“Why?” I hiss. He smiles.

“I saw you on the camera feeds, defacing Summers’ office. Even made a few copies of the video for myself. What will the dean think of that, I wonder?”

I run, as far as I can from the room, from the house. When Nameless’ voice finally fades in my head, I collapse on the lawn and throw up on the grass.

-11-

4 Years

0 Weeks

0 Days

Seeing and talking to Nameless is one thing.

Seeing and talking to him the day before the anniversary of his evildoings is too coincidental. He had to have planned that. Or not. Maybe I’m the only one who remembers the exact date everything went to shit. He could probably care less.

In the last few years of my short yet brilliant and extremely f**ked up life, I’d take the day off from school, play hooky. I’d walk down to the beach with McDonald’s and count crabs and collect little jewel-colored rocks. I tried to go easy on myself, since on that day no one had gone easy on me. Last year I hadn’t done anything at all, because I was so wrapped up in the war with Jack. It was the only year I’d completely forgotten about it.

Looking back, I should’ve realized the only boy in the world who managed to distract me from my pain was special. Special and worth keeping around. Maybe I knew that subconsciously, because I tried to keep him around in my own way, in my ‘haha-I-planted-drugs-in-your-locker-and-pried-into-your-past’ way, which admittedly probably wasn’t the best way. But I was so out of practice asking people to be my friend, asking them to stay, it was all I could do. Be annoying. Be loud, and people will remember you and maybe hopefully stay.

Maybe hopefully.

‘You try to. You try to stop all these injustices, and save people from them. But you never try to save yourself.’

I shake Kieran’s voice out of my head, and make a quick damage assessment. For obviously working with Nameless by luring me into that room, Heather is now on my shit list permanently, with at least ten red exclamation marks. I can’t trust her, but I don’t think I ever really did to begin with. Nameless is gonna give the feds back the video, and Jack will be in a whole new world of shit. Even better – he has the camera footage of me defacing Summers’ office. I’d considered cameras, but I figured I’d be inside the office, away from the cameras, while I did the defacing. My unquenchable zeal for justice blinded me and I went completely overboard and into the sea but that is honestly nothing new, the only new thing is this time, I could get kicked out of college for it.

College! Collagen! Collage! This isn’t high school. This is the Real World™, waiting for me to slip so it can open its mouth and swallow me whole. College is the end-all-be-all, the big cool thing you’re supposed to do so you can get a degree and put it on your wall or use it as kindling when your student loans eat the money for your heating bill, I guess, and sometimes it helps you get a job but all the upperclassmen at my old high school went to college and got a degree and then worked at American Eagle or Starbucks anyway, so I’m fairly certain it would be more useful as toilet paper, or, if you’re feeling particularly vindictive about your college experience, a maxi pad. I worked hard to be here, didn’t I? I think I did. I can’t exactly remember, it’s a blur of school assignments and your mom jokes and bad fish sticks. If I get kicked out of college I’ll bring shame to my entire family and dad will be disappointed and mom will be happy, probably, and I’ll be sinking my future into the ground with a jackhammer and condemning myself to a life of flipping burgers and blood will probably start raining from the sky or something. Everyone just goes to college. That’s something middle America does, and I’m definitely privileged middle America.

If everyone goes here, why do I feel like I’m a seal in a fishpond?

Why do I need to go to college again? To figure out what I want to do? But I already know what I wanted to do, and that was get out of this state. Get away. Go to Europe. But I couldn’t leave Mom, so I compromised.

I put my feet up on my desk and frown.

Getting kicked out of college is nothing compared to getting arrested for murder.

The tape lingers in my mind, Wren’s young face and Sophia’s healthy face and Jack’s furious, heartbroken one. I wandered right into all that without even considering their feelings. I forced my way down the shittiest, darkest rabbit hole, their rabbit hole, and they somehow tolerated me for it.

If I close my eyes too long, I hear Jack’s screaming again.

If I close my eyes for too long, Nameless’ laughter mixes with it and makes thinking impossible.

My arm throbs, and I remember I have to get the bandage changed, so I head to the nurse’s.

Jemma is a pretty woman with brown hair and big dark eyes like a deer. She sits me down the second I walk in and peels the bandage on my arm back carefully. The smell is rotting flesh and stale cotton balls. She doesn’t even wrinkle her nose.

“Well, it’s looking good. You’re taking those antibiotics I gave you, right?”

“I made a candy necklace out of them and I’ve been chewing at it in class.”

She fixes me with a stern gaze, and I sigh.

“Two a day with meals.”

Jemma smiles. “Good. You can’t imagine how dirty a human mouth is and what it can do to a wound.”

I fidget as she dresses my wound, my eyes catching on a fish bowl full of condoms she has on the counter. She unfortunately catches me staring.

“Are you sexually active?” Jemma asks.

“Nay, madame.”

“Do you plan on being sexually active?”

“In the entirety of my future as a living human being I would certainly hope so. But, you know. Things could change. Meteors could strike. The sun could go cold and peanut butter could stop being gross and I could get smart.”

Jemma stares at me forever. Fiveever. Her brown eyes are huge and knowing and for a second I could swear she knows me, knows what I’m all about in a creepy crystal ball way. And then her eyes soften, and I know she knows. She knows what happened, without me saying much at all.

And it makes me angry – angry that I’m so obvious. Angry that I’m too weak to hide it anymore. The bruises and the booze and the flurry of make outs have only made me weaker, and I didn’t want that shit. I wanted to be stronger. Better. More experienced.

“I’ve been having some problems,” I say carefully. Jemma takes out a clipboard slowly, so closely, like she knows she won’t be able to take notes on this at all.

“Where does it hurt?” She asks.

There’s a moment, a moment where I could get up and walk out and leave her to less complicated problems, problems that pills and casts and shots can fix.

“I tried shots for my problems, too,” I say finally. “Vodka shots. But it didn’t work because that’s not how it works. You can’t just shoot things over and over and expect them to get better.”

Jenna’s silent, writing fluidly.

“Bad things happen, and you tell yourself that’s life, because you’ve lived a while and you know bad things happen ,and they’ll keep happening, but you try to stay alive even after they do because you know it isn’t all bad, so you keep moving, keep going, try to put space between you and the bad things so you forget about them but they always catch up and then they sit on your back and make you trip while you try to move forward and it sucks,” I knead my forehead with my knuckles. “It just f**king sucks.”