twelve
Duke Dolce
But he was there.
They said so when they got home. They saw him.
I couldn’t ask how he looked, how he was. It would have made Baron wonder why I asked, why I cared.
I don’t care.
I have his sister right here. The girl I love. The girl I always loved. The girl who loves me, as far as she’s able. I have the life we dreamed about for two years, that I never thought I’d have. Now I do. I have the life, the girl. The one who was supposed to make everything good again.
So why can’t I be fucking happy?
I flop back on the pillows. Mabel and Baron are sleeping. She’s nestled into his arms, both of them fitting together like halves of a whole.
That’s my place, but she took it, and now I don’t fit.
I don’t fit anywhere. Not with them, not with Royal and Harper.
I sit up and swing my legs off the side of the bed, then check over my shoulder. Without his glasses, Baron looks just like me. Another version, the mirror image, the one who fits. We should fit together. We’re the two halves of the whole, after all. Literally one person divided in two.
We used to be. Mabel was the third wheel then, the outsider.
It was me and Baron, Baron and me. We worked together to destroy her, laughing all the way.
When we did, it was my victory too. When we realized we needed her, it was my epiphany too.
When we decided to wait until graduation and then go get her, it was my plan too.
But Baron didn’t wait.
He left, and I was here, and everything changed, and I don’t know if it will ever be good again. He broke the whole, and it doesn’t fit back together the way it used to.
That’s the midnight thought, the 2AM thought, that keeps me awake. Not the dawning realization that everything is not good, not the frustration that it should be but it’s not. It’s the gnawing sense that it never will be.
I grab my glasses and slip out of the room, pad down the hall, down the creaking old wooden staircase.
In the kitchen, before I hit the light, I see something hanging from the ceiling, swaying slowly in the dim light from the window—a body.
I choke back a startled sound, not wanting to squeal like a pussy.
I hit the light, and it bathes the kitchen.
My heart is hammering erratically. It was just the light fixture.
I go to the fridge, take out a beer, and tip it back, downing the bottle in long, slow pulls. When the last of the cold bitterness gurgles down the neck of the bottle, down my throat, I toss it and get another one. Maybe they’ll help me sleep. At the very least, they’ll keep the ghosts at bay.
The ghosts are always with me now, even when I’m not high. The only difference is, when I’m high, they don’t always disappear when I look directly at them. Sometimes they stay, whisper to me like my demon, tell me what to do.
I thought being here would help. That Mabel wasn’t the thing that was missing after all.
If I was here without her, I wasn’t happy.
And when I was somewhere else with her I wasn’t happy.
So it made sense to put the two things together.
The last time I was happy, I was here with Mabel and Baron, and we were all together, and there were no ghosts.
But here we are, and I have everything, and I’m still moping around like a little bitch.
Even Olive wasn’t mad at me. She was happy to see me, like I never hurt her at all. If anyone has something to be pissy about, it’s her. But she’s happier than ever, like she doesn’t even remember. Like she doesn’t miss her sister at all.
I’ve been torturing myself over it for a year, and she doesn’t even care.
I open another beer. Somehow I’ve gone through the whole six-pack already.
At first, it felt like a miracle that she wasn’t mad.
She didn’t care at all that I could have killed her.
But now it’s starting to feel like a punishment.
I know it’s sick, but I want her to be mad.
I don’t deserve to get off the hook that easy.
I wanted to show her how sorry I was, to earn her forgiveness, but she didn’t even care, so there’s no reason to.
There’s no reason to be here, to see her.
She doesn’t miss me. She was perfectly happy without me, off living her big New York life with Royal and Harper.
Maybe not everyone gets to be happy. At least Olive deserves her happiness. I don’t deserve shit.
The ghosts creep in, whispering in my ears, reminding me of what I’ve done, why I will be forever seeking, chasing, never content until the day I die.
Dawson.
Dad.
The man who fucked Mabel.
Blue.
Olive wouldn’t forgive me so easily if she knew.
This time, when I go to the refrigerator, I bring a whole six-pack back to the table with me. I’m smart enough to know this isn’t going to make me happy either, but I keep going anyway. At least it can make me numb.
I don’t know how the others deal with the guilt, the ghosts that visit in the night, that linger in every corner, whispering warnings.
Harper and Royal seem fine. Happy, even.
Crystal and Devlin were there when we left Dad in the burning building.
They’re fine. They’re still making babies and raising more, kids who will never know that their parents are murderers.
I don’t know what happened to Gideon and his brother.
If I wanted to find out, I could call their dad and ask, or go to church and see if they were there, but I don’t want to see them.
We were never friends, and I haven’t talked to DeShaun or Cotton since we graduated.
I talk to Baron, but he doesn’t understand. He can’t because he never would have let that happen. Family is everything to Baron, even the bad ones like Dad.
Like me.
He forgives me, even when I can’t forgive myself, even when I don’t deserve it, even when he would never have done what I did.
Patricide.
That’s the word for it. Killing your own father.
Baron would no more do that than he’d kill me. People think he’s a psychopath, but he’s better than all of us. There’s no shades of grey to him. It’s black and white. Simple. You don’t kill family. He doesn’t make excuses or exceptions. He knows it’s wrong, so he wouldn’t have done it.
I wish I had that kind of clarity. But I can’t find the border between good and bad, between black and white.
It’s all blended into a dull grey fog, where nothing feels good and pure anymore.
Even Olive, who was the last good thing I had, the one pure and simple part of my life after we killed Dad, when Baron was gone, has been perverted by what everyone’s said to me.
Even after Mabel told me that I was probably okay, I can’t stop worrying.
I can’t hug her without wondering if someone is going to think I’m a sicko, can’t hang out with her without wondering if they’re right, because what kind of person wants to be friends with a kid?
The people I should be most comfortable with, who share that dark secret, that terrible bond, can’t be trusted because they don’t trust me.
They poisoned my mind against myself, and I can’t get the venom out.
It’s part of me now, the doubts, the fears, the questions that circle around and around in a never-ending, claustrophobic spiral.
I stumble from the table, needing to get out, to breathe, to leave my head that’s closing in on me. The beer isn’t enough. I need Alice.
I’m out, but I know where to get more. I grab some clothes from the hamper in the bathroom and stumble outside.
A low, sluggish layer of clouds hangs over the town, trapping in the heat.
The air hits me with its choking suffocation, oppressive and ominous.
I hurry to the car, feeling the ghosts close behind. I don’t dare look back.
In the car, I’m shivering but I turn the air on full blast, needing it to suck away the dread that curdles in the heat, the vapors.
I don’t know why I ever wanted to come back here.
Faulkner is a curse, a scourge on the world.
I want to burn it all to the ground, leave it obliterated, wipe it off the face of the earth like Chernobyl.
I take out my phone and thumb it on, correcting when my wheel goes into the ditch. I clip the mailbox, then jerk the car onto the road and give it some gas. In the rearview, I can see the post jutting from the ground at an odd angle, like a crooked headstone.
My phone connects to the speakers as I hit call. I have to try three more times before he answers, sounding annoyed.
“What do you want?”
“I need some shit,” I say.
He sighs. “It’s three in the fuckin’ morning.”
“I know,” I say. “But you work for us, don’t you?”
“No,” he says, and I can hear the scowl in his voice.
I probably disrespected him, which might be cause for killing in his world. I decide it doesn’t much matter. Even the people who would miss me would be better off without me.
“Okay, well, I need it,” I say. “I’m on my way.”
“I’m not getting out of bed for you, pretty boy.”
“We make the shit you sell,” I say. “You owe us.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Money, dumbass,” I say. “And you get to move some product. I’ll buy enough to make it worth your while.”
“I can do that in the morning, so unless you’re going to eat my ass so good I see God, you’re not worth losing sleep over, and if you’re desperate enough to do that to get a fix, I don’t trust where your mouth has been.”
“Why?” I demand. “You got a girl there with you?”
“Because it’s three in the fucking morning.”
“You got a guy there?”
I throw in a slur for good measure, but he just laughs.
“Only you would think that’s an insult.”
The phone disconnects, and when I try him back, it goes straight to voicemail.