Chapter Fourteen #3
For three whole days I wasn’t a killer. Lila had come back from the dead, and with her, the abatement of my self-loathing. But now the pile of corpses teeters above me, threatening to crash down and suffocate me with guilt.
All my life I wanted my brothers to trust me. To let me in on their secrets. I wanted them, Philip especially, to think of me as a worthy accomplice.
Even after they kicked the crap out of me, my instinct was to try and save them.
Now I just want revenge.
After all, I’m already a murderer. No one really expects a murderer to stop killing. I grip the metal bar on the rolling train, my fingers clenching around it like it’s Philip’s throat. I don’t want to be a monster, but maybe it’s too late to be anything else.
The door swings open and the conductor steps onto the platform and past me. “You can’t ride out here,” he says, looking back.
“Okay,” I say, and he opens the door to the next car, ready to collect more tickets. He doesn’t really care. I could probably stay where I am for a long while before he comes back through again.
I suck in another couple breaths of fetid air and then go back to Lila.
“Very dramatic,” she says when I sit down. “Storming off and all.” Her eyes look bruised around the edges. She’d found a pen somewhere and started doodling in ink on her leg, below the knee.
I feel awful, but I don’t apologize.
“Yeah,” I say, “I’m a dramatic guy. High strung.”
That makes her smile, but it fades fast. “I hated you, lying in your comfortable bed at your school, caring about grades and girls and not about what you did to me.”
I grit my teeth. “You slept in my bed. You really think it’s that comfortable?”
She laughs, but it sounds more like a sob.
I look out the window. We’re in woods now. “I shouldn’t have said that. You were sleeping in a cage. I’m not a good person, Lila.” I hesitate. “But I did—I do care what I’ve done to you. I thought about you every single day. And I am sorry. I’m grovelingly, pathetically sorry.”
“I don’t want your pity,” she says, but her voice sounds gentler.
“Too bad,” I say.
She gives me a wry lopsided grin and kicks me with my own boot.
“I’d like it if you’d tell me the rest of what happened. How I transformed you. How you got away. I’m not going to freak out anymore. I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me.”
She nods and goes back to drawing on her leg. Swirls that spiral out from an ink blue center. “Right. So. There you are, pressing me down to the carpet.
“You look crazy, angry. But then you get this weird smile on your face. I’m scared, really scared, because I think you’re going to do it. You lean down and whisper in my ear. ‘Run.’ That’s what you say.”
“Run?” I ask.
“I know. Crazy, right? You’re still on top of me—how am I supposed to do anything?
But then I start to change.” The pen presses against her skin, hard now.
It’s scratching her leg. “It felt like my skin was getting tight and itchy. My bones twisted and I grew hunched, small. My vision blurred, and then I could crawl away from you. I didn’t know how to run on four legs, but I ran anyway.
“I heard you scream, but I didn’t look back. There was a lot of shouting.
“They caught me under some bushes. I made it out of the house, but I just couldn’t run fast enough.”
She stops drawing lines and starts punching the point of the pen against her leg.
“Hey,” I say, putting my gloved hand on top of hers.
She blinks quickly, like she forgot where she was.
“Barron put me in a cage and he put a shock collar around my neck—the kind they use on little dogs. He said that it was better than if I was dead. I was out of the way, but he could still use me. I made people sleepwalk right out to you guys; it’s easy for a cat to slip into a house and to touch someone.
I even made you sleepwalk out of the dorms to where your brothers were waiting.
“You looked at me like I was nothing. An animal.” Her nostrils flare. “I thought you’d been trying to save me. But you never tried to save me again.”
I don’t know what to say. I feel a deep, aching sorrow that hurts more than I know how to express. I don’t have the words. I want to touch her, but I don’t deserve it.
She shakes her head. “I know Barron worked you. I’m here now because of you. I shouldn’t say that.”
“It’s okay.” I take a deep breath. “I have a lot to be sorry for.”
“I should have guessed that they’d changed your memories. Barron’s so busy trying to make people remember what he wants them to and make them forget everything else that he doesn’t notice that he’s strip-mining his own brain. He can’t pull the strings because he’s forgotten where they are.
“It’s just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he’d forget my water or food and I’d cry and cry and cry.” She stops talking and looks out the window. “I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.
“In the beginning I tried to escape, but I guess after a while I just used up all my hope like I used up the stories.” Lila lowers her voice and leans into me, so close that the hairs on the back of my neck rise with her breath.
“When I found out you were going to hurt my dad, when I overheard them, I realized escaping didn’t matter. I knew I had to kill you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I say. I think of my bare feet sliding on slate.
She smiles. “It turned out Barron wasn’t watching me as closely as he had before. I wore down the nylon part of the collar enough. It was still hard to get it the rest of the way off, but I did it.”
I think of the blood crusted on her fur when I saw her that first time.
“Do you still hate me?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “A little.”
My ribs ache. I want to close my eyes. Somewhere on the train a baby starts to cry. The businessman two seats in front of us is on the phone. “I don’t want sorbet,” he says. “I don’t like sorbet. Just give me some damn ice cream.”
I think maybe I deserve for my ribs to hurt more.