twenty-seven #2
“It’s not possible,” Harper whispers, but she must know it is, because she folds in on herself, a slow crumpling.
Royal pulls her into his arms, rocking her, his face like marble.
The broken boy with the swollen lips and bruised eyes, begging for help, no longer exists.
He is a stone statue now, immovable and unbreakable.
But inside, I know this will break him. Inside, it will break us all.
I always study them with fascination, this unlikely pair, but tonight, there’s no wonder, no curiosity that this spark plug of a girl could disrupt the whole Dolce engine, could bring it to a halt.
Tonight, there are too many other thoughts, ideas, feelings I haven’t even begun to comprehend.
I can’t look ahead. Not yet. So I look back.
I replay the moment. The car slowing. The window lowering.
Why didn’t he duck?
It was probably the drugs clouding his mind, making him slow. Even then, they might have hit him. A bullet is faster than a person.
Baron hasn’t accepted that yet. “I’m going to find her,” he swears. “I know where she lives.”
He doesn’t wait for me, just turns and storms off suddenly, leaving me to face the incomprehensible with these two strangers.
“What happened?” Royal asks me, his gaze unflinching. He always looked at me like that, like he was daring me to tell him that he should look away in shame, like he was forcing me to do it instead.
“He was shot,” I whisper.
“By… Blue?” he asks, less certain now.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe it’s a coincidence.”
People like to believe things like that.
Harper lifts her head, wipes her cheeks. “Why would Blue shoot Duke?”
“She wouldn’t,” I say. “But she’d shoot Baron.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?” I ask, cutting my eyes at Royal.
I don’t know what he knows, but I’m assuming it’s enough. He knows what Baron is like, because he’s just like him. He knows what Baron does, because he does it too. They all do.
Did.
I swallow hard and look away from them both.
“But when did they even meet?” Harper asks. “And why are you calling her Jane?”
“I thought that was her name,” I say. “Tell me what she said. Tell me exactly what she said when she came here.”
Harper draws back, and I know I was too intense, too weird.
Instead of telling me I’m a freak, though, she just picks up the pack of cigarettes and takes one out.
“I think this calls for an extra smoke,” she says, lighting up before speaking to me.
“She said… She was ranting, like, all in a rushed panic that didn’t make sense.
I don’t even know everything she said. She said they had to go, and she kept saying, ‘right now.’ She said someone was waiting in the car, and they had to get out right now. ”
“A baby,” Royal says, taking the cigarette from her. “She said the baby was waiting.”
She wasn’t lying. She really had it.
“Yes,” Harper says, nodding. “She definitely said something about a baby, and something about the forest? And then she grabbed Olive and they ran out. She barely let her say goodbye before she dragged her out the door. Olive wanted to get her stuff, but Blue told her there was no time.”
“She gave you that number,” Royal says, handing the cigarette back.
“Oh, shit, yeah,” Harper says, tucking the filter in the corner of her mouth and digging into her pockets. She finally comes up with a torn scrap of paper. “She said she couldn’t thank us enough, and if we ever needed anything, to call this number and tell them we’re a friend of hers.”
We all stare at the scrap, weighing its meaning, its significance, its impact on the rest of our lives.
“Should we call it?” she asks, glancing at Royal like she’s afraid of his reaction.
He knows Blue killed his brother. He knows Baron will kill her if he finds her.
“Can I see it?” I ask, holding out a hand.
Harper hands it over with all the trust in the world, like she’s never considered that I might already know what to do. I crumple the tiny scrap, pull out the pack of matches that Baron gave me when he told me to burn the house, and I light one. I hold the flame to the paper.
“Whoa, what the fuck?” Royal barks, jumping up.
I turn away, so if he grabs me, he won’t get the hand with the paper. By the time he could get it, it’ll be too late.
But he never reaches me. Harper stops him with a hand on his elbow. In the two seconds of contemplation before he pulls free, the flame has swallowed the paper.
Royal glowers at me, like he’s not sure whether to throttle me.
There’s nothing any of us can do now, though.
I’ve made the choice for all of us. They could beat me up, but it won’t bring the number back, and I have a feeling they didn’t memorize it, if they even looked at it before Harper shoved it into her pocket in the chaos of Blue rushing in, grabbing Olive, and running out.
“You should have gone with Baron,” Royal says to me.
“I don’t think he wants company.”
“Well, too fucking bad,” he says, leaning down to kiss Harper’s head. “I’m going to find him.”
“You know where he is?”
“I’ve got his location,” he says, striding off toward the garage.
I marvel at that. I didn’t think Baron would let anyone know his whereabouts. I didn’t even know if his twin had his location. But Duke wasn’t his only brother. Baron has two more. They all love each other as well as they can, in their broken ways.
Just like they love us.
I sit down beside Harper.
“Smoke?” she asks.
I shake my head no. “How’d she look?”
“Okay,” Harper says, knowing who I mean. She drags on her cigarette. “How do you know her?”
“I don’t.”
“Doesn’t seem like the kind of girl you’d be friends with.”
“I’m not friends with any kind of girl,” I say. “No one likes me enough to call me a friend.”
I wait for her to say that’s not true, or that she’s my friend.
Not because I want her to, but because everyone always does when I say things like that.
I’m glad when she doesn’t, when I don’t have to deal with the discomfort of pretending I don’t know she’s lying, and her discomfort at knowing I’m pretending.
“Yeah, you’re pretty tough to figure out,” she says.
“Do you have to figure someone out to be their friend?”
“I guess not,” she says. “But it helps to be able to know someone, so you know if you like them. That’s kinda the whole basis of friendship.”
“I don’t think I’m a very likeable person,” I point out. “Whether or not someone knows me.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
She finishes off her cigarette and sets the butt between her feet on the steps with the other one.
“I can’t believe he’s gone. I mean, I believe it, but I can’t believe it at the same time.
I want to ask if you’re sure. If there’s zero chance that he’ll just come walking around the side of the house right now, or call and say he got us good. ”
My throat tightens, and I can’t speak. I may be unlikeable, but he found a way. The twins are the only friends I’ve had in over ten years. And now the one who loved me is gone, and the one who can’t will never let me go.
“Are you sure we got the right twin?” Harper asks, apparently having similar thoughts to mine.
I nod, but I’m thinking about how Baron insisted on going in alone to get Duke, how he told me to wait outside. How long it took. Could they have switched? Is this his way of testing me one more time, to see if I want it to be him? To make me prove myself one final time?
But no. I can’t think like that. I can’t play the game anymore. We played too long, and we all lost. It doesn’t matter who’s left. It only matters that only one of them remains. I will love him, no matter who he is.
“You know, I always hoped… I hoped you’d pick him,” she says. “I was rooting for him. For you.”
“Me too,” I whisper, and a tear spills down my cheek.
I look over at the row of lilacs where we sat that night, when we burned the house.
How he held me trapped when the fire trucks came, how I freaked out because I still couldn’t stand to be touched.
How Baron caught us there, demanded a sacrifice for my betrayal.
“Do you believe in god?” Harper asks after a minute.
“No.” I shake my head, wiping away the tears that won’t stop coming.
She pauses, like she’s waiting for me to elaborate.
When I don’t, she nods. “I don’t either.
I always hate when people die, and everyone says, they’re in a better place.
Like, no, they’re just dead. And most people wouldn’t go to the ‘better place’ anyway.
When people say, ‘they’re at peace now,’ I always thought it meant they were floating around on a cloud singing kumbaya or whatever.
But maybe it just means nothingness. Maybe, for some people, nothingness is better than what they had to endure. ”
I can’t speak. All I can think about is how miserable Duke was, and how we didn’t fix it in time, and now it’s too late.
I should have just let Baron kill Jane. I should never have interfered, should never have gotten involved.
I thought I was helping, but all I did was bring the suffering back on us.
And it landed on the one who deserved it least of all.
I double over, pressing my eye sockets to my knees.
“Royal always says life is suffering,” Harper says, absently drawing another cigarette from her pack. “So if peace is the end of suffering, then death is peace.”
It’s a nice thought, so I don’t argue. There’s no peace for those left to suffer.
I stand, not wanting to fall to pieces in front of a perfect stranger.
As I walk away, Harper calls after me. “You know, if you stick around long enough, we might end up being friends despite our best efforts. I may be a bitch, but I have a habit of seeing the best in people. Even when they don’t see it themselves. ”
That night, after Royal comes back with Baron when they don’t find Blue, after they talk to the police, after everything is quiet except for a light, steady rain falling on the roof, Baron crawls into bed with me in my childhood bedroom where Duke once slept.
He curls into me, sliding down the bed, hiding his head in my middle, as if he’s searching for the softest place to land.
He grips my hips, burrowing, seeking, as if he can find his way inside, climb through my navel and into the warmth of a different womb, the one he shared with his brother, and never come out.
“It’s my fault,” Baron says, his voice raw, shattered. “He was wearing glasses. She meant it for me. He never did anything to her.”
“I know,” I whisper, threading my fingers through his hair.
“I love you,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t know if he’s apologizing for loving me, or that it’s now my burden to bear, his monstrous love. I know he’s never said those words to me before—only his brother. My shirt is wet, sticking to my stomach where his face is hidden.
“It’s my fault too,” I admit. “I should never have interfered.”
He doesn’t say anything, but his shoulders shake and he holds me tighter, like he’s afraid I’ll slip away next, like he’s the spider and I’m his catch, not the other way around.
“It’s just us now,” I whisper, cradling his head to my hollow belly, holding all the pieces I have left of this beautiful, terrible boy.
The pillow is wet with my tears, but I still search for his scent in it, bury my face in it the way Baron buries his in me. The pillowcase is clean, though, smelling only of detergent. I wish we’d known, that we could have saved the last one he slept on here, so we could have that tonight.
“I can’t,” Baron says, pressing his face into my belly. “Mabel, I can’t. How can I?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper, another tear slipping down my cheek. “We just do.”
And then he’s lower, between my legs, and his mouth is hungry and desperate, and I remember what Harper said. Because Baron never does this—not since one time, in high school, when he pushed a sucker inside me and then licked it out and told me I tasted like cherries.
This is Duke’s thing. And when he won’t stop, when he refuses until I give in, that’s Duke’s thing.
When he forces me to keep going until my legs are shaking and I’m crying, I hate it even more than usual, because I want it to be him.
I wish, and I wonder, and I pretend as I shatter, that it’s the right twin who lived.