Chapter Twenty-Nine
My blanket slips from my shoulders as I stretch for my phone. Half my torso hangs off the single bed pushed against the pale-pink wall in my room at Nan’s.
I crawl my fingers across the surface of an upcycled turquoise bedside table until the blinking device is clasped in the palm of my hand.
I fall to my back with a sigh, pull the covers to my chin and try not to look at it, in fact, I bury it beneath the covers, even go as far to contemplate switching it off.
Only, I had never been good at running on anything but impulse.
And four weeks ago, that impulse killed my best friend, and left me in pieces.
I drag it out, stare at the glowing screen, hoping it to be him.
Harlen
You got this, Laik.
Tears lick at the back of my eyes and I swallow twice, strangling a cry.
Harlen was a gift, and while he wasn’t the person I’d been waiting to hear from, his messages and support and visits always felt like a small portion of the gentle hug only he, and his best friend, could give me.
My stomach tilts at the thought of him, of Chase Keller, of my best friend's older brother. The boy I didn’t realize I’d become to be so heavily reliant on since my father’s suicide.
I suck in a breath, allow a moment for my insides to realign, pushing down the agony until nothing but numbness follows behind.
Today, I was returning to school a broken version of the sixteen-year-old girl I no longer knew, missing the most important part of me—my best friend.
I chew on my bottom lip when it wobbles and my teeth begin to chatter, clicking inside my head.
My thumbs shake when I reply with a love heart to Harlen, feeling my stomach—that I’d worked so hard to settle—lurch into my throat.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to go on without her. How I was supposed to get myself up and dressed and fed when I had forgotten how to breathe.
I fight for another breath, begging for it to curl around my lungs when I swipe out of the thread, feeling my thumbs instinctively reach and stretch for the one that had long become one-sided.
Two more weeks had passed, and my final plea had fallen on deaf ears. When Harlen came around last night, I wanted to ask him if he had given Chase my message from the night we were at the cemetery, when I was crying and it was raining.
“Please tell him that I miss him.”
I wanted to ask him myself. I wanted to ask him what I had done to deserve his silence. Was it because I had run that night? Did he walk out of the hospital room and realize that I didn’t fight for his sister the way he’d expected me to, even though he’d expressed anger with the choices I had made.
I was rightfully confused.
I reel my thumbs in, don’t let them move. Anger and embarrassment rise inside of me, and I force myself to shove it down. I leave my phone on the bed, throwing my blanket aside.
Part of me wanted to stop reaching out, but the other part, the small piece that felt everything for this boy, wanted to turn up in some place he was, begging for him to look at me and tell me to my face why he was avoiding me.
A chill washes through me when cool air drifts across my bare skin.
I work quickly, dressing in a black tube top, shimmying on a pair of light denim shorts that I button and zip high on my waist.
I force my mind, my body, my soul to return to numbness. It was better that way.
I pull on my Reeboks before moving out of my room and to the bathroom across the small hall.
I don’t allow myself to think about anything.
I brush my teeth, take a swig of mouthwash, pull my hair back into a high ponytail, scrub away the tears that had dried in streams across my cheeks and down my neck before applying a generous layer of moisturizer, sunscreen and a quick swipe of lip balm, all while avoiding my broken mossy-green gaze.
It was all I could bring myself to do; to feel a semblance of normalcy again. But I knew I was a far cry from the teenager I had been. Before the car ride, before our attacker, before the gunshots and my best friend’s assault and murder, my parent’s suicides. Before Chase…disappeared.
I step back, keep my chin to my chest. I didn’t need to be reminded of the darkened pool that sat at the rims of my eyes, or the entanglement of red capillaries that weaved in webs of anguish and terror and fear. I knew how I looked, how I felt, how alone I truly was.
I let go of my breath, clench my jaw, then move back toward the room, snatching up my tote bag, along with my phone before heading for the kitchen.
Nan spins around when I drag one of the mismatched embroidered chairs back, the screech is loud in the room. She is quick to smile, quicker to grab the glass beside her, plonking the orange juice in front of me.
“Thanks,” I whisper around a smile, snatching up the frosted glass and taking a sip, chewing on the pulp. The taste is terrible after brushing my teeth, but that's the least of my worries.
I turn and look at the urn perched on the windowsill. My mother was facing the sun, wrapped in a snow queen cascading pothos. She had been directly cremated, and we had finally got her home.
“I’ve made some oatmeal,” Nan says, returning to the stove, turning off the burner.
She separates the pot of cooked oats into two small ceramic bowls painted with limbed tulips in purples, pinks and oranges. She adds a generous drizzle of maple syrup, sliced strawberries that she must have prepared earlier, and chopped walnuts crumbled over the top.
Placing it in front of me with her practiced and dutiful warning, she says, “It’s very hot.”
I smile because it feels familiar now, like a new routine, a new normal.
“Thanks, Nan.” I curl my fingers around the metal spoon and bring a strawberry to my mouth.
“How are you feeling about today?” she asks, taking the chair to my left, resting the small cup of black coffee at her wrinkled bottom lip, blowing away steam as she cradles the ceramic in the palms of her velvety hands.
I drop my eyes and twist the spoon into the middle of the oatmeal, creating some kind of centered whirlpool I wish I could fall and disappear into.
She reaches for my hand, the one beside my bowl, and delicately places her palm over the top of mine.
“It’s okay to be afraid, sweetheart.”
And with her reassurance, a tear, the one I had been battling with earlier, dripped down my cheek and off the ledge of my chin.
I raise my eyes to hers and the matching green of my mother’s, of mine, stares back at me.
“I’m scared,” I admit and it’s the first time I truly feel a weight lifting from my shoulders, as though my spoken words have taken the pressure with them. “I have no one. Jade and I were it; it was just me and her, we never needed or wanted anyone else.”
She grasps onto my hand, her other reaching out and cradling it between both palms. “You girls were the closest I’ve seen to sisters without sharing the same blood.”
My heart feels as if it shatters inside my chest at her evaluation, because we were, we really were.
“I don’t know if I can do this without her,” I whisper, my voice so low I barely hear it crash and fall.
Nan squeezes my hand between hers.
“You know what I know?” And when I don’t look up, she lifts my hand off the table a little, shaking it, a silent cry for me to make my way back to her.
I let my eyes touch her wrinkled face, though I can barely see her through the film of tears at the surface.
“That Jade will be with you, even if you can’t see her.
Look for her in the places you both cherished, pay attention to the way the wind moves, and the way the sun wraps around your skin.
That’s where Jade is…she is always with you, a breath away, you just have to find her. ”
Tears are a waterfall down my cheeks, dripping into my bowl of oatmeal that Nan kindly moves to the side. She guides a handkerchief from her navy slacks and dabs at my cheeks for me, then takes the small piece of fabric to her own, before returning it to her pants.
I lift my chin, a cry trembling at my bottom lip. “Is that what you do, Nan…with Mom a-a-and Gramps?” I stutter.
She had lost Gramps long before I was born, in an accident at work. He had been a roofer. He had fallen to his death. He wasn’t wearing a harness, because back then, there weren’t any workplace safety regulations, just men that had done it a thousand times before.
It was a tragedy.
She squeezes my hand a little tighter and smiles. “Every minute of every day, sweetheart.”
I cut across the small oval toward Devil’s Peak High.
Blades of dewy grass tickle my ankles, the early sun warm and sharp across the back of my bare legs. I focus on that, the balmy morning, a small moment instead of the big one to come.
But, for a Campbell, moments like this were fleeting.
They were already there, the swarm of bees at the entrance, waiting with cameras and microphones and lattes in paper cups.
I hadn’t told anyone that I was returning to school today, aside from Harlen and Nan, who had made a phone call to Principal Garland a week earlier advising her of my return.
It made me wonder if they had been waiting for weeks, or if Principal Garland broke all student confidentiality to grasp at the clutches of a story too.
The urge to turn and take myself home is strong.
There was only one way in, and one way out of Devil’s Peak High, and I didn’t know if I was brave enough to step into the buzzing hive today.
Curling my hand around my body and slipping it into my back pocket, I guide my phone out, along with my headphones, pressing the corded buds into my ears, hoping that perhaps, they will act as an obvious deterrent.
But when I hit play on my music, I feel my body freeze. It’s as if my shoes grow roots, latching into the ground.
“Off With Her Head” by Icon For Hire comes through my headphones and I want to laugh, then I just want to cry.
I could hear Jade, the ghost of her voice, singing loudly beside me in Chase’s truck, and then I could see Chase in the rearview mirror and the way his already dark eyes turned impossibly darker when he realized I’d been keeping a secret from him.
I try to stop myself. I curl my fists, dig my nails through my palms, tuck my phone away, pull it back out, am a moment from throwing it to the ground, but my fingers make their way to his contact before I can tame them.
The dial tone is loud through my headphones, and it rings three times before hitting the brick wall of his voicemail.
I suck back a sharp breath and press on it again, and this time it rings once before meeting the beep.
My heart hammers inside the walls of my chest, the rhythm vibrating up my throat, and I don’t realize that I’ve completely diverted off track, leaving the school behind as I stagger the desolate street toward the Devil’s Peak MC clubhouse, until the gleaming bars at the entrance are a wall of steel working to keep me out.
My hands are cold, then they turn hot when I wrap them around the metal bars.
“Chase!” I yell into the quiet, my voice breaking on a cry. A tear stains my cheek. I work quickly to bury it into the bones of my shoulder, swiping it away.
When the bars don’t shift and no voices or signs of life follow, I begin to shake the bars uncontrollably, as if I’m a rabid animal.
An anger I’ve never felt brews inside me, taking hold of my limbs, and I rear back, kicking against the steel, throwing my arms, and when it begins to hurt; I do it again…and again…
Face me, motherfucker.