“Emma—”
“You’re both so selfish.” I turn for the stairs.
“Come back here!” my mother yells.
“Let her go,” says my father. “Let her process this.”
I hate him. I hate her.
I HATE THEM.
My room is cool and silent. Lights flicker on my routers. Texy barrels in beside me and shoves her nose under my hand.
I ignore her and fling my laptop open.
There are my text messages. The message my father never answered.
The tense messages with Cait. She lives with parents who are so in love with each other that it makes me want to vomit when I’m over there. Her mother comments and likes her makeup videos, for god’s sake. The last thing I need right now is an offer of chocolate-chip pancakes or someone to give me a hug, and that’s all I’d find at Cait’s house.
After a moment, all my messages with Rev filter onto my screen, too, loading from my phone.
You and your dad are close. One of his last text messages. The words made me feel warm inside an hour ago.
Now they feel like molten lava, melting my organs.
He might understand—but all my brain hears are his parting words.
Go. I can’t do this.
I can’t text him either.
My father knocks on the door. “Emma. Please. Talk to me.”
His tone is always so quiet, which goes with his no-big-deal manner. I used to think it was a sign of strength, that he could take anything in stride.
Now it just pisses me off. I put my gaming headset on. The padded earphones muffle any sounds.
“Emma,” my father calls.
I log in to OtherLANDS.
And there, right on top, is another message from Nightmare.
Saturday, March 17 9:36 p.m.
From: N1ghtm@re4
To: Azure M
Are you blowing me off ?
This one has an attachment, too. It’s the same naked, bound avatar, but now her head has been blown up. The graphic design work is impressively visceral.
Rage fills every cell of my body. If molten lava were eating my insides before, it’s turned into a supernova settling somewhere in the center of my chest.
I don’t think about it. I type back.
Saturday, March 17 10:47 p.m.
From: Azure M
To: N1ghtm@re4
I HATE YOU.
I HATE YOU.
I HATE YOU.
I HATE YOU.
I HATE YOU.
LEAVE ME ALONE.
I block him.
Then I slam my laptop shut. I flip over in bed and scream into my pillow.
I scream so loud and so long that I forget what silence is like.
I scream until I run out of breath.
And then the silence falls and pours in around me. So much silence I almost can’t stand it.
I don’t know where my parents are. I don’t care. I don’t care.
My phone chimes. I almost throw it.
It’s almost eleven now. I hope for Cait, though I know that’s impossible. I hope for Rev, somehow.
No. It’s a message through 5Core.
For a moment, I panic that Nightmare has written back, but it’s not him. It’s Ethan.
Ethan_717: Are you around tonight? Want to get on OtherLANDS or Battle Realms?
I’m so stupid. I burst into tears.
I’m sobbing openly, but I log in to my game. Mom knocks on the door. “Emma. Can I speak with you, please?”
“Why?” I yell. I sound hysterical. “So you can tell me what a slacker I am? Or are you going to tell me how evil gaming is? Or what a loser Dad is? Or have I covered it all?”
“Emma.” Her voice is so quiet that I can barely hear her. “Emma—”
“Forget it!” I yell. “Go away.”
Then something else occurs to me. “If you turn off the Internet again, I will hack your laptop and delete everything on it.”
“Emma.” Her voice is sharp.
I turn on music and drown her out. It’s so loud that my ears hurt.
I look for Ethan_717. He’s online. I send him a team request.
He doesn’t respond, but he opens a private chat link.
Ethan_717: I’m in a group already. Want me to add you?
Of course. Like I can join a group while openly sobbing.
Azure M: No. It’s OK.
Then I sit there and stare at the screen. My parents’ words spin in my head.
Divorce.
We’ll have to put the house on the market.
We can’t support a mortgage and an apartment.
Divorce.
Divorce.
Divorce.
My screen blips with a private team request.
I send Ethan a quick chat.
Azure M: I really can’t deal with a team right now.
Ethan_717: It’s OK. It’s just me.
Oh. I click Accept.
His voice is warm in my ear. “What’s up?”
I don’t want to talk. I just want to play.
But then I inhale, and I break down sobbing. I tell him everything. My mother. My father. Their divorce. Nightmare and his messages.
It takes me a long time.
“I’m sorry,” I say when I get to the end. “I didn’t mean to unload all of that.”
“Don’t be sorry.” He takes a long breath. “I’m sorry about your parents.” A pause. “And I’m sorry about that other guy.”
“It’s fine.” I sniff. “I keep blocking him. He’ll get bored eventually.”
“Probably.” He pauses. “Is there anything I can do?”
I think of the feel of Rev’s fingers wound through mine. I swipe at my cheeks and turn down the music. My parents have gone quiet.
“Can we just play?” I say.
“Absolutely.”
So I load up a mission to do exactly that.
EIGHTEEN
Rev
It’s after midnight, again.
I’m not sleeping, again.
Quiet has overtaken the house, but it’s a false quiet. No one is asleep. Geoff and Kristin are talking, their voices a low hum down the hall. The door to Matthew’s room closed a short while ago, but I know—just know—he’s not sleeping.
My jaw aches something fierce, but I welcome the pain. When I was a child, my father always told me pain was evil leaving my body, and I find a measure of reassurance in that now.
I haven’t talked to Geoff or Kristin. After they brought Matthew into the house, I headed straight for my room, while they dealt with him in the kitchen.
He didn’t have a knife. I attacked him like that, and he didn’t have a knife.
I can’t face him. I don’t want to face him. I told him I wouldn’t mess with him, and then I did.
Have you been tempted away so thoroughly?
The words from my father’s e-mail are haunting. Have I been tempted? Who is tempting me? I feel this pressure to satisfy everyone, and I can’t. Everything is so confusing.
I keep flashing on that moment in the rain and the dark when I knew I could hurt him. I wonder if Matthew knows. I wonder if he could sense it.
It all happened in front of Emma, too.
Shame has taken up residence in my belly, a dark and curling feeling that won’t leave me alone.
I need to apologize. I don’t know how to apologize for what I am.
A knock sounds at my door. It’s very soft, so I think it’s Kristin.
“Come in.”
I was wrong. It’s Geoff. His frame fills the doorway, darkness and shadows at his back.
“I thought you might be sleeping,” he says.
I shake my head and study the quilt on my bed. I haven’t even lain down. Sleep has been an elusive creature lately.
“Can I sit down?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He sits in my desk chair and wheels it around to face me. “That’s quite a bruise.” Before I can say anything, h
e turns his head and calls out to the hallway. “Hey, Kris, he needs an ice pack.”
My jaw tightens, but that hurts, so I force myself to relax. “I don’t need an ice pack.”
“Humor me.”
Kristin appears in the doorway with a bag of ice wrapped in a towel. She takes one look at me and her face falls. “Oh, Rev, you should have said something. We’ve been out here talking, and I didn’t realize—”
“I’m fine. It’s fine.”
She comes into the room and sits beside me, then puts the ice pack against my face. “I didn’t realize he hit you that hard.”
“Stop.” I push her hand away and hold the ice there myself. I don’t want to, but she’ll pick it back up if I don’t. “I’m fine.”
She puts a hand on my shoulder. “You’re not fine.”
I go still. I don’t know what that means.
My breath quickens.
“We didn’t mean to cause this,” she says quietly. “When we told Bonnie that we’d welcome Matthew staying here, I don’t think we considered what it would do to you.”
These words take the longest time to sink in.
They’re not here to yell at me.
They’re not mad.
Somehow, this is worse.
I lower the ice pack. “Stop. Stop.”
“Rev—”
“I hurt him. Don’t you understand? I hurt him.”
“You didn’t hurt him.” Kristin leans into me. Her voice is so gentle. “You stopped him from hurting you. You stopped him from running away—which could have been so much worse.”
They can’t paint this a different way. I know what I did. I know what I felt.
“Rev. Sweetheart.” Her arm comes around me. “You didn’t—”
“I did.” I shove myself away. It’s a motion full of fear and fury and I wish I could take it back immediately.
I curl into myself. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” My voice breaks and I wait for Geoff to grab me, to protect Kristin.
He doesn’t. He wheels the chair closer to me. “Rev. Look at me.”
I don’t want to look at him, but he’s got a good voice for when he has no patience for nonsense. Deep and solid. I look at him and meet his eyes.
“You didn’t hurt him,” Geoff says. “Do you understand me? You did not hurt him. He’s fine.”
“I hurt Mom—”
“You didn’t hurt me.” Kristin moves toward me again, and I put up a hand.
“Stop.” I can’t look at them now. I can’t look at anything. “Please. Stop.”
“Okay.” But she doesn’t move from the bed.
We all sit in absolute silence, broken by nothing but my ragged breathing.
But they sit, and they don’t leave me.
I can’t handle all of this alone anymore.
It takes three attempts for me to force the words out. “Do you know where my father is?”
“No,” says Geoff. He wheels even closer to the bed, but not so close that the distance is threatening. “Do you want me to find out?”
I look up at him. “Can you do that?”
“Maybe.” He pauses. “Would it be okay if I ask you why?”
I inhale to tell them about the letter. About the e-mails.
But I can’t. It feels like such a betrayal on so many levels.
But if I know where my father is, I can judge whether he’s a threat. He could be on the other side of the country. He could be in jail. He could have another child.
The thought turns my blood to ice. “I just want to know.” My voice is a broken thing, the words squeezed out of lungs that don’t want to work. I feel wrung out and exhausted. All that’s holding me upright is the frozen blood in my veins. “I need to know. Okay?”
“All right.” He pauses, and his eyes are full of concern. “Rev—it’s okay to talk about your father. Do you know that? It’s okay.”
No, it’s not. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
I know I sound crazy. I’m the one who brought him up.
But it’s not like you can Google “Robert Ellis” and have any hope of finding the right guy. He might as well be named John Smith or Jack Baker.
“Do you want to talk about Emma?” says Kristin.
Hmm. Do I want to talk about how I completely lost control and attacked Matthew in front of her? How I will never trust myself around her now?
I shake my head.
“Rev, I need you to answer me honestly,” says Geoff. “Should I call Bonnie and have her start making arrangements for another home for Matthew?”
I blink and stare at him. “You want to find another home for him?”
“No. I don’t. I think he needs time to figure out he can trust us. But I will call her right now if it’s causing too much stress for you.”
“No—” I shake my head. “That’s not what I mean. I did this. You had to know I would do this.”
He straightens in the chair and studies me, nonplussed. “Rev.” His voice is almost hushed. “I don’t understand what you think you did.”
“I’m going to turn into my father. I keep waiting for it to happen. I’ve read about the cycle of violence, and the way certain traits are carved into your genetic makeup.” My forearms are clenched tight against my abdomen, like I need to physically hold myself together. “It’s like how Dec swears he’ll never touch alcohol again. I have to do that somehow. Because I don’t know how it starts, and I won’t know how to stop.”
They’re silent, and my eyes are on the quilt again, and I don’t know if I want to look up to read their expressions. I’ve discussed this with Declan, but never with them.
I think of that flash in my head when I pinned Matthew in the grass. How I could have broken his neck.
Or the way my father’s words have wormed their way into my brain, triggering long-dormant thoughts.
Maybe he’s right.
Maybe I’m the one who belongs in juvenile detention. Locked away where I can’t hurt anyone.
Geoff moves a bit closer, and rests a hand on my knee. It makes my breath catch, but I don’t pull away, and he doesn’t react.
“You said you know about the cycle of violence,” he says. “What do you know?”
His voice is very matter-of-fact. Not challenging. Just a question. His teaching voice.
“I know that abused children grow up to be abusers.”
“Not always, Rev.”
“Almost always.”
“Do you know why? Because it’s not just genetics.”
I hesitate. “I know it has something to do with your brain getting screwed up as a kid, and not learning how to handle emotions the right way.”
“Yes. Somewhat. At a very basic level, attachment disorder happens when a child does not develop a normal bond with a caregiver, whether because of neglect, or abandonment, or abuse. You’ve seen this in some of the children we’ve had here. Some of these kids have never learned what trust is.”
He’s right. I have seen it. I remember a little boy who never cried because no one had ever responded. He was three years old and couldn’t speak.
By the time his mother got clean, he was a chatterbox who loved to sing the alphabet. When she regained custody, Kristin went to visit every single day for months.
Geoff spreads his hands. “Young children are pretty simple, really. If they’re hungry, they need to be fed. If they’re sad, they need to be comforted. If they’re hurt, they need to be cared for. It’s the core of a trusting relationship with adults. But if someone isn’t there to do those things, or if those things aren’t consistent, those children start missing some of the building blocks for their personality.” He pauses. “Or if the response to those needs is negative, and not just neglectful, the child begins learning incorrect responses for himself. So if a child asks for food and the response is a smack across the face, the child begins to internalize that as cause and effect.”
My breathing has gone shallow, a familiar tension gripping my shoulders again.
I don’t know if I can keep talking about this. I don’t know if I can stop.
“My father—he wasn’t like that. He was—”
Diabolical.
“This is different,” I finish.
“Why?” says Geoff.
“Because he wasn’t being neglectful. He thought he was doing the right thing. He believed in what he was doing. How can I fight against that?”
“Do you believe in what he was doing?”
The question draws me up short. “What?”
“Do you believe in what he was doing? Do you believe his actions were directed by God?”
I freeze. It’s so obvious, but I can’t say the words.
Even after all these years, denying it feels like an act against my father.
I press my hands against the sides of my head. A sudden migraine pulses between my temples. “I can’t talk about this.”
A brief pause. “Okay. I know it’s late.” Geoff gives my knee a little shake. “We don’t have to talk about this now.”
Kristin’s hand brushes over my shoulder. She drops a kiss on my forehead. Light touches that remind me I’m here. It’s now. I’m eighteen. I’m not seven.
“You’ve had a long day,” she says. “Get some sleep.”
She shifts off the bed and moves away.
Geoff doesn’t move from the chair. “I meant what I said earlier. If having Matthew here is causing a problem—”
“It’s not.” I clear my throat and rub my palms against my knees. “It’s not.”
He hesitates. “Something else is going on, Rev. I wish you would talk to me.”
Oh, I wish I could.
“Tomorrow,” I say. My voice is weak. All of me feels weak. “Tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.” He rises from the chair and gives my shoulder a gentle squeeze.
When he gets to my door, I stop him. “Wait. Why does he keep running? Where’s he going?”
“He won’t say.” His face screws up in thought. “Sometimes, I think people are so used to negativity that a positive atmosphere is uncomfortable, or even frightening. It goes along with what we were talking about. When you can’t trust anyone, the unknown is a very frightening place indeed.”
A heavy, loaded pause. “Think about it, Rev. Why did you run?”
I look away. I don’t really have an answer for that.
Actually, I do, and the answer is shameful.
Geoff doesn’t push me. His voice is kind, even though I don’t deserve it. “Good night, Rev.”