Page 148 of Our Last Resort

It’s fall. The trees on either side of the road have yellowed. Around us, the smell of humid earth swirls through the air. For a second, I’m brought back to the day of Annie’s death. I feel the spray of the waterfall on my face, the burn in my arms as I shove her over the bridge and into the water.

Bile rises at the back of my throat. I swallow it back.

This isn’t about me.

This is about Gabriel, and whatever he needs to find at the end of this road.

It takes me by surprise. The compound. Time passes faster for adults than it does for children; distances, it turns out, are shorter, too.

Somehow, most of the buildings are still standing.

The old church. The cafeteria. The dorms. The stamp of abandonment is everywhere: Whole sections of walls are missing; the church’s roof has half collapsed. Ivy has grown on every structure. The ground is covered in weeds.

We walk the property. Underneath the decay, Émile’s world is frozen in time. There are still a few bowls—dirty, rusted—in the cafeteria. Some beds in the dorms. Animals have pokedholes in the mattresses and nested there. It smells like a pet store, and, in parts, like death.

At the back of the cafeteria, we find it. The Secret Place.

A broom closet.

The door has rotted off its hinges. Inside, the closet is covered in dust, dirt, animal droppings.

This is where we met.

We don’t step back inside.

Amazing, the stories we tell ourselves. The fears we conjure up in the dark.

We’re not children anymore.

We walk to Émile’s building.

Here it is, still.

Almost completely charred.

They never tried to rebuild it, by the looks of it. Émile must have settled elsewhere in the time between the fire and his arrest.

We stand near it. I swear I can smell smoke, the strangely salty scent of burnt wood and plastic.

Is this where it began?

Did our lives melt together in the fire? Did the embers keep glowing under the pile of ashes? Did a force enter our lives that night, something that couldn’t be extinguished, no matter how long we waited?

Or was it all ordained, somehow?

There’s a fable I hate.

The one about the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river; the frog agrees. The scorpion hops on the frog’s back. While they’re in the water, the scorpion stings the frog, condemning them both to death. When the frog asks the scorpion why it did it, the scorpion’s excuse is essentially:Because I’m a scorpion, and this is what scorpions do.

It’s all so flat. Scorpion has no morals; scorpion has no choice; scorpion stings.

No.

I was never a scorpion.

Whatever I am, I became.

There’s a sound at my side—soft, muffled. Gabriel has his face in his hands. His shoulders twitch.

---