3. Three
Three
Xavier
Months. It had been months. Eight months, five days–I glanced away from the graveled road and down to my wrist to read the time on my Peugeot–and apparently forty-seven minutes exactly since I last held Toni in my arms. This whole school year had been torture.
First, the photo ops and magazine covers celebrating Toni’s return home like her fucking family wasn’t the reason she vanished in the first place.
Then, it was the news about her transferring schools, all so she could be closer to her father and brother.
I bought every paper, read every article, analyzed her smile in every picture.
While she hid it well, behind her brilliant smile and articulate responses to interview questions, I saw what was really happening.
Day by day Toni’s fire, her fight, was dimming.
My wild girl was dying. And that was unacceptable to me.
Shortly, though, I would remedy that. Today, we would be reunited properly, and she would be mine for nearly four whole months.
Forever, if I got my way, but I had four months to work that out.
I said a silent prayer of gratitude to Camp Agonde and our boss, Jack Walker, for letting Toni return to her job from last summer as the camp’s waterfront director. And for buying us time.
It wasn’t exactly like I hadn’t seen her all year.
The first weeks after her disappearance from camp had been the worst. I had no idea where to start or how to track her down.
She was a ghost all over again. No social media, no phone number.
Fuck, I’d even tried her old email from back when we were teenagers and got exactly nowhere.
Then the news broke, and I finally knew where to find her and how.
Trouble was, unlike my former…friends, I was currently enrolled in a school on the other side of the damn country.
But West Barrett University also had a business school, a pretty good one.
Not quite as good as the University of Calder, where I’d attended the last two years, but I could make do.
So, without so much as a word to parents–not that we talked much anyways–I applied to transfer, and of course, with my 4. 2 GPA, was accepted.
From there, it had been easy enough to pack my shit in the Range and start the cross-country drive.
I only made one real stop along the way, other than to eat, sleep or shit, and that had been at my father’s house.
Undesirable as the visit had been–on both sides–I needed to grab the remainder of my things.
I hadn’t lived in that house, not really, since I left for Agonde right after my high school graduation.
Only returning to deposit my summer items and pick up more winter-appropriate clothing.
It was less my home, and more a convenient storage facility.
Now, with Toni on my horizon, I had no intention of ever returning to the hellhole my father had constructed inside that house.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to engage with my father, or my mother, for that matter.
I was greeted at the front door by one of my father’s minions.
I was pretty certain her name was Elizabeth.
She had been with him long enough for me to know it, that didn’t always happen.
She let me in, wordlessly, before following me like some fucking valley of the dolls stalker to my former bedroom door.
I slammed it in her fucking face when she attempted to follow me inside.
Undoubtedly, she was following my father’s orders to accompany me.
I should never have texted him about my arrival.
Sure enough, she was waiting there when I opened the door again and proceeded to trail after me as I carried a duffel bag and a suitcase towards my waiting car.
I couldn’t wait to get out of there. That house had always given me the creeps.
From as far back as I could remember, it had been frigid and grey, a mausoleum, more than a home.
I shouldn’t have bothered. I should have just bought new shit.
Because the bone-chilling scream I heard as I descended into the large foyer was one I wouldn’t forget.
It was a child’s scream. High-pitched. Piercing.
Terrified. It sent me hurtling back in time to when I didn’t have the option of escaping.
As it echoed through the empty halls, no one moved to find out what was wrong.
Screams like that weren’t unfamiliar in this place.
The sound was enough to get me out, however, so was having my father’s minion shove me out the door, locking it at my back.
Not before I caught the faintest glimpse of my father with a blonde set of pigtails clutched in his unyielding fist. There wasn’t anything I could do at that moment, nor now.
Not yet anyways. One day, when I figured out what happened to Rachel, my father would pay.
For now, I thought, as I drove away from the house, I had another girl to save.
Pulling my attention back to the road, I drove under the camp sign and rounded the last corner before the staff parking lot came into view.
When I spotted the gap in the trees, I slowed to pull into the already busy lot.
Of course, Cole’s ‘I’m a manly-man’ Mustang and Brennon’s hippie-coloured car are already parked.
Who in their right mind painted a Porsche powder blue.
It made my blood boil. After our friendship turned to shit all those years ago, I had worked hard to erase them from my mind, from my memory, until I could see their faces without feeling a damn thing.
Last summer, knowing now how and why Nettie did what she did, any thoughts of those two made a fire burn inside my brain.
I parked the car, and scanned the lot more thoroughly.
There was no sign of Betty, Toni’s shitty old car that she left behind.
She loved that car, even if I wasn’t sure it was road-worthy, and I knew she mourned its loss.
She had told me as much. She told me so many things.
About all the ways her father tortured her.
About all the sick things her brother did behind closed doors.
After today, she’d never have to suffer anything at their hands ever again.
Because her father and brother might be evil fuckers, but I’m a slippery bastard when I want to be.
About two weeks after I got to West Barrett U, I managed to slip myself into her 20th century literature class.
It had to be a class, because Francis–that slimy fuck–tailed her everywhere else.
But since he was a fucking idiot, who I suspected didn’t know how to read picture books, let alone Fitzgerald or Tolkien, he simply dropped her at the door like a child and picked her up again after each of her lectures.
I knew, because I spent my first week in town watching them go everywhere.
It’s not stalking if it’s a rescue. So, on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-October, I slid into the lecture hall thirty minutes early and waited.
The second the door closed behind her, leaving her brother in the hallway, I stood.
And across the huge auditorium–even surrounded by a hundred and fifty other students–our connection zinged to life.
She glanced around the room, wary of the other eyes around us, then moved so slowly, too slowly, towards the empty seat beside me at the back.
Tears danced in her eyes when she finally sat down beside me.
“Xavi.” My name sounded like a prayer from her lips.
“Don’t cry, wild girl,” I smiled back, although my body was practically shaking with the need to pull her onto my lap and never let her go. I tried to reach for her hand under the desk, but she pulled her hand back against her stomach and whispered, “They’re watching.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, it could be anyone. My father’s eyes are everywhere,” she blinked slowly, and when her eyes reopened, she was focused on the professor at the front of the room instead of looking at me.
I, for one, was never going to take my eyes off her again.
Which meant my hand was ready and waiting when she passed me a folded-up piece of paper that read: If my father or brother see you, they’ll kill you. They are dangerous.
I wrote back. Oh, Nettie, so am I.
Her next note just read simply; I love you.
We spent the rest of the class passing notes to one another like a couple of pre-teens gossiping, each of mine ending with those same three words.
She was right about one thing; It was best if no one knew I was here.
After she shared just a few of the details about what the last weeks of her life had been like, it was clear that if word got back to Francis, or God help us, Franklin, Nettie would be the one to pay the price.
So, as that lecture drew to a close, and students started to pack up, I passed her one last note.
This one was tied with a rubber band around a cheap burner phone. It read:
This is a burner phone. No internet connection. It has one number. Mine. You can call or text me and I will always answer. I’ll see you this time next week, wild girl.
She beamed at me, and beneath the desk, I reached for her hand and gave it two quick squeezes.
Then she sighed, and the heavy fear she’d come in with was back as she left me behind.
From then on, all year, we had at least an hour every week where we could be together.
Even if we couldn’t kiss and barely touched, that hour, and the late-night texts and secret phone calls, sustained us both.