Chapter Four
Sixteen Years Old
The timbre of an engine flattens outside the trailer.
A shiver sweeps across the base of my neck, shakes me from my hands to my heels. I drop the glass I’m holding into the stacked sink. It chips and small translucent shards like crushed ice catch in the blade of light cutting through the small window centered above.
When three quick taps of a horn tell me who it is, I let go of the breath I’m holding, glancing over my shoulder, toward my mother, Sara Campbell. She is lying across the two-person torn-up, saggy sofa and she doesn’t so much as flinch, not even a stir.
My heart thumps, and nerves bite. A rancorous taste fills my mouth. It is familiar and raw, brutally uncut.
I leave the mess in the sink and move around the counter toward my mother’s motionless shell. I pull her white-blonde hair, that had been toned a few shades too purple, away from her neck, slipping two fingers against her pulse.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It’s slightly arrhythmic, but it’s there.
I sigh a breath of relief, thankful we weren’t going to have a repeat of last week, and still, my knees knock together, threatening to give way.
I crouch, feeling a familiar shadow darken over my heart, staring at the living as though it had become the lifeless.
Heroin was a nasty drug, and I knew well what it could do to a person. But I also knew intimately the havoc it could wreak on the people around them. I was tired wondering every day if it would be the day I’d find my mother foaming from the mouth, cold on our couch.
I press my lips together, inhale roughly, the air ballooning my chest.
I hold it until it hurts.
I’d thought they’d be the worst days, the ones where she was so high, I was terrified she was dead.
However, they were nothing compared to when her stash had dwindled out.
When I’d find her bloody and beaten; when she couldn’t get the rot into her veins quick enough to numb everything she had just done to get it out.
Resentment swells in my stomach, then fizzles into something much deeper, more complex.
It had begun with cocaine, racking lines at the kitchen table before breakfast. It had been her way of waking up, of moving, of getting out the front door.
But my mother had always preferred her sleep.
And now, at sixteen, I watched her shoot up all while simultaneously begging for the mother I once knew to come back to me.
Back before she was giving her body away for her next rush.
Back to the way she was when my father was alive, back before he…
I shake the thought away, squeezing my eyes closed.
My heart thuds.
I feel my blood heat.
I never had a whole lot of anything growing up, but the three of us had each other and that seemed to be enough.
And it was, until it wasn’t.
It took the speculation of one stuck-up local to throw our family into the fire.
We had sat beneath the embers for a while, until the rest of the town fueled the flames.
Because it was easier to believe the fat-nosed, pig-looking gossip filter, than to take a gamble on a family man that had worked his ass off every day collecting their trash from all corners of the streets so he could feed his family at least one decent meal that week.
The problem with humans is they’re always looking for a scapegoat.
Was it the Campbell name?
Was it because my grandfather was the Devil’s Peak Killer?
Did they believe my father’s, our blood was tainted like his, too?
My father, Charlie Campbell, had been labeled ‘The Second Killer of Devil’s Peak’ when the body of an eighteen-year-old girl had been found in Devil’s Tunnel two years ago, twelve years after my grandfather's killing spree.
And after numerous unlawful and unsuccessful raids of our trailer, carried out by the police force of Devil’s Peak, they didn’t find a thing.
But they tried, three times to be exact, and all three times my father was left working harder to clean up the mess, fixing what they had broken.
And yet, he couldn’t mend what the accusations had done to his heart.
After the third and final raid, the heckling and constant bullying, the noise had become too much.
And it was Jade, my best friend, and Chase Keller, her older brother, and Harlen Graves, his best friend too, who were with me that same night.
Nine Months Earlier
The moon's reflection had caught on the river's edge. Its glow rippling in the murky water, skittering and looping as the breeze of the early morning smoothed its way across the dark surface.
We had been out here for hours.
My mother was on night shift at the hospital as a fill-in receptionist at the emergency department.
Her shifts were sporadic and sparse. Some months she was working full-time, others she could barely catch a shift.
However, this was her third night working consecutively and the bounce in her step was much greater, and I knew it was because she’d be able to offer her assistance with our expenses this month, especially because my father hadn’t been to work in the past week.
Another raid of our trailer had resulted in the heckling starting all over again, only this time it was much worse.
The noise was louder and the bullying that much stronger.
I couldn’t blame my father for wanting to hide away from it all.
There were only so many times you could be told to neck yourself before actually considering it, and I had known for some time now that my father had been teetering dangerously on death's edge.
He hadn’t blinked an eyelid when Jade came around just after ten in the evening with her older brother, Chase, and his best friend, Harlen.
He had us wait while he put the last of the hot dogs in the microwave, stuffed a bag of slightly stale rolls into Chase’s arms and threw the mustard and ketchup in Harlen’s direction.
With our arms full of food and a cooler loaded with drinks—that Harlen had managed to pinch from the motorcycle club his father is Vice President of—we had trekked our way down the length of the river.
It was a fair walk in the opposite direction of the trailer, especially in the dark, but it was worth it because a year ago Chase and Harlen had hung a tire swing at the deepest part of the water and it had become one of our favorite places to hang out.
Now, blood rushes to my eyeballs, flooding my skull.
I am over Chase’s shoulder, hanging upside down. Water rolls and tumbles over the length of my face, my soaked hair sticking to my cheekbones, crawling over my nose and slipping between my quivering lips.
I squeal when Chase swings us higher, sending us airborne. Goosebumps pebble across the surface of my skin as I slide down his body, wrapping myself around him.
I focus on the way his right arm coils my waist, his bicep flexing across my ribs, tightening and hardening as he holds me to him. And I wonder if he feels the way my heart rate spikes.
“Hold your breath!” Chase shouts, and on cue, we each suck down a deep breath, inflating our lungs moments before splitting the surface.
Muffled distortion fills my ears. The water takes us, and I untangle myself from my best friend's older brother, kicking around for a while before pushing to the surface.
A shiver dances up my spine when the fresh morning air kisses my skin.
“Almost thought I was gonna have to jump my ass back in and save you,” Chase taunts from the edge of the river where he sits waiting casually, almost smugly.
He knows damn well that I can look after myself, but he’s always enjoyed giving me shit, because, well, it’s Chase, and he’s an asshole.
A beautiful one at that, though.
It was honestly annoying how gorgeous he was. But what was even more annoying was that aside from being Jade’s best friend, I was nothing more to him than another extended limb.
My cheeks heat.
I swim to the edge where Chase stands with his hand thrust forward, as if he thinks I’ll take the easy way out and accept his help. I snort, slap his offering away and begin to pull myself out of the water unassisted.
Chase’s shoulders shake with a laugh.
“Suit yourself,” he sing-songs, waiting for me to right myself.
And those two words shouldn’t sound that perfect. That rough and deep and meaningful, but they do because Chase’s voice was like nothing I’d heard before.
Digging the fabric of my bikini bottoms out of my ass and curling my soaked hair to one side, I wring the gallon of water from the long strands, feeling the cool water drip down my chest.
My shoulder taps Chase’s arm. I graze past him, laughing, and I don’t look back. “If anyone’s gonna need saving—”
He scoffs, cutting me off, “Oh, here we go. Hit me, Laik, but please make it fucking good.”
I peek over my shoulder with a smirk. “It’ll be you, when I drown your ass.”
“I’ll help!” Jade shouts, and I turn to look at her. She’s pushing a bottle of vodka to her lips and squeezing her eyes closed.
And I’m sauntering my way to where Jade and Harlen are seated a few feet back from the river's edge, listening to Chase laugh off mine and his sister’s retorts behind me.
Harlen places his palm against the face of his guitar, taking the bottle from Jade’s hands when she drops her head into her bicep, a familiar attempt to quench the burn.
Jade’s forearms are hung over her propped knees, her dark hair limp and stringy from the water.
“Can’t handle it, huh, Jadey?” Harlen teases her, thumping her leg with the base of the bottle.
And I can feel Chase behind me, so close, yet far away.
Jade raises her head, her hair long and wet and stuck to her forehead. She works away the taste of what I could only compare to the smell of solvent. Her eyes are jammed closed.
“All good here.” She raises her hand and clenches her throat, splattering through a cough, all while asking Harlen, “But why does it always burn so bad?”