“The last one ran off the cliff because it was dark,” I say smoothly. “Jack didn’t push him. Joseph, the man he thinks he killed, killed himself.”
“He wouldn’t have been running if Jack wasn’t chasing him,” Nameless counters. “Don’t defend him. He killed a man, and he’s going to jail for it once we turn this tape in to the feds.”
“He didn’t, and there’s no body anyway,” I retort. “You can’t prove anything.”
“Belina Hernandez. You know her, don’t you? You went to visit her.”
“How do you know—”
“It wasn’t hard to dig up facts. Belina Hernandez is the wife of Joseph Hernandez, the man who ran off the cliff. Your bloodthirsty nemesis has been paying her child support under the guise of federal funds because he’s so guilt-ridden. How do you think it’ll look when the jury sees that? He’s practically convinced he killed Joseph, and that’ll convince the jury.”
“He was protecting Sophia!” I snarl.
“Protecting is one thing. Mindless violence is another. This tape shows the difference very clearly.”
I clutch the tablet and weigh the pros and cons of throwing it into an incinerator, but Nameless laughs.
“I know what you’re thinking. Don’t try it. I have many copies on different hard drives. You’d just be ruining a perfectly good tablet.”
Nameless stands, and I shrink into myself, fully aware again of how close we are to each other in this room.
“I wanted to show you just who you think you’re in love with. He’s not me, that’s for sure. He’s worse than me. He’s a killer. He’ll hurt you more than I ever did.”
He ducks just in time as I throw the tablet at his head, my chest heaving. It clunks against the wall, leaving an indent in the pink paint.
“Fuck you,” I spit. “No one will ever hurt me more than you did. I won’t let them.”
The door behind me suddenly unlocks, and a wild-eyed guy with an afro walks in.
“Oh, u-uh, shit. Sorry, wrong room.”
I lunge for the door, but Nameless calls me back.
“It’s been nice talking with you. I know you don’t like it, but you’ll have to do a lot more of it.”
“Why?” I whisper. He smiles.
“I saw you defacing Summers’s office. Even took a video of it for myself. What will the dean think of that, I wonder?”
“Why?” I repeat. “Why the fuck are you on my case all the time?”
“Because”—he cocks his head like a mildly interested bird—“you’re mine.”
My stomach goes cold, and he laughs.
“You’ve always been mine, Isis. You know that. And no one, not even a pretty boy in shining armor, can come between us. Not after what we’ve shared.”
I run as far as I can from the room, from the house. When Nameless’s voice finally fades in my head, I collapse onto the lawn and throw up on the grass.
Chapter Twelve
4 Years, 0 Weeks, 0 Days
Seeing and talking to Nameless is one thing.
Seeing and talking to him the day before the anniversary of his evildoings is too coincidental. He had to have planned that. Or not. Maybe I’m the only one who remembers the exact date everything went to shit. He probably couldn’t care less.
In the last few years of my short yet brilliant and extremely fucked-up life, I’d take the day off from school in Florida, play hooky. I’d walk down to the beach with McDonald’s and count crabs and collect little jewel-colored rocks. I tried to go easy on myself, since on that day no one had gone easy on me. Last year I hadn’t done anything at all, because I was so wrapped up in the war with Jack.
Looking back, I should’ve realized the only boy in the world who managed to distract me from my pain was special. Special and worth keeping around. Maybe I knew that subconsciously, because I tried to keep him around in my own way, in my “ha-ha I planted fake drugs in your locker and pried into your past” way, which admittedly probably wasn’t the best way. But I was so out of practice asking people to be my friend, asking them to stay, it was all I could do. Be annoying. Be loud, and people will remember you and maybe hopefully stay.
Maybe hopefully.
You try to. You try to stop all these injustices and save people from them. But you never try to save yourself.
I shake Kieran’s voice out of my head and make a quick damage assessment. Nameless is gonna give the feds back the video, and Jack will be in a whole new world of shit. Even better—he has footage of me defacing Summers’s office. Has he been stalking me? My unquenchable zeal for justice blinded me, and I went completely overboard and into the sea, but that is honestly nothing new; the only new thing is this time I could get kicked out of college for it.
College! Collagen! Collage! This isn’t high school. This is the Real World™ waiting for me to slip so it can open its mouth and swallow me whole. College is the end-all-be-all, the big, cool thing you’re supposed to do so you can get a degree and put it on your wall or use it as kindling when your student loans eat the money for your heating bill, I guess, and sometimes it helps you get a job, but all the upperclassmen at my old high school went to college and got a degree and then worked at American Eagle or Starbucks anyway, so I’m fairly certain it would be more useful as toilet paper, or, if you’re feeling particularly vindictive about your college experience, a maxi pad. I worked hard to be here, didn’t I? I think I did. I can’t exactly remember; it’s a blur of school assignments and “your mom” jokes and bad fish sticks. If I get kicked out of college, I’ll bring shame to my entire family and Dad will be disappointed and Mom will be happy I’m back, probably, and I’ll be sinking my future into the ground with a jackhammer and condemning myself to a life of flipping burgers, and blood will probably start raining from the sky or something. Everyone goes to college. That’s just something Middle America does, and I’m definitely privileged Middle America.
If everyone goes here, why do I feel like I’m a seal in a fishpond?
Why do I need to go to college again? To figure out what I want to do? But I already knew what I wanted to do, and that was to get out of this state. Get away. Go to Europe. But I couldn’t leave Mom, so I compromised.
I put my feet up on my desk and frown.
Getting kicked out of college is nothing compared to getting arrested for murder.
The tape lingers in my mind, Wren’s young face and Sophia’s healthy face and Jack’s furious, heartbroken one. I wandered right into all that without even considering their feelings. I forced my way down the shittiest, darkest rabbit hole, their rabbit hole, and they somehow tolerated me for it.
If I close my eyes for too long, I hear Jack’s screaming again.
If I close my eyes for too long, Nameless’s laughter mixes with it and makes thinking impossible.
My arm throbs, and I remember I have to get the bandage changed, so I head to the infirmary.
“Isis?”
I recognize the voice. It was shouting at me last time I heard it. Sure enough, Mildred stands there, a bunch of textbooks in her arms. Her eyes are softer than I remember.
“Oh God, hi, look, I’m really sorry about that night at the party—” I start, but Mildred holds up her hand.
“Don’t. I don’t really feel like talking about it. I don’t like you, and I don’t want to like you. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
I frown, and she sighs and flips one wisp of red hair over her shoulder.
“I’m with Jack, right? The hottest guy on campus, pretty much. The hottest guy I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure. And so I thought I was super lucky or whatever, but then this guy starts talking to me at this party—another one, not Jack.”
“Guy?” I narrow my eyes.
“Yeah, sort of cute. Dark hair, really intense gray eyes.”
That sounds like Nameless—why would he do that? No, I know exactly why he’d do that. To hurt me. To make me suffer in any small way he could. To make someone else hate me as much as he
does. I let my guard down, and he shot at me from another angle, and I didn’t even see the bullet this time.
“Anyway, he starts telling me about you, and how you and Jack used to fool around in high school. And I was so drunk, I guess I—” She gnaws her lip. “He kept telling me all this shit, and I believed it. So the next time I saw you, at that party, I just— I just lost it.”
“It didn’t help that I called you a colorful name,” I remind her, then kick myself for reminding her. But she just shrugs.
“I guess. But it was shitty of me to listen to some stranger and go wild off whatever he said. He was just so persuasive, and I was super fucked up. Anyway, I’ve felt really bad about it these last few weeks and I wanna stop feeling bad, honestly. So. I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” I say.
Mildred sniffs. “I’m Brittany, by the way. So you don’t have to call me names anymore.”
“Okay. Hi, um, Brittany.”
“Hi,” she says, looking me up and down one last time. “Bye.”
I watch her go, opening my mouth a few times. I want to say something, but it gets blocked each time, until finally, “Brittany!”
I run to catch up to her, and she mercifully waits.
“What is it?”
“Is Jack—” I swallow hard. “Is Jack doing okay?”
Brittany frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Is he… Does he smile? Is he— Is he eating okay?”
“How should I know? We don’t like, live together. And yeah. He smiles, like every normal person.”
Some tight knot I didn’t know I had in my throat loosens, and I grin. “That’s great. Thanks. Have a good day.”
She turns and leaves again, and I watch her go. She’s very pretty, and very honest and straightforward. She’s the opposite of me, and maybe that’s what Jack wants. Maybe that’s what he needs.
I swallow what’s left of the knot and head toward the infirmary again.
Jemma is a pretty woman with brown hair and big dark eyes like a deer. She sits me down the second I walk in and peels the bandage on my arm back carefully. The smell is rotting flesh and stale cotton balls. She doesn’t even wrinkle her nose.
“Well, it’s looking good. You’re taking those antibiotics I gave you, right?”
“I made a candy necklace out of them and I’ve been chewing it in class.”
She fixes me with a stern gaze, and I sigh.
“Two a day with meals.”
Jemma smiles. “Good. You can’t imagine how dirty a human mouth is and what it can do to a wound.”
I fidget as she dresses my wound, my eyes catching on a fishbowl full of condoms she has on the counter. She unfortunately catches me staring.
“Are you sexually active?” Jemma asks.
“Nay, madam.”
“Do you plan on being sexually active?”
“In the entirety of my future as a living human being I would certainly hope so. But, you know. Things could change. Meteors could strike. The sun could go cold and peanut butter could stop being gross and I could get smart.”
Jemma stares at me forever. Fivever. Her brown eyes are huge and knowing and for a second I could swear she knows me, knows what I’m all about in a creepy crystal-ball way. And then her eyes soften, and I know she knows. She knows what happened without my saying much at all.
And it makes me angry—angry that I’m so obvious. Angry that I’m too weak to hide it anymore. The bruises and the booze and the flurry of make-outs have only made me weaker, and I didn’t want that shit. I wanted to be stronger. Better. More experienced.
“I’ve been having some problems,” I say carefully. Jemma takes out a clipboard slowly, like she knows she won’t be able to take notes on this at all.
“Where does it hurt?” she asks.
There’s a moment, a moment where I could get up and walk out and leave her to less complicated problems, problems that pills and casts and shots can fix.
“I tried shots for my problems, too,” I say finally. “Vodka shots. But it didn’t work because that’s not how it works. You can’t just shoot things over and over and expect them to get better.”
Jemma’s silent, writing fluidly.
“Bad things happen, and you tell yourself that’s life, because you’ve lived a while and you know bad things happen, and they’ll keep happening, but you try to stay alive even after they do because you know it isn’t all bad, so you keep moving, keep going, try to put space between you and the bad things so you forget about them, but they always catch up, and then they sit on your back and make you trip while you try to move forward and it sucks.” I knead my forehead with my knuckles. “It just fucking sucks.”
A couple sits outside the window below us, holding hands on the bench, and I want to be them and barf on them at the same time.
“And sometimes you get tripped so much and so hard you just feel like staying down, you know? Like, maybe you deserve to stay down, maybe it’s meant to be. Maybe it’s just easier to stay down. You don’t have the energy to haul your ass off the ground again, anyway.”
“It sounds terrible,” Jemma says softly.
“It’s the worst!” I laugh. “It’s everything you don’t want to happen to you. You think you’re strong and that you’ll always love living and want to live, but sometimes you get so tired…”
“You’re tired a lot, then.”
I shrug. “Sometimes. But I’m Isis Blake. I’m the opposite of tired. Derit. Being tired just isn’t something I do.”
“We all do it once in a while, Isis,” Jemma assures me. “No one is an exception.”
“But I’m special!” I whine. “You don’t understand! Crazy shit is my forte and I do stuff, the best stuff, and I never stop moving ever except when I am peeing and even then sometimes not. Side note: the janitor hates me.”
Jemma tries to hide the laugh-snort behind her hand, eyes twinkling, and suddenly I start laughing, too. But it’s a different laugh from the angry, short laughs I’ve been making lately—it’s loud and happy, and it only gets louder and happier, and it’s light, the lightest thing I’ve done in a long time.
“That wasn’t even my best joke.” I sigh when we both calm down. “And I broke rule numero uno.”
Jemma wipes away a tear. “Which is?”
“Never laugh at your own joke, because that means it’s probably not a very good one and also you look like an easily amused, self-absorbed asshole.”
“I see what you mean now,” she says. “Someone like you, so vibrant and funny, is rarely tired. It must be so strange for you when you are.”
“It’s like…like losing a leg but trying to run a race anyway,” I say. Jemma nods, then inhales.
“I know this isn’t going to sound very sensitive, and please don’t take this to mean I’m diagnosing you with anything, because I’m not qualified to do that, but does anyone in your family have a history of depression?”
I melt all over the chair dramatically and grumble. “My mom. But I don’t have it!” I protest, sitting straight up. “I swear to you I definitely don’t, because I’ve worked really hard to not have it and I’m happy all the time so I don’t have it. Ever. And I never will.”
Jemma nods and writes on the clipboard, but my words are so hollow and wrong-sounding I burn to fill them up with the truth. I squirrel my hands and clutch them together tight.
“I had it. Maybe. I think. When I was fourteen.”
“What made you think that?”
“I didn’t like myself. I still don’t a little. But I really didn’t like myself because I was huge and I thought being huge was wrong, but it’s not, but when you’re in love and a guy tells you you’re ugly and fat you start to believe it, you know? Also it wasn’t love. Maybe it was. But probably not, because it made me feel horrible, and love’s supposed to make you feel good.”
“Some people say it’s supposed to make you feel good and horrible at the same time.”
“Well, those people are
dumb and wrong.” I jut my chin. “That’s just…that’s just the old-man-poetry-romanticism of it. People like to sound deep, so they say pain is a part of love, but it’s not. Love is—”
“There is nothing about it that is ugly,” Jack says. “May I?”
I hesitate, then nod. He reaches around and brings my forearm up, gently running his fingers over the cigarette burns on my wrist. He traces around each circle with his thumb gently, so gently.
“It looks like a galaxy.” He smiles. “Full of stars and supernovas and conductive cryogeysers and a lot of wonderful science things I could go on to list that would probably bore the hell out of you.”
“—Love is being accepted and adored for who you are, scars and all.”
My eyes get wet and my lap gets wet and I curl in on myself, hugging my arms.
Now I know the difference.
Now I know what love is and what it isn’t.
Jemma puts the clipboard down and her arms up, enclosing me in them as the darkness comes rushing out of my mouth and into her sweater.
“I w-was…I was r-raped. When I was fourteen. By the guy I thought I loved.”
It pours out of me; it falls on the floor and pools on the tile and slithers down my cheeks. Four years of carefully silent suffering floods her office, and her lap, and I’m a stranger and she must hate me for it, but all she does is hug me closer, and I hate myself, I hate who I used to be and I hate who I’m trying to be, and the people I loved betrayed me, and I betrayed myself. I hid it away instead of telling—telling somebody, anybody—I stayed quiet instead of asking for help from somebody, anybody, and all the hurt is being pulled out of me sideways, the thorns scraping my mouth and eyes and this must be what it’s like to die, except the pain doesn’t end, not for hours and hours, and Jemma just holds me and cries with me and whispers I know over and over again, because she does know, because she went through it, too, and I’m not alone, not anymore.
Chapter Thirteen
Gregory Callan might be a busy man running a successful bodyguard firm, but that doesn’t stop him from enjoying the finer things in life, like dropping in on his employees on the job without a single warning. I open the dorm room this morning to find him with two cups of coffee, a fresh-pressed suit, and a jovial smile.