Grim and Darling

Chapter Fourteen

I sit on the highway for half an hour before I finally work up the courage to turn down the driveway.

Dad let me borrow the pickup. It’s the first time. Ever. I’ve never driven alone, never wanted to or needed to before because no friends means nowhere to be. Until now. Until Edward. When I asked Dad for the keys this morning, he looked shocked enough to pass out in his reheated spaghetti.

“Where are you going?” he asked, sounding like there’s nowhere a girl like me would want to be other than right there in that kitchen with the spaghetti and the memories and the stifling father-daughter awkwardness. I shrugged. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Certainly not “There’s this creepy, cold, totally hot guy who has been hanging around for some reason, and he finally told me where he lives, so I want to go stalk him.’

I’m pretty sure that would go over like a lead balloon.

“Not out to the Rez, right?” Dad’s big bushy eyebrows smashed together like two caterpillars getting frisky, and I had to try so hard not to laugh out loud because that was totally mean, and he’d probably think I wasn’t taking this Rez thing seriously enough. Billy Black’s death was still unsolved, and even though the coroner thought it was an animal attack, some people are more animal than human, so who knows, really?

“No. Just. . . around, I guess.” I shrugged again. This was awkward. Really awkward. He kept frowning at me for what felt like forever before he shook his head and seemed to give in.

“Ok, but be easy on her.” He dropped the keys into my palm, still warm from his pocket. “She’s a hell of a lot older than you and twice as stubborn. Double pump the clutch, and remember that the left blinker doesn’t work. Use your arm signals. I don’t want to have to pull you over later.”

I fled before I had to ask him how to double pump anything.

The driveway is just how I imagined it: so overgrown that it’s barely a dent in the foliage. There aren’t any tire marks in the dirt ruts that cut through the grass, at least not that I can tell, and I wonder just how Edward gets to and from town without a car. He runs like a bullet, but that doesn’t mean he runs back and forth every day, right? I mean, he’s way too sick and wheezy for that. I still can’t shake the fact that he reminds me of a doctor who injected himself with some disease just to try out a new cure, still unsure if it’s going to work even as he’s sticking a needle into his arm.

I bump through the woods, fighting to keep the old truck’s wheels in the sunken tracks, wondering just what the fuck I’m doing. Part of me thinks I’m going to show up there and march right in the front door without even knocking, drag him to his couch to kiss him crazy for a while; go silly and stupid on not enough air and too much boy. Another part of me is pretty sure I’m going to turn around before I even get there, that I’m not brave enough or brash enough or even dumb enough to be doing this right now. There’s an even another part of me that hopes he’ll yell at me, chase me away, tell me to go home.

Then maybe I’ll never see him again because I’ve never been more confused about anything in my life before he showed up and threw the whole thing upside down.

Before I have a chance to get freaked out and eight-point turn the truck around, I’m breaking through the trees, and there it is.

The house is enormous. Giant like it should have been a hotel. A hostel. An orphanage. There have got to be fifty rooms, and there are windows everywhere. There’s a big wide porch and a big gabled roof. It would almost look elegant with those columns, the black shutters, and the red door, except that the paint is peeling, and the stairs are sagging, and a few of those shutters are hanging on by a thread. It looks fancy from far away and kind of shitty the closer I get. The truck crawls to a halt in the grassy driveway, and I stare up at the place, expecting crows on the roof and ghosts in the windows and something living underneath the porch. I can’t believe he lives here because no one should live here.

It’s definitely haunted.

“You’re here.”

I scream. Loudly. And almost faint. There are stars and black fuzz and everything warps wildly. I’m pretty sure my heart fled clear down to my feet. My stomach is in my mouth, and all of my blood in in my brain. Edward puts a hand on my back through my open window as I fight to regain my breath. I push him away, flapping my hands in the air like a drowned bird.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” I pant, my vision stabilizing, and my heart slowly edging back into its proper place between my lungs.

“I’m sorry. I forget that hu-” His eyes go wide, and he lets out a sharp breath. “Girls,” he corrects himself.  “I forget that girls startle so easily.”

“It’s not just girls,” I hiss, resisting the urge to call him a sexist jerk. Or worse. “I’m pretty sure anyone would freak out if you snuck up on them like that.”

“I think it’s fair to say that you snuck up on me, too. What are you doing here?”

“You’ve been to my house.” I say, and even though I don’t mean for it to, my voice sounds accusing anyway. I get out of the truck, the cool air on my flushed cheeks making my skin prickle sweaty and goosebumped.

“I like your house better.”

“Why?” I ask. My house could fit in the living room of his. My house has a rotting foundation and asbestos siding and the non-existent ghost of an eight-year-old. It might not be haunted the way his is, but it feels emptier somehow.

“Because you’re there.” His answer is absent, thoughtless, as though it came easy without a bunch of justification or convincing or even editing. Like he meant it. Like he didn’t even think for a moment about not saying it. I blush. Hard. Cheeks flaming and ears on fire and I shuffle in the overgrown grass beside him, fingering the frayed edges of my cut-off shorts and resisting the urge to cross my arms over my chest.

My scuffed up sneakers are just inches away from his shiny shoes.       

There’s something about him that makes me feel clumsy and unpolished. Like I shouldn’t be here in my chucks and unbrushed hair. Like I should be dressed in some fancy black ball gown, reclining on a velvet fainting couch with pearls around my neck and a glass of something alcoholic in my hand. Like my hair should be in ringlets and my nails should be painted.

Like I should be elegantly anguished, but I’m not.

I’m just disheveled anxiety.

“You’re not going to invite me inside?” I rub the top of my sneaker against the back of my leg.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says, taking a sharp step back like he’s worried I might try to tarnish his virtue or take advantage of his virginal heart or something. He has his hands in his pockets and his eyes on his shoes, and I expect a blush, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, he goes grey.

“Why not? I won’t try to kiss you or anything,” I tease, slapping on a forced grin because I’d actually thought about doing exactly that on the way here. The faint disappointment that I won’t get to do such a thing is stronger than I thought it would be.

“That’s a shame.” He stares at me so hard I swear he’s going to burn a hole right through me.

“Why isn’t it a good idea then? Me coming inside?”

He glances toward the house, the big dark windows and the heavy red door, his face puckered and his hands twitching nervously at his sides.

“Haunted, remember?”

---

I go home and spend the entire night wondering what he meant by “That’s a shame.”

Next

AN:

I wrote Hadley Hemingway a mushy love letter. It's over at The Lemonade Stand, as part of their grammar gratitude special feature. I cried lots while writing it, and had to reread it eleven billion time because I didn't have a beta to look it over. There's still mistakes in it. 

Check it out - it says more than I ever could here:

Bee's love letter to Hadley

Grim and Darling

CHAPTER SIX

Dear Self,

You wake up in Mrs. Sherman’s flower bed with your mouth tasting of metal.

You are cold, and shivering, and slimey. In the damp light from the window, you can see a speckle of wet across your arms and hands, and when you wipe your face, your palms come back glistening. Inky black, but you know it’s not ink. For all you know, you are the blood-battered hostage of a war. The gutted victim of a homicide. The bystander to a triple takedown.

But you don’t know anything.

All you know is your mouth tastes horrible, and you need to get home.

There are roses around your ears and violets between your fingers, and you’ve crushed her peonies beneath your feet. You can hear her from the house, the off-key singing she does because she’s still stuck in a youth spent chasing a Broadway dream that died somewhere in the Midwest with a positive pregnancy test and a bad case of deadbeat dad. She was probably wearing that see-through robe and smoking those black cigarettes, indulging her drinking problem with a mixture of gin and whiskey She was probably inspecting every wrinkle in the mirror, pulling her temples back, and her chin up, and her lips tight over her teeth.

She was probably going to come outside in the morning and flip her shit over her ruined flower bed.

You duck through the darkened yard, avoiding the glow from the windows like some dark nocturnal creature. Mrs. Sherman lived on the complete opposite side of town, and it’s kind of amazing that you made it this far without getting picked up by the cops. Thank god for that, because you’re only wearing a bra and a pair of sweatpants, and you’re fucking freezing. You hop fences and run down alleyways to get home, hiding behind some especially smelly trash cans when one of those cop cars rolls slowly by. You scare a cat that screeches beneath someone’s porch and fling yourself into the dark when the living room light bursts on. You get caught up in a wild morning-glory bush that’s eating up a fence you scrambled over, and you end up trailing flowers all the way back to your house.

You should have known something was wrong.

You should have known.

Even from the end of the driveway, the house felt hollow. Like the space in a bowl waiting to be filled, like the see-through squares of a window, suddenly empty, and nothing more. You should have known the moment you stepped through the door, but you don’t. You don’t notice anything out of place until you make it to the kitchen, and you slip. Your feet go out from underneath you, and you land knees and palms in a puddle of something wet and warm and thick. You stand, unsteady, feet still slipping, and reach for the lightswitch.

The kitchen floods with a weak yellow glow from the ancient overhead light, and you can’t move. You can’t blink. Can’t breathe. Can’t feel your heart, or your skin, or your eyes. Can’t cry, or swallow, or sob. You can’t even scream. You drop your eyes to your feet, and you don’t look up. Reaching blindly for the old rotary phone on the wall with the long curly cord, you press the phone to your ear as the panic starts to rise. You wait with something concrete blooming in your throat and weight like a hurricane sitting on your breastbone, and when the line clicks on and his gruff voice comes through the speaker, you lose your shit entirely.

You can only whisper even though you feel like screaming.

“Dad?”

Sincerely,

Me

NEXT

AN:

*falls down at the alter of Hadley Hemingway*

Grim and Darling

CHAPTER FOUR

I don’t know much about Alice’s disappearance, but I do know a few things:

One.

I know that the lock on the front door had been tampered with, was basically demolished, and there was a shitty rusted screwdriver found underneath the porch.

The police tried to lift prints.

They got nothing.

Two.

I know that there was a size 11½ men’s shoe print in the mud at the edge of the yard, facing the house. It was from a Carolina brand boot, the tread worn down more on the outside of the sole than the arch, like someone bearing their weight wrong.

Maybe a back problem. Maybe a bad case of sciatica. Maybe a limp.

Three.

I know that the blood in the kitchen was type B.

Four.

I know that there was a big knife missing from the kitchen. The one with the smooth birchwood handle. The one that my dad liked to descale fish with.

Five.

I know that there was a trail of blood that led from the back door into the forest at the north side of the yard. They brought in dogs. They brought in metal detectors. They did grid searches and even summoned in a lady who claimed she could speak with the dead, but nothing. No knife. No Alice.

Nothing.

Six.

I know that Rose didn’t die of blood loss or blunt trauma. There was a bruise an inch thick all around her throat in the shape of two big hands. Her death certificate declared her cause of death as asphyxiation.

Seven.

I know that there wasn’t a single trace of Alice. No sign of a struggle. No blood or hair or fingernails popped off in a fight to escape.

Eight.

I know that her body still hasn’t been found.

---

I am going to solve this shit if it kills me.

It’s not that the police aren’t doing their job, but they aren’t. They aren’t doing it well, or at all. It might be because of my dad. They don’t want to disappoint their boss or have to break bad news themselves. So they avoid it altogether. It might be because of me, the dead-eyed daughter who watches their every move and asks too many questions they don’t have answers for. It might be because of the day my mother drank half a bottle of vodka before she drove down to the station and pitched a screaming, spitting fit at the front desk, then charged the back rooms. She accused all of them of being lazy, worthless assholes who were content to leave her baby girl dead in a ditch somewhere before she stumbled back to the car and hightailed it out of town, never to be seen again.

So, fuck the police.

If it comes down to me, it comes down to me.

I’ve done a lot of research, most of it in the middle of the night, huddled underneath my covers. It’s one thing to wonder about the old lady down the street who sat in her recliner for six days before the postman bothered to look through the front window. Or that tourist from Germany who drove his car off the highway and sat submerged in the Bogachiel River for almost two weeks before the prison crew picking trashing up off the highway spotted the underside of his fancy rented cadillac. But it’s a whole other thing when it’s Alice. Death is not pretty, and actually is really fucking ugly when you’ve got your little sister in the back of your mind. The human body is a miraculous machine, and it breaks down in a very specific way. It depends on the temperature and the humidity and the exposure to sunlight, wind, and rain, but decomposition starts exactly four minutes after you die. One: Your body acclimates to external temperatures: algor mortis. Two: Your blood settles and discolors your skin: livor mortis. Three: Your cytoplasm turns gummy and stiff: rigor mortis.

Your fat literally turns into soap.

Soap.

The soap thing really got to me. That was the night I made a promise. I made lots of promises, actually. A promise to my dad that I’d find whoever did this so that he could stop killing himself trying to track down a mirage. A promise to my mom that I’d prove to her it wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t hers for letting me be in charge that night. A promise to myself that I'd finally clear my name.

A promise to Alice.

Because no one wants to be soap.

Next

AN:

1) All hail Hadley Hemingway because that girl is GOLD STANDARD.

2) Do you need a warning? Because this is your warning.

No one wants to be soap, and I don't want to write fluff.

Grim and Darling

Chapter Three

“Hi,” I sigh and slump into the kitchen chair across the formica table from my father. Everything is a sigh. Everything is a slump. Every look my father gives me is the same, and today is no different. We sit in the kitchen because neither of us can set foot into the living room. I still avert my eyes when I pass Alice’s bedroom door on the way to my own, and he still averts his eyes when he talks to me.

“Hi, baby girl. How was school?” He asks this with a furrow between his brows and that deep heavy thing beneath his skin that darkens his eyes and deepens his wrinkles. He glances at me and then looks away, like he’s trying really hard not to remember something super shitty about me.

I slump further and shrug.

“Fine,” I say, even though I mean terrible. Fucking horrible. Intolerable, even though I still tolerate it. I don’t have much choice.

“I put some pork in the crock pot this morning.” He drops the subject because he knows exactly what school is like for me. I don’t know why he won’t just let me homeschool. Something about him not being around enough to supervise me, but I think it’s because the last time he left me alone and responsible in this house, the unthinkable happened.

“Smells good,” I mumble and study the table top. I have it memorized. Every fleck of silver. Every smidge of gold. Three years of afternoons spent studying it means that I could replicate every spot from memory, and there are a million of them.

We sit in silence for half an hour. This is typical.

He finally breaks. “I’m following a lead out of Seattle. A real scumbag with a rap sheet ten miles long. He was in the area that… day.” He chokes on the end of his sentence like a hard candy cracked suddenly in half and lodged wrong in his windpipe. His face reddens and the newspaper shakes.

“Oh, yeah? That’s good.” I try to sound interested, involved, hopeful, but everything is a sigh and a slump, and I can’t muster up much beyond basic apathy. He can tell, but he doesn’t let on.

“If I can just get a warrant for a DNA test, I may be able to prove something.”

My gaze drops even further to the cheap linoleum he plastered over the beautiful hardwood floor. It’s white and patterned with ugly square blocks, but it might as well not even be there. I can still see it, the brown and blonde and amber of the wood. The glistening ruby red stain, right there in the middle. It wasn’t Alice’s blood though, or Rose’s. The blood in the kitchen, that was someone else’s. It didn’t match the girls. Didn’t match me.

It’s the only thing that kept me out of jail, or juvie, or worse.

Between the black eye Alice gave me that morning and the blood in the bathtub from my misadventures in shaving, I looked suspicious. The fact that I didn’t remember anything between falling asleep at this exact spot at the table and waking up somewhere else entirely, I looked like a red-handed homage to guilt. I might as well have marched myself into the cop shop and ‘fessed up to something I didn’t do. Might as well have lynched myself from the flagpole in the town square for all to see, because they’d basically all decided I was guilty anyway.

I was a murderer. Even though I wasn’t.

“Seems like you’ve been sleeping better lately.” Dad breaks the silence like the sledgehammer that he is, no grace, no subtlety. He’s always been a wrecking ball. I roll my eyes before I look back at him and try to smile, but it hurts, and I can’t keep it up long enough to be convincing.

“Yeah. Sort of.” That’s a lie. He thinks I’m sleeping better because I haven’t been walking, but that’s not the truth. I’m not walking because I’m not sleeping. Between a rock and a hard place, between the walking and the sleeping, there is only the slim, unbearable middle.

Insomnia.

It’s harder than it looks.

The first few nights were easy, losing myself in a book, then a movie, then Tumblr and Pinterest, and some site dedicated to asshole cats being assholes. The next few nights were a little harder, pinching my arms and thighs and cheeks to stay awake. By now, I’m in tunnel vision mode. Zombieland. Everything outside the small circle right in front of me is meaningless and fuzzy. Out of focus. A blur.

Everything outside is fucked.

Next

AN:

Forever grateful for HH.

<3

Grim and Darling

Chapter Two

Dear Self,

September fourth will be the worst day of your life.

You just won’t know it until the next day.

It will start out boring. Alice will wake you at 7:08, which is two hours earlier than you told her to, and she will do it by landing on your face. With her knee. You’ll be pretty sure she broke your eye, and your vision will be fuzzy and faded all day. You’ll barely be able to breathe through your nose. She will want to play ponies and house and dress up, and you’ll end up on the floor of her bedroom with a purple feather boa around your neck, your dead grandmother’s mothballed dress over your pajamas, and a splitting headache pounding around in your skull. You’ll pretend to drink fake tea and pretend to have a baby named Fred, which will really just be a towel rolled up into the shape of a burrito, and pretend to be entertained by Alice’s dance routine to a high-pitched boy band song that you hate.

You will try to get her to listen to the Rolling Stones, to Etta James, to Nirvana, but she’ll scrunch her nose and tell you that you’re weird and that no one likes your boring music before she switches it back.

When you finally escape Alice to take a shower, you’ll slip. You will land on your elbow and twist your ankle and jam the third finger on your right hand. You’ll get shampoo in your eyes and nick yourself behind your left knee when you try to shave with your mother’s cheap pink plastic razor, turning the drain red. You’ll be out of deodorant and have to use your father’s, which smells like something moldy, and you’ll consider for the hundredth time just chopping all your ridiculous hair off once and for all. You’ll even dig out his electric razor, the one he uses when his beard has grown out too far, and you’ll turn it on just to listen to the vibrations buzz through the steam.

You’ll be too much of a chicken to actually shave your head. You’ll put the razor away and brush the knots out of your hair just like you do every day.

Mrs. Hale will drop Rose off at eleven in the morning. Your parents went out of town, but the girls have a sleepover once a month, every month like clockwork, and that night is tonight, come hell or high water. Alice practically threw a shit fit when your mother tried to tell her no, so you stepped in and offered to play the responsible one. You’re fourteen, after all, and they’re letting you carry a credit card in case of emergencies which means you should be able to watch a couple of kids, no sweat.

Mrs. Hale will stay for seventeen minutes, and she will tell you all about her son, Jasper, who is one grade above you and not nearly as cool as she thinks he is. She’ll tell you he’s in a band, but really, he plays the accordion with his weird friend Emmett and writes nonsense lyrics about space and black holes and alien life forms on the bathroom walls with grease pencils. She’ll tell you that he’s on the football team, but he only refills the water bottles and sprays down the jockstraps with watered-down bleach. She’ll tell you that he talks about you, and you’ll cringe a little on the inside, but you’ll smile at her and tell her how nice it is to be talked about.

If only you knew how wrong you were.

When she finally, finally leaves, you’ll take the girls and spend nearly two hours destroying the kitchen in an attempt to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch. At one in the afternoon, you’ll give up. There will be flour on the ceiling and chocolate chips in every corner, and Alice will have ruined a whole carton of eggs by dropping them one by one into the bowl, without removing the shells first. You’ll send the girls into the living room to watch that same godawful Disney movie they’ve practically burned a hole through while you open the package of pre-made dough. They will be loud, too loud, singing that terrible, horrible song, just the chorus over and over and over. They will argue loudly that Rose has to be Anna which means that Alice gets to be Elsa, and there’s that fucking song. Again.

It will take twelve minutes for the cookies to bake, and you’re so tired from walking all night long, so you will sit at the table and put your head down on the cool blue formica and close your eyes.

Just for a minute.

When you wake up, it will be 2:37 in the morning. You will be lying in a flower bed, half-naked, and there will be blood everywhere. Your arms. Your legs. Your hands. It will be in your hair. Your eyelashes. Your mouth. You’ll sit there in the grass for half an hour studying the way you’ve turned into a speckled space of bloody constellations. Into a Pollack painting. Into a gore-laced, connect-the-dots drawing.

If you could say anything to yourself right then, sitting in that flower bed in the middle of the night, covered in blood, it would be “Don’t go home.”

Don’t go home.

Don’t go home.

Whatever you do, please don’t go home.

Sincerely,

Me

Next

AN: 

There are bright, shiny people in the world. 

And then there is Hadley Hemingway. 

Y'all are gold, but that girl is diamond plated.

Grim and Darling - 1

Chapter One

By the time I turned fourteen, it was a joke.

The sleepwalking.

The first time it happened, it scared me. Five years old, I woke up in the front yard in nothing but my princess pajamas, knee-deep in snow. It was dark and freezing and dead silent. My fingers were numb. My toes were blue. I couldn’t feel my knees. There was something getting into the trash can at the end of the driveway, its eyes glowing neon through the dark, staring right at me, and I was so scared and so cold that my tears froze to my face before I got back inside.

I didn’t tell anyone. Mostly because I wasn’t sure at all what had happened, but partly because I didn’t know how I’d gotten all the way out of bed and down the stairs without tripping on the third step, the one with the loose nail and the creaky board.

I always tripped there.

The next time, it wasn’t quite as scary, but I still kept it to myself. Who wakes up in the front seat of the family car with the keys in their hand and their tiptoes barely reaching the gas? Certainly not the average six-year-old. I couldn’t even see over the steering wheel. I don’t know what my brain was thinking, don’t know where it thought it was going. I had been dreaming of the desert, the kind where the trees turn to rock, and the sand turns to sky, so maybe I was going there.

By the time I was fourteen, there was no more hiding it. I was going too far. Too often. Too publicly. The whole thing had become a joke. I was front page news more often than Ralph, the town drunk who had a penchant for stripping naked and high-stepping the streets in his birthday suit. I was more entertaining than the Mitchells, the couple over on Third Avenue who’d gotten married and divorced and remarried more times than anyone could remember to count. I was the little pin at the center of the gossip mill, the talk of the town, the ever updating sitcom.

Bella Swan, in shorts and an old tank top, flat on her back in the middle of the football field.

Bella Swan, in sweats and a sports bra, standing spread-eagled on the steps of the library.

Bella Swan, in her underwear and nothing else, nearly three miles out of town, tiptoeing the yellow highway lines like a tightrope.

When Alice went missing, they blamed the sleepwalking.

When Alice went missing, they blamed me.

---

It’s been three years since that night, and I know ten things for certain:       

One.

I will always surprise myself.

There is no getting the best of me. There is no “one step ahead.” No matter what I did to curb myself, no matter how I tried to contain myself or wake myself or stop myself - nothing worked. I locked my bedroom door and nearly broke my leg falling through my second story window instead. I tied my ankle to the bedpost and woke up when it dislocated, limping around for a month before the bruising went away. I rigged the front door up with bells and found them in my fist when I woke up underneath the birch tree at the edge of Ashburn park.

If I ever go to jail, I’ll bet I could sleepwalk my way right out of there.

Two.

It’s better to be prepared.

I figured this out after I showed up in nothing but my red and white-striped boy underwear in front of the gas station on South and Main last year. I woke up to Tommy Meyers, the sad, dark-haired boy who dropped out of school last year because he knocked up his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, staring at me through the big plate glass window with the phone to his ear and his jaw to his chest. That was when I started wearing sweatpants to bed. I started wearing socks, even though I hated socks. I started wearing a hat because the middle of the night is cold, no matter what time of year. I started wearing gloves. My rain boots. A jacket. I started keeping a five dollar bill in my pocket in case I needed a bus or a pay phone or a bribe to get home.

Three.

Forks High School is a cesspool, and I am at the very bottom of the pond. Lower than the math nerds. Lower than the band geeks. Lower than Macy Phillips with her acne and her lazy eye and her one tooth that sticks out at an odd angle and makes all her words come out wonky. I hover somewhere above the creepy dude who sits in his car two blocks away with his dick in his hand watching the kids walk to school, but lower than the janitor.

I am the sleepwalker. The outcast. The girl with the dead sister.

The girl who maybe murdered her dead sister.

Four.

You cannot ignore whispers. They may be soft and spoken behind hands or around corners, behind your back, but you cannot ignore them.

Five.

My mother will send a card at Christmas, and she will call on my birthday, but she won’t want to talk to me. My dad will hold the phone to his ear for less than four minutes before he hangs up, and he’ll have that same look on his face that he always did when she’d bitten his ear off. He’ll avoid my gaze for the rest of the night. He still hasn’t told me where she went, but I found a letter under his bed in her shitty handwriting that described a farm with a bunch of people who grow their own food and don’t wear clothing and believe that some guy named Rashiki was the second coming of God and would save them from a comet that is going to hit earth in four years.

Six.

My father will never be the same. He went from big and burly and bright to utterly wasted in a single afternoon. From loud and boisterous to silent and staring off at nothing, his coffee going cold, the crossword going undone, and the house slowly sinking into the ground. He used to fish. Used to hunt. Used to hike to the tops of the cloud bank mountains. Now, he holds down a spot on the couch, puts in extra hours at work, and turns on football games but doesn’t watch them. He investigates lead after lead after lead, and none of them go anywhere.

Seven.

The best way to fuck up your family?

Murder your sister. Supposedly.

Eight.

No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want to, no matter how you try to push it away or block it out or deny it - you will never, ever, ever, forget the smell of fresh blood.

Nine.

Every town has a tragedy. Every tragedy has a devil.

Ten.

That’s me.

Next

AN: Thank you for reading, and thank god for Hadley Hemingway.