are good while I’m gone. No fighting or sassing Mom, okay? You’re my best girls. You have to stick together,” he says, grabbing the pan from the cupboard next to the stove.
I look at Mama, who is watching Drake with a soft smile on her face.
“Team Drake.” I smile. It’s small because I’m sad still, but I want Drake to be proud of me.
“Team Drake, I like that.” He grins. “What do you think, Ma?”
Mama steps up beside the counter next to me and runs a hand through my hair. She smiles, and hers is a little sad too, but she nods anyway.
“Team Drake, it is.”
We eat the best pancakes in the world and watch SpongeBob before I start struggling to keep my eyes open.
“Time for bed, Chicken Little,” Drake whispers to me, flicking the television off. Mama went to bed earlier, tired from working all day in the diner down the road, but she let me sit up with Drake for a little while longer, even though it’s already past my bedtime.
“Just five more minutes,” I whisper even though I really am tired.
He chuckles, making my head wobble where it’s resting on his shoulder.
“Tell me a story.” I snuggle closer to him, soaking in his warmth.
He sighs, but he doesn’t complain. He doesn’t ask which story either. It’s always Chicken Little, a favorite of mine since I was tiny, and even though I’m a big girl now, I still love the way he does the voices.
I lie there with a smile on my face listening to the tale of the chicken who wins everyone over in the end, even though the other animals thought he was weird. It makes me feel better about being the weird kid at school. Not that I needed friends, I had Drake.
I wake with a start, rolling over with a groan at how stiff I feel. I sit up and try to shrug off the dream that haunts me. After everything I’ve survived, I have no idea why this one hurts me so much more than the rest. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t long after that I figured out Drake had been telling me the kid-friendly version of my once favorite story based on the movie instead of the original tale. Perhaps if he had read me the true version, where everyone gets eaten by the manipulative fox, I would have known from the beginning that not every story has a happy ending.
Maybe then I could have prepared myself for the darkness that plagued me. Instead, I found out in the worst way possible that the covers on my bed didn’t keep the monsters away and when heroes leave, they never return. I would have known that when the sky falls, sometimes there is no one left to save you. You have to save yourself.
Chapter Three
You adapt quickly in this life, or you die. It’s survival of the fittest. It doesn’t matter if it’s foraging for discarded food in dumpsters or shooting the big bad wolf dead on the same bed he debased you. Your will to survive has to be stronger than the ever-present fear in your mind and the longing for escape that only death can offer.
That knowledge, that will to survive, is what got me through the first six brutal months on the streets.
I left that house on the hill, still wearing Clyde’s blood. I should have showered, that would have been smarter, but in a twisted way, his blood on my skin gave me strength. It made me feel like a warrior who had slain the beast. I earned every smear, every splatter, every drop coating my body, and I wore it proudly like a talisman showing the world that had tried and failed to swallow me whole—I survived.
I moved around the house like the ghost he made me, turning on the gas of the stove as I made sure nobody else was there. Making my way to his wet bar, I took the bottles of his favorite whiskey and doused my room with it, covering Clyde, offering him a farewell drink as his soul made its way back to hell.
Knowing I needed to get out of there, I got dressed, layering up my clothes and pulling a black beanie over my distinctive auburn hair, all while feeling strangely detached from the death scene a few feet from me. I had killed a man and not by accident. I’d collected his gun with one aim; shoot to kill. So why