Page 68 of The Cruelest Kind of Hate
“Are you sure?”
I angle my chin so I can kiss the crown of her head, smiling when her curls tickle my nose and I get a whiff of that heavenly cinnamon scent. “Yeah, I’m sure. Seeing how excited Teague is…it just reminds me of how excited Trip used to be when Halloween came around.”
She looks up at me through her lashes, and I transfer the lollipop from my mouth into hers. She jumbles it around so she can speak. “I take it he loved Halloween?”
“Big fan. Our parents never took us trick-or-treating, but Trip would always dress up,” I tell her.
“You do know your parents are on my shit list, right?”
“Oh, mine too.”
Laughter boomerangs between us, rich and rumbling like a faraway motor engine, and I feel Cali’s hands hug my arm as she lists closer to me.
“What did Trip like to dress up as?” she asks, nuzzling into me.
My hand comes up to rest over hers, which are freezing to the touch. “He loved dinosaurs. His favorite movie wasThe Land Before Time.”
“So one of those blow-up dinosaur costumes?”
“Yeah. One of those ridiculous, blow-up dinosaur costumes.”
It feels really good to talk about Trip without also talking about his death. It feels good to acknowledge him without grieving him. I don’t remember the last time I was able to talk about who he was, truly—the things he was interested in, the memories we made together. And talking about him with Cali gives me a sense of closure I’ve never found anywhere else.
Cali chews the rest of her lollipop before discarding the stick in Teague’s pail.
“I, um, I hope I’m not upsetting you by saying this, but…” The last of her words are swallowed by a rocky breath, and the way she looks up at me has my heart clenching around a bullet-sized hole of fear.
“But?”
Her fingers absentmindedly squeeze my bicep. “How are you so happy all the time? I mean, I know you aren’t, but you seem so put together.”
I was expecting her comment to floor me, but all it does is produce a small smile on my lips and generate a newfound warmth between our hands—one that travels all the way to my cheeks and scorches a presumable blush. “It’s not always easy,” I admit with a hollow chuckle. “When Trip died, I had a choice: either I could let his death drown me and take me under, or I could let his death strengthen me. It was then that I realized I didn’t want to live the rest of my life in sorrow. I wanted to find a reason to be happy again, and the more I presented myself thatway, the more it tricked my brain into believing Iwastruly happy.”
“You don’t always have to put on a happy face,” Cali says quietly. “It’s okay to break down every once in a while.”
“I know that now, thanks to you. One reason I’ve always been so happy-go-lucky is because I’d suppressed Trip’s memory. I refused to revisit it or eventhinkabout it. It was easier to be blissfully ignorant than confront my past. But ever since I met Teague, he’s helped me come to the conclusion that my brother’s memory is always going to be there, no matter how hard I try to ignore it. And it would be a shame for Trip’s memory to disappear all because I was too cowardly to share it.”
Cali doesn’t say anything before she rises to her tiptoes and presses a kiss to my cheek, the stickiness of her lip gloss gluing down the faint stubble starting to crop up. “I’m so proud of you, Gage. I know you don’t talk about your brother with anyone.”
“You’re not just anyone, Cali,” I whisper.
Suddenly, I feel a tug on my sleeve, and Teague’s looking up at me with huge, glossy eyes, his lower lip trembling like a leaf in the wind. “Gage, I’m scared,” he says quietly, to the point where I nearly don’t hear him over the background chatter.
His gaze cuts briefly to the ominous-sounding garage, and I follow his line of sight to find that only a few people stand between us and the haunted house. The exaggerated, eardrum-blasting noise of evil scientist laughter can be heard from our spot, and there’s a pre-recorded mess of clanking machinery that acts as white noise beneath well-rehearsed dialogue.
And all my worries disappear to make room for his. I hunker down to a squat so I’m level with him, and I give his shoulder a comforting rub. “Hey, Little Man. It’s alright. We can turn around right now.”
Teague shakes his mop of ginger hair, mouth set in a thin,hard line. “I don’t want to turn around. I want to go in. But I’m…scared.”
“You know, I’m kind of scared too. Maybe if we hold hands, it’ll be less scary, yeah?”
I can tell he’s skeptical as he glances between me and the foreboding garage, but he eventually nods his head in agreement, clinging to my hand so tightly that he cracks my knuckles. Am I scared? Hell yes, I am. I don’t know what the fuck lies behind those sketchy-ass tarps. Will I punch one of the scare actors if they jump out at me? I’ll try not to.
Teague hands his bucket off to Cali to hold through the haunted house, since she’s the least likely out of all of us to feel any terror walking through it. She’s a horror junkie—which makes sense as to why she’s so scary sometimes.
The tour starts relatively calmly, with our guide dressed in a blood-splattered lab coat and his hair an electrified mess of spikes on top of his head. He leads us through the first room, which consists of a man being bound to an operating table by leather restraints, squirming and thrashing while he screams bloody murder. Another scientist hovers over him with a drill to his head, complete with fake blood squirting from the realistic-looking wound on the man’s temple. If that wasn’t gross enough, there are tons of glass vials and bottles filled with unidentifiable body parts and murky liquids. Blinding lights flare in my eyes, and a particularly gruesome jump scare thieves my breath and makes Teague grip my clammy hand harder.
I keep him hugged to my leg as we creep through a pitch-black corridor, only illuminated in spurts, timed with the screams from both actors and traumatized kids. I have no idea where I’m going, and I can hear Cali squealing and falling into easy laughter behind me. The fear in my body is palpable now, my heart juddering at an alarming rate, and my stomach relocating to my goddamn esophagus. When we round the corner, anew, disturbing scene is laid out before us: a woman strapped down on a table, but this time, her body has been severed in half, and the scientist is digging through a gory spillover of entrails with his bare hands.
