Oblivion (3 page)

The door pops open.

Elijah grins over his shoulder, offering the only invitation I need.

I fling my backpack into the space and fall into his arms.

One of us kicks the door shut before he shoves his shoes off, before I kick off my flip-flops.

The fuzzy carpeting itches against my back.

My hair clings to my eyelashes like burgundy streamers, which he brushes away.

I lick his lips, trail my tongue over the ridges of the only crooked teeth in his mouth: the four front and center on the bottom.

Burn her, burn her, burn her, burn her …

Tears build. I whimper in both frustration and desire.

His cheek is warm and smooth against mine. “Shh,” he whispers, as he wrestles out of his oxford.

But I can’t let him quiet me. Quiet’s no good. Quiet welcomes the words.

 … in an urn
.

I pull his T-shirt over his head and off his body, as he kisses a line down my neck.

“Come here.” I give his hair a tug and coax him upward. “Kiss me.”

His skin melts against my abdomen, and his tongue, teasing mine, ignites a fire within me.
Burn her in an urn
.

It’s hot in here.

So hot.

The words are coming closer.

“Elijah. I need—”

“Let it go,” he suggests. “Ignore it.”

I’m trying. I can’t. My fingertips tremble; I imagine closing them around a pen, putting its tip to paper. I yank my bag closer, fiddle with the zipper, and pull out a pen.

“Love you,” he says. “God, I love you.”

What?

The words miraculously scatter from my mind.

A sob of relief escapes me.

Slowly, my eyes open. It’s just him, here, and me. Just us.

“I’ve got you.” He smiles down at me. “I’ve got you.”

The pen drops from my hand.

“Got a cig?” Elijah asks.

My head’s resting on his bicep. I wish we could risk opening a window, but that might clue someone into where we are.

I catch my breath. “I quit.”

“Since when?”

“Since the Hutches found my pack. Like a month ago.”

He shrugs. He doesn’t usually smoke. Not nicotine, anyway. Marijuana, though, is fair game. “Good for you, baby.” He kisses me on the forehead.

“Want a lollipop instead?”

He chuckles. “No.”

“So …” I don’t want to ask what I’m about to ask, but the question has been turning cartwheels in my mind since I bid adieu to my Camel Lights. “Where’ve you been?”

He sighs. “Calliope.”

“What?” I sit up and stare down at him. “I’ve been here every Tuesday.”

His glance shifts away, but he quickly reengages, caressing my cheek. “You don’t think I’ve wanted to be here? You, of all people, should know how hard it is to get away, when you live in their world. I have rules now.”

“So do I.” Not as many as I had under Palmer’s reign, but rules all the same.

“You know what happens when I don’t follow them?”

“They give you a gift card to the Gap?”

“Worse.” He twitches a smile. “Hilfiger.”

“Come on.” I reach for my backpack in search of a lollipop. “I miss you. I haven’t seen you in a month. You hardly return my texts anymore. We don’t even talk—”

“Come here.” He gives my hand a tug. “I’m kidding.”

“Well, stop kidding.” I open a grape-flavored Tootsie Pop and shove it in my mouth. “Last month, you were talking about running away together, and now their rules are more important than seeing me.”

“Come here!”

This time my defiance is no match for his yanking on my hand. I curl into his embrace.

“Listen, if I fuck up, I lose my phone privileges, so I can’t text or talk. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You know I want to talk to you every fucking day.”

I nod. At least I hope he does.

“And I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this, but—”

“About what?” The syrupy sweetness of the lollipop is too much for me right now, but I need it to curb unhealthy yens. I look up at him. Our gazes lock.

He brushes his thumb against the dent in my chin and
chews his lip for a few seconds. “Never mind.”

“Never mind what?”

“Not important. I feel stupid. Forget it.”

“Stupid.”

“Never mind.”

“Oops-I-slept-with-someone-else-when-I-was-drunk stupid? I-cut-trig-so-many-times-I’m-failing stupid? Or … or is it worse? I-fell-in-love-with-someone-else-before-I-broke-up-with-you stupid?”

“Callie, don’t. Don’t do this.”

I pull the candy from my mouth and point it at his nose. “Then don’t start something you can’t finish.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Nothing. Nothing I’m going to be thinking about for the next seven days, or until you decide to show up here again.”

“Hey, I come when I can.”

“You know what? I come even when I can’t.”

He emits an overexaggerated sigh. “I made the varsity soccer team. Okay?”

“Okay.” I feel like I just rode up four stories in a roller-coaster car, only to find flat land at the top of the hill. That’s not so bad. Except that … “Since when do you play soccer?”

He shrugs. “Just started. Turns out, I’m pretty damn good at it.”

“I guess so.” Crossing Elijah Breshock with varsity sports
is sort of like crossing a llama with a chicken. It doesn’t compute to much more than a scatterbrain who can spit, and what good is that? The guy has a juvenile record, for fuck’s sake. The only sport I’ve known him to take interest in is running—when it’s in the opposite direction.

“It started as an outlet for my”—he draws quotation marks in the air—“aggression. But the foster Ps think I might be able to get a scholarship to U of I.”

“Better stop cutting classes, if that’s what you want.” I refrain from rolling my eyes, but there’s no masking the sarcasm dripping from my words.

“Hey.” He places a finger against my cheek, forcing eye contact. “Why do you think I’m doing this? For you, baby. For us.”

This isn’t the Elijah I know, if only because the Elijah who’s been distracting me for the better part of the past year doesn’t use words like
us
. But I snuggle back into his embrace for one reason: I truly want to believe him. The truth has to be far more sinister than soccer, but I deserve a break. I deserve to blindly believe … in something. “Congratulations.”

“So now you know. If I’m not here some Tuesday, it’s because we have a game, or practice, or something.”

I’m so tired, and he feels so warm and inviting that I let it go.

“I’ve missed you,” he whispers, dragging his fingers across my forehead, draping my hair aside.

Oh, those fingers. Talented. Attentive.

And he says all the right things.

But he’s lying to me.

I know it.

“Baby, you wrote on your pants.”

“Yeah.”

I close my eyes and inhale the scent of him: musk shower gel combined with cinnamon gum. No matter how present he feels in my arms, no matter how convincing his words, I feel the distance between us. Somehow I know: he’s already gone.

I concentrate on the feeling of his fingers drawing lines on my forehead and wonder if anyone’s ever going to paint over my tiny, red words on the bathroom walls—the words I wrote the night my father disappeared … presumably with Hannah Rynes.

B
urn her in an urn. Burn her in an urn. Burn her in an urn
.

I’m digging in an open field. Icy rain pelts down on the back of my neck, chilling me to the bone.

Mud encrusts the soles of my shoes, making them inches thick, and the loam clings to the hems of my jeans, climbs toward my knees with every shovelful.

I don’t know where I am, but I feel like I’ve been here before. The dense air is blowing in off the lake. It smells of fresh fish and sediment, sand, clay. I can’t be too far from home.

My hair clings to my face, and my clothing is soaked through to my flesh.

Crucify
.

I stifle a sob and press the blade of my shovel to the wet earth.

Crucify
.

It dawns on me: I must be digging for my father’s body.

This must be where he is. Must find his body. It isn’t over, until I find his body.

Sobs rack my body. I drop my shovel to the mud and hide my face in my hands.
Crucify, crucify, crucify
.

Crucify, quarter, and stone her
.

I can’t draw a breath. I listen hard. Flinch at a wave crashing on the shore. Jolt with the distant hoot of an owl in a remote tree. I see nothing but dark bleeding into the beyond.

I spin in a circle, searching, but the night is too black. I feel my father’s presence, but can’t see him. His voice echoes off the lake. He could be anywhere. He could be nowhere. I’m numb, leaden, planted in the earth like an ancient oak tree. My roots intrude on my father’s grave, push into his remains, curl about his bones.

Crucify, quarter, and stone her
.

No way to fight it. He’s part of me. I’m part of him.

The ground rumbles with the thunder in the distance. My body is shaking.

“Callie, wake up!”

Crucify, quarter, and stone her
.

“Callie!”

I gasp and grab at salvation.

“Callie.”

“Help me,” I say.

Fingers close around my forearm, as I hold tight to whatever I’m grasping.

“Goddamn, dude. What the hell were you dreaming about?”

My eyes peel open and adjust to my dim surroundings. I’m in Lindsey’s room, in her queen-sized bed, lying next to her, grasping her wrist with a white-knuckled grip. I’m wearing a tank top and Elijah’s flannel boxers; she’s wearing a T-shirt that reads
I’m skilled
and navy-blue tick-striped boyshort panties. For a minute, I’m confused, but then I remember: I couldn’t be alone. It’s always hardest to sleep on nights I’ve seen Elijah. It’s almost as if our brief encounters only serve as reminders of how alone I am once we part ways.

When I’d shown up at her door last night, Lindsey had pulled back her covers—“Snuggle”—and I’d crawled into her bed. It’s a little weird that we sleep together sometimes, but I assume it’s acceptable for biological sisters, so why not for us?

Once I release my grip on her arm, she begins to move her feet back and forth beneath the covers. This is something very decidedly Lindsey. In even cadence, she brushes her feet against the Waverly sheets until she feels secure enough to sleep. She says she’s been doing it since babyhood. It
took some getting used to, but now it’s a comfort to me, too. Sometimes, when she’s asleep down the hall or if she’s closed her door, I can’t hear the swishing, and I feel sort of lost.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“A little after three. And after that mess, there’s no fucking way I’m going back to sleep without a little medication.” She crawls over me and traipses toward her closet, where she keeps her stash hidden—along with her contraband birth control pills, which she and half the girls in the junior class buy from some mysterious supplier—in the sleeve of
The Little Mermaid
DVD. “Come on, let’s hit the shed.”

A lime-green hoodie and a pair of pink-and-green argyle knee socks hit me in the chest when I sit up. I yawn, don the extra clothes, and concentrate on the scent of the lake in my dream. Is it a real place? Or a figment of a wild imagination?

I follow her quietly down the back staircase and to the back door, where she punches in a code on the alarm pad. Every key beeps, but the senior Hutches don’t sleep as much as hibernate, thanks to regular doses of Ambien for each of them. Once Lindsey and I couldn’t silence the alarm—she drunkenly pushed the wrong buttons—but neither of her parents responded to either the whir of the siren, or the follow-up phone calls from the security firm, ensuring our safety. But tonight we have our faculties about us, and we exit smoothly into the night.

My backpack, always slung over my shoulder in the likely event I need to write something, contains Lindsey’s weed. I’m well aware that if we’re caught on our way out to the shed, everyone and Lindsey’s mother will assume the drugs are mine. Lindsey would try to set the record straight—at least I think she would—but I’d rather take the hit for my pseudo sister than watch her throw her future away.

Solar-powered lights illuminate the flagstone path with a blue-tinted glow from the orbs that pop up at evenly spaced intervals along the way. When he isn’t litigating, Mr. Hutch makes a hobby of landscape design, and the sprawling two acres of their estate are meticulously manicured with gardens and water features that would put average—and some above-average—lawns to shame. Mrs. Hutch does not share his passion, but she takes advantage of it. In the six months I’ve lived here, Mrs. Hutch has hosted tented, catered, orchestra-music charity events on the property, most supporting the Children’s Hospital, where she used to work. Lindsey says her mother is obsessed with charity, which, incidentally, works out pretty well for me, seeing as I’m relying on the kindness of strangers for survival these days.

The Hutches’ back gardens remind me of my father’s only semi-realized vision for the grounds of his church—mini waterfalls, a koi pond, idyllic swings surrounded by lush perennials and blooms. Yet for all the serenity here, I
feel anxious walking the paths, and not because my backpack contains a nickel bag.