Page 67 of Riot Act
Friendship bracelet.How does she come out with those words without bursting into flames? It makes no sense. She shouldn’t be able to utter such blasphemy in front of me without combusting on the spot. Horrified, I pull even harder on the woven braid around my wrist, but it just ain’t budging.
“Give me your scissors,” I command.
She laughs. “I don’t have scissors. Why would I? We’re not ten. We don’t cut pictures out of magazines anymore.”
My cheeks feelreallyhot. “You know I’m cutting this thing off my body the moment I lay my hands on something sharp, right?”
Chase makes a show of pouting. She’s acting, but there’s something serious in her eyes. I see pain there, which doesn’t make sense. I also see a flicker of something else, too, and that something else looks suspiciously like fear. She should be fucking afraid. I mean, what the hell was she thinking, tying something as dumb and childish as afriendship braceletaround my wrist? I’ve ruined lives for lesser crimes. But there’s something weird about that flash of fear I just saw. Something off. It’s gone too quickly for me to analyze properly—Chase plasters a very fake looking smile on her face—but I can still see a hint of it lingering…
“Go ahead, then. Be my guest. I can always make you another one,” she says.
“Why the fuck would you bother?”
Annoying, irritating, asshole of a girl that she is, she shrugs. “I’m a glutton for punishment.”
The bell shrieks out in the hall, and a wall of sounds erupts around us. Chair legs scrape against the floor. Someone drops their books, and a rowdy group of nerds cheer. Jarvis Reid claps her hands like the softball coach she was born to be, trying fruitlessly to get our attention.
“Remember what I said, guys. Four extra hours of writing between now and our next class. I want at least three complete chapters by this time next week. Work together in the library as and when you need to. And feel free to email me, but don’t expect a response outside of school hours. Despite the rumors, I do have a life, people!”
“Liar,” I snipe.
“Presley, can you actually stay behind for a second? I wanted to speak to you about something.”
She stiffens next to me, wild-eyed like a doe. “Uh…sure.” She has no idea what Jarvis could want to talk to her about. If she did, she wouldn’t look so perplexed. The English teacher probably just wants to give her a run-down of everything we’ve done in this class since the beginning of the academic year. It’s patently ridiculous to let a student join an AP program so close to graduation. Presley probably has a fuck ton of work to do now that she’s chained herself to this program, and not a lot of time to do it in. I don’t think this has crossed Chase’s mind, though. She’s staring at Jarvis, her eyes shining brightly, like she’s about to burst into tears.
Everyone files out of the classroom in knots of three and four, talking heatedly about their projects, arguing over what should happen and who should write what. I get up and snatch my shit off the desk, nearly boiling over when I catch sight of the stupid fucking friendship bracelet tied tightly around my wrist again.
“Email me what you got down,” Chase says softly. “I’ll work on it tonight.”
I grunt in response. There are too many weird thoughts bouncing around inside my head for me to construct an intelligible response. I want to be a dick and fire back some sort of shitty retort, but all my brain comes up with is the command:
“You’re not working on shit tonight. You’re coming to the house.”
She just blinks.
“Did you hear me?”
She nods.
“Eight-thirty. Come in and straight up the stairs. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Say yes if you understand.”
Whatever anxiety gripped her when Jarvis told her to stay back releases her. I watch her shoulders relax as she looks up at me, eyes clear as refined honey, and then says, “Yes.”
25
PAX
I sit in my dark room to finish off the chapter. I have a perfectly good desk, but it seems only right to shut myself away when I want to create. Both my photography and my words are personal, private things. It’s safer to open myself and bleed out my art in a small space like this, controlled, secreted away from the world, where no one can witness the fucked-up mess that seeps out of me.
I don’t think about the fact that Chase will be reading my words soon. I only think about the sentence that I’m working on, and then the one that follows, and the one that comes after that. Soon, the first chapter’s finished. Two and a half thousand words. The main protagonist is Leo. Twenty-three years old. Murderer. His victims range from innocent, sweet blondes with pretty smiles to grumpy old men. His motives aren’t clear until the end of the chapter, when he shares a secret with the reader: his victims are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Leo sits at a specific bench on a specific street, every Tuesday, and he waits, staring at his watch. The moment the watch’s hands reach 12.27 pm, Leo looks up. Occasionally, he has to wait. The street he sits on is residential, and sometimes no one comes along for hours. It’s a Tuesday, after all, in the middle of the day. People are at work, or running errands, or having lunch with their friends. But Leo is patient. Leo waits. And eventually, someone comes along. Theyalwayscome. The first person he sees once the hands on his watch strike 12.27 is doomed to die.
The chapter ends with Leo panting over the body of the runner he’s just killed, the stranger’s blood sticky and drying on his skin, and I wonder if I’ve described the gore in enough detail to fuck with Chase’s head. She’s not squeamish, I don’t think. She didn’t seem to be grossed out by her own injuries at the hospital.
I want to horrify her. I wanna creep her out. I want to make her think twice about doing this stupid writing challenge with me. But reading over what I've written, the content doesn't seem that bad anymore. Leo’s depraved urge to kill is messed up and dark, sure. The front row seat I've given the reader seems like it would make most people uncomfortable, but Chase tried to killherself, for fuck's sake. How dark is her mind, to contemplate doingthat?
Sighing, I open up a new document and start over. This time, I don't even think about the words that I'm putting down on the paper. I just write. Horror scales my spine as I realize which story I'm unleashing onto the world. It’s the dream I used to have as a kid. A night terror. The words flow out of me, fingers flying across the keyboard, as I describe the maze I used to find myself trapped in. I note the cold, and the rolling nausea in the pit of my stomach, and the pounding of my heart in my ears as I run. I paint a vivid, hopeless picture of my never-ending panic to escape the damp, dark, and shadowy construct. The looming creatures that lurk around every corner. The fear and the explosion of adrenalin when one of them captures me and rips a little piece of my soul away with their jagged claws before I pull myself free from their grasp.
I don't explain that this was once a horror show that plagued me every night. I write it down like it's the beginning of a story. The main character knows the maze intimately and knows precisely which turns he needs to take in order to get out. When he rounds a corner and is faced with one of his demons, he evades it and continues on unscathed. At the end of the chapter, he sees the mouth of the maze directly ahead of him, fast approaching as he runs, and then he does something that the childhood version of me never did:he actually gets out.
