Chapter 58
“KEEP YOU (SAFE)” BY QUINCY HARREKSON
I’d kept as much distance from Quinntessa as possible. I didn’t trust myself anymore. If I was given the chance, I worried I’d send us both back into the painful cycle I caused.
When I arrived for Spirit Hunter’s rehearsal this morning, I parked my car in the back and weaved through the school to avoid her baby blue Mustang.
I’d taken every precaution to avoid disrupting her life more than I already had, keeping a distance and forcing her out of my head anytime she entered.
At least, I tried to. She was all I could ever think about.
“How about you, Quinn?”
I raised my eyes from my boots to see Mr. Evers looking at me from the front of the choir room. My head shook, and I looked back down, arms wrapped around my body.
“Oh, come on, Miss Battles. Show us what you got!” Mr. Evers insisted.
“She said no.” Erica sank back in her chair when Olivia cleared her throat and shot her an unimpressed look. “I’m just saying.”
“Well, what you’re saying is, Quinn doesn’t have a song.” Diana spoke up, standing from her chair at the top of the risers. “Mr. Evers, I would be delighted to sing another one of my originals for the group.”
Noah made a noise of disdain behind me. If I had to guess, they didn’t want to be blessed with Diana Goodbody’s theatrics again.
“Quinn, do you have a song?” Mr. Evers asked, floating in my direction.
I ground my teeth and nodded. Obviously, I’d have a song after watching my heart walk away from me. It was scribbled in my notebook, ink smeared from my tears and crinkled up from my final toss of the notebook across my bedroom.
I’d already shattered the mirror on my vanity and the glass Quinntessa left behind. My mother wasn’t pleased to see such a vintage piece of furniture destroyed by my rage.
“Great!” Mr. Evers seemed clueless to my mood and motioned to the front of the room. “Let’s hear it.”
At first, I didn’t move from my chair. My hands clutched the sides and my fingers curled over the tip to hold myself in place. I imagined what might happen if I go up there and sing this emotional hurl of a song to these people who didn’t care about me. Sure. I had friends in here.
Olivia and Erica were my sisters. Meadow and I had exchanged a few jokes over the course of the past few months.
Noah was adorable, and their dog gave me puppy dog eyes when I looked back at them.
Christian was a small-dicked little cunt, but he and I were polite to each other enough to make it through rehearsals.
Rillie and I were friends with an understanding for the others’ dark involvement with Coven.
I didn’t have anything nice to say about Goodbody. She could suck a toilet brush for all I cared.
I felt something poke at my shoulder. My head turned, and I rolled my eyes when Rillie jabbed the blunt tip of their cane into my cheek.
“Do something.” She gave me a squiggly smile and poked me with her narrow seeing eye stick.
I scowled at her and shoved the pole away from me. She groaned as it fell to the floor, dramatically bending down to pick it back up as I rummaged through my book bag.
“Fine. Fine!” I snapped, glaring at everyone around me. “I’ll sing the damn song.”
“It’s almost like that’s why we’re here.”
“If you”—Meadow turned and shot Diana a look at her mumbling—“don’t learn to be quiet, I will teach you.”
“This class is so entertaining,” Rillie snickered.
I rolled my eyes at them and dropped my backpack on the top of the grand piano. My chest hurt as I peeked under my arm in the direction Quinntessa and I had hugged weeks ago. I inhaled deeply and returned to the notebook I’d yanked out of my bag.
I dropped down on the bench and flipped through the pages. Multiple ripped out sheets, scratches and scribbles in different colored ink. I found a page where I’d written Quinntessa’s nicknames all out, each and every one I had used. I had circled my favorites.
Sally.
Mustang.
Honeybee.
Miss Sweet Face.
“Maybe I should go,” I heard Erica speak up from the risers.
Mr. Evers sat down in his usual chair and shook his head. Though I wished to skip out on every lesson he wanted to teach us, it didn’t look like he was going to let this one slide.
Closing my eyes, I settled my fingers over the keys and gently played the melody in my head. My chin quivered, already feeling like I was going to die crawling through this. I pulled back and exhaled, staring at my notebook where I had doodled little hearts in the middle of my star.
“Come on.” I felt arms wrap around my shoulders from behind and was drowned in the sweet scent of Olivia’s perfume. “We got you. Just sing.”
I turned my head when I felt someone shove me lightly and found Erica huffing on the bench beside me. She spared me a quick glance before motioning to my notebook.
“Well, let’s go. Sing,” she insisted.
Olivia leaned her head against mine, kissing the back of my ear over my crescent moon tattoo. “You got this, Quinnie.”
I swallowed back the soreness in my throat. I’d lost all ability to cry overnight, yet somehow, tears continued to pour when I thought of her. Like now, I could feel the burning in my eyes as the melody danced from the piano.
My fingers flowed over the keys. Note after note, I was brought back into the world where Quinntessa and I would dance until our feet gave out.
“You and I,” I closed my eyes and sang. These words were written in my heart. There wasn’t a need to look at my notebook anymore. “What a sweet rhyme. Can’t believe I never noticed it before.”
Quinntessa Dawson.
“All this time. I’ve been so blind.”
Her name was Quinntessa Dawson. The sweet, faced football player who drowned my heart in glitter and dorky smiles.
“All I know is I’ve never wanted somebody more.”
And I had fallen in love with her.
“Honey bee, I’d do anything for a sting.
Been falling for you behind the scenes.” Olivia’s smile against my neck gave me goosebumps.
It reminded me of Quinntessa’s lips against me, relaxing into my arms where she thought she was safest. “The way that you dance, the way that you dream . . . That’s why it’s killing me . . .”
I’d driven by her house a few times since we parted ways. Estelle needed to go to Erica’s house, so it wasn’t like I purposely chose to drive slowly past and wonder where she was.
Usually there were lights, sometimes colored ones, keeping the window alive for me to see her dancing inside. Last I drove by, like the times before, it was dark. The curtains were pulled closed, and the dancing had finished.
She wasn’t here, daydreaming the lyrics or making up goofy dance moves with her ghost friends. My girl was missing in action.
Dead.
I had killed the light inside her. The monster in me had done that. The fire in my veins was straight from hell, burning and burning her until she fizzled out, blown out of reach like ash in the wind.
“Some things just can’t be. I’ll set you free, you’ll be safe . . .” My voice trembled and my eyes squeezed tight.
Quinntessa’s face appeared behind my eyelids, trust and acceptance etched across her freckles while I betrayed her. Even with the piano’s volume growing, I could still hear the choking sound of my name scratching to escape her in a weak plea.
“I won’t stand in the way.”
Quinntessa was gone. She was here, but for me, she was already dead. All these people around me had no idea how close to death she was, or how undecided I felt staying here after the fact.
I loved her. Quinntessa Dawson. My football player with the cute Disney obsessions and lungs filled with glitter. The gorgeous girl who tackled guys to the ground on the field and ran like her life depended on it into the end zone.
The girl who loved me.
“Cause sometimes life’s not fair. And if you don’t care, I’ll still keep you safe.”
Oh, she loved me. She really loved me. Here I thought hearing Christian say he loved me was the last time I’d ever feel so happy, but it was nothing.
Nothing compared to this. Nothing compared to the confidence in this girl when she told me she loved me, when she fought against all odds to continue loving me.
She was right. I saw what I was missing, and it killed me. I watched her walk away and thought of her late into the night when it was just me and the darkness.
There were nights where I felt it seeping into my brain, stabbing and punching me repeatedly, nights where I thought I was done crying and all I could do was weep and accept that life didn’t intend for me to make it out.
“I can’t stand in the way. Of keeping you safe.” I felt tears flowing down my face. The only sounds in my ears were the piano and the occasional trembling crack to my voice. “How I wish we had met in another dimension . . . Where there’s no type of tension, no letting go. Mustang . . .”
Quinntessa Dawson.
“I love that smile on your face.”
There was a darkness in that rich honey gaze. I’d watched through the window of the dark house, craving to save her from everything she wished to escape. Why had it taken me so long to realize it was only my reflection in her sweet eyes frightening me?
“Insane, you’re perfect in every way.”
I had taunted myself through her innocence. Every chance I had to push my own life onto her, I had. I had manipulated myself into believing she could be easy to kill, that she would be happier, all while I let her fall in love with the devil.
She was safer without me. She was safer crying in that dark, big room of hers. She was safer fighting off a Doberman in the dead of night and naively walking into Victor’s trap.
“I’d take a bullet for you any day. And that’s exactly why I’m filled with this pain.”
Quinntessa Dawson.
I never called her Quinns like everyone else did. I called her all these meaningless nicknames to push her away. Now look at me, smitten and stupid, hung up on a breakup with a girl I never even dated. A girl I never wanted to love.
I did. I loved her. With her, my heart was golden.
I was a star in her eyes, and it filled me with more joy than I could ever have imagined. Now, it filled me with a numbing, violent wave of regret. Despair. Want.
“Some things just can’t be I’ll set you free, you’ll be safe. I won’t stand in your way.”
Quinntessa Dawson.
“Cause sometimes life’s not fair and if you don’t care, I’ll keep you safe. I can’t stand in the way . . . of keeping you safe.”
My sweet girl.
“Don’t want to let you go . . . Don’t want to say goodbye . . .”
I would have fallen into the piano if Olivia hadn’t hugged me tighter.
My singing was normally average. I liked to sing music I enjoyed, but I wasn’t Zachari or Diana, who planned entire futures around their voices.
As I let these lyrics flow through me, the feelings that ruptured my heart barreled into me like ocean waves crashing into the sea walls during king tides, a coastal maddening within me.
I was mad.
Psychotic.
I had tasted the blood of my family, of a man I killed, and walked into a bookstore the next day to check out another one of Quinntessa’s interesting porno-books like it was nothing. I had acted like killing her was a crime, yet I downed four other people without batting an eye.
“But some things just can’t be. I’ll set you free, you’ll be safe. I won’t stand in the way.”
When my eyes opened, I looked over the heart doodles near the top of the page. My vision was blurry and filled with spots.
“Some things just can’t be. I’ll set you free, you’ll be safe . . .” My voice trembled, struggling to finish as my thoughts got the best of me. I watched Quinntessa twirl around the piano and look to me with a smile and a laugh. “I won’t stand in the way.”
There was a window in the choir room, up above the risers. It led to the courtyard near the quad entrance of the cafeteria. The sun peeked through like one of those heaven tunnels of light through the clouds.
I swore. I swore Quinntessa faded away with this beautiful halo above her head and the kindest eyes, almost like she knew I’d have no choice but to kill her, and I’d join her soon.
Would I? Would I leave Estelle? My friends? My family?
Would I kill her?
I didn’t think I could.
“Cause sometimes life’s not fair.”
No.
“And if you don’t care, I’ll keep you safe.”
I wouldn’t.
“I can’t stand in the way.”
I couldn’t kill Quinntessa Dawson.
“Of keeping you safe,” I cried out the last line, my fingers slipping off the piano. “Ke-Keeping you safe . . .”
There was a violent ringing in my ears as the piano finished and the choir room echoed with my sniffles and quiet whimpers. My elbows dug into my thighs, and I hunched over, choking out embarrassed apologies to the class.
“Shh,” Olivia cooed, rubbing my back. “That was super great.”
Erica leaned her head on my back and hugged me the best she could. I felt my shirt moisten, most likely from the cheerleaders’ tears.
“I-I’m sorry,” I apologized again, squeezing my eyes shut tight to try to destroy that image of Quinntessa. “I’m sorry.”
“Why don’t we end there today?” I heard Mr. Evers clear his throat, his chair creaking as he stood.