Chapter 60
The Grabadook was right. It's useless to go to the police, knowing how powerful he is. When I get far enough outside of Houston on the interstate, I toss Bundy out of the window and watch him get shredded up by an army of eighteen-wheelers. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Afterward, I keep driving until I reach home. My real home, that is. I don't shake as the ruins come into sight and the van bumps over the scoured road. I think the adrenaline of being chased by that rhinestone-covered sex goblin sapped all the energy I had.
I sit on the slab where the living room used to be—where I last saw my parents.
The sun is on the other side of the horizon, casting a beautiful shade of amber over the prairie of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes that surrounded Shadow Oaks.
A nice, warm wind wraps around me; nothing like the chill of death that blew us all away that night.
That stupid fucking night. If we had just gotten into the car like my mom wanted, they'd still be here.
I never would have lived with Dinah. I wouldn't have these stupid scars.
I wouldn't be a fuckup. I never would have met Felix and been a bad friend. He'd have met someone better.
I follow the light into the fields and fall into the flowers. My mom used to chase me into the bluebonnets out here.
That big solar bully that makes me so miserable most of the year cradles me as it sets.
It's warm in a comfortable way. I've spent the past school year determined to get out of the state.
But Texas can be so beautiful. Maybe California is prettier, and the weather is better, but this right here is a special kind of beauty you can't get anywhere else in the world.
The people here are good, too. Not everybody is like Clint or Dinah or Brandon.
Maybe I can get out of Oyster Pit and come back here someday. Try to rebuild and reclaim my life.
I know it's impossible, but I close my eyes thinking about it, and it's the most comfortable sleep I've had since before the tornado.
Then I wake up to laughter in the dark.
Three guys are standing on my house. One of them holds a phone up, recording somebody narrating something while another holds a flashlight up. They look like they're in college.
“Don't forget to like and subscribe,” the narrator declares emphatically.
“This is where things went down. The ultimate EF5 that literally wiped a town off the map on Christmas Eve, of all days.” He moves backward with animated hands like he's a CNN correspondent.
“The land? Completely ripped out of the earth. While everybody was waiting for Santa Claus, they got a tornado instead. The twister was so strong, it sucked the lungs out of livestock and flayed them…”
He busts out laughing. “Cut, cut, cut!” he says.
“What's so funny?” the person recording asks.
“I'm picturing motherfuckin' Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer legs-up in this field with his lungs sucked out,” he says. The other two laugh with him.
“Bruh,” one of them says, shaking his head.
They resume recording. “Some people even say this place is haunted now. How many ghosts do you think are hanging out here at night?” the narrator says.
I steamroll through the field, back to the slab. The trio sees me and starts to step back.
“Get away from my house.”
One of them chuckles uncomfortably. “Uh-oh, y'all! Our first ghost!”
“What do you mean, your house?” the narrator asks. “Ain't nobody living here.”
My fingers curl into a fist. “No shit. Everyone's dead.”
“Hold up, this is your house that got all blown motherfuckin' away like The Wizard of Oz?” They look at each other and have an open conference about interviewing me and the clicks they could get, talking about me like I'm not there.
“His face is deadass chopped!” the phone guy says with a chuckle.
Then they start recording me like a zoo animal while asking me rapid-fire questions: Did I feel like Superman flying while being blown around inside a tornado. Did I see the dead bodies. Would I like to collaborate with them on a short film about it.
“I'd like my fist to collaborate with your fucking face,” I yell and start for the phone guy, who runs. The second I grab his phone I'm going to smash it into the concrete.
He laughs as he leads me in a circle. “Look at this sideshow freak tweaking out on me!”
I trip over a crack in the foundation and fall on my elbows. He stops and laughs harder.
“You Frankenstein-looking freak!”
“My dead parents aren't your content,” I croak through my tears, rubbing my elbows. My loss doesn't need to be packaged up and delivered to the masses by people looking to Be Someone.
He's about to come at me and kick me until the narrator blocks him and tells him to chill out. He looks at me with sympathy. “Bro's got some baggage. Let's just split.”
They start back to their car, but not before the phone guy shoots me the middle finger.
When the car lights disappear into the distance, I take out my phone. I look at my account, @WadeAndFelixForever, one last time and delete it. All my videos and memories with Felix no more.
At this moment, I wish every cell phone, every camera, every single thing that records our existence would burn to a crisp.
All the pain they have caused because we use them to boost our own signal.
I wish I had smashed his phone. I wish somebody had done the same to mine.
But I can't go back and erase what I've done.
Right now, though? I know what I can do.
___________
I get home at midnight. Clint is passed out on a chair outside the garage, his cheap, crappy vape pen that Dinah got him for Christmas sitting there on a small table next to a pile of crushed beer cans.
Dinah is sleeping on the couch inside, the light of the TV flickering over her body.
I go to Clint's gun rack, and halfway through pulling the flamethrower off, I stop.
No. It would be too obvious. I can't use the flamethrower. But what could I use instead?
Then the image of the guy with the vape pen at the IntegriTruth assembly last semester hits me. I walk back outside, and there Clint's vape pen sparkles. I pick it up slowly and study it like I'm holding a weapon of mass destruction.
In the garage, Dinah's Catherine the Great portrait watches me.
I wrench my arm behind me as far as I can go and, in what feels like slow motion, slam the pen into the concrete, below the painting.
It sparks and explodes, and Dinah the Great erupts in flames.
The paint melts and Dinah's blank face wilts as the fire consumes it.
Once the whole painting is ablaze, the surrounding wall catches fire up to the ceiling.
I hightail it out of the garage, waiting for the fire to spread a little more, and I run inside to wake Dinah.