Chapter Four #3
Her shell is here, though frail and splintered, I can still see her, hear her and feel her. However, her soul is gone, buried in the empty plot beside my father.
My heart thuds, cracks again.
It was hard watching her like this, brutally broken.
And in some ways, it was harder than dealing with the loss of my father.
Because while I watched him handle the bullying and the effect it had on him, he held the shards of his brokenness together.
But my mother, I was watching her disintegrate before my eyes.
Fury fires through my veins. Hot and scalding.
My parents were good people, they didn’t deserve this fate, or the accusations the Campbell name carried. They deserved better, so much fucking better.
I curl my fingers around the edge of the purple crocheted blanket that has slipped off my mother’s shoulders, pulling it up and tucking her in.
My mouth pushes to the top of her head, her skin cool beneath my lips.
I step back, and cross my arms, bite and gnaw at my bottom lip when it begins to tremble, a shiver cutting and tugging at the skin around my spine.
My father hadn’t been dead for twenty-four hours before the town had started celebrating.
They thought it was over, that the lives of the town's vibrant young women were no longer doomed to a sinister fate, and that the ones down there, in Devil’s Tunnel, screaming from behind the concrete, could finally drift away.
However, I knew that eventually another life would be taken and they would realize that they had fucked up.
That they had pointed the finger at the wrong man.
That their whispers held the noose of a rumor that found the neck of my father and ultimately destroyed my family.
That they, themselves, had taken an innocent life.
I shuffle toward the front of the trailer and peek from behind the gauze of floating cream fabric that hangs crookedly over the small, frosted window. The hood of Chase’s faded red truck has caught the sun hiding behind the heavy cloud cover, and I can see Jade in his passenger seat.
I drop the material and shuffle toward the door, my hand skating the length of the metal, unlocking all three deadbolts before prying it open and stepping out. I stumble over the dead pot plant I was supposed to have cleared a week ago.
Heat rises to my cheeks. It's a small hint of embarrassment, but mostly annoyance, and I’m reeling my leg backward, stubbing my big toe against the black flexible plastic.
My chin is angled down toward my feet, and I bite my tongue when searing pain shoots from the small bones and up my calves. That’s when I hear his voice, the same raspy, chesty timbre I’ve come to find comfort in.
“Hey, Laik!” Chase calls.
I spin and watch him jerk his stubbled chin at me. “Please, do that again.”
A small grin lifts my cheeks. I guide a cigarette out of my running shorts, biting it between my teeth and sparking it up.
I am still sweaty from the ten-mile run I’d thrown my body and brain against. I’d started running after we’d lost Dad, after Mom took to the slopes that quickly turned to needles filled with heroin.
I’d needed an escape too, and running had become mine.
Taking a sharp pull, I raise my voice and call around a lungful of nicotine, “Hey, Chase!” On the recline of my head, I exhale, then drop my chin, smirking.
“How about you go fuck yourself.” I return the cigarette to its place between my lips, snickering quietly, not taking my eyes off him.
And somehow, his dark eyes turn darker. I quirk a brow in challenge, sucking my bottom lip into my mouth.
He must say something beneath his breath because I watch Jade sputter a laugh from the passenger seat before slapping the back of her hand to his flexed bicep.
Chase curls his shoulders to his ears, sticking his tongue out and biting it when she does it again. His smile is wide, teeth bright.
My bare feet brush across the ground, granules of gray dirt seeping between my toes as I move toward the idling truck, curling around the front and beating a fist lightly on the driver's side window.
Chase snaps his head in my direction, still laughing. He extends his hand toward the door, manually winding the window down further. Another laugh vibrates through him when Jade pinches his arm.
I prop my elbows into the opening of the dented frame, bend at the waist, arching my spine and raising my chin. Cigarette between my lips, I tell him to, “Say it to my—” Only, Chase snatches it away, silencing me.
“I said you’re a little brat.” He smiles, flicking my forehead.
“Fucker,” I moan, pressing an open palm to the place he just got me, reeling back.
He laughs and turns away, shoving the trunk between his own lips, his chest and throat rippling as he takes a hit.
I tell him, “You’re gonna have to replace that, big brother.”
Chase slowly rolls the back of his head over the headrest, his gaze leveling with mine. He exhales through his nose.
I smirk, raising my brow in challenge.
And he follows, the small tilt at the corner of his mouth stirring the butterflies he’d manage to hatch deep inside my stomach a long time ago.
He wets his lips, takes another pull, reclines his head. And I can’t help but flick my eyes toward his arms, focusing on the left one, the one that carries the scars I gave him nine months ago.
“I’ll replace it, Laik, don’t worry about that,” he says his words on a tilted exhale of smoke, and I feel myself swallow.
Jade unclips her seatbelt, and Chase snaps his attention toward her, and when their eyes meet, I watch something dark and shadowy pass between them.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and any playfulness that had sat between them disappears.
Chase’s throat dips.
“What happened?” I ask, injecting myself when I notice the strain, the weight of his pain.
Jade scoffs. “Dad was being a cunt again.” She jumps out of the truck, slamming the door closed behind her.
“The Diary of Jane” by Breaking Benjamin rattles its way through the speakers and into my ears.
Jade hikes her bag onto her shoulder and rounds the rear of her brother’s truck.
Her denim shorts sit tight around her petite waist, her cropped red T-shirt high around her chest. I snap my attention back to Chase, finding his eyes vacant.
His dark orbs don’t reach mine, even though I so desperately try to catch them.
He drops his head backward, the rear of his skull bouncing off the headrest, taking another hit from my cigarette.
I swallow, watching the orange pull from the bottom of the trunk between his lips.
“What did he do this time?” I ask Jade when she slips up beside me, curling her arms around me. We fall into a hug, the kind that sways back and forth. And I laugh, twirling a lock of her long dark hair around my pointer finger.
“He—” Jade starts, only for Chase to cut her off.
“Something he will never do again.” Chase’s words are hard and rough, harboring the hammer of a force I hadn’t yet felt from him.
And I shiver, violently.
I’m still holding onto Jade. “Is he okay?” I whisper quietly in her ear, feeling the trembling crack of Chase’s rage spark through me.
“Yeah, he will be,” she says, and I turn back over my shoulder to look at him. He’s shuffling in his seat, pulling something out of his front pocket.
I turn back around but quickly find myself spinning toward the truck again when Chase calls, “Yo, Laik.”
He hauls a pack of cigarettes toward me, and I catch them.
“We are even now,” he states.
“I—you only took one,” I reply, confusion laced through my tone.
He nods, and when he flicks his eyes toward me, I notice how his jutting cheekbones have settled, the rage gone…hidden and tucked away.
“Just paying up early for the rest I plan on stealing.” The corner of his mouth tilts, he turns the volume up on his speakers, tapping the side of his truck with an open palm.
His eyes lift from mine, meeting his sister’s. “What time are we heading to Bryce’s?”
Jade hikes the strap of her bag that has slipped off her bony shoulder back into place. “Not sure yet.”
Chase sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, dragging it into his mouth. His left wrist hangs casually over the wheel, his right pushing the car into gear. “We’ll pick you up at ten.”
Jade is smiling. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Chase replies, furrowing his brow, then tsking, spinning his wheels.
Jade’s smile grows brighter. “You are only coming because of what I told you earlier!” she shouts.
I was lost. I had no idea what they were talking about.
Chase smiles too, though it’s dark, yet controlled, and instead of looking at his sister, he looks directly at me, pushing on the gas.
I shiver, watching Chase disappear behind the gray cloud of dirt he tore up with his tires.
“Why did he just look at me like that?” I ask Jade, who's watching her brother drive away.
Her smile is still there, and her response is a small sigh of contentment.
I pinch her arm when she doesn’t reply.
“Ouch,” she says, raising her shoulders and slapping my hand away, shielding herself. “Why do you always do that?” she whine-laughs.
“Why, Jade? What did you say to him?”
She turns to me, and I feel my eyes catch her blue ones, locking into place.
“I told him Colton was going to be at the party…and that you like him,” she says casually with a shrug.
I scoff, and run my hands through my hair. “And why the fuck would you do that?”
I didn’t like Colton James. In fact, I thought he was a total loser.
Jade laughs and shakes her head like the answer to my question is so obvious, and yet, I don’t see it or hear it or feel it at all.
The air between us thickens when every playful feature drops from Jade’s beautiful face.
“You know last week when you spewed all that bullshit about me being the only person who cared about you, that this town had it out for you, that no one would even notice if you vanished or just disappeared, that no one would even bother looking for you, even after I tried telling you multiple times that you were literally full of shit?”
When I don’t reply, she raises her eyebrows, nudging me with her elbow. “Hmmm?” she prompts a response.
I drop my chin to my chest and exhale my breath.
I’d had a little too much vodka that night. I didn’t know what I was saying, or maybe I did. I was feeling sorry for myself and my fucked-up life, and the liquor had heightened my emotions.
I should have known that what I’d shared would stick with Jade.
Jade has always wanted the people she cares about to feel significant and important, and if they didn’t, she would make it her life’s mission to find a way to make sure they did.
Of course she would pull a stunt like this. I just didn’t expect her to drag her brother into it.
I’ve been best friends with Jade for years, and yet, she still surprises me.
Jade curls her fingers between mine and jerks her head toward the rear of Chase’s truck.
We watch the subtle orange of his indicator among the dusty gray blink in and out when he throws a left out of the trailer park.
Squeezing my hand, she whispers, “I just wanted to prove to you that my brother cares about you, too. And see…” She pauses, throwing her hand in the direction he just left.
“He does, and that’s why he’s coming tonight.
He cares about you so much more than you realize, Laik. ”
Her words had something twisting in my gut.
“You will survive this. I’ll make sure you do.”
It was what Chase had said to me nine months ago, the night we found my father’s body hanging limp from the tree.
And the words he spoke when I tore at his arms in agony, and he let me.
Chase Keller wore my pain with the scars I gave him.
I didn’t need Jade to prove it to me, but I can’t help but admit that it makes me feel good hearing it from her, the person closest to him.
Jade curls into my side, clasping my bicep, her temple to my shoulder.
“You have people in your life that care about you, Laik. Don’t ever let yourself fall blind to that.”
One single tear rolls down my cheek.