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But of course I don’t.
I stay glued to my bed like I’m tied down, like the invisible manacles are real. I ignore my racing thoughts and twitching fingers.
It’s a few minutes later when the screaming starts, echoing down the hallways and through the night, and I get goose-bumps because I have a startling realization.
Dare is in the hospital, not here.
The screaming has never been his.
I’m confused, shocked, unsettled.
I focus on the wailing, on the shrieks, and I ponder life here at Whitley. Nothing is what it seems, I guess. I’m not sure who I can trust, who I can’t.
The screams finally dwindle, then die out, and I’m able to relax, my muscles sinking into my sheets.
Nothing is what it seems, and I know nothing.
All I know for sure is that Dare is an outcast, frowned upon by everyone, and I hate that. It’s unfair. If I could change that, I would. Because Dare deserves the moon and the stars and everything in between.
Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll somehow figure out a way to change it.
I fall asleep with my teeth gritted together. I relax my body, and focus on Dare. I focus on what the family would be like if he hadn’t been born into it, if he was safe somewhere else.
I love him enough to want that for him, even if it means he’d be gone from me.
The thought of being apart from him breaks my heart into jagged shards, but the thought of him laughing and running through a loving home, a home where he is appreciated, puts the shards back together.
He deserves that.
He does.
* * *
When I wake in the morning, I eye everyone with suspicion at breakfast.
I’ve always thought Dare was screaming, that Richard was hurting him in the night, that everyone was closing their eyes to it, turning their backs on what was happening.
But if that’s not the case, and thank God, then what is happening here?
My mother quietly picks at her breakfast and I shove my food around my plate, ignoring Finn’s concerned stares and my grandmother’s coldness.
My grandmother’s fingers are like spiders, long and thin, as they curl around her water glass. Her eyes are steel as she looks at me over the rim. I look away. At the wall, at the table, at my own arm. At anything but her cold eyes.
I trace the outline of the vein on my wrist as it throbs against my skin, my life’s blood pulse, pulse, pulsing through me. The blood is blue, the blood is red, the blood is mine. I stare at the skin, at the bump, at the vein. It bends with my arm, it caves when I move, it--
“Calla?”
My mother interrupts my thoughts and I yank my attention from my arm to my mother.
“Yes?”
“Don’t stray too far today,” she instructs, and something is troubled on her face. Something disturbs her perfect features.
Something.
Something.
What is it?
