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"What?" I taunt after him. "You don't like hearing the truth?"
He keeps going, walking straight ahead, and I'm afraid, shaking even as I see my one hope of getting out of here disappear, but even more than that, I'm angry.
Fuck him for bringing me down here.
Fuck him for locking me up.
And most of all fuck him for wanting me to confront my demons while he pretends his don't even exist.
I hate him. I hate him. I hate him!!!
Part of me hopes that if I think the words enough times, my wish will be granted, and they'll become true.
20
GABE
Ibolt up the stone stairs that lead out of the basement and run through the maintenance hallways and into pitch black. The gurgle of water and the buzz of electricity from somewhere close by intertwines with my uneven breath as I run. I move so fast that the motion-sensor lights don't even turn on until after I'm already past them and farther down the hallway. I've been here so often, it doesn't matter, though. The power could go out, and I'd find my way back to the surface in the dark.
My knuckles prickle with the urge to hit something, and I ball them into tight fists, trying to suffocate the urge. I can't give in to it now. Stone bricks and thick steel pipes surround me, and I can't split open my knuckles today or risk breaking the bones in my hand. The administration has already started searching the woods for Avery, bringing in search parties and hunting dogs. Not the police, though, not yet at least. She isn't even considered missing for forty-eight hours, and I'm sure Headmistress doesn't want the attention that comes with a missing student. Right now, I imagine they're still combing through the woods like they have a hope of locating her. Still, a broken hand would raise questions, and I can't risk them looking inward and zeroing in on me. I need time to fix my Firefly.
I tighten my fists, feeling my knuckles pop, and bound through the maze of hallways until I reach the flight of stairs that wind all the way up to the ground floor. I hadn't planned on leaving her so soon, but if she said one more word about my failures, I was going to prove I wasn't a failure . . . well, at killing her, at least.
She has food, water, and a bucket, and I left the lights on for her. What else could she need? Whatever. It doesn't matter anyway. I need time to decompress before I fucking explode.
Stop thinking about her, Gabe!
What is it about her that always makes me lose my cool?
Normally, the flames would keep the noise at bay, but not today, not with her. If I had taken my lighter out in her cell, I wouldn't have found it to be calming. I wouldn't have calmed until I watched her sizzle.
Fuck, I let her get to me. She'sstillgetting to me, hammering away at my ability to repress. If she gets through, I'm going to kill her, and that won't be good for either one of us.
Control yourself, Gabriel!
I shouldn't have let her get to me. She's angry and afraid, which is understandable, given I locked her up so many feet underground that the devil has a better chance of hearing her than God. The basement is about as isolated as it gets at the Asylum, even more secluded than the cemetery on the outskirts of campus and the overgrown mausoleums that stand watch there.
The basement isn't really a basement. It's more like a cavern. It's deep underground, below even the morgue and doctors' offices originally built during the typhus outbreak, and all the way down to the old root cellar. The cellar was converted to the maintenance tunnels when they installed electricity in the mid-twentieth century and then central heating and air conditioning thereafter. Or that's what I've been able to learn on the rare occasion the internet works.
I locked her up in a place where no one would hear her screams or find her body. She knows it too. I can see it in the frantic jitter of her gaze every time something skitters in the dark. My Firefly is scared, and she's taking it out on me. I guess that's expected too. I am the one who locked her up down there, after all. I could take her snarky comments, her sarcasm, and her eye rolls, but I can't take her sounding like my father.
She said I was too weak to keep the noise away, and she's right, goddammit. I walk around campus, letting the pyros worship me, doing whatever I want, and acting like I'm better than everyone else, but I'm not. Outside these walls, I'm just another fucked-up guy with a mental illness that society doesn't know what to do with. I'm a number, not a name, no matter how much I pretend otherwise. I'm not special, and my father knows it, just like she does. That's why he sent me here.
She even talked to me like my father does, using theexactsame tone, the one that makes me feel lower than dog shit. My father compared me to my mother's dog once, a Pomeranian that she decorates with different colored bows depending on the occasion. He said that the dog was smarter than me because at least the dog could follow commands. It didn't matter that I couldn't follow his commands because he was breathing down my neck and ordering me to perform like a trained monkey. When I couldn't read the words on the page and they all jumbled together, he extinguished his cigar against the top of my hand. You can still see the scar when the light hits it just right. I'd like to see my mother's dog keep its cool under those circumstances.
The backs of my thighs burn like a bitch as I exit the stairwell and find the hallway blissfully empty. I really need to step up my cardio if I'm going to be making multiple visits to my Firefly every day. I walk it off and beeline to my dormitory. My knuckles are still craving a good punch or two, and my lighter isn't doing shit to quiet the rising tide of noise at the moment.
I roll the wheel, press the button, and burn the inside of my index finger like I always do.
It does nothing to quell the furious drumming of my heart or the replay of her insults like I'm listening to Avery's Top 40 hits.
. . . are you stupid or self-absorbed . . .
. . . you're just as fucked up and human as the rest of us . . .
. . . it's pretty pathetic you can't cope . . .
Shut up, shut up, shut up!!!
