We passed a highway sign for Pathosbury: Next Exit. Caiden’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, and I felt it like a current in my chest.
“Almost there,” he said, but it came out as if he’d bitten his tongue.
I watched the town appear out of the autumn haze, all battered strip malls and the faint outline of the old mill smokestack. The trees thinned, replaced by brittle telephone poles streaked with rust.
My pulse thudded in my ears. I wondered if everyone feels this way, like coming home is a kind of drowning.
Caiden slowed as we reached Main Street, the car creeping past the pharmacy, the gas station, the little market I’d once shoplifted a candy bar.
Home.
26
AMELIA
I hatedhow much I remembered, hated that my body responded with the dull ache of nostalgia for a place that had never loved me back.
It felt wrong, seeing it all exactly as I remembered, like a crime scene left untouched, the tape still fluttering in the wind. The town looked smaller, almost shrunken in the cold gray light, but the secrets it held had only grown heavier.
We passed the high school, the parking lot empty except for a broken-down pickup and a girl in a red jacket sitting on the curb, head bent over her phone.
I stared at her a long time, trying to imagine what it would be like to step out onto that parking lot with unbroken skin and the soft certainty that nothing would ever touch me. I couldn’t remember ever feeling that safe, but I wanted it for her so badly my teeth hurt.
When I finally looked away, Caiden was side-eyeing me, his eyes so dark they swallowed the light. “You think it’s still the same?” he asked, voice hoarse with the effort of speaking and not screaming.
“You mean the building or us?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
A beat of silence filled the car.
We both knew nothing here ever changed. The town devoured anything that tried.
I let the silence stretch, pulling tight over my sternum. Here it was: the same old game, pretending neither of us remembered that year when he made it his job to make me hate myself.
I tried to focus on the brown slush streaking up from the tires, but my mind kept circling the memory of sophomore year, the way he would catch my eye in the cafeteria and mouth the word worthless with a venomous clarity before melting back into his pack of wolves.
But he was the one who found me in the woods, after my breakdown days ago. He’d picked me up off the forest floor, cradled my worn body to his chest, and whispered “it’s okay” so many times it almost made it true.
I keep wondering which version of him was the real one.
I didn’t want to think about that year, but as soon as the high school disappeared in the rearview, the old memories spilled in, dark and vague. I remembered the day I’d gotten my period in the middle of third period and didn’t know until the end of class.
He’d been the first to notice, or at least the first to call it out. His voice carried over the din, a lazy drawl that made mockery sound like kindness. “Somebody get Langston a mop,” he’d said, and the laughter had been instantaneous, mean-spirited, and echoing even as I ran for the nurse’s office.
He’d found me in the hallway afterward, eyes colder than the sky outside, and handed me a wad of folded paper towels with a look so blank it made me want to scratch my own eyes out.
I never knew if it was meant as pity or if he just liked watching me squirm.
There were worse memories, of course. The time he’d cornered me in the stairwell and called me a parasite.
Or the time he’d pinned me against my locker, not hard, just enough, and whispered,“You’re not even worth the bruises.”
Looking back, I didn’t know why none of the teachers ever stepped in, why I never tried to break the cycle.
I tried to believe I was past it, but the evidence was everywhere. Even now, in the passenger seat, I could feel the hunger of that sorrow gnawing through me.
My own memories were a clattering of snapshots.
