one last thing that I need you to do.
Either you tell Levi that you killed his half brother, or I’ll send him, and the police, this video.
Attached file: adamsbirthdayparty.mp4
TWENTY
September 30
Grace
GETTING DRESSED IS HARD. MY FINGERS won’t move. I maneuver into my sweatshirt with my wrists, elbows. Yank on shorts. I never washed off my makeup.
Don’t be scared. Be something else. Empty isn’t working.
I can’t hold on to the handlebars of my bike, so I abandon it in the dew-wet grass of our lawn, dropping it softly so Mom and Dad won’t hear. I don’t need it. We walked the last time, too.
She wasn’t supposed to go alone. I was supposed to be there, a safety net in the background. Joy, don’t do anything without me. Don’t go anywhere without me. It’s not safe for either of us to ever be alone.
Only two cars pass me on the way there, the headlights slicing through the darkness.
As I get closer, I hear the bass down the deserted road, past all the trees. Fast, like the people are dancing to my heartbeat.
There’s a bonfire in the yard, barely controlled, but nobody’s watching it. This is the kind of party I thought we’d find that night. The kind of party where everyone is hungry, but it’s okay, because everyone is overflowing with themselves. When people take, there’s enough to go around. There’s still soemthing left behind.
I slip inside like I did at Cassius’s party, like a ghost. The furniture’s shoved to the side. A rotating black box spits blobs of colored light at the walls. I wind through laughter and screams. Underneath it all, there’s the quiet hungry growl of the quarry. Nobody else hears it.
There’s a hundred people packed together, one body with a million limbs. The house drinks me into the walls. An elbow knocks the breath out of my chest. Light moves dizzyingly over faces mashing together in front of me. I try to disappear, but there’s too many hands and everyone is so starving and there’s not enough left of me to feed anyone. Find Joy.
And there he is, detached from everyone, in the center of the mass, the hungriest of all, staggering to the beat. In the darkness his shape is feral. Flashes of red light illuminate every drop of sweat, his mindless, drunken grin.
He’ll look. He’ll see me. He’ll take what’s left. The fear knocks all my walls down at once and I feel everything. Everything.
I run. I fight through a jungle of people, and then a jungle of trees. There’s no moon, no stars. I lose myself in the dark. Branches snag me, trip me, cut me. I fall. My knees bleed more than when Joy shaved hers. I’m on my stomach in the dirt and dead leaves, just like when November and I broke into his house. I’ll always be running, running in circles. I’m in a cage made of my own bones and skin.
Some part of me sits back and watches me sob. Get over it.
I was wrong about being empty. I was always full. I just couldn’t see it.
People turn off the light when they don’t want to know what’s in the dark. Everyone’s afraid of the dark. They should be afraid of the light.
Pine needles scratch my cheek. Slowly the cold of the earth soaks into me, the truth with it. Tricking my sister into hurting my rapist was never going to help me. There was never an easy fix, a secret shortcut to being okay. I’ve always been screwed up, and now I’m screwing up Joy, too.
I stay, I don’t know how long, until I stop making noises. Then I realize the house isn’t making noises anymore, either.
I leave the woods.
The sky’s a different kind of blue now. The cars that were in the driveway are gone. I was in the woods for hours.
I left Joy alone for hours.
The house is full of beer bottles, pizza boxes, spilled liquids, but no people. In the silence, my heartbeat is deafening. Did Joy go home? Did she find him first?
“Grace, is that you?”
Cassius is stumbling toward me in the dark, hitting the edge of the dining room table. One of his eyes is bloodshot and swollen. His phone sticks out of his shirt pocket. He stops far away from me and stretches out a hand, like he’s reaching over some impossible distance.
“Where’s Joy?” I ask, my voice too loud.
“I . . . don’t know.”
“I asked you to find her.”
He sways, still drunk. His cheeks