Chapter Sixteen
Dear self,
Edward is a vampire.
Holy.
Fuck.
Edward is a vampire.
Sincerely,Yourself
When I wake up, I’m in the park.
It’s the one down on Mill Street with the dogwoods that don’t flower, the fountain that never runs, and the infestation of mourning doves. The playground equipment is super outdated, wood and metal, and falling over. It’s on the south side of town, and no one ever plays here because a herd of elk like to sleep here, which means the grass is forever littered with poop. I’m lying underneath the swing set, wood chips under my knees and elbows, the swings creaking above my head.
I take a mental inventory before I try to move.
I have my blue sweats on. The legs are hiked up around my knees. I have no shirt on, but I’m wearing one of my fancy lace bras. The underwire on the right side is popped out, stabbing me in the rib. I have gloves on, Dad’s old stinky wool ones, but I’m only wearing one sock. If I had a mirror, I’d know for certain I had a black eye. At the moment, without a mirror and judging just by the pain, I’m 98% certain I have a black eye. I press my fingers gently all around the socket, and it smarts fire across my forehead.
“Hey.”
“What the fuck?” I scream, scrabbling away from the disembodied voice of Edward somewhere to my right. Pain darts through my hand and up my arm and lodges at the base of my skull, setting off flashes behind my eyes and making the whole world tilt oddly to the side. My eye throbs; my left foot is numb, and my head is full of buzzing like there’s an angry swarm of bees trapped between my ears.
“Are you ok?” he asks, and I roll my eyes. What a fucking stupid question. I wrap my arms around my chest, suddenly freezing.
“No. Do I look ok?” I grumble, trying not to cry.
“No. You don’t.” He shakes his head and shrugs out of his jacket. I expect to be enveloped in warmth, but I’m not. It’s just cold. Cold like he left the jacket in his car all night long. I push my arms through the sleeves anyway, still struggling not to cry. Everything is terrible. I’m cold, sore, and barely dressed. Edward is in that same fucking suit and looks just as beautiful as ever.
I am like a whale that intentionally beached itself for no good reason.
“Why are you here?” I ask glumly, inspecting my feet. They’re covered in mud and blood, and I don’t even want to know which route I took to get here.
“I followed you.”
“You followed me?”
Great.
Edward nods but doesn’t elaborate. I don’t know what I just did or how long I did it for, but I am missing suspicious pieces of clothing, and I’m at least a mile and half from home. Nothing about the last few hours could have been that innocent.
“What happened?” I ask, curious. The walking is like a big, empty, black hole I can’t see the bottom or even the top, and I want to know. Sort of. Mostly. Maybe not. But I can’t help the curiosity: it’s like a leech you only realize is sucked to your leg when you’re out of the water and walking home. It’s like the sewing needle you lost two months ago that suddenly stabs you, even though you’ve sat in the same spot on the couch a million times since then. It’s like that yowling alley cat you wished death upon for months and then, one night, it’s gone, and you kind of miss it.
“You left your house. Took off some clothes. Walked here. Fell off that slide.” He looks up at the old rickety slide that is way too high and steep to be safe for children. No wonder my foot is numb. No wonder my underwire is poking out, and my eye is black, and my head is full of bees.
“What are you looking for when you walk?” he asks me.
“How should I know?” I snap, my voice hard as rock. My face feels even harder, like I was cut from limestone a billion centuries old. I want to tell him to shut up. Want to tell him to keep talking. To leave me alone, but don’t go too far. To walk me home, but stay a safe distance away. I want to tell him to fuck off and never talk to me again, but I also really want to kiss him. I feel bad about being a giant ball of contradiction and huff out a bunch of air, picking dried bits of mud off my feet. “Alice, probably,” I admit.
“Why do you want to find her so badly?”
“You mean besides the fact that she’s my little sister?” I glare at him. Duh.
I stare off at the playground equipment, the gentle sway of a swing and the moonlight reflection on the old metal slide, and I hate this place. Hate it because it was always Alice’s favorite. She never wanted to go to the newer, fancier park on the other side of town: the one with the new plastic slides, swings shaped like armchairs, and cushy rubber matting beneath the equipment. No, she liked this park with the damn doves, the elk poop, and the wood that gave you splinters when you rubbed up against it too hard. I think about Rose. Not about her dead and face down in my living room but about her frizzy red hair and double-colored eyes and twisted front tooth and that Alice was the only other kid I ever saw her with.
“She was a good kid, you know? I mean, annoying as fuck, but a good kid. She liked to play dress up, pretend she was a princess or a doctor or an alien. She gave me shit if I picked flowers. She ate whatever gross dinner my mother made and didn’t complain about it like I did. She was always hanging out with the weird kids. She was sweet to everyone. She was just... good, you know?”
“And what if you don’t like what you find?” he asks, which is the shittiest question because it’s the only one I haven’t asked myself yet and for good reason. I imagine Alice with mummy skin. As a pile of bones. Buried, or maybe not buried. There’s still some slim possibility that she’s not actually dead, but even I’m beginning to accept that this possibility is fading rapidly. She’s probably dead. And probably a sudsy pile of soap. But I still have to look.
“I don’t know,” I sigh. “But I have to find her.”
I look over at Edward, and he’s watching me. Hard. Eyes on my mouth like he could understand me better if he saw the words leaving my lips. He’s licking his own lips like he’s hungry, and it’s that exact moment that I remember he’s a vampire.
“Don’t get any funny ideas,” I snap, my hands clamping around my neck to hide my thumping pulse, and Edward blinks, his eyes returning to mine and his eyebrows high in his forehead.
“I wasn’t - I wasn’t getting funny ideas,” he stutters, which I thought he was too cool and collected to do. “I can feel your heart,” he finally says.
“What the fuck do you mean, you can feel it?” I’m looking at him like he’s crazy because who says stuff like that? Guys in knockoff Lifetime movies, that’s who. Vampires who are like a hundred years old and don’t know how fucking creepy they sound when they say stuff like that, that’s who.
“I can feel it beating. It’s going too fast. You should take some deep breaths, calm down.” He sounds like he’s giving me instructions on how to install a car battery.
“You say the creepiest shit sometimes.”
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