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It’s me. The stillness is me.
I feel a bitter, breathless not-quite smile creeping up my cheek. It feels as wrong and ugly as I’m sure it looks.
I run my tongue over my lips, allowing myself to finally take a breath. Gently turning the wheel, I ease my foot back on the gas, and straighten the car once more.
My pulse is pounding. Sweat coats my hands, and the back of my neck. I ease a hand off the wheel once I’m moving again—at a much more reasonable speed—and run it through my tangled dirty blond hair, pushing it back off my face. My fingers tremble from the rush, teeth threatening to chatter.
Much better.
I work my jaw, crack my neck—reacquaint myself with the bones and flesh that make up my body, like they haven’t abandoned me these last six months.
As if it’s not all a farce, hiding nothing but an empty husk.
The song playing from my speakers draws to a perfectly timed close, just as I spot my turn up ahead, indicated only by a single white X sprayed over a telephone pole. Before the next song kicks on, I lower the volume to a whisper.
There are no street signs out here in the boonies, but everyone knows pretty much everyone and where everything is around here. Even someone like me, a recluse, and a stoner one at that, who’s all but had these backroads memorized for years now.
The road I turn onto is narrow, even more narrow than the one I just turned off—fit for only a single lane. It dips down through fields of crushed corn husks—a wintry, barren wasteland—and then just up ahead, over another hill, past more woods, there will be an abandoned farm.
Old man Hollinger’s place.
He’s in a nursing home now, and his grandson has all but turned his property into party central these last couple years, seemingly doing his best to try to run the place literally into the ground.
It’s the smoke and embers swaying and dancing over the treetops I see first. And then there’s a break—a clearing—and it’s the sea of cars, all parked haphazardly surrounding a rundown farmhouse half-buried by more trees and overgrown weeds. Most cars sit dark and silent, but a few are lit up, casting harsh shadows all about the woods and the white slatted two-story with the sinking awning and crooked porch.
A couple of girls smoking next to a black Dodge pivot their heads, sparing my arrival an ambivalent glance before returning to their conversation. I vaguely recognize them from school.
I ease down the brakes and turn the wheel, swinging the car off to the side, before slamming to a stop. Shifting into park, I reach for the key, kill the engine.
And in the plummeting silence, I freeze, momentarily choked by the quiet.
My heart thumps heavily in my chest, and what little life I felt moments ago, fizzles just as quick as it came.
I don’t even call it numbness anymore.
Numbness is supposed to be fleeting.
There’s supposed to be an end in sight.
But barring a fucking miracle, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But at least when I’m alone, I can sit with it—get lost in it—and not try to keep up fucking pretenses.
There’s a tapping on my window and I flinch, whirling around. The narrow figure steps back into the shadows, head hanging, her black hair curtained around her face shining like oil in the haze of light.
The pale pink dress she’s wearing stands at stark odds with the oversized black leather jacket half-covering it—courtesy of her cousin, I assume—and the dull grays and browns of the wooded night pressing in around her.
The pink also stands at odds with the hard look on her round face when I open the door and peer up at her, though I don’t have far to go.
Ivaiah McAllister is tiny, even at fifteen. Barely scraping five-foot. She seems even smaller out here, in the dead of night, all but swallowed up by a too-big jacket.
I climb out, towering over her by several inches.
She crosses her arms and stands as tall as she can get, jutting out her chin. Her green eyes dart around, looking everywhere but at my face.
I make her uncomfortable, I think. Hell, I make a lot of people uncomfortable these days, even my own parents…
Especially them.
I clear my throat. “Any word?” I rasp, feeling my lips move, but barely register that it’s my voice speaking them.
