Page 11 of One Last Chance

Chapter 5

The best partabout working at the library was that I always had something new to read. On this day, I’d chosen a fantasy adventure book about dragons which, at first glance, didn’t seem to have any romantic overtones whatsoever. I was hoping for a land far away from here, a mystery, maybe some blood, anything that would carry my mind off into a faraway land. I brought the book to bed after delivering Dad’s nightly dozen of beer. The game was on and I’d barely gotten comfortable before he started shouting at the TV.

“Get it in there! Get it in there! What are you doing?! Oh, come on!”

My temple throbbed and I tried to tune him out.The stiff breeze blew ice cold over the waves of G’alut--

“Pass it, pass it! Damn it, who let this guy on the field?”

I groaned and grabbed my headphones. A little music, maybe some movie scores, and I could block him out and focus. There, that was better.

The stiff breeze blew ice cold over the waves of G’alut. Prince T’ryll watched the horizon with a—

“Woo! Did you see that? Yeah! Finally got some players out here!”

I buried my face in my pillow and swore. This was never going to work. Tension twisted my body and made my small room feel even more claustrophobic than it usually did. Giving up on my routine, I put the book aside and shoved my feet into my sneakers. I shook my head at it.

“Don’t even need a bookmark, do we? Sorry, Ivy Lee Smith. I’m sure it’s great.” I wasn’t sure—her being a new author to me and all—but I felt irrationally guilty for cracking open a book and not getting through the first chapter at least.

The swamp cooler rattled as I walked under it. It was leaking onto its supports again—I was sure that one of these days I’d meet my end under its bulk when it finally rotted the roof through. I eyed it warily and took a cartoonishly big step out of its path. God, I needed to get out of here. Out of this house. Out of this town. Out of this life.

Dad was up out of his chair, sloshing beer around while he gesticulated. The carpet was soaked with the stuff. It would have taken a thousand shampoos to get the smell out. Maybe not even then. The whole trailer needed to be thrown away, honestly. Burnt to the ground and shoveled beneath the earth. I thought about it on my darker days—but Mom never left the house anymore, and I wasn’t willing to kill her to get out of here.

I entered the room to find her sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through bills with a blank face. I don’t know why she never went paperless. Maybe there was something soothing about the routine, paper bills, paper balance book. She jotted a figure down and flipped to the next page, expression unchanged. I always wondered what went on in her head when she was doing that. She had never been the most expressive person in the world and after Hunter died, it got even worse.

She glanced up at me and offered me her weak little smile. “Where are you off to so late in the night?”

“Just gonna sit on the porch a while,” I said with a pointed glance at Dad, who had started shouting at the television again. “Maybe go for a walk.”

She nodded. “Be safe. Lots of coyotes out lately.”

There was something about the warning that made me look at her twice. She smiled at me benignly—but somehow I didn’t think she was talking about canines.

“I’ll keep an eye out.”

The thin door didn’t do much more than muffle Dad’s hollering, but it was better than being inside. Cicadas buzzed and screamed in the woods and coyotes sang a grating harmony way off in the distance. They were miles away and moving south.

They’ll only hurt you if they’re starving and you’re alone.

Hunter’s words of wisdom floated through my head in his voice, so clear that I could almost feel him standing beside me. We used to sit out here and talk—just the two of us at first, then the three of us. God, we’d been inseparable back then.

My body moved through the memory, wandering over to the rickety porch swing. The paint had peeled down to almost nothing and the roof anchors were rusted, but it could still hold my weight. Probably couldn’t hold all of us at once anymore.

“Not like it needs to,” I said through a sigh. “Never again.”

The stars were bright tonight. The Milky Way swirled red and purple high above me, just the same as it always had. I wondered how many of those stars, like Hunter, were dead already. Gone way before their time.

Kicking my feet out, I drew memories around me until they draped over me the way Kash and Hunter’s arms used to. I was the smallest of our group, so I always got stuck in the middle. I used to hate that. It seemed unfair. It’s funny how some things grow on you, though. I’d have given anything to be squished between them just then, hips pinched, neck uncomfortably warm, just to feel that eternal security once more.

The coyote yips faded in the distance and Dad’s shouts devolved into snores. It was just me and the cicadas and the endless sky. No Hunter, no Kash, no comfort.

Then, suddenly, no cicadas either. The hairs on my arms stood up and I held my breath. They didn’t stop screaming for no reason, not at this time of year. My eyes strained out past the gentle splashes of light streaming from the windows, out into the black woods. My ears rang, desperately trying to fill the silence with anything.

When it came, it sounded deafening. A birdcall for a bird who never really existed, some crazy hybrid of mockingbird and quail, whistled out of the woods directly in front of me. There was only one person alive today who knew how to make that sound. I could feel his eyes on me but I still couldn’t see him.

I didn’t move.

The call came again, louder and closer this time. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could he? Of course, it was kind of my fault for getting all stupid over seeing him in the window. I could have just ignored him then, but I hadn’t, and now I was paying for it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. No, I decided as I straightened my spine. I wasn’t the stupid one, he was.

How dare he come sneaking around here after dark like some kind of juvenile delinquent? I was a grown woman with a job, damn it. He couldn’t just swoop in here and mess with my head like this.

At the third call, I stood up. A small, secret part of me was hoping that he would convince me that he hadn’t killed Hunter, cement in my beliefs what I was pretty sure I already knew. Maybe he could even pitch in a believable and forgivable reason why he hadn’t answered my letters. The rest of me was just looking for an excuse to hit him. Hard.

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