Page 71 of Jayson
The overhead lights are off. I don’t bother turning them on.
The fridge hums. The countertop gleams faintly under moonlight. But it’s the pantry I’m pulled toward—like something in there is waiting.
I crack open the door. The light inside is dim, yellow, flickering with age. It hums faintly like it might go out at any second.
Shelves line the walls, stacked with dust-coated tins, mason jars, ancient spices with names in languages I don’t speak. I reach for a tin of biscuits and pause.
I freeze. There’s a blue cardboard box tucked behind a sack of jasmine rice. The cartoon fox still grins, smug and sharp-toothed. The packaging has changed over the years, but I’d know that box anywhere.
Riley’s favorite cereal.
The cereal box is wedged behind a sack of rice, cardboardcorners soft with age—but one brush of my fingertip and I’m ripped backward in time.
Midnight in Riley’s kitchen, the overhead light buzzing like a bee stuck in glass. We’re thirteen, socks sliding on vinyl, pilfering contraband before her mother wakes for the night shift. Riley flips the box onto the counter with a flourish.
“Snap-crackle-lies,” she declares, pouring a river of neon puffs straight into her palm.
“It’s basically stale sugar,” I mutter, but I’m already stealing a handful.
“That’s the point,” she says, cheeks ballooned, grin wide enough to swallow the moonlight. “Tastes like childhood and rebellion—two things grown-ups keep trying to sell back to us.”
Crunch. Sweet dust clings to the roof of my mouth, fizzes like static in the quiet. I glance at the clock: 12:03 a.m.—a time that feels lawless, ours. Riley leans against the fridge, legs crossed at the ankles, smirking like she’s cracked some cosmic code.
“Someday,” she whispers, “we’ll laugh about eating cheap sugar out of a box.”
“Or we’ll choke on it,” I shoot back, but the laughter’s already bubbling up, reckless and bright.
She nudges me with her elbow. “Exactly.”
That single word—equal parts dare and promise—echoes across the years as I stand in the mansion’s pantry, knuckles white around cardboard that shouldn’t still smell like vanilla and neon dye. The kitchen light here is polished brass, not buzzing plastic; the night outside this window is guarded by money and power, not a half-broken porch light. And Riley’s grin is dust, somewhere beneath unmarked soil.
But the taste—stale sugar, cheap food dye—spreads across my tongue anyway, carrying the rush of who we were before the world learned how to break us.
Exactly.
The box slips from my hand, thuds to the floor, and spills its dead constellations everywhere—tiny, bright lies scattered at my feet.
We’re thirteen. Her kitchen. Midnight. The lights are off and we’re eating cereal straight from the box, laughing into each other’s shoulders like we’re invincible. Her freckles are stardust. Her eyes are wild. She’s talking about running away, hitchhiking across the country with nothing but a guitar and that damn cereal box.
Then we’re fourteen. Her bedroom. I’m lying on the floor, staring at her ceiling. She’s braiding my hair. She tells me someone’s been watching her. I feel his eyes on me all the time, she says, voice shaking. I tell her I’ll walk her home on Monday.
Monday never comes.
Next memory: sirens. Police tape. Her mother’s face caving in as she screams. A body bag without a body. The news says missing. But I know better. I feel she’s gone. I say nothing.
Dad’s hand on my shoulder that night was gentle, but his grip told me: Shut up. And I did.
My knees give out.
I fall into a sack of flour. It bursts open, a soft explosion. I choke. Cough. Claw at the air.
The walls are closing in.
I can’t breathe.
My ribs feel like they’re wrapped in barbed wire. Every gasp is a wound. The cereal box stares at me like it knows what I did. Or didn’t do. Like Riley’s ghost is crouched beside me whispering,Why didn’t you come with me?
I drop to the tile, hands slick with flour, body shaking. I taste bile. I think I might’ve screamed, but I can’t hear over the blood in my ears. My heart’s not beating—it’s hammering. Wild. Terrified. Loud enough to wake the dead.
