The End of the World (15 page)

Shaye

I’m worried about
how much my guard seems to be slipping around Cameron. For me, letting the carefully crafted walls around my heart come down a little has never worked out too well. Letting the walls down is always short-lived for me, always dangerous, and always clouded by the shadow of misery lurking just on the other side of the bricks.

Although it’s hard to remember now, I was content here for the first few days. I moved in as a hopeful girl who might once again have a family for things like birthdays and Christmas. I dreamed with the caution of someone whose wounds had been bandaged and were edging closer to healing. Within days the wounds were beginning to fester. By the time my social worker’s visits dwindled to once a month, the cuts were all-out bleeding. That’s when Tami began to show her true colors. That’s when Carl made it clear he was never interested in having a daughter at all. That’s when I tried to get out and instead got punished in ways I don’t like to think about. But then Pete arrived. Then Maria and Alan. When it became clear they were there to stay, I decided I would too. No one wants their life to be in vain, not even the people stuck living when those they love most are dead. In all the ways I’m different than most people, in this one way I am the same.

Still, even with a purpose, that’s when the longest three years of my life took off.

I never looked back or breathed long enough to enjoy any part of it.

Then Cameron moved in and somehow convinced me in two short days that the teenage kid who thankfully wasn’t a toddler—despite his young-looking face and his odd affinity for counting—wasn’t so bad after all. More than not so bad; he managed to become a friend. And now I rely on him too much. Count on him too much. Look forward to him too much. Like to laugh with him too much.

It could all be gone tomorrow.

I take another bite of the best enchiladas I’ve ever eaten and try not to think about it.

“You have sauce on your chin,” Cameron tells me.

I laugh, pick up the paper towel I’m using for a napkin, and gesture to the pan. “I’m saving it for later when all of these are gone.”

“Your way of remembering my awesome cooking? Is that it?” He forks another piece into his mouth and smiles at me over the bite. He has something stuck in his front tooth but I say nothing. Just sigh when my own smile fades.

“Something like that.”

Cameron

I
t takes seven
more months before I get brave enough. Seven more months of turning over to face the wall when I hear the familiar three a.m. knock on Shaye’s bedroom door. Seven more months of clutching my gut when my stomach churns at the sound of her reluctant footsteps following behind stronger, more determined ones. Seven more months of squeezing my eyes shut against the visions that dance in front of them like fireflies, illuminating the lies I tell myself—that the images are nothing more than outlandish fantasy set in motion by a boy with a too-vivid imagination.

It takes seven more months, but I finally find the courage to do what I should have done forever ago.

I follow them.

It takes some work and more than a fair share of creative maneuvering to keep myself from being seen, but I walk in the shadows exactly twenty feet behind them, inching along the dimly lit corridor in bare feet to keep anything from creaking. This isn’t the time for a knuckle to crack or a toe to pop.

I hear the sound of a door shut. I hear the sounds of other things, too. And with my head in my hands and my brain screaming curses and my heart resting somewhere between my shoulder blades and my esophagus, I slide to the floor to wait.

My shirt is already wet before I realize I’m crying.

*

Shaye

Carl takes a
little longer than usual, but finally I’m able to inch out from underneath the covers and make my way toward the door. Like every night just like this one in the last four years, the door seems so far away, like it requires more footsteps and heartbeats and thinly held breaths to get there. Then my hand finds the knob and begins to turn. It takes a slow pull followed by a firm yank designed to glide quickly through a painfully loud squeak, but I make it.

When Carl wakes up he’ll be one of two things—angry that I’m gone or ticked off that I managed to make it out without him noticing, but he won’t say anything.

He’ll never complain. At least not out loud.

I slide through the doorway and close the door behind me, then stifle a scream when a hand appears from nowhere and covers my mouth.

*

Cameron

I’m not trying
to scare her, but if she doesn’t stop shrieking she’s going to mess everything up for both of us.

“Stop it, Shaye! It’s me.”

I whisper into the darkness. It takes a few times of me repeating those same five words, but eventually she hears me and her screams turn to sobs and she’s shaking in my arms and the girl I’ve known for over a year now shatters into a million tiny pieces. I’ve never seen someone convulse so violently. I’ve never felt someone crumble so quickly. But here I am, holding all the pieces of the friend I’ve grown to love, trying and failing to find a way to put her back together.

I hate myself for waiting so long.

I hate myself for believing her when she told me it only happened once.

There’s only one thing I can think of to do. Only one place that makes sense if I want to protect her now, if we’re honestly going to disappear, even for a short time.

“Walk with me, Shaye.”

At her barely perceptible nod, I take off. After several stops and starts that leave us both stumbling under a moonless black sky, we finally make it.

*

Shaye

I never imagined
he would follow me. Worse, that he would hear me. I saw the look on his face—the sadness, the disappointment, the disgust.

I’m the worst thing that ever happened to Cameron.

The look on his face said it all.

His hand closes around mine. I struggle to breathe as he presses us palm against palm. I know I should shrug away, but I can’t bring myself to. This might be the only time he holds onto me, and I can’t deny myself the closeness.

“I’m sorry,” he says. And I’m not sure I hear him right, because he has no reason to apologize. I’m the one who needs to feel the lash of a thousand accusations. Every one of them I’ve earned. Every one of them is well-deserved.

“For what?” I sniff and wipe my nose, looking down at the reflection we make as our legs dangle loosely over the water. Cameron was right—it really is like the end of the world out here. And more than anything, I wish I could jump in now and swim to it.

“For not stopping it. For not beating the crap out of that pathetic excuse of a man. For not telling my social worker a second time. For not ignoring you when you got upset with me the first. For not jumping in to save you all those nights I lay in my bed and pretended not to know what was still going on.”

My hand tightens against his. “You tried, Cameron, and look where that got us. There’s nothing you could have done. Nothing at all.” Bile edges its way up my throat, but I swallow. I won’t give myself the satisfaction of even that simple release.

“I just wanted to believe you.” His voice sounds stiff with anger. All the soft concern that lined the edges of his earlier words is gone.

I want to die.

With everything in me, I wish the water would swallow me and lead me down a path where girls who’ve been tainted by sin go to be washed clean of their filth. But that place doesn’t exist, and I know it. Cameron knows it. I’m dirty, and he’s seen all the evidence of the mud that clings to me with the ferocity of leeches—the same leeches found in this lake. I’ve seen them. I want to cover myself in them. I want to roll in them and let them suck every immoral thing from me. But I can’t. I can’t because something tells me even they would swim away.

I’m so numb that I don’t feel anything when Cameron puts his arm around me and lowers my head to his shoulder.

“We’ll figure out what to do somehow, Shaye. If I could keep you out of that house, I would. But I can promise you right now that I won’t let you go back to that room. If I have to kill him myself to put a stop to it, I will.” He looks down at me, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I know I’ve done a bad job of it until now, but I’ll take care of you, Shaye. I mean it.”

And this boy. This boy who has grown a foot in the past year, who has grown in muscle and stature and practically turned into a man in fifteen short months while I’ve stood by and watched…I know he means it. But he’s no match for Carl. One attempt to stop him, and Carl would be the one committing murder. There’s only one way to keep that from happening, even though the thought of it makes me ill.

I nod up at him and close my eyes. And for an hour or two or ten we sit at the end of the world. Our own private spot. A place discovered by me and meant for both of us.

We stay that way until the sun comes up.

Cameron

I
roll over
and stretch, feeling every knot and kink and tear my back endured from all the hours I sat unmoving so that Shaye could sleep. She cried on my shoulder for what felt like hours, and when she finally drifted to sleep I didn’t want to wake her. So we stayed that way, her head sliding to my lap and my hands moving backwards to prop myself up.

And she slept.

When she woke a couple hours later we made our way back to the house—Shaye going her way and me going mine in search for a few minutes of comfortable sleep. I squint through the blazing sun shining into the room to find the clock. I’ve been in bed a little less than an hour. Pete is snoring below me and Alan is jabbering in his crib, so I reluctantly sit up, feeling the room spin along with my head as vertigo claims me for a moment. I wait for it to pass, then slowly stand up. Maybe I’ll have time for a nap later. Then again, maybe I won’t. Right now all that matters is checking on Shaye.

I shuffle my way to the door and grab the doorknob. And it’s at that moment that everything slams into me. Call it intuition or a bad omen or a simple feeling that things aren’t right. But something tells me to hurry. So I fling open my bedroom door and scramble the five steps it takes to cross the hall.

After one two three four five six seconds of looking inside her bedroom it’s painfully obvious that I’m right. I’m right I’m right I’m right I’m right.

Maria is in her crib.

There’s a note taped to a spindle.

But Shaye is gone.

All her books and clothes and her pink pillow that she’s slept on every night that I’ve been here since I showed up scared and once again parentless on this ramshackle doorstep.

It’s all gone. Right along with her.

Because I failed her, plain and simple.

I reach for the note…bring it to my face.

Take care of Maria for me. Don’t let anything happen to her or the other kids.

I back against the wall to keep myself from falling, and all I can think is that I hate it hate it hate it when I’m right.