The Enemy of Time

Chapter 1

Chapter one

You don’t have to love to be loved.

You don’t have to live to be alive.

You don’t have to die to be a ghost.

3:00 p.m.

Dante once wrote, “There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.” But the worst part isn’t remembering—it’s knowing you can’t go back.

Today is May 4, 2022. Five years had passed since I escaped my hometown in Massachusetts and moved away to college—five years since I stepped foot in my mother’s car, and now here I am, driving back to my childhood home.

“The brakes need fixing,” my mom said as we pulled into the cracked driveway after a high-pitched squeal cut the silence between us.

The house looked the same. The yellow shutters were still barely holding on by silver nails, the front door remained an alarming firetruck red, and the front lawn overflowed with too many plants and flowers, causing the house to disappear into a tiny jungle.

Everything appeared to be precisely the same.

Pulling my worn purple suitcase out of the rusted trunk, I struggled to drag the wobbly wheels over the cobblestone path leading to the porch steps, which desperately needed replacement.

My mother touched my shoulder. “Alex, why don’t you head upstairs and get some rest before dinner? It’s been a long day, and tomorrow won’t be any easier.”

All I could manage was a nod; words wouldn’t form.

As I reached for the doorknob, my hands began to shake.

Damn. How hard is it to turn a freaking handle?

I cursed myself, feeling like a foolish, emotional child ruled more by my heart than my head.

That’s what this house did to me, what this town did to me, and it’s why I promised never to return.

But promises are just empty words, as fragile as a house of cards.

An icy dread seeped into my veins as I twisted the gold handle and opened the door.

It felt like ripping a bandage off my skin.

I cautiously stepped over the threshold, entering the house like a five-year-old intent on sneaking a cookie from the kitchen, my red pumps barely making a sound on the heavily scratched wood floors.

The house was just as I had left it: small and overcrowded with furniture and trinkets.

The loud clatter of my suitcase against the stairs filled the silence as I wrestled it towards the top.

Our house wasn't grand, but the stairs certainly were.

My mom and I had moved in with her new husband, Julian, and his son, Lucas, when I was five years old.

His wife had passed away three years earlier; Julian had been living alone, and it showed.

The walls were covered in garish yellow wallpaper, and the wooden floors were hidden beneath a layer of green shag carpet.

Mismatched chairs in the living room were held together with duct tape, and random pizza stains tainted the fraying brown rug.

Although the house dated back to the 1870s, it was clear that a 1970s renovation, with its bold colors and lava lamps, had obscured its Victorian charm.

My mom wasted no time restoring the home to its original craftsmanship.

On the day we moved in, she tackled the staircase, which was covered in the same green shag carpet that plagued the rest of the house.

My mom immediately grabbed a box cutter and slashed the carpet off the steps, pulling it away with such force that Lucas and I became covered in fluffy shreds of decade-old material, making us look like characters from The Muppets.

Next, she sanded down the old, chipped paint from the original banister, leaving a thick layer of powdery dust throughout the house.

It took six days to strip the staircase of an unappealing brownish-green paint down to its original beauty, but it was all worth it when my mom applied the first coat of stain to the mahogany wood.

From the delicate carvings on the banister to the intricate molding on the wall, every element of the staircase gleamed as if it were thanking us for bringing it back to life.

Memories flooded back with each step I took.

The way light filtered through the stained-glass window at the top of the stairs, broken four times throughout my childhood; the creaky step that woke mom up when I was fifteen and trying to sneak home in the middle of the night; the way the baseboard still smelled of nail polish from when I splintered the wood and covered it up.

Each step felt like swimming through the past, my eyes dancing over the familiar field of memories displayed on the wall.

Photos of family, friends, and cherished moments from my childhood were mounted in thick, ornate frames.

They ascended the stairs like a picturesque timeline, a mismatched storm of bad haircuts and braces.

For most families, the kitchen was the heart of the home, but in this house, it was the staircase.

Somehow, this pile of carved wood brought our two broken families together and created a home for us.

One picture, mounted in a gaudy gold frame hanging six steps up, immediately drew my attention.

It was of Lucas and me on his seventh birthday; I’ve always hated that he was older by just a few months.

The party was pirate-themed, which he still denied was my idea, even years later.

We had been bickering since sunrise, a common occurrence back then, but it escalated to unprecedented heights on that particular day.

Competitions against each other were constant: best grades, the highest score on Mario Kart, who could run fastest from the car to the front door—trivial stuff.

On the morning of his birthday, we had a teeth-brushing competition, and Lucas won, putting me in a bad mood for the entire day and ramping up my competitiveness to level 10.

An intense relay race occurred just before our parents cut the cake, which I won by 1/10 of a second.

Lucas refused to accept the loss and called a foul, blaming me for his trip right before the finish line.

I was furious at his accusation, even though he was entirely correct.

That morning, I applied a layer of super glue to the soles of his shoes to make them extra slick.

What Lucas called cheating, I called competitive ingenuity.

As Lucas was about to blow out his candles, Mom was prepared to take the picture, but he grabbed a chunk of the cake and threw it at me, painting blue frosting all over my white shirt.

I retaliated by blowing out his candles and smashing his face into the cake.

The result? The infamous family food fight photo.

That picture of two kids covered in the aftermath of sibling rivalry had always been my favorite.

Back then, Lucas and I couldn’t go five minutes without talking to each other, but five years of silence had passed because of one decision: one moment, one stupid fight, one second that altered the course of our entire lives.

How insignificant a single second seemed until it became the last.

As I reached the top of the stairs, I could feel the weight of adolescent mistakes piling on my shoulders like boulders trying to bury me in a mountain of regret.

Yet, there was a weird sense of comfort and peace, knowing my childhood would always be preserved on that wall, a time capsule forever hanging right there, a speck of proof that life was once pure.

That peaceful feeling died quickly upon seeing a photo that stopped me dead in my tracks.

It was him.

Jamie and I met about a year after we moved in with Lucas and his dad. He became my first and only friend despite my mom’s failed attempts to force me to socialize.

It was an agonizingly hot day in July—the kind that turned the playground, made of 40% plastic and 60% metal, into a blistering barbecue upon which you could cook a child's leg.

I had the burn marks to prove it. My mom, hoping for some sibling bonding, had taken Lucas and me to the park.

Lucas and I had been at each other's throats ever since I moved in, and not just with typical sibling bickering; I mean, full-on barbarian head-bashing attacks.

Once, when Lucas tried to steal my pink unicorn eraser, I stabbed him in the hand with a pencil—no regrets.

Laughter had filled the air at the park, but none of it had been mine.

I’d never been the giggly type, and once Lucas saw my mom's attention drift to the other parents, he abandoned me for the other six-year-old boys, leaving me alone on the teeter-totter. As I sat there, my bare thighs sizzling on the searing metal, a blonde, blue-eyed girl approached. I thought maybe I’d have some company, but then I recognized her—Bethany.

Our moms had forced us into playdates a few times, the last ending with me spilling watercolor paints all over her puffy princess dress.

Her tiny feet rushed toward me, and without a word, she threw a muddy rock at my head, knocking me off the teeter-totter and into the wood chips.

When I opened my eyes, four girls surrounded me, with Bethany clearly in charge.

She grabbed my hair like a grizzly bear clutching a dead fish while another girl beside her menacingly snipping pink scissors.

The instant I felt the tension released from my scalp, I knew she had taken a crucial chunk of my hair.

I was still convinced those Barbie bitches worked for the devil, and I was meant to be their human sacrifice.