Page 68 of Body Count

AndAnything that startles me, really.

People staring at me.

Mirrors and reflections and shit.

I dropped the pen and pushed the pad of paper away.I got to my feet.I shook out my hands like they’d cramped, and then I had to start walking—around the room, around the house.I stopped in the kitchen to get a glass of water.I couldn’t even fill up the glass; most of the water from the faucet splashed across my knuckles, the back of my hand.I put the glass in the sink and walked some more.I thought I could hear my heartbeat in my head.

I ended up staring at the bank of switches that controlled the kitchen lights.It wasn’t like I’d never turned on a light switch.It wasn’t like I’d never touched one since the accident.I had to, sometimes.At work, mostly.Sometimes at home, if Darnell hadn’t turned them on for me.Had left them off.Had, I wanted to believe, forgotten.At work, it had to look normal.If I did what I did at home—turning them on with my back to the lights, or turning them on as I was leaving a room, or turning them on and darting behind a wall—I’d have gotten myself a nice fucking stretch of psych leave before they figured out how to get rid of me.At work, I had to keep my face empty, had to keep my body relaxed, had to move normally, slowly, bring my hand up just right.

I blew out a breath that was kind of a laugh.Or that was supposed to be one, anyway.I dried my hands on my shorts.Homework.This was just homework.All I had to do was spend some time being uncomfortable with a trigger.Great.Easy.I was uncomfortable all the fucking time.How long?Had she said?A minute?Five minutes?I felt clammy, my hands cold now, my body greasy with flop sweat.I did this at work.I’d done this.I’d done this before.

I dropped into my seat at the counter, my back to the switches.I was trembling.It took me a couple of tries to get the vape out of my pocket.The rush of that first hit made my eyes sting.I hit it a few more times.After a few minutes, the knots in my back and shoulders began to undo themselves.The trembling eased.Did I have to write this down, I thought.Vaped.Terrified out of my fucking skull because of a light switch.Rating?10/10.

Jesus Christ, I thought as I took another hit and stared out the window.The world was sliced into two halves: golden morning light, and lingering, cool blue shadows.A sparrow settled on the fence.Its little shadow looked like it had been Bic’d onto the patio.What am I going to do?

Maybe Darnell had been right.Maybe I wasn’t ready.But just thinking that felt like falling down a long, dark tunnel back to—back to somewhere.And I thought if I started to fall back there, I’d keep falling, maybe forever.Things would never change.Things would never get better.And one day, I realized with a clarity as cool and sharp-edged as that little Bic’d shadow, I’d eat my fucking gun, because I couldn’t do this.I couldn’t keep doing this.

Until now, I hadn’t let myself think about the strangeness of Darnell’s behavior the night before, but it was easier to try to think about that than to consider—well, the other stuff.Why had he gotten upset?That was the part that had stuck with me.Darnell didn’t yell.He didn’t shout.He didn’t swear.Not until you pushed him past the limits of any reasonable person.I knew that firsthand.But last night, he hadn’t just been shouting.He’d been…furious.

Why?

Because he’s protective was the first answer.Because he’s protecting you.

That might have been true.Or it might have been what Darnell believed.But I remembered the dreamlike certainty, at the end of a horrible day, when I’d looked at Darnell and known—known—that it was something more.That, for some reason, he’d been scared of what Pauline had said.Frightened by the possibility that I might get better.

That didn’t make any sense.He loved me.Of course he wanted me to get better.For fuck’s sake, he’d been the one to suggest going to therapy.Why would he have suggested that if he hadn’t wanted me to get better?

Because he likes taking care of you.Because he likes when you need him.

No, I thought.I even shook my head—not that there was anyone there to see it, but it was more my body’s response to the suggestion than anything else.

But I kept coming back to one thing:

Why had he left the lights off?

It was more than I wanted to think about.More than I felt capable of thinking about—of processing, dealing with, having to face.

Instead of wasting my time on this sad boi emo jerkoff fest, I decided, I should be doing something useful.Something productive.Like figuring out who had killed Tip Wheeler.

I threw the legal pad in the nightstand drawer and took my vape outside.The patio furniture was still cool in the shade; when I sat, rusty springs creaked, and the sparrow blurred wings against the sky and was gone.A long way off, I could hear a diesel engine and the rattle of a heavy truck.The air smelled like dew.

Sunny had said he’d seen Tip and Jordan arguing.And that didn’t line up with what Tip and Jordan had told me.They’d said they hadn’t seen each other all night.They’d split up, that’s what they’d told me.And, even then, I’d known they’d been lying.

The smart thing to do, the responsible thing to do, would be to dig that notepad out of my nightstand and do some more homework.Wait for Darnell to come home.Start trying to dig myself out of Shit Mountain.

I hit my vape and went inside to find shoes.And underwear.Because I was an adult.

Because—what was that saying?

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

So, why not fuck things up?

24

I waited in the car halfway down the block from the apartment Tip, Jordan, and Rory had shared, and I watched.

The day was shimmery-hot, the air boiling over the asphalt and thick enough to stick to your tongue.Even with the AC running in the car, it was uncomfortable.The smell of melting tar filtered through the vents.Cars passed, slowed, parked, drove away again.Nobody looked at me; the glare of sunlight on glass and metal made everyone in a hurry to be somewhere else.A dog padded around listlessly in the shade of a house for about five minutes before his owner, a woman who’d just had her eyes done, called him back inside.It was the kind of day that made guys get in parking lot brawls and women ram each other with their cars and teenage psychos light things on fire.

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