out together.”
I shake my head and think of my sister. I can’t leave her, not now. I don’t even know where she is. “No. You can’t…I can’t.” Tears well up in my eyes. “I…” I start, wanting to explain further, but not being able to find the words. What am I trying to say? I love you please understand? I can’t say anything because any words that leave my lips won’t come out right. I’m not good with the ones that involve feelings, and right now, I’m feeling so much. “I want to, but I can’t leave because—”
The door handle jiggles followed by three hard thumps. “Who is in there? Mickey, is that you?”
“Come with me,” Pike says again, pulling up his pants. “Please, Mic. Come on.” He extends his hand, and all I can think about is that if I take it, my sister is as good as dead.
“Mickey?” the voice asks again.
A tear spills down my cheek. “I just can’t.”
Pike stares at me, and I can see the hurt in his eyes until, suddenly, it’s gone and replaced with something else. I know, in this moment, I’ve said the wrong thing. Something I can’t take back. The shift in him feels permanent. A new reality of what’s to come, and I can feel the intensity of whatever he’s just decided in my very bones. “For what it’s worth, I wanted this. I wanted you. What happens now, you should know, it’s on you.”
He begins to lift himself up to the window, and I charge him, yanking him down by his shirt. I hold his face in my hands, stand up on my tip-toes, and kiss him with everything I have. It’s too short and brief, and when I pull away, I only have a second to glimpse the look in his eyes. A look that says goodbye because something tells me that after what he’s just said, this is it for us.
The end.
“Mickey! Why is this shit locked!” Percy calls out.
Pike gives me one last confused, burning look, then leaps out the window, shutting it behind him. I straighten myself in the mirror and hope that the properly fucked look I’m sporting can also pass as drunk and disheveled.
I unlock the door, and Percy practically falls into the bathroom. He walks in and checks each of the stalls before noticing the broken mirror and the blood. “What the fuck happened?” Percy asks.
“I drank too much. I came in here to puke and fell right into the mirror,” I lie, swaying a little for emphasis.
Percy looks at the mirror again, and I think he’s about to call me out on the impossibility of falling into a mirror above the sink without taking a running leap at it, but his stance softens, and he seems to believe me because his face turns from surprise to concern. “Come with me. Let’s get that hand bandaged up for you.”
I wrap some toilet paper around my hand and shake my head. “I’ve got it. I have a first aid kit in my room.”
“You sure?” he asks.
I nod. “Percy, where’s Mindy?” I ask, holding a piece of toilet paper over my hand, blood soaking through the white tissue instantly.
“I told you not to go poking around.” He glances at my bleeding hand again. “She’s safe, Mickey. Go patch yourself up.”
Feeling defeated and used and sated all at the same time, I barrel past Percy through the main doors and up the stairs toward my room, leaving a bloody trail in my wake…and so much more.
Hours later, I’m in my small bed, feeling the beat of the music shaking the walls of my small room from the party still raging below. The moonlight shines through the window and casts light on my face.
I never cried when my family died. Not real tears. They were for show for the benefit of Darius and my commitment to my act about not knowing he was the one responsible for their demise. I didn’t have time for real tears then, and I don’t have time for them now.
My tears and my grief are my own, and I refuse to give them to him. The time to grieve isn’t now. It’s when this is all over. And I fear the grief on that day more than the killing that needs to be done by my own hands.
I’ve always been a loner. Even when I was living in a house with my sisters and my parents. I’d always find time to