Strangely Normal - By Tess Oliver Page 0,71

kissed my shoulder and I relaxed against him. His rough fingers dragged a tantalizing path up my bare thigh. “I need this, Eden. I need you.”

CHAPTER 21

The morning after the Teresa disaster, Jude and Cole had returned to work and Finley had slept late. I stayed in my room and read, waiting for her to wake. When she finally did, instead of stopping at my door to burst in, climb on my bed, and tell me what our day’s activities would be she walked past. I hopped over to the door and peered out.

Finley was dressed in gray sweats with no bracelets or other adornments, just a gloomy expression. Some Pig followed behind closely, most likely wondering why breakfast had been skipped.

I followed her downstairs but didn’t say a word, and she didn’t look back to speak to me. A cold knot formed in my chest, and all of Jude’s warnings and predictions bounced around in my head. Still I felt confident that Finley could be easily snapped out of this strange dark mood. By the end of that first day with the other Finley, I realized that I was a completely ignorant fool.

Over the next several days, I watched Finley evolve from a petite force of nature who could light up a room with her energy to a pale, withdrawn girl who hovered around the house like a gloomy mist. Aside from her tiny stature, white blonde hair, and blue eyes, which had lost their luster completely, there was nothing about Finley I recognized. She spent the entire day huddled in a tight, impenetrable ball of silence, speaking more words to her pig than to me. She had few words for her brothers too, and the strain of it was showing heavily on their faces. Her abrupt plummet into depression had brought the entire mood of the house down, and even Jude and I hardly looked at each other. I felt completely helpless and completely out of my depth. There was nothing I could do except sit and hope she would somehow lift out of it.

Jude and Cole seemed to be working extra long hours, and I felt certain that it was purposeful to avoid being home. Several times, they’d argued about whether or not they should call their dad home, but they compromised on just letting him know that she was feeling down. And feeling down was a humongous understatement. Feeling down comes from losing your favorite necklace. Feeling down comes from starting your period the day before the class pool party. Feeling down comes from forgetting the homework you spent two hours on the night before. Finley had long passed feeling down. She seemed to have slipped into a long black tunnel where no light could be seen on either end.

***

A knock on the door roused me from a restless sleep. It was just after six. I shuffled to the door and opened it. Jude was standing in the hallway dressed for work. He stared down at a phone on the palm of his hand. He’d hardly looked me in the eye for the past few days, almost as if he were embarrassed by the whole situation or as if he felt like he’d failed his sister in some way.

“You need a phone,” he said in a tone that was completely foreign and distant. “I put our phone numbers in there. Call if you need us.”

A lump the size of an orange formed in my throat. He spoke to me almost as if we were strangers, and suddenly, I wanted to be far away from this place and back with my kooky but normal family. Finley had not been carrying her phone, and I was sure it was no longer charged. So I had no way to communicate with my family. They had planned to call me with their new number and address the moment they arrived. Now I had no idea where they were or how to reach them and they were no doubt worried about the loss of contact. In that respect, it was hard not be angry at Finley for being so self-absorbed in her own problems that now I was just an employee who was there to keep an eye on her. For the first time since I’d arrived, I felt that she was regretting my presence as much as I was regretting being there.

I responded to Jude with the same distant tone, only I had to make a conscious effort to make