She goes down hard, with a gasp, and I ignore it, starting back toward the kitchen, only to change my mind at the last second and turn—veer—left, where I see another door. I don’t want to leave Lucas. I want to stay close, but I don’t want to deal with her.
It’s a bedroom. I slam the door shut behind me and lock it, trying to block out Sam’s voice as she calls after me. I feel a fire burning under my skin as I thread my hands through my hair and start pacing that slice of space between the bed’s stripped mattress and the busted dresser. My fingers snare in the curls, but I don’t care. I want anything, anything, to distract me from the throbbing pain in my back. I can’t stop shaking.
She did this to him.
This is her fault.
I hate her, I hate her, I hate her—
I’m crying so hard I have to sit down, and I hate myself for it. I haven’t let myself cry in years. It was so bad at first, right when they brought me to the Blank Rooms, because I couldn’t stop seeing Mom and Dad, and the pain in my hand—the one the PSFs broke dragging me away from Lucas—kept me up all night. I cried until I thought I would drown in myself. The only way to pull myself up and out was to remember that I’d be out of there eventually. I knew Lucas would find me, and we’d figure out what to do, what happened to Mom and Dad…their bodies, if they were given a funeral, where they were buried.
There’s a sound I don’t recognize—it’s one I haven’t ever heard before from her. I turn toward the door, straining my ears to hear if she really is crying, too. But when she speaks, Sam sounds so calm it’s infuriating. “The people who did this to him…Lucas called them Trainers. I don’t know what they did to him and the others, but this is the only way he’ll respond. I’ve been trying to get through to him in other ways, but I haven’t had any luck.”
Of course, because she got to be with the real Lucas in her camp before they did…this to him.
No. I don’t want to think about her being in her camp for years. I don’t want to picture her parents just ditching her at school. I don’t care that she got that snake bite, that it almost killed her. I don’t want to feel sorry for her.
I stand up, my hands closing around the old brass handle of one of the dresser drawers, and just pull. There’s so much fury powering the movement that the heavy wood comes flying out and I stumble back. I let it fall, kicking it until one of the sides breaks. The drawer liner is covered with daisies, and a shower of brittle receipts and a few buttons scatter across the floor.
I reach for the next drawer and do it again, again, again, and there’s something here, there’s something good in wrecking this the way that I’m wrecked. I don’t stop until I run out of drawers, and then it’s only to see what I can smash next.
“I’m sorry…Mia, I know it’s my fault, I’m sorry,” Sam is saying. I think she’s been talking this whole time, and I just haven’t heard her over the thunder pumping through my ears. “I tried to get him to leave—”
“Not hard enough! You should have made him go!”
“I know,” she says, “I tried, he wouldn’t—”
“You should have tried harder! You should have done everything you could! And now he’s—he’s—”
Gone. He’s here, but a thousand miles away. He isn’t just disappearing into himself, the way he used to when he got tangled up in one of his daydreams. They’ve erased him, drained him of every piece of kindness and love that added up to who he is. They hurt him, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
“Don’t shut me out,” Sam pleads. “He’ll never forgive me if he knows you saw him like this…that he did that to you. I think he’s still there, I think he’s in there, and we just have to—” The Sam I grew up with would have shouted me right back down. This one just sounds like she’s been dragged off a cliff by her hair and left there to dangle. Exhaustion is grinding her words to dust, and I can feel them drifting down between us like sand