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She reaches down and grabs a fistful of hair from the top of my head, using it to force me to my feet. “And you’ve ruined my marriage, too. God, if no one were watching, I’d throw you out on your ass so fast. I can’t wait to be done with you. Just a few more months.”
‘Much less than that,’I think. The days had been crawling since Darci died, but we were still barreling toward my eighteenth birthday.
“Get out of my sight,” she snarls, releasing me. “And you stay away from him. Don’t talk to anyone about himorwhat happened.”
I take a few steps backward, pick my bag up from the ground, and glance toward the kitchen.
“Grace, I—” I start weakly.
“Upstairs,” she says, interrupting me. “Not the kitchen. There’s nothing in there for you. I’d better not see anything missing from the fridge or the pantry in the morning, either.”
I head toward the staircase and then down to my room at the end of the hall. I pull open the door, close it behind me, then change into pajama pants and a t-shirt and crawl into bed. I pull the covers up to my shoulders and sob quietly into my pillow, knowing I’ll be in trouble if I make a sound. I stay like that for a while, the tears bringing at least some relief to the weight crushing my chest and distracting me from my aching, empty stomach.
This is the only downside to when he’s gone. I hate the sham family dinners; I hate the fear. But I hate being hungry, too.
I wait until long after I hear her bedroom door close before I get up. I lie flat on my stomach and slide under the bed, slowly and quietly removing the loose board from the floor. I open the shoebox lid then take the phone and the money I found on the bus and add it to my stash.
I shuffle through the box’s contents until I find another cell phone and remove it for the first time in months. Then, I reach further into the hole, feeling around until my fingers brush against plastic. I grasp the bag and extract it from my hiding place as well before replacing the board and sliding out from under the bed. I remove the black skull hoodie from the plastic bag and pull it over my head before crawling back under the covers. It still smells like him. I can still make out his fabric softener and the cedar and sandalwood of his cologne. I power on the phone—surprised to find it still works—and stare at the one contact in my list.
No new messages.
Of course not. He probably has a different phone number, and even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t want to talk to me.
I lie awake for hours, thinking of everything I wish I could say to him, just like I have every night for over four months. The only difference is that before tonight, I thought I’d never get to see him again.
And when it happens in my head, he doesn’t grab me by my throat and tell me he wants to kill me. But I don’t know why I’d expect any better after what I did.
I pull the collar of the hoodie over my nose and breathe it in, my eyes watering as my mind takes me back to Devon’s car on a cool spring night with the windows down, the music turned up, and a secret.Oursecret.
I swallow a lump in my throat.
I’d sell my soul to try again if I thought I still had one. I’d give anything to go back and spend five more minutes in that car, to hit repeat on that last song and drive around the block one more time. But this is reality, and we don’t get do-overs.
Only one life per customer. Try not to fuck it up.
But that’s what I did.
I let the tears soak into the fabric until, eventually, sleep comes for me.
“Go back upstairs, Devon. No one wants you here,” my stepsister Darci snaps as I pass through the living room to the kitchen.
“I need sustenance,” I tell her. “If I die upstairs, our parents probably won’t be happy.”
“They’ll be the only ones,” she sneers. “Make it quick.”
I walk through the group of jocks and cheerleaders I wouldn’t want to be around anyway and head for the refrigerator.
“So fucking weird, guys. I’m sorry,” she says as I pass. I roll my eyes hard enough that I’m surprised they don’t get stuck in the back of my head. “I literally paid him twenty bucks not to come down here and get fucking loser all over us.”
“Stop, Darci,” Audrey’s nails-on-a-fucking-chalkboard voice exclaims. “He’s going to put a spell on us or something.”
“I already did,” I tell them. “It’s called the Zero Fucking Personality spell.”
“Just get your fucking…whatever you said and go back upstairs. Or I want a refund.”
“Sustenance,” I tell her. “Look it up.”
I walk into the kitchen and find another one of Darci’s…friends? Are any of them actually her friends? Anyway, it’s Ally. She’s leaning over the kitchen island, scarfing down pizza, and looks embarrassed that I caught her. I’m pretty sure she’s the only one of those girls that fucking eats, even though she doesn’t look like it. It’s hard to tell, though, under her baggy jeans and oversized sweatshirt.
