twenty-four
Duke Dolce
As soon as we’re unpacked, Mabel opens Seeley’s pet carrier and sets out his food and water dishes. He crouches inside the cage, refusing to come out, glaring at us for forcing him to endure the indignity of another road trip. I don’t blame him. I don’t see why we ever left Faulkner.
Giving up on getting him to come out, Mabel stands and turns to Baron.
“I need the car,” she says. “I have something to take care of.”
“What?” I ask, narrowing my eyes at her. “Going to give the damaged bumper to the police as evidence?”
I don’t know how Baron can ever trust her.
This was my first time killing, and even though she thinks it was Baron driving, Baron who killed her, I still jump at every siren, every flashing light on the way here, even the ones that weren’t police.
My heart stopped every time I saw a squad car in a town where we stopped for food or gas.
I almost pissed myself when a state police drove in the other lane for a full two minutes on the highway.
Mabel frowns. “Why do you still act like I’m the enemy? We’re on the same team, Duke. We were all there. We’re all accomplices at the very least.”
“Because you still act like it,” I point out.
“How do I act like it?” she asks, planting her hands on her hips.
I glance at Baron, remembering her words. How tender she was sitting on my lap, lying with me. Asking me to do the impossible. She thinks Baron killed Dixie, so I still owe her. She doesn’t even have to ask. I already know what she wants me to do.
“Never mind,” I say.
Maybe if she takes the car, if she turns us in, she’ll do it in a way that implicates only Baron. No one knows we helped plan it. She could say he rammed Dixie’s car off the road while we screamed for him to stop. No one could say otherwise except Baron himself.
I shake the thought away. What has she done to me, that I’m contemplating getting my own brother, my twin, my other half, locked up?
It’s better than the alternative , my demon reminds me.
I can’t argue. He’s right. I can’t kill Baron, and if that’s what she asks of me, I’ve already failed. But if he was in prison, I wouldn’t have to.
And let’s be real, he’d be fine there. He’d thrive. Probably be running the joint in a week’s time, running drugs, arranging ‘accidents’ for the inmates dumb enough to cross him.
I wouldn’t survive a day. I’d be turned into some thug’s bitch, and then I’d run my mouth and get shanked.
What if that’s her plan instead? What if she says the same things to him when they’re alone?
He could do it.
Baron can do anything.
He wouldn’t like it, but he could kill me.
He’d do that before he’d send me to prison. Baron knows I wouldn’t last, and he wouldn’t want to let someone else take my life. If someone’s going to do it, he’d want it to be him.
“You can go in the morning,” Baron tells Mabel, hanging the keys by the door.
“He wants to go by the lawyer’s in the morning,” she says.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Baron points out.
“It’s Preston,” she says with a shrug, like that explains anything.
“We’ve been driving all day,” I argue. “Sit down. Chill. Have a beer.”
She sighs. “I can have him bring it here.”
“Bring what here?” I ask.
“The paperwork for Grandpa’s estate,” she says. “I have to sign a bunch of stuff before Summer House is officially mine.”
“Is anyone else coming?” I ask, thinking about Colt, his smoky blue eyes, his smoky breath on my lips, the way he always slips through my fingers like smoke.
“Who else would come?” Baron asks, watching me.
“I don’t know,” Mabel says, pulling out her phone. “I can ask. I don’t know if Dolly puts the baby to bed or if the nanny does it.”
“Don’t bring him here,” I say, tossing myself on the couch and pulling out my phone. “I don’t want to see your family right now.”
“I’ll take you over,” Baron says, but he’s eyeing me. “Want me to drop you by Royal’s on the way?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t feel like seeing anyone right now.”
He frowns harder, standing there in a rare moment of indecision before he turns to go with Mabel. I can tell something’s up, but I don’t know what. Is that suspicion in his eyes? Or regret for what he’s about to do to me?
I shouldn’t let them leave together, cut me out again. This is their perfect opportunity to get rid of me, for Baron to come clean and tell her I committed a murder. They could go to the police. But I can’t bring myself to care.
I swallow a handful of Alice without bothering to hide it. I didn’t want to leave Faulkner, but now that I’m back, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere.
I don’t want to see Olive happy with Royal and Harper, and know I’m the reason her sister is gone.
I don’t want to see my sister, who is still normal, who still loves me when I don’t deserve it, don’t deserve her. Why should I get a sister when Olive doesn’t?
I don’t want to know that Colt is still with Lo, that they’re happy now that she’s finally out of Cedar Crest and able to be with him.
I just want to be left alone.
Mabel steps outside, but Baron lingers in the door, brow furrowed. “You shouldn’t take that many at once.”
“Fuck off,” I say, not looking up from my phone.
“Duke,” he says, glancing out at Mabel and then back. “I want to talk to you. When I get back, can we do that?”
“I’ll be high as fuck.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
I sigh. “You’ll do it whether or not I want to. Why even ask?”
“Because you’re my brother.”
When I shrug, he scowls, then shakes his head and walks out. I lay there for a while, letting Lady Alice creep over me. He said tomorrow, which means he’s not getting rid of me tonight, at least. I have one more night. One night to do whatever the fuck I want.
He also said “I.”
I want to talk to you. When I get back.
Baron never says “I.” It’s always “we.”
He’s too evolved for petty feelings like jealousy.
I’m the one who gets mired in feelings. Even Mabel gets jealous. Maybe that’s why she picked me. That’s what she said he can’t give her. I can feel things for her that he never will.
He can’t give her his heart because he doesn’t have one.
He says I am his heart.
What if that’s what she asks for, like the Evil Queen asking the Huntsman to bring her Snow White’s heart. It makes perfect sense. She will have asked Baron to bring her his own heart, and that is me. He’ll deliver me to her.
They’ll dump my body wherever it is that they put Mr. Harris, in some secret location where I’ll never be found. And who would report me missing?
Like Blue, I have no one. Only a sibling, but mine is the one who will destroy me, like he destroyed her. He wouldn’t make me suffer. At least I’m sure of that. He’ll make it quick.
When Royal and King ask where I am, Baron will tell them I went my own way.
They’ll believe him. They would never believe he’d hurt me.
They haven’t seen how Mabel has changed us, how Alice has, how Blue has.
They don’t know that when he left me, he tore me out of him, tore out his own heart.
Now he studies it with the clinical detachment that he does everything else.
He studies himself more than anyone—he is his first subject.
He’d be fascinated to know how a man can live without a heart, to study his own reaction like a specimen under a microscope.
That must be where they went. To plan it out.
I thumb open my phone. Wonderland shimmers around me, inside me. It swallows me and pulls me down the rabbit hole, but the rabbit hole is inside me, a sucking vortex that always wants more.
I jerk off for a while, and then I want to move, so I dance until I’m hot, and then I take off my clothes and wander the house, prowling, seeking something new, some novice sensation to feed the beast. Seeley Boots watches me with suspicion from the top of the refrigerator.
“Fuck off, asshole,” I mutter to him, grabbing a beer from inside. “You think I’m going to light you on fire? I’m not that evil. Yet.”
I grin at him, and he shrinks down, like a fluffy orange turtle trying to retract its head into its shell. I toss the beer cap at him and go back to the living room. I grab my phone and thumb it on.
DukeOfBeavertown: u here?
Dynamo: wsp
DukeOfBeavertown: r u in Faulkner
Dynamo: no
DukeOfBeavertown: wya
Dynamo: at the great lakes w lo
DukeOfBeavertown: y
Dynamo: I told u I was leaving town w her when she got out
DukeOfBeavertown: u dnt come back for labor day?
Dynamo: no lol
Dynamo: not rlly a big holiday 4 2 ppl w/o jobs
DukeOfBeavertown: wb xmas
Dynamo: will prob come back 4 that
Dynamo: c u then k? gg
DukeOfBeavertown: I think ur sisters going to kill me
Dynamo: no shes not
DukeOfBeavertown: u don’t know her anymore
Dynamo: I know her well enough to know that.
DukeOfBeavertown: u dont
Dynamo: r u hi rn
DukeOfBeavertown: wut does that matter
Dynamo: get help
DukeOfBeavertown: I’m trying
Dynamo: ffs I told u I cant help u. get therapy.
DukeOfBeavertown: I dont need therapy
Dynamo: sorry cant help u
Dynamo: Pls consider it. Srsly. & sobriety. Its hard but so much better here. I know u can get here 2. I believe in u man. Think about it. gg.
[Dynamo has left the chat]
DukeOfBeavertown: I dnt need fcking sboriety
[Dynamo is away]
DukeOfBeavertown: I need u
[Dynamo is away]
“Fuck,” I roar, sitting up and hurling my phone across the room. When I go pick it up, cracks have spiderwebbed the screen. I want to smash it into a million pieces, but I don’t have a way out of here if I do. They took the car.
I have to get out.
I pace the house, shaking, raging.
How dare he walk away like that? How dare he get better and act all fucking sanctimonious, when he’s the one who left me in hell? He was supposed to be here with me, but he crawled out and left me to burn alone.
I’m so fucking hot even without clothes, that my skin feels like it’s going to peel off. I stick my head in the freezer, panting in the cool vapors, my eyes stinging.
He doesn’t care about you, Duke.