Chapter Thirty-Six
I’m sitting in a booth on the opposite side of the diner with both hands jammed beneath my thighs. My palms are clammy with sweat, clinging to the leather seat.
Blood is stuck to my skin like glue. I’d tried cleaning myself up as best I could. And yet, it was still there, pink stains, a permanent rash.
I squeeze my eyes closed, run my fingers through my hair, feeling pieces of missed chipped bone tangled in the strands.
I couldn’t get away from it. Death, it followed me, clung to me, had a hold on me.
A clunk resonates from in front of me. I raise my chin to see Chief Wynston sliding into the seat opposite me. The last strands of his gray hair are pushed back into place over his balding head, and his unruly, bushy eyebrows pointing in all directions.
Peeling one hand from beneath my leg like hot wax, I reach out, wrapping it around the glass of water.
It quivers the way I knew it would, but I do my best to clamp it down, bringing the cool glass to my lips, taking a small sip.
A metallic taste fills my mouth when I swallow it down, and I realize only now that I have gnawed into my left cheek, my tongue flicking at flayed pieces of flesh.
A cold ache settles in my stomach as I digest the massacre.
“Laiken, I’m going to make this as quick as possible, okay?” Chief Wynston’s voice is full of sympathy, and when I raise my eyes, I notice how his light brown shirt is straining at the buttons, a clear sign that he’d left it in the dryer too long. “Can you tell…”
He’s speaking but I’ve zoned out, my eyes slipping past him and over his curled shoulders, landing on Chase through the large, paneled window at our side.
He’s outside, his shoulders taking the weight of his body as he rests against the big glass panel, one foot perched on the low windowsill. His phone is pressed to his ear, chin down and his long brown hair is a bracket around his stubbled face, blowing with the breeze.
He pushes a bottle of water to his lips and takes a hard pull, and I think he can feel me watching him because when he turns his head, his eyes instantly find mine.
Heat flushes up my neck, accompanied by a familiar coiling in my stomach that I hadn’t felt in years.
I look away, toward Wynston, cross my arms and wrap them around my abdomen, grabbing for my hips.
I answer his questions about the shooting, all while clenching at my skin, and when he’s done, Wynston pushes from the booth and moves to my side.
His hand trembles when he reluctantly rests it on top of my shoulder and drops his chin.
And I know he wants to say more. I know he wants to address the news of the young woman they found this morning. I know he wants to reassure me that he will keep me safe. But he doesn’t do any of that, instead, asking, “Can I take you home, sweetheart?”
And I raise my chin, tilt it toward Chase.
He was still outside, in the same position, watching me watch him, watching Wynston, with the water bottle back at his lips. And Wynston must follow my line of sight because I feel his hand slip from my shoulder as he nods and walks away.
A flurry of vehicles and a marked police cruiser are at the entrance of the trailer park. I tug at the hair tie on my wrist when asphalt turns to loose rock and Chase takes the gravel road toward my lilac home.
I keep my head down.
The police company wasn’t abnormal.
Here, someone was always causing trouble, fighting with their neighbor, threatening to kill them, or their cat.
I lived among a bunch of impulsive losers. It was the cost of being a Campbell.
I draw in a breath, my pulse tapping at my neck as I sit only inches from Chase, close enough to feel the heat coming off him.
We hadn’t spoken a word to each other. Not since he had his chin pressed to the top of my head, mine at his chest, surrounded by blood and debris. The silence in the cabin had begun to fester with words we weren’t ready to say yet.
My teeth are clamped together and I’m breathing through my nose.
Music is low through the speaker at my side. I recognized it, an acoustic version of “Ghost” by Badflower. However, the lull of the track couldn’t find a way to soften the reserve between us.
I’m staring at my hands, picking at the chipped pink nail polish stroked across my thumb when Chase rasps, “What the fuck?”
My chin rises, but not toward him. My eyes catch on the scene that sits ahead of the truck's red hood, and my stomach drops because I’d clung to some atom of hope that maybe the universe would find a way to be kind to me today.
But my wishes and fate had always been marginally separated.
A swarm of reporters are camped at the front of my trailer. Microphones at the ready. Bulky cameras resting beside lanky or severely overweight men, no in-between.
My gaze shifts to my neighbors, and I notice how every last one is perched on their porch, or camped out in fold out chairs, waiting expectantly and excitedly for the scene of my arrival to unfold.
My pulse taps again, faster now.
News spread quickly in a small town, and it was hard to evade the swarm when Devil’s Peak made you the center of their hive.
I cast my eyes to Chase. It’s the first time I’ve looked at him since folding myself inside his truck. His brows are furrowed, and he looks almost unbalanced.
“Why are they here?” he speaks aloud, agitation fierce through his voice. “Why the fuck aren’t they at the diner?”
I drop my chin to my chest with a sigh, eyes casting down, returning to my chipped fingernails. I start picking at the edges of the pink lacquer on my opposite thumb, shaking my head.
“Didn’t you hear?” I ask, eyes still downcast.
I swallow the fear that sits in the base of my throat.
“Hear what?” Chase turns to look at me, one hand wrapped around the wheel.
I angle my eyes up, catching how his knuckles push white against his skin.
“Hear what, Laiken?” he repeats, his voice is urgent now.
I stop picking at the polish. I draw my legs to my chest and push my chin to the top of my knees.
I cradle myself as our past stirs, sickness curling in my gut.
“Laiken,” he breathes, and I feel it across all of my limbs like a plea.
I resist the urge to shiver.
My eyes rise to his. My voice is vacant. “He’s back, Chase.”
And Chase Keller knows exactly who I’m talking about, because I watch him pale before my very eyes.
My hand vibrates when I rip the stick into reverse and lay my arm across the back of the passenger seat.
Laiken’s watching ahead as I circle the steering wheel in my palm.
“What are you doing?” she asks, so cool I find myself shivering from the chill.
Fear sits low at the back of my throat, like a wall restraining my words.
I hammer through it.
“There’s no way in Hell I’m leaving you here.”
Laiken snorts, and I ignore it, pulling onto the road and accelerating a little too hard, leaving behind rubber on the blacktop.
Then she mumbles something under her breath, and I’m flicking my gaze from the cruiser in the front of the park to the white object behind it—beneath the sign that three years later, still reads Evil’s Peak Trailer Park, and not Devil’s—taking my eyes back to her when I spit, “You got something to say?”
Laiken turns toward me, her wavy hair flicking across her bare face. She tucks the strands behind her ears, and the billowing flames that swallow the green of her orbs remind me of when we used to argue back in the day, when she used to test me in a way not even my sister could.
“Yeah, actually, I do,” she states matter-of-factly, and I shiver again, not sure I’m ready for all of that yet.
Once a coward, always a coward. Just like my father.
I adjust the shifter, hammering harder on the gas. There’s a silence, static and electric, circling around us and I’m about to clamp it but she says, “I said, you can’t just pick and choose when you’d like to give a shit about me.”
I feel my teeth grinding. Ripping harder on the stick, I tear my eyes from hers, speeding ahead. And my voice is low when I rasp, “I’ve always given a shit about you.”
And when she doesn’t reply, I look to my side, see her staring out the window, away from me, her shoulders raised like she’s using them as a shield against me.
“Could have fooled me.” Her voice is a whisper, more air than sound.
I shake my head, suck on my front teeth.
“Just take me to Nan’s, Chase.”
Not happening.
When we approach Nan’s street, Laiken unbuckles her seatbelt, preparing for a quick exit even though the car is still moving.
“Put your belt on,” I tell her.
She replies with a swift, “Fuck off.”
I press down heavier on the accelerator, flying past the street when Laiken’s hand reaches across the console, latching to the steering wheel. She attempts to make the turn herself.
There’s a horn blaring in front of us when we swerve onto the opposite side of the road. I slide us back into our lane seconds before a sedan flies past us.
My heart is in my mouth.
My life echoes before my eyes.
I jerk the wheel, nosing my truck to the side of the road, my front wheels catching in dips and unfilled potholes. We rock up and down until I pull to a heated stop, ripping up the handbrake, wet dirt spraying violently in our trail.
I turn in my seat to look at her, my chest heaving, ready for a fight, but instead, I find her with her skull against the headrest, closing her eyes.
“What the fuck was that?” I ask, my voice so low.
Laiken’s eyes remain pressed closed and when she folds her arms across her chest, rubbing away the goosebumps that stipple across her bare triceps, a small laugh gurgles in the base of her throat.
It is so broken, so unrecognizable, I want to remove it from my ears the moment it hits.
Her head grinds into the back of the seat when she swivels it to the side, her eyes popping open, latching onto mine.
A chill laces down my back, numbing my legs, my spine.
Laiken’s eyes are empty, her voice walking the same jagged path. “Do you think it would be easier sometimes, if we just, you know…died?”
Every. Fucking. Day.
That’s what I want to say, but instead, I turn away, biting my tongue and spearing my hands through my hair, forcing back a lungful of air.
“Doomed” by Bring Me The Horizon is a low rumble through my speakers.
We sit in a still silence, my heart racing as we listen and when the final notes approach, I reach toward her, my hand trembling when I wrap it around the nape of her neck, burying my fingers gently into the skin at the side of her throat.
A friend holding a friend.
A friend that hurt a friend.
And a friend that knows it could have been so much worse.
Still could.
Laiken crawls her fingers up to mine, and they’re so cold, quivering at the bone.
She curls a weak grip around my thumb and with her eyes pressed closed, she guides it away from her, returning my hand to my lap.
I pretend it doesn’t hurt, remind myself that I deserve it.
I drop my chin, bite into my cheek, stare at her hand as it slowly slips away.
“Take me to Nan’s, Chase,” she croaks.
And my hand shakes as I wrap it around the stick, pulling back onto the road, though not turning around.
“Chase,” she warns.
And I pretend I don’t hear her.