Chapter 12
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Twilight” by Vanessa Carlton
I wake up swinging before my eyes even pop open. My fist connects with the hard line of a spine beneath a hoodie. Someone grunts, cursing, then hands catch mine, pushing my claws aside, cupping my cheeks, gentle thumbs prying open my stuck-shut eyes.
“Hey, you’re back. You’re fine. I’ve got you,” Bas whispers, an urgent kind of stressed. “Look, I’m right here. I got you. You’re okay. Everything’s okay.”
Hands shaking, I grip him hard. Cold in my bones, in my soul, my whole body trembles until even my teeth rattle. I can’t seem to get warm, even inside the blazing circle of his arms. I could climb inside his body and not be warm enough, whole enough.
Stomach threatening to climb up my throat, I jam my hands hard into my rib cage, my throat, forcing the bile down. That awful, helpless baby wail echoes in my head.
Something was taken from me. Some massive, vital part of me carved away. Stolen. I feel its missing space, ragged and sore, screaming in the hollow where my heart should be.
Chest heaving, I meet Bas’s eyes. He doesn’t look any better than I feel. Wild and pale, a muscle jumps in his jaw as he keeps scanning the room—checking the windows, the door, constantly seeking an exit.
“How long?” I gasp. “How long was I—” I can’t finish. How long was I what? I don’t know how to ask where I was, what I was, how to explain that dream that felt like an awful memory, the rending loss of my other half ripped away—
An other half with sweet black eyes exactly like Bas’s. Living and dying over and over again, jumping bodies, trying to fight his way to me and failing, dying, a fish on a red line thrashing against fate.
And my mother was there. God, I’d know that judgmental disdain anywhere.
She was there in that awful lab, like a mutated version of the room I found in the basement, all spinning machines and iron, iron, iron.
Why is my brain doing this to me? Am I… remembering?
Or just spitting up acid-trip dreams, some kind of haunted afterimage of a hallucination, a side effect of last night?
Eyes wide, I grip Bas hard, a question in my face I can’t ask, and he can’t answer.
His mouth jerks like he’s trying to smile but has forgotten how.
Outside, someone pounds on the door and his head whips around, fury in every trembling muscle.
For just a second, he’s a different person, hauntingly familiar.
“I said no,” he bellows, and we’re in a room banded in iron—I couldn’t possibly feel it tremble. Still, I’d bet my whole playlist the door rattled on its hinges, even with the crossbeam still in place.
Except, wait—the last thing I remember is that crossbeam failing. Only the classroom is empty now, not a soul inside it but the two of us, hunkered in the belly of a closet like two kids hiding from monsters.
Quietly, I ask, “Why the closet?”
Bas’s attention never breaks from the door. “We had a little disagreement about how to treat a lady when she’s unconscious.”
“We?”
“Yeah. Me and”—he flips an aimless gesture—“everybody. Teachers. The nurse—man, she was real insistent—some ambulance guys. Think one might have been a cop.” He tips his head, adding with a grimace, “Also, your mom.”
I sit up quick. My head hates me for it, but I don’t have time for its whining.
“My mom is here? What did you do?”
Bas hunches, a stubborn, sullen look crossing his face.
“Told them to wait for you to wake up. I’m not letting them take you anywhere you didn’t ask to go.”
I’ve never done drugs, but holy crap, I imagine the rush feels a little like this.
Swallowing hard, I squeeze Bas’s hand in a silent thank-you I can’t force out through my swollen throat.
He didn’t let them touch me. He let me choose.
Even now, he doesn’t ask for more, just holds me up, his arm tight around my shoulders while we wait for the aftershocks to subside.
I suck in deep breaths through my nose, clenching and unclenching my hands to force life back into my fingers—
Oh yeah, that’s absolutely Mom out there screaming at Bas to open the door.
“I swear to god, little boy, the unmitigated hell I will rain down on you—”
“Mom, enough,” I call. “I’m awake now. Give me a minute for crap’s sake.”
I shove to my feet, but my watery legs spill me right back onto the floor.
Leaning down, Bas loops my hand over his shoulder, heaving me upright.
The world spins, threatening to swallow me or else violently unswallow the contents of my stomach.
I grip Bas tight, holding very still, breathing in the scent of pine and dead leaves still clinging to his hoodie from yesterday.
Funny. This morning I was worried if he liked me back.
Now I’m worried about what we are—two kids without heartbeats, unruly feral dead with asphodel blooming where we kiss, and meanwhile hell is empty, and all her ghosts are here.
I don’t care what my mother says, what the government says. I’m not stupid. Something isn’t right.
“Let’s go,” I manage and together, we hobble awkwardly out of the closet. Bas lifts the crossbeam from the door by himself and tosses it aside without obvious strain, even though it took three people to wedge it up there. It hits the ground hard enough to rattle the windowpanes.
I almost tell him to stop, desperate for another minute in this solitude.
Side by side with him, I want to spill my guts, let him reach inside my chest and pull out every painful splinter I’ve been hoarding.
Together, we could figure this out. I know it, the way my dream-self recognized her other half—not a platitude but a fact.
The casual surety of a sunrise, the changing seasons, the moon-drawn tide.
Too late. I take too long to remember how to speak. Bas leads me outside our little sanctuary and my mother wheels around from berating some poor, trapped cop. She rounds on us, her face furious.
Immediately, an answering rage shatters in my chest. What the hell does she have to be angry about?
She should be worried. She should be terrified.
She sent her daughter to school in the middle of a ghost storm, and she’s only here now because someone was legally obligated to call and tell her what happened.
I should be ghost-touched. I should be lying dead and drained in there on the linoleum.
And yet Mom’s not scared or even relieved or any regular-mother emotion.
Her glare battle-axes straight through Bas.
“You,” she snarls, lurching forward, hand rocketing back. “Get away from my daughter—”
Bas sweeps me behind him. His body braced between me and my rampaging mother, he tanks a slap to the face.
“Mom!” I scream, punching her hand down. “What the fuck?”
She doesn’t hear me. When does she ever?
“I don’t care who the hell you think you are, little boy,” she says, low and furious, a trembling finger held between his eyes. “You touch her again and I will dismantle you down to your godforsaken atoms.”
“Go ahead.” Bas smiles, baring teeth. His eyes shine, something in their glittering black suddenly dangerous. “Try it. Break something else. Impose your meager will on the world and see what next pittance it brings you.”
And he’s not tall—he’s exactly the same height as me—but somehow Bas stands taller in that moment, like the enormity of him could fill the hallway. He seems brighter, more saturate than everyone else, lit from within like a spotlight.
Grimacing, the cop steps forward.
“Ma’am, I understand tensions are high, but I’ll have to ask you to keep your hands to yourself.”
Behind us, a new voice snaps, “Touch my kid again and you won’t enjoy the consequences.”
Startled, I whip around. I hadn’t even heard a single footstep, but suddenly there’s the man from yesterday morning, crossing the hall to stand at Bas’s side, arms folded and every line of his stance an open threat.
Eyes locked on my mom, on the cop, on his exits, Bas doesn’t even flinch.
He barely glances at the newcomer, like he knew he’d be there—even when obviously, by the cop’s stressed muttering into his radio about a breached cordon, he’s not supposed to be.
“Kid?” Mom sneers. Her hand lashes out, gripping my arm, but her attention locks on the man, her face barely an inch from his.
“Is that what we’re calling it? Well, you better pull your kid from this school because I swear to god, Cain, if he so much as looks at my daughter again, we will see just how much your ‘parenting’ holds up under scrutiny. ”
Her threat bares its teeth in the unspoken undercurrent, but Bas’s dad shrugs, unbothered.
“Your desk jockey friends don’t scare me. Especially not when our skeletons are in the same closet.” His lips curl, the lighthouse of his attention passing over me. Low and cutting, he says, “Your daughter, Chloe?”
That voice—This is some Pet Sematary bullshit, Chloe. That is not your daughter—and my blood runs cold.
I wasn’t dreaming. I know I wasn’t dreaming. I would never have cast a blink-and-forget-him stranger in my nightmare. I wouldn’t have remembered his voice well enough to re-create it, angry and afraid.
“Sir, young man,” the cop tries, “if you could both step away from the girl, please.”
No one listens.
“How dare you?” Mom says. “She is my daughter.”
My head whips around. I scour her face, searching for the lie in her eyes. With sinking horror, I know I’ll find it. That’s not the right emphasis, not for the argument we’re having. That’s a different answer—an answer to an older question.
The answer to the accusation in my memory.
“Everybody, step back,” the cop bellows.
My patience breaks. No, no—I refuse. I won’t be a helpless passenger to this, not anymore. It’s my turn to drive, my turn to pick the tune. And if they won’t give me the wheel, I’ll fucking steal it.
Ripping my arm out of my mom’s grip, I grab Bas, drag him back, away from everything.