabel.
They want me to see them, to go to Baron and tell him.
Then they can prove he’s the mastermind, that I’m just a grunt.
He always tries to give me credit, but all I did was test his first iterations. I was his subject before Jane.
He got rid of her once she served her purpose. He called her garbage. One day, he’ll see that I’ve served mine.
The FBI doesn’t think I’ve served my purpose yet though.
That must be why they wait, why they duck away every time I blink, so I’m not sure if I’m seeing things or if they were really there.
Maybe they don’t care about Lady Alice at all, because they think they’re onto the Black Widow Killer, and even busting a drug operation isn’t worth blowing their cover.
Or maybe they were collecting information, and today is the day they’ll make their move.
I might even be their target. After all, I make the stuff, all day, every day.
Maybe that’s why Baron put me on this job.
I make all the money, make it all possible, and I take all the risk.
He knows I won’t rat him out. And if we’re caught, I’m the one who will take the fall.
Maybe he’s even tipped them off—him or Mabel.
They needed the money, but now that Baron crossed the nine-figure mark, they might be ready to get rid of me and disappear off the map.
They could start over anywhere with that kind of money, and Mabel already knows how to disappear.
I try to imagine prison, but I can’t. It’s too similar to my life now, plodding through endless, monotonous days in a dark building, an hour in the yard here and there.
If that was my future, I would find a way to cut it short.
If I couldn’t get a belt, I’d make the other inmates do it.
It wouldn’t be hard. Talk shit to the wrong guy, and if that didn’t work, tell them what everyone thinks about me is true, turn a life sentence into a death sentence.
“Hey.”
I look up. Someone is standing in the yard, grass seed stocks around her ankles.
I squint into the bright, afternoon sun.
My skin is damp with sweat, but a chill passes over me before she steps out of the sun, and she’s more than a silhouette, more than a ghost of a girl who didn’t stay in her grave.
“I thought you quit smoking,” Mabel says, nodding to the circle of butts on the ground around my feet.
How long was I out here this time?
“I did,” I say, pocketing the gold pack, the same ones her brother smoked in another life. “Mostly.”
“We’ve been looking for you,” she says. “Baron closed up shop.”
“Damn,” I say. “Sorry. Must have lost track of time.”
“You really shouldn’t take so many of those.”
“Don’t smoke, don’t take Alice,” I say. “You don’t want me to have any fun.”
I stomp past her, but she catches my elbow. “Duke,” she says. “I don’t mind if you have fun. I’m worried about you.”
I look down at her, those blue eyes so convincing, and I melt. I cup her face in my hands and kiss her, and she lets me, even though I’ve been smoking and she hates that.
“I’m okay, Duchess,” I say, drawing back and sweeping a strand of hair back from her cheek. “I don’t take that many. It’s just something to pass the time. It gets boring being in there all day.”
“Promise?” she asks, searching my eyes.
“I promise.”
We’re not supposed to lie to each other, but how can I know she’s holding up her end of the bargain? And if she’s not, then I don’t have to, either.
“Good,” she says, stepping in and wrapping her arms around me, pressing her ear to my chest. “Because I don’t think I could live without you.”
She doesn’t think Baron would let her live. That’s what she means. That I’m the only thing keeping him from going too far, like he almost did that day he found out about Blue. I like knowing her survival depends on me. That’s the only thing either of them really need me for.
“I have a surprise for you,” Baron says when we slide into the car.
I don’t answer because I think he’s talking to Mabel, but then they’re both looking at me in the back seat.
“What?” I ask.
“We’re going back to Faulkner for the summer,” Baron says.
I wanted that so much at Christmas, but it’s not Christmas anymore. It’s the last day of classes for the students, which means Baron and Mabel are done with the school year.
“But… What about the operation?” I ask, gesturing back toward Wonderland as Baron pulls away.
“I found someone to run it,” he says. “A couple people, in fact. It’s past time you were out of there, anyway. You shouldn’t be making the product. We’re too big for that now.”
“I don’t mind,” I say, trying not to panic at the thought of leaving without grabbing a handful.
If I’d known we’d be leaving, I would have taken more than that.
A handful won’t last me all summer. I need a whole bag.
I have some at home, but I would have been stockpiling if I knew he was going to pull me out.
“I know you don’t,” Baron says. “But you should be in a higher-level position. You’re joint owner. You shouldn’t be in the trenches with the stuff. Besides, it’s not good for you to be around that all day.”
Fuck. I try to calculate how many I have at home against how many I’ll need, how many I take per day, and how many days of summer I’ll need to make them last.
Did they plan this, make sure I wouldn’t go back in and grab some on the way out? Is that why Baron closed up, and why Mabel didn’t tell me we weren’t coming back tomorrow?
“Aren’t you happy to be going home?” Mabel presses, turning around in her seat to look at me. “You haven’t seen your family in a year.”
“I thought Royal wouldn’t let you come back,” I say to my brother.
“We worked it out,” he says, like it’s all inconsequential, though I know it’s not. Family matters to Baron more than anything else.
“How?” I ask, narrowing my eyes at him.
“I made a deal with Harper.”
“What kind of deal?”
He pulls up at our place and turns off the car before meeting my eyes in the mirror. “I told her I’d help her track down her missing friend.”
“What friend?”
“You know which one,” he says, holding my gaze.
My heart lurches, and I wonder how long he’s known.
We never talked about it. I hoped he didn’t know, hadn’t put it together, connected her with Olive.
I didn’t until I was about to kill her. But of course Baron’s always three steps ahead.
Maybe he knew the whole time. Probably he did.
“She’s dead,” I say, because she has to be. She would have gone back for Olive if she were alive.
“She doesn’t know that,” Baron says, swinging open his door. “And for that matter, neither do we. I’d like to find out what happened to her too. So we all win.”
Inside, we pack our things. I scour the apartment for pearls, searching every nook and cranny, every spot I’ve taped them in case I need a boost when the others aren’t looking.
By the time I’m done, the stash I’ve put together is pathetic.
Despair thrums inside me, and I resist the urge to pop one right now.
Maybe this will be a good thing. Time to dry out a little, so when we come back in the fall, I won’t need so many to reach Wonderland. Besides, I won’t be sitting around all day in a dark warehouse going out of my mind. I’ll have lots of other stuff to do, so I probably won’t even need them.
We take my Lexus because it’s the biggest and most comfortable. Baron drives, and I sit in the back, thinking it’s funny, because in high school when Royal drove, Baron always sat in the back. But he never felt less important like I do. I’m sure of that.
“I thought you’d be more excited to be going home,” Mabel says to me as we cross the bridge into Arkansas.
Only a few hours left. My stomach tightens, and I lay my head back, refusing the nagging urge to reach in my pocket and take one of the pearls. I don’t want to be high when I get home.
I don’t want to see disappointment on Crystal’s face.
Judgment on Royal’s. He was always too strong to get addicted to anything.
He’d never let a substance control him. And I don’t either.
I’m the one in control. I’m not a junkie like fucking Colt Darling, who’s been in and out of rehab since graduation last summer.
Suddenly I’m back there, outside the Slaughterpen, the last time I saw him.
His fist around my cock, his fingers in my mouth, the taste of my own cum on my tongue.
I shove the image away. That was the night I hurt Olive.
That’s why I let him do that, to punish myself.
That’s all it was. That, and being fucked up.
And he was probably as fucked up as me, if not more.
He probably won’t even remember. And if he does, he’d never say it aloud.
Hopefully he’s back in rehab and I won’t have to see him at all, and we can both pretend it never happened, that none of it happened.
I wanted to go home so badly at Christmas, but maybe that’s because I couldn’t.
Now that it’s not only an option but a reality, everything comes crashing in.
Not just Colt, but Olive. What I did to her.
What will she do when she sees me? Will she run away scared?
Will Harper even let me see her? And then there’s Harper, who I got used to, but it was always there, the guilt of what I did following me like a dark cloud over my head, always lurking, waiting to drop reminders like acid rain when I forgot for a moment and laughed with her or noticed how hot she was.
Then it would dump onto me, burning away my skin, eating away at me like fire.
Crystal wasn’t there for that, so at least she can look at me without seeing a monster.
But even she was there the night we left Dad to die.
She left him too, and that shared knowledge doesn’t just bind us together, it weighs us down.
The more of us who are in a room together, the heavier it gets, the burden magnified by the weight of each person’s guilt.
We are all murderers, not just me. We all made the decision together.
Getting away from that, being with only Mabel and Baron, who weren’t there that night, has let me put it out of my mind for hours, sometimes days at a time. When I’m back in Faulkner, it will be all around me—not just Dad’s vengeful ghost, but the people who helped create it.
Crystal, Devlin, Royal, Harper. Even my old friends from high school, who I never talk to anymore. That’s probably why. None of us want to remember, to go back to that night.
Suddenly I can’t remember why I ever wanted to go back to Faulkner.
But we’re already passing the city limit sign, and it’s too late to turn back.