My “patient” endurance has begun spiraling on day fifty-six, the morning of me writing this.
Step one:
I woke up calmly. I didn’t have a lot of mornings like that anymore. That was an immediate tell that Natalie was still not here. Or maybe she came and left… didn’t matter. She wasn’t here now.
I rubbed my head and sat up. The door was closed, even though I knew I had fallen asleep with it still open. There was something on it that my eyes couldn’t see from the bed, crusted shut as they still were with sleep particles. I groaned and slid out of the sheets. The clock on my dresser said 10:19. This poor-excuse for a day/night cycle was bending my circadian rhythm to its will… like a normal human. I stood and slumped over to the door. There was a post-it note sitting at almost my perfect eye-level.
Come downstairs.
That doesn’t feel threatening at all.
Maybe Natalie is home. This handwriting doesn’t strike me as being Natalie’s, but I don’t think I’ve even seen her handwriting before. Maybe this is what Death’s signature looks like when he signs your soul away.
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I guided myself nervously down the stairs, waiting for the moment that I would be cold-cocked by my incendiary roommate. My nerves calmed only EVER SO SLIGHTLY when I turned to see who was actually sitting on our couch.
“Um… hi?” I said.
Roman’s head shot up, as he had been dozing whilst waiting for me.
“Ugh, hey,” He said. “You’re awake.“
“Yeah. Now that makes two of us.”
He scoffed and stood.
“I showed up an hour ago. I thought Natalie usually woke you up before the lights came on. But you were… obviously sleeping still…”
I raised an eyebrow at him. Had he been… watching me sleep?
“You didn’t think to wake me up?”
I wanted to tease him and ask if he thought I looked like a sleeping angel, but most of the time, I just didn’t feel like it with Roman.
Roman was the one person that made me feel like I didn’t even want to try and be funny. Nothing was ever funny around Roman. Even if his reaction was the same that I would have desired from someone else, his surrounding energy just seemed to Hoover up my enjoyment of the moment completely.
“I thought I was doing you a solid by letting you wake up on your own,” He said. “Guess I’m not getting a ‘thank you’ for bypassing the boot-camp roll-call?”
“Isn’t that like… your job?”
He looked kind of prematurely pissed before I had even said that. He grunted and walked over to the fridge. Natalie put water bottles in it every once in a while, but I hadn’t seen anything in that fridge in over a week. He opened the door, taking way too long to look at what was definitely nothing.
“So…” I began. “Why is it that you’re here again? You mentioned it a little too quickly the last time you uhhh… completely forgot to mention it…”
He kept his head in the fridge, but answered.
“I gotta send you out today.”
I looked out the front window to notice that the cart was already there. I usually was brought to the kitchen to drive it back through town, but Roman must have brought it himself. While I hadn’t forgotten about going out today to make up for yesterday morning, I still scratched my head as to why he was here.
“Yeah but like… you know why I’m asking you that, right?”
He finally closed the fridge, ignoring me.
“Do you know where Natalie keeps her gun?”
I felt a slight drop in my stomach.
“That seems like it would be… a problem if I knew.”
“Yeah, I know, dude. I’m asking you if that problem is existent or not.”
I don’t know how much higher my eyebrow could raise.
“Well, I definitely don’t think that she keeps it in her fridge…”
He rubbed his hands through his hair (have I mentioned how miraculous of a pompadour he has for someone living in a furniture superstore?).
“Alright, let’s go,” He said. “You’re late, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been on time-… why are you looking for Natalie’s gun?”
“Come on. I’m serious, we gotta move. You ready?”
I rubbed my eyes.
“I… no. Hang on.”
I walked awkwardly back up the steps, almost jumping around the corner to escape Roman’s eye-line.
I just needed the backpack and the notebook. Natalie or Elijah usually gave me the pole when I went to the kitchen, but I was pretty sure we weren’t going there.
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I walked back down, only slightly more prepared, to see Roman nervously shifting his weight by the open front door. For someone as intimidating as Roman was, he acted pretty fucking timid sometimes.
He turned to me.
“Before you say anything,” I said. “I counted. It was eighty-seven seconds, so don’t be dramatic.”
“Don’t do that. I’m trying to help you help us both.”
We stepped outside as he took the cart and waved his hand in a direction that was NOT going towards the gate. I stood firm for a moment.
“Roman, where is Natalie?”
I saw his fist grip the railing a lot tighter.
“She’s fine… I promise… she’s just busy, okay? Really goddamn busy… and stressed. It’s a blessing that she’s not here with you.”
I… believed him. Enough to not ask where I was going. I just started walking. Silently. I heard the cart wheels following behind me as I set-off.
“Why,” He said behind me. “You worried about her or something?”
And I seriously do like Roman, but…
“You wanna fucking Nobel, detective?”
… he makes it really difficult.
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“Right here.”
I stopped in front of a two story house, a great deal wider than Natalie’s. Roman stopped the cart behind me and walked to the door, opening it and walking in before peeking back out.
“Are you… coming?”
I looked at the structure nervously.
“Is this your house? Why are we here?”
“I left the pole here. Natalie gave it to me last night.”
“So go get it, then.”
“I’m not gonna leave you out in the street. I want you to come stand in the living room.”
I didn’t know what time it currently was, but I felt pretty confident that I didn’t have the time for this. Especially since I wanted to write today. I was also a little bit confused why Natalie’s schedule was restricting Elijah from escorting me the way he already had in the past.
“Do you know where it is already?” I asked as I approached the door.
“Yeah, in the house.”
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Roman’s house was dark, almost abyssal. He had lights, but he kept them all off. He had windows, but he kept them all closed. He had enough decorative “belongings” and furniture for the home to look normal and inviting on paper, but instead, it felt like I was walking around in the shadow of a corpse.
“Alright, just hang here for a minute, alright? I’ll be back.”
He began exiting the room before receiving my confirmation.
“Shouldn’t you tie me up or something?” I called sarcastically.
“How about you follow me and prove I couldn’t handle you?” He called back coldly.
Maybe if he had a metal poll, and I had a samurai sword, it would be a somewhat fair fight.
I looked around the room, trying to find a distraction from the desire to genuinely try escaping. The room was landlocked by the stairs to the second level and the room that Roman had entered, the same direction of the front door. I think I’m too tired to try my luck.
I sighed and sat down in the cushioned chair in the corner. I could barely make out the sound of Roman rummaging through things in the other room. I looked around.
The living room was somewhat of a dining room as well. A beautiful, almost Victorian wooden table stood in the center of the large room. The white tablecloth dripping over only its vertical edges was covered in bluebirds on exponentially stretching branches. There was even a small chandelier suspended above it by the support of two rafters. It was… obviously kind of crooked, but the attempt seemed campy enough for the thought to count. It was pretty. Something about the room made me really want to small talk with Roman. Ask him some stupid question about his family, where he went to school, what his favorite movie was…
I didn’t know anything about him, and I had never asked Elijah. For how many uncomfortably intimate moments I’d shared with him thus far, I felt like I barely recognized him.
The bookshelves at the side of the room held a wealth of board games and emptied picture frames. I guess the empty frames were less strange than the clearly procedurally generated photos of false humans. I had still been hoping to look over and see pictures of him and his real world friends, forgetting that this house was built in limbo. There was one frame that did have a photo, but it looked to be drawn with crayons.
The photo displayed a blue stick-man, but with two biblically accurate arms of muscle. A pink stick-woman with two big circles around her torso was hugging him. A heart was drawn above the both of them.
I wonder if-…
Crrrrrr
My head shot around as I heard an uncomfortable ache come from the floor above. I stood from the chair, looking towards the steps. With that ominous creak, I realized that I found Roman’s dark abode to be quite eerie. It was a mild version of the dark outdoors that constantly haunted my dreams these days.
I watched the stairs as the creaking continued.
“Uhh… Roman?” I called into the other room, feeling like I wanted another body around me.
“What?” I heard his muffled voice call from far away.
I was about to respond before the source of the sound revealed itself, for the first time in almost two months.
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Step two:
Jen stood silently on the landing, barely visible in the cloth of shroud.
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“Cody?” Roman called in my silence. “Did you say something?”
Jennifer stepped lazily down the stairs, slowly slumping around the table towards me. I was petrified, incapable of even closing my fist. The way she moved was unreservedly haunting. It looked like she was dragging around five-times her body weight with every step. Her arms were so loosely dead at her sides, as though neither of them belonged to her. She was using the Staff members’ running animation, but was only capable of lumbering sedately. As she stared at me, the way the dark mixed with the sapped over-exhaustion of her empty face… I thought I could feel the whites being sucked from my eyes.
She was trying to steal any part of my body that was lighter than the blackness of this house.
“Cody?” Roman called again. “You okay?”
She stopped in front of me.
“Tell him,” She hissed. “Normally.”
Have I ever had a voice? It didn’t feel like it in that moment.
“I…” I croaked in a pitchy moan before clearing my throat. “I’m good… just making sure you didn’t fall in…”
“Shut up,” He called. “I’ll be done in a sec.”
I needed that “second” to be accurate.
I tried to catch my breath as her decaying eyes pierced through her hair. I like to exaggerate my aspect of fear when talking about these events, but I had a long moment of considering it possible that Jen had died, and I was face to face with a phantom. She looked so disheveled, and everything followed. The world around her was aching, like this entire black complex was bleeding out its light through the stab wound that was her body. As I felt myself being completely emptied, the freezing of my own blood began to surge in my forehead, stinging and throbbing. I almost needed her to be a ghost for the sake of my comprehension.
She was such an appallingly horrible depiction of a “living” human, and yet…
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…I was kind of still cognizant that she was the hottest girl I had ever seen.
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“Do you remember me?”
I didn’t even try talking again. I just nodded. Her head tilted a little. She was wearing a T-shirt I assumed was Roman’s, from the way it reached down far past her waist, or any indication of whether or not she was naked beneath it. She reached up under it with one hand.
“I hold this…”
A small, irritatingly sharp knife reflects the void of the room, as I feel myself growing borderline inconsolable.
“Listen…” I began nervously. “I’ll leave, okay? I’ll tell Roman to just throw me outside and-“
“-No. I want to talk to you,” She demanded quietly. “I needed to make sure you could listen… you listening?”
I nodded hurriedly, once again spurning any audible dialogue options.
“Are you scared of me?”
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
“I… I don’t know…” I mumbled shakily. “I don’t know what to say to you… I think anything I say is going to hurt you… make you want to hurt me…”
I saw the smallest glitter somewhere behind the shield of her hair. It didn’t stay long.
“I’ve already wanted to hurt you. I deserve to hurt you.”
I know. I know she does.
“You’re not even sorry about it…” She added. “Are you?”
I don’t know my ceiling of potential confidence, but if I was feeling triple-it, I doubt I would have been able to answer that straight. I’m not. I know that I’m not. I’ve said that I’m not. I can blame that on my desperation to resist feeling any sympathy towards this community, but it doesn’t change the essential fact that Patrick’s death wasn’t enough to overpower my never-ending self-importance. The prospect of Jen’s grief was also not enough. I don’t even know if it changed my mind in the wake of the lawless repulsion standing in front of me.
I didn’t look away, but I stayed silent as waves of bile leaped around in my stomach. I couldn’t respond. She slit her eyes and focused in on me, before placing the knife on the table beside her.
“… you shouldn’t have to be, ya know…”
I almost let myself vomit.
“I… what?” I stammered.
“You didn’t kill him… it wasn’t your fault… not even close…”
I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a team of cameramen filming me from the other room as they waited for me to fall for that.
“No…” I said more firmly than I thought I would. “That’s not true… it’s okay… you can blame me-“
“-don’t tell me what I can do. I do blame you… but that’s not your fault either.”
I’d expected my soul to have already dissipated by now, so having the time to be confused was incredible off-putting.
“I… Jesus I… want to be sorry… I just don’t know how to be… I’m trying so hard… but it’s like…”
She rubbed a palm over her throat.
“Praying when you don’t believe that anyone is actually listening…” She said.
You just hope that if someone is listening… they can’t tell the difference.
“You look horrible,” I said in a moment of pure delirium.
She didn’t even react.
“I am horrible, Cody… he’s gone.”
A small little heckler in my survival instincts told me to try hugging her, and I promptly told it that I would sooner put her out of her misery here and now. Though, with the agency to call that a horrible idea, I didn’t actually have any better ones.
“He might not be…”
The most functioning emotion I had seen from her brushed over her face as she looked sickened by that suggestion.
“You haven’t been going to that sorry excuse for a church, have you? You better not try and tell me that you think this is all some sort of test…”
I didn’t, and I doubted that anything Otto had to say in that haunted synagogue would convince me of such a thing.
“My relationship with death isn’t confident enough to say… I just don’t want you to think he can’t be somewhere better…”
I already knew what her internal response was the second I uttered that.
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Death is better.
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She moved her head in a way that completely shielded her eyes with her hair, as if she could control every individual strand.
“You didn’t see what he looked like… no Heaven is taking the mess they turned him into…”
I…
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Her eyes reappeared as she inspected me in my silence. Her expression shifted to infuriation, as she saw that I was shaking on the verge of tears.
“Don’t do that,” She said. “Stop.”
I never saw him. I never saw what happened to Patrick. I only heard it. I don’t even know what to be haunted by. It was her own brother… right in front of her.
“Jennifer… I want him back too… I don’t want to be here if he’s-“
“-you don’t mean what you’re saying. I know you think you do, but you don’t. He wasn’t yours, he was mine. Don’t do this in front of me, it’s fucking insulting.”
I tried to close my sore throat, forcing back the edge of a breakdown.
“Do you… want to punch me or… something?”
She stayed silent for a moment, hopefully considering it.
“Cody, if you would’ve died between then and now… I think I would feel a lot worse than I already do… if you were gone, it would mean he died for nothing… I’m mad at you…”
She looked away, preparing to believe herself.
“…I don’t wish you were dead.”
I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t say this.
I’m not the main character. I shouldn’t say this.
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“ I do.”
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She stared at me for a moment. At the very least, I hoped it would motivate her to relieve her anger physically. It didn’t. She began to look into space a little.
“He was never sad, dude…” She began. “I never saw him sad for a single day here… he had shown up eight months after me, and didn’t even care that he had trapped himself. He just cared that he’d found his little sister that had disappeared and… I never had a moment where I didn’t feel horrible about it. I was so happy to have him, and I’d missed him so much… but I felt like I had dragged him here myself. I didn’t want to have him back… it never felt right… it always just felt like borrowed time. I… should’ve known it would make me like this. It’s… the second time I’ve lost him, ya know? And while he was here… he was just…”
I know… everyone says the same thing.
“He was your everything…”
Her eyes focused back on me suddenly.
“Listen to me Cody, I can’t help you if you can’t get over this… but…” She began. “Help yourself… please try to… please don’t die over it.”
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“What exactly are you doing right now?” I challenged .
Her arms held her hollow stomach.
“That’s why I can’t help you.”
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I found myself initially unable to pull my eyes away from her, as a large presence noticeably changed the tone of the room when entering.
Eventually, I looked over to see Roman standing there, holding the pole with a horribly nervous look on his face. I had expected him to look enraged by me even being in the same room as his depressed (likely suicidal) girlfriend, but he just looked incredibly worried.
“Jen,” He said. “I didn’t know you were awake…”
“I’m not,” She said in an almost identical whisper as she looked away from me. “Can you help?”
“Yes, come on.”
He dropped the pole and walked around the table, taking her by the hand and shoulder. I tried to say something to him, but he didn’t even look at me. He hadn’t even been looking at me. He’d walked in the room and immediately saw nothing but her.
He guided her to the stairs, and followed her with his hands slightly tense and raised, prepared for her to fall at any moment. She climbed with the same bizarre, jagged steps I had seen before, but even more sluggish now.
Like walking down those stairs was more taxation than her body had experienced in weeks, and it might take months to recover that energy.
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I… I couldn’t. I couldn’t be okay with it. The way Elijah had described it was already enough. Natalie’s corroboration was more than enough. Seeing Jennifer face to face, seeing the state she’s still in almost two months after Patrick’s death… how am I ever supposed to step on the road to acceptance after seeing that?
Should I be mad at her?
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No… she wants me to accept it. She wants someone to be able to… because she knows that she never will.
The floor gently creaked above me.
That’s why I can’t help you.
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Roman finally acknowledged me as he came back down some five minutes later, realizing he had left me unattended for that entire time. I hadn’t thought of anything substantially effective to say, so instead, I picked up the knife by the blade, and held the handle towards him. He looked at it strangely, with a gaze full of sadness, before walking up and gently taking it from me.
“Okay…” He began.
It took his intimidating voice to realize I still felt locked in place.
“Let’s go.”
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I gripped the pole loosely, as we both walked in a recognizably mutual silence towards the gate.
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Step three:
“Hey,” Roman said behind me. “Thank you. For what you’re doing for us… all of us… and I know Jen would never say this to you, but she appreciates you just as much as I do.”
I tried to feel comfortable turning back to him, but I felt like the fake outdoor light wasn’t enough. Everything felt dimmer than it had before I stepped into that house.
“… yeah,” I said absently.
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Alright, well, you’re back up to speed.
That was this morning. I’m sitting at a coffee table right now, pretending there’s a pretty girl watching me from across the room as I scribble away in this new, awful notebook (seriously, I hate this thing). The fantasy is not helping. I don’t feel good.
I’m… done writing today. I’m just about as happy thinking about Jen as I was with visiting her.
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Okay, wow… what you just read was the last chance I’d have to write for a considerable while. Let me give you a break and take you along in real time, I’m just not so sure how to begin. I am not writing this on the fifty-eighth day. I am not writing this on the fifty-ninth day. I’ve been a little lost.
Sorry, that’s what I’m trying to avoid. I’ll bring you there like it was normal.
Let me explain.
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Cody Camargo: Fifty-Seven Days In.
Step four:
I woke up to a finally familiar pounding on my bedroom door. I ran through sixteen-thousand emotions before remembering which one was assigned to her.
“Just come in!- you woulda done it anyway…”
I sat up to see Natalie stepping into my room somewhat calmly for how loud she was just knocking. She was holding a small bundle of clothes. I was groggy and annoyed to be awake, but somewhat relieved to see her. She hadn’t returned the last night either, and I had begun to theorize whether or not she had been murdered by an angry resident.
“Yo,” She said with a weird warble in her tone.
She was dressed up so nicely.
“… am I dumb to think that this is my day off? I went back out yesterday-“
“-I know. I’m just here to remind you that The Omen is meeting today. 11:30. I want us there at 11:25. Understand?”
“So… yes, I am dumb for thinking that?”
I had been to one “meeting” after my first impromptu inauguration into The Omen. It was a short fifteen minutes of basically deciding whether or not my contribution to the community was actually worthwhile, or if it was fine to throw me back to the wolves again.
“You’re going. It won’t be long. You’ll survive.”
Sadly, they decided I was doing great.
“I might ,” I said as I rubbed my face. “What’s it about?”
She didn’t answer.
“Can you just tell me you don’t want to answer something instead of staring at me? I know you don’t have trouble telling me to shut up-“
“-Just… wear this,” She said as she threw the pile of clothes on the foot of the bed. “You need more than one and a half outfits… you smell like shit.”
“No, I don’t. I bathe when I’m outside. Water bottles and hand soap is a goddamn car wash compared to what some other people do. I’m surprised you’re not nose-blind to someone smelling awful in here.”
She rolled her eyes in a way that set me strangely at ease. Not a great sign on my part.
“11:20,” She said before turning around. “Out the door.”
She walked out of the room. No cursing, no yelling.
“Where have you been, Natalie?” I called to her.
She turned and descended the stairs, briskly shunning my question. I checked the clock to see 10:49 AM. She’d let me sleep in.
I sat forward and looked at the clothes she’d brought. A plain white t-shirt (bar a weird yellow stain on the small of the back), and a pair of loose-fitting cargo pants. Brown, and definitely a little too long for me.
I triple-dog-fucking-dared these to belong to the person I think they belonged to.
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I walked down at 11:18 to see her standing by the door, tapping her heel like she always does when she’s trying to avoid massacring me.
“You did that on purpose,” She says, without even looking at me.
“You said 11:20. I was reading.”
She looked over, likely about to question my capacity to read, before stopping and staring. Her brow furrows.
“What?” I said. “You insulted by your own decision?”
“Excuse me?”
“Whose clothes are these?”
Her brow parted as she realized I was talking about my deceased forefather. She looked back away.
“They’re mine, since you can barely dress yourself. I’m just surprised they fit you, half-pint.”
I’m surprised I wasn’t immediately swallowed in a ball of satanically conjured flames the second I put them on. Seems like another person wearing her clothes would be breaking the demonic seal she embroidered them with.
“Somebody have a fun night on the back of this?”
She rubbed her forehead and opened the door without making eye contact.
“It’s oil,” She said angrily. “Virgin.”
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t in reference to the style of oil.
I followed her out of the door, closing it behind me. She was stopped in the street, looking down at her fingers.
“Listen,” She ravaged herself to begin. “I’m on a rope. I’m saying it to you directly. Don’t joke around today. With me, or with anyone. Just be a good dog for a while.”
The mental image of being Natalie’s “good dog” was not a fantastic influence on what my behavior might look like today.
“Okay?” She said, her eyes somewhere far away.
“Uhh… yeah… thanks for saying it honestly… that’s growth for us.”
I saw her fingers burst into a sudden spasm.
“Prime example… don’t say anymore shit like that.”
She started walking towards the church as I tried to let some distance grow between us before following. She didn’t make me walk in front of her anymore, and that made me happy. Not because of… um… hang on, let me back that sentence up. I felt happy to not be so distrusted by her anymore… even though I found it more likely that looking at me would send her into an episode on days like this, and she was just trying to have some in-between time of pretending I wasn’t real. On that note, I’ve come to a somewhat conjecture-based conclusion, that I believe Natalie may be slightly… neurodivergent. She just has a tendency to flip out, and I know I’ve established that dead horse with my superfluous description-chain of her unmitigated trail of destruction, but I think my defensiveness may have painted those scenes a little crudely. I told you this before, but Natalie does really try to calm herself down when she can. However, it’s like she has this Wheel Of Fortune in her head, and every once in a while, her reasonable self-control goes completely bankrupt with absolutely no warning, by no choice of her own.
It’s clear she recognizes it, and she’s never stated it to me as explicitly as she just did. It felt nice to know she was trying with me.
Really nice.
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Probably should’ve appreciated that moment a little more than I did…
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Step five:
Halfway through our silent walk to church, I was toying with the stitch line of Natalie’s shirt with my eyes to the ground. I had just been considering pushing my luck, wanting to walk a little closer to her side, when a voice appeared.
“Hey.”
Natalie turned as Sean stepped in front of me from around a corner, looking like he spawned there out of thin air.
“Sean? What-… hi…” She said, tripping over her own tongue. “I um… I just missed the time this morning, and I’m on my way to-
“-nah it’s cool, I was just on my way to your house,” He said softly as he walked up to her, not even knowing I was there. “I’m not gonna keep you, I just… have something of yours.”
I noticed that Sean was holding a shirt as he… eughhh.
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My stomach doesn’t feel good thinking about this part…
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I recognized that shirt… every time Natalie wore it, I was uncontrollably transfixed by her chest…
It was the one that probably still had my blood stains on it…
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Natalie made an awkward face as she took it from him.
“You okay?” He said, in that same soft tone I wasn’t familiar with from him. “I don’t wanna accuse you of avoiding me, but I did think we were gonna talk.”
“It’s not… it’s not that… I’ve just been distracted… and not to say you weren’t… a priority-“
“-Hey hey hey, I get it. You don’t gotta explain, I was just teasing you.”
I had never seen Natalie OR Sean like this. He still hadn’t noticed me, but he had noticed her timid energy.
“Hey,” He said, basically cooing as he placed his hand on her neck. “What’s going-“
As she tensed at his touch, he saw her accidentally look towards me, and followed that glance.
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If I had to make a top five list of the most isolated I’ve felt in this place, I think this would rank over any singular moment of being out on my own in the first days, with no knowledge of any other speck of human life being present in that entire endless wilderness.
The way the two of them both stared at me… it was the way someone looks at a junkie on the street. Pitying them, but not-so-secretly disgusted. Wishing they weren’t invading their perfect little world with their filth. Wishing they would just vanish into thin air.
Privileged little shits.
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“Cody,” Sean said awkwardly, slipping his hand away from her. “Sorry I… didn’t see you there, man.”
I stayed silent, wanting to vanish into thin air myself. I must’ve had a look on my face that immediately warranted an apology.
“I’ll um…” He continued. “Just be a minute-“
“-actually, we…” Natalie began. “We really have to go.”
Her voice barely belonged to her. Sean looked backed.
“Yeah yeah for sure, I just wanted to say that we can talk later,” He said. “I get you um… probably have a lot going on.”
I felt my hand shaking in a strange way. My chest felt like it needed to sweat. I was… suddenly desperate to scream.
“Yeah we’ll….” She began nervously. “We’ll talk… but… not today.”
Sean noticeably squirmed a little.
“Uh… alright,” He said. “So I mean… maybe… tomorrow, then?”
“Sean, I…”
Those eyes. The way she looked at him with those fucking eyes. The eyes that I couldn’t stop having dreams about.
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Goddammit.
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“Dude, can you not see we’re in the fucking middle of something?” I suddenly said.
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I don’t know. I just don’t know. It was over, he would’ve walked away the next time she persisted, right? All I had to do was pretend it didn’t happen and move on.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
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“Cody!” Natalie said sternly, yet somehow trepidatiously.
I wanted to just tell her I didn’t mean it. I should’ve just grunted, or pinched myself, or saved my energy to punch a wall later, or anything that didn’t involve opening up my mouth again.
“Excuse me?” Sean said, his hesitation disappearing. “Do you mind if I have a conversation with her?”
“She already told you she was busy, douchebag.”
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God in Heaven, why did I have to use that fucking word?
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“Cody! Stop talking!” Natalie yelled.
Her voice was slightly pitchy. Anxious in a way I felt uncomfortable hearing from her.
Sean began to walk towards me.
“Sean! Ignore him!” She called.
“What the hell is your issue? Huh?” He said. “Do I owe you something?”
It was too late to back-off. I think I’d grown enough shame to have apologized if it was just Sean and I… but… she was there.
God it’s so stupid. I’m such a freak.
“Whatever, dude. You’re better than me,” I said sarcastically. “You’re the king, everybody knows.”
He shook his head.
“What are you talking about, Cody?” He said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I was in full defcon-1 cornered defense now.
“Are you suddenly concerned about it? I wonder what could possibly be causing you to act that way.”
As he angrily quickened his pace, Natalie ran up and stood in front of him.
“Stop listening to him-Cody, I swear to God be quiet-“
He looked straight past her as he pointed his anger at me.
“-listen, you little asshole. You’re probably still settling in, and I get that, but everyone else is dealing with the same Hell that you are,” He said. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve watched basketball? Taken a normal shower? Eaten pizza? You’re not special, so I don’t know why you’re acting so fucking precious. I’ve been trying really hard to leave your conceited ass alone-“
“-Oh you have?” I said. “That’s why you’re conveniently here with her shirt?”
“… what did you just say?”
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Jesus Christ, stop. Please just stop. Don’t say it.
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“You knew I was here,” I seethed. “Do you want to shove it in my face any closer? How about you just fuck her right in front of me?!”
Sean was silent with a look of total disbelief. Natalie, however, didn’t hesitate for even a moment. She turned away from Sean, slammed the shirt down with her face red, and began barreling forwards.
“THAT’S NOT YOUR PLACE! HOW DARE YOU?!” She screamed, with her voice settling into its rightful authority. She grabbed me by my collar ( Her collar). “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?! IS THAT FUNNY TO YOU?! DO YOU THINK BEING A TOTAL FUCKING CREEP IS FUNNY?!”
Just say sorry. It’s obviously too late, but it’s better late than never. Say it now before anything more happens, because you’ll never have another time as good as this one.
“… am I wrong?”
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I thought back to how I’d pestered Nikko about Margo, and realized he had been an incredibly good sport about what was a ridiculously rude insinuation. I thought back about my assumption of Natalie’s erratic externalized behavior, and realized I basically have an identical lack of self control. I thought back about watching Lizzie with the bat, and how that image wasn’t enough to get me to intervene. I couldn’t do it then… but now ? Really? This is when I’m motivated to speak up? Anything’s possible when it has to do with your insecurity, huh?
I guess I do that more often than I think…
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Sean’s hand appeared on Natalie’s shoulder.
“Hey,” He said. “Who cares what he thinks? If that’s what it’s about, then let’s just-“
Natalie released me as she turned around and pushed Sean forcefully away from her.
“STOP FUCKING TOUCHING ME!”
A horror crept into Sean’s eyes that even I was inclined to feel sympathy for. I was suddenly cognizant of the possibility that I had done something irreversible to Natalie. Something that it’d be childish to believe would only be taken out on me.
You wanna say sorry now?
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Before I got the chance to, a voice called behind us.
“Natalie?”
I turned to see Tecca standing nervously behind me, staring at the heaving beast between Sean and I.
“What’s going on?” He said carefully.
Her hair fell over her eyes as she looked straight to the ground, balling both her fists and clenching her teeth. She didn’t respond to him. He walked past me. Without touching her, he approached and leaned into her ear. He whispered something I couldn’t hear as I snuck a glance towards Sean. His gaze was stuck on them. Tecca waited for a moment, until I saw Natalie breathing deeply, then shaking her head. Her view never left the ground. Tecca whispered something else in response, a little longer this time. She simmered in her mental-rapture for a moment, but eventually stood up straight. The kind of straight that made me think inappropriately . With her eyes closed, she nodded her head as if to assure herself, and finally unclenched her fists. She opened her eyes, looking towards Tecca as he smiled, delicately rubbing her wrist with his pinkie. The equivalent of barely a gust of wind. Instead of shoving him away, Natalie lightly brushed his hand away, turned, and walked away towards the church. All three of us stood and watched until she disappeared around a corner. I waited until she had been gone for almost a whole minute to breathe again.
Tecca crossed his arms and sighed.
“What the hell did you say to her?” He asked angrily with his back to us.
“I didn’t think I said anything,” Sean said. “I was trying to calm her down.”
Tecca rubbed his face.
“You know I’m not talking to you.”
Tecca’s gaze drifted over to me.
“What did you do?” He grilled.
Gross… and bitter.
“I… I don’t know…”
“You don’t know?!” Sean yelled. “When I think of all the times you’ve stuck to your guns, and now you don’t know-“
“-Sean, please,” Tecca said. “You’re right, and I agree, so can you let me berate him in peace?”
“And say what ? That he needs to try a little harder ? So this little kid gets away with another win for terrorizing Natalie?! He always manages to get away with it! I just wanted to have a conversation with her-are we really supposed to put up with this forever?!”
He shifted back to me.
“What is it? Do you think that sleeping with me makes her a slut ?!“
“Sean!”
Hearing him say that word had almost made me feel a confirmation bias based justification for the way I had just acted.
Almost isn’t a good word. Totally is better.
“I definitely don’t think it makes her picky…”
Tecca’s glare shot around to me, absolutely furious for continuing to egg it on. Before he had the chance to yell at me, Sean bubbled over. He silently brushed past him to get to me. Tecca wouldn’t be able to stop him the same way Natalie had.
“Sean,” Tecca began, desperate to try anyway. “Don’t put your hands on him.”
Sean leaned in without touching me.
“Sorry, am I getting in your way?” He whispered as he towered over me. “Think I’m blocking her view of you?”
My mouth was so full of spit. Warm spit.
I can’t lie about it, though. My throat was dry.
“Did you know I was standing there?” I asked.
He slowly smiled, and I heavily despised my spine for the chill that ran down it.
“If I say no, would that help you to stop thinking about my dick?”
No.
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He suddenly turned around, walked over, and picked up her shirt from the floor.
“Just get over it, Romeo,” He said as he passed without shoulder-checking me.
I turned to try and yell, but I knew I wouldn’t have anything to say. I silently watched him walk away towards Natalie’s house.
Our house. Our fucking house.
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What am I even talking about? Seriously…
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“Hey.”
Tecca was pissed.
“Real answer or start walking,” He continued. “Don’t care which one you do first, because you’re gonna do both, but I’m telling you that you’re gonna do at least one right now. Right now.”
Yeah… I am.
I turned around to him, struggling to make eye-contact. He nodded slowly, before turning and walking towards the church with his arms crossed.
I followed.
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“If you don’t talk, I will,” He said. “You don’t want that, do you?”
I felt so embarrassed. I kind of wanted to cry. I also kind of wanted to run away.
“…I might as well have called her a slut to her face,” I said.
I saw Tecca flick his head to throw a hair out of his view (even though none of his bangs were ever long enough to do that, he just liked tossing his hair).
“Have you not already done that at least once? I’d find that hard to believe.”
I stifled a “fuck you, Tecca”, and remained silent, though I genuinely couldn’t remember what the answer was.
Out loud? Maybe not. Internally? Duh.
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“Listen, I know what probably happened before I got there…” He began. “I’m just going to assume I’m right unless you say otherwise. I guess you don’t have to tell me about it if you’re really that scared of yourself.”
I never claimed not to be, so I didn’t respond.
“… I know it sucks, and I’m sorry you had to feel like that,” He began again. “… but Jesus Christ, Cody. Please decide which side of the fence you’re on.”
It’s not a fence, it’s a wall.
“… do you want me to stop talking?” He said in a more soothing tone.
“…no. I just want to go away somewhere. I don’t want to see her.”
“… do you feel sorry?”
“Yes.”
“Then how about you get the fuck over it and tell her that ?” He said, returning candidly to his normal tone. “You had an outburst. If anyone here would understand that, it would be Natalie.”
“She hates me.”
“I don’t know a ton of people here that don’t , Cody. You’re also not really making the most compelling case for her not to.”
“I’VE DONE NOTHING BUT-… HOW WOULD-…” I sputtered with my face red as Tecca immediately stopped walking and turned around.
“Do you want her to not hate you?”
I rubbed my face in my hands like a five-year old.
“What the-… fuck do you think?” I said in a childish whine.
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Tecca didn’t like me very much, but he was quite honest about it. Not that anyone else really tried to hide it here, but Tecca made it very clear that our relationship would likely not grow past that point, and had a way of making me feel very pressure-free about it.
It made me feel calm in his company, where I definitely should not have felt that way. As far as folks who didn’t like me, Tecca’s scorn was the most comfortingly warm I’d maybe ever experienced, and he knew it. He made a concentrated effort beside his repugnance to never make me feel alienated.
I enjoyed his proximity more than that of most people I weaseled onto some “good side” of.
He was the nicest “bitch” I’d ever met.
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“Why the hell do I have to live in that goddamn house with her, dude?!” I said. “It’s such a sick joke. I feel like I’m gonna explode. Imagine he walked in there one day while I was in my room, and I had to hear them like-… Jesus Christ-“
“-she wouldn’t let that happen-“
“-why not?! Why the fuck wouldn’t she?! I… I would if I were her… if I knew it would hurt the dork across the hall from me.”
“Yeah well… Natalie isn’t you, Cody.”
“Exactly, so she doesn’t understand anything.”
“… why don’t you want her to hate you?”
“Shut up, Tecca…”
“Cody, think about it.”
“Stop, man!-I’m serious! Let’s just go!”
“You’re not gonna stand in that church with her the way you are right now-“
“-damn straight-“
“-get a hold of yourself, seriously. Take a goddamn breath.”
I wanted him to hug me.
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Jesus, God in the flesh, I wanted my mom.
What kind of fresh Hell allows that?
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“What’d you say to her?” I asked with my face in my hands.
He took a moment. I would guess he was considering whether I deserved to hear it.
“I asked if you hurt her.”
… why had she said no?
“…I thought it’d be something more mysterious than that…”
I brought my head out of my hands, but Tecca wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was staring into space, thinking about something else…
“What-…” I said. “What did you say after that?”
His vision re-centered in recognition, and squinted at me.
“Sorry, next time I say something I want everybody to hear, I’ll make sure not to whisper it in one person’s ear.”
I sighed.
“You should’ve reminded her that nobody would find my death to be a devastating tragedy. It would be like hurting a fly.”
A fruit fly.
He rolled his eyes.
“Jesus Christ, you’re annoying,” He said.
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Tecca stayed quiet for a moment, but eventually stepped closer to me.
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Step six:
“Has anyone ever told you about The Pile?”
I got a forehead-rub in, and finally took a deep breath like an adult.
“The what , dude?”
He, of course, started walking away again.
“Natalie doesn’t want to kill you.”
I, of course, didn’t want to follow him. But I did, like a good dog.
“Killing you would mean you won,” He said. “Natalie doesn’t win when she has your blood on her hands.”
Oh please.
“Is that what she says to people? I’m glad she’s such a pillar of civility that she can’t handle it resting on her otherwise spotless consciousness.”
“Are you questioning that? I hope you understand the box you’re putting her in if you do.”
“That I’m putting her in?! It’s been her idea to waste me since I was a five-day old citizen.”
“Not hers.”
“What?”
“I thought that seeing the Omen would reiterate to you that we don’t make one-person decisions here.”
“Are you gonna tell me what the fucking pile is?”
He let his arms slip back down to his sides
“… I’ll either tell you when you stop hurting people’s feelings, or when you keep hurting people’s feelings. I would like it if it was the former.”
Even before I would find out how horrifyingly threatening that statement was, I was just as ready to jump off the lip of a total deranged breakdown. What Natalie and Sean had seen was fucking child’s play in comparison to what was finally about to emerge from me.
We wanna talk about sides of the fence? R&E is getting real cozy for a place that seems to be keeping me around as an emotional cat toy. I guess that’s where I should really embrace being a dog. Wanna hear a metaphor I will NOT get lost in? R&E is like my owner, and every single other person in this town is a cat. For some reason, some goddamn reason, in the middle of their lonely crazy-cat-lady existence, my owner decided to buy a dog. Where all the cats were previously spiraling into a depression cycle of repetitive ennui, the boring cat toys have been put on the shelf for the newest attraction for their curiosity. Feeling bored? Just fuck with the dog! Just smack it and nip at it and claw at it and hiss at it and walk all over it and shove your ass in its face and meow to a creature that only understands woofs, because the dog just takes it. The dog will always take it, because what happens if he doesn’t? Well apparently, something called “The Pile” happens (Jesus Christ, “The Pile”? They’re just so lame it’s mind-altering. Their naming convention is just Elijah convincing them to put “The” in front of ambiguous nouns). I should whisper in their ear to remind them that Kanata is here. When the dog spot is more sufficiently filled by her, maybe I can just be the gerbil that gets eaten or explodes or whatever other grotesque way those things randomly die, because I am not a fan of being the dog.
I’m only about one good hit away from going rabid. My mouth is practically foaming as I silently follow Tecca the rest of the way to the church.
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The first thing I noticed was that Natalie wasn’t there. Neither was Roman, Evelyn or Robert.
Elijah and Carolette noticed Tecca and I as we entered. Both of them performed such a comically fast-fading smile when noticing the expressions we were wearing. Tecca breezed past them both as Carolette broke away to follow him. Elijah did the same to step in front of me.
“Okay,” He fucking began. “I know utter wrath is the one thing you two can bond over, but this seems like excessively intricate wrath.”
“It’s not,” I said shortly. “It’s simple wrath.”
Otto chuckled from where he stood a couple feet away.
Step seven:
“Wrath isn’t simple just because it seems spontaneous” He said. “There’s a lot to take from that feeling.”
I refused to look at him, and focused the anger that had brewed into hardening my gaze towards Elijah.
“Thanks so much for using that word here,” I growled at him before brushing past the both of them.
Planting myself, I found safety in a corner hugging the back of the chancel. I tried hard to discharge enough noxious discontent to keep the rest of the gathering away from me. Though unintentional, that usually worked for Vernon (currently on the other side of the pulpit, scratching an itch far closer to his genitals than should have been publicly displayed). It didn’t work long at all for me.
The tree of Roman walked into the chapel, alone. Looking far more discontent than Tecca or I could have possibly looked combined. I was immediately struck a little straighter in posture than I had been a couple seconds ago. Natalie and Robert entered only a couple seconds after him, and I barely noticed them in his wake. Natalie watched Roman in agitated concern as he walked up silently.
Had she… gone to find Robert after walking away?
Carolette briefly looked away from her conversation with Tecca as Roman passed them. She watched him as he followed my almost identical actions to go stand away from the rest of the group. He found a suitable oasis of solitude and began to stare blankly into space. I met eyes with Carolette, who’s eyes were stirring a perfect mixture of being distraught and infuriated. Surely she hadn’t let Tecca keep our encounter a secret. I doubt he had to describe even half of what he himself had witnessed in order for Carolette to understand the situation completely. I would be hearing about it double from her.
But at the moment, something about Roman was so powerfully winning against her concern for it. That was bad.
Despite the rude awakening, I had woken up this morning with a much brighter perspective on my meeting with Jennifer. In such a horrible bleak space, she had pushed herself so far beyond the barrier to speak with me. Maybe to give me consolation, but I think it was just so she could look at me again. I’m really hoping that being able to see the face of what had stolen something from her… I hope it had given her some ground to walk towards healing. Ground her suffering to reality.
Roman had been taking care of her in that state for the entire time I’d been in here and out of here and in here again. I can’t imagine how much that must mentally drag him right along through the mud. I remembered how Roman had thanked me yesterday, and proceeded to completely misread what Carolette’s eye contact was asking of me.
Where her eyes had previously been urging me to “stay the fuck away from him”, I now saw them widen in a “what do you think you’re doing?” motion, as I got up from my spot and walked towards him. As always, I was missing some pretty blatant context clues.
To my own credit, I think I handled it pretty well at the beginning.
I turned and leaned against the wall next to him, but still with a sizable chunk of space between us. I didn’t force myself into his range of view, and I didn’t say anything. He knew I was there, and I let him come to me.
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“You can talk but… just say something unrelated to anything” He eventually said. “Just talk for a little, I’m not even gonna really listen, I’m not looking for comfort.”
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“Well… yeah…”
That feels like a lot of pressure, but obviously yes, I think I can find the ability to talk.
“… you uhhh… think it’s probably December outside? I was thinking about dead trees like a week ago… I always really hated dead trees, but I was thinking that it would look so much better here if we had trees. Even if they didn’t have any leaves. It would just be so much less unnerving if there was any bit of nature. I mean, most trees just go dormant in the winter, they don’t actually die, so it’s not like-“
“-that’s related to a lot of things, Cody.”
- Don’t talk about IKEA
- Don’t talk about death
Uhhhhh…
“… you… ever watched Lost ?”
He rubbed his forehead.
“Never mind, you’re fine,” He said.
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“I’m sorry I talked to her,” I said.
I immediately wondered if the gap between us was small enough for his massive arms to reach me.
“… nah, I’m glad you did. She doesn’t talk to many people besides me… sometimes she doesn’t even speak to Natalie anymore when she visits.”
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She still visits her. She sounds like a good friend.
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“She used to live with him,” He said more quietly, without needing to tell me who he was referring to . “We’d been messing around for like a year, and we obviously cared about each other… but she loved him so much, I wasn’t even a lightbulb next to him. The only way she felt safe here was… imagining that they were kids again, living in the same house, sleeping right next-door to each other… pretending their parents were just down the hall… he used to give me such hell for not putting my whole wrist in the pot… I had never liked the idea of getting romantically involved with someone here, but he was so cool about what I always felt should have been uncomfortable.”
I looked to him just in time to see the smile on his face begin to slowly disappear.
“That house wasn’t safe for her anymore… with him, it had become her new childhood home, but then… then it was covered in a person that wasn’t there anymore… she couldn’t stay there after him… that’s the only reason she’s with me now… sometimes I feel like I’m burdening her… if I had gone instead, I bet he would be so much better at comforting her.”
I wasn’t even going to try saying anything. I had come over here for that exact reason. Silence is a better friend than most people understand.
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His smile returned slightly as he chuckled.
“Sorry,” He said. “I wasn’t trying to prove I’m better at distracting myself than you, I shouldn’t have let that all go on you.”
“No, don’t say sorry. I’m glad you can-…”
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Wait, what did he say?
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“Distracting?”
He looked towards me for the first time.
“Yeah, I just… needed to think about something else.”
Something else… like… besides that? I thought that was it.
“I mean, what else is-“
I was silenced by the church doors opening again. I looked towards them, anticipating to see the tenth member of The Omen, only realizing that wouldn’t make any sense when that was not what I saw.
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Step eight:
Sandra walked in.
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I felt the air change, immediately realizing the gravity of Carolette’s warning. I had dodged decapitation by never asking Roman what was wrong.
Sandra whispered briefly with Natalie and Robert, as Roman pushed up from the wall.
“Roman…” I said.
He didn’t respond.
The three’s aside ended as they all began walking up to the pulpit. The rest of the group began to centralize closer as Roman walked away from me. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to be a part of this meeting. My skin began to crawl as Natalie’s first foot stepped up onto the platform. I barely felt Carolette’s hand on my wrist as she gently brought me over to the circle. I stood between her and Roman, completely petrified with a dread that I couldn’t really describe. Nothing was hurting me. Nothing was immediately threatening to. I was alive and breathing. I should have been, and I was, but my lungs were beginning to overthink. As Natalie began to speak, I felt a similar sensation to this month’s earlier lingering symptoms. Somewhere in my chest, I started teetering.
“Vernon,” Natalie began. “Are you gonna fix Angie’s door this week?”
He scowled a little as Sandra stepped next to her. Robert walked silently to a spot behind Tecca and Vernon, not really joining the circle.
“I have to sand down the edges, it takes a while,” Vernon said.
“Don’t talk back to me, just tell her that. Tecca and I haven’t heard the end of it.”
“I’ve read,” Tecca said. “She’s heard .”
Vernon scratched his beard. I was much too distracted to be disgusted.
“Before closing tomorrow,” Vernon said. “But I’d have to stop working on-“
“-That shouldn’t be your priority anyway,” Natalie interrupted. “You know that. Don’t act cute.”
He silently took the slight and folded his arms. She sighed.
“You and Tecca can go tell her together. Just spit out a ballpark to her, she isn’t going to honor it anyway. Just tell her something , okay?”
“I don’t need Tecca to do that,” He said, slightly challenging. “What makes you think I can’t tell her on my own?”
Natalie’s expression didn’t change as she let her brief silence answer his question.
“Take Tecca.”
She turned to Otto.
“Um… Tecca and I…” She began to him. “Would… appreciate it if you would stop talking to Veronica about how her son is doing on the ‘other side’. I think it would be best if she didn’t have any more reminders of her family, Otto.”
“I’m not sure why you say that, and well,” Otto replied with his usual uncanny smile. “She is the one who told me about him in the first place. I don’t see why it would be making her uncomfortable.”
“She told you about it for ten seconds two years ago. It was a mistake. Please don’t bring up anything of her family again… and try to give that same respect when speaking to everyone. Until they are explicitly asking you to pray for someone outside… pretend that their families don’t exist.”
He tilted his head.
“Do you think that God just pretends that his children don’t exist?”
I saw Natalie begin to scratch her wrist uncomfortably. A weird color in her cheeks.
“… we can talk about this later,” She resigned. “Alone.”
Something in Otto had overpowered her, and I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was, but it mortified me.
Her view shifted to Elijah.
“What’s Tracy doing?” She asked him.
“Just organizing her room, making a list of things she doesn’t want there, or wants there instead. You can decide whether or not we listen to that .”
“Not. Who told her to make a list?”
“Uhhhh,” He said. “I think I was just joking…”
“Great idea,” She said with about the level of sarcasm you’d assume.
“Well, anyway… Sam’s gonna start teaching her the record-keeping tomorrow.”
Tracy had somehow managed to almost immediately earn a job in The Library. I wasn’t happy about it. I still hadn’t been allowed to even go there on my own.
“Alright. I want him telling you everything he thinks about her…” She said.
He chuckled.
“What, still don’t like her?”
She ignored him and looked at Carolette dejectedly. She paused, as if preparing herself.
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“Okay… tell me about it,” She said before taking a deep breath she had been resisting the need for.
Carolette was silent for a moment. She looked past me to Roman before responding. Roman was still looking at the floor.
“Well,” She began as she turned back to Natalie. “I don’t think it’s dire as of today, it’s just something you’ll have to think about… in the next month I’d say… but I wouldn’t put it off for two.”
Natalie closed her eyes for a moment and remained silent.
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Her eyes opened.
“Roman?” She said calmly, not in impatience.
He pulled his eyes up to her respectfully.
“I disagree,” He said. “… I wouldn’t wait even a month.”
“… that’s pessimistic,” Carolette said.
Roman thought for a moment before he finally looked at her.
“Yeah… and I’m glad you’re still realistic without being optimistic ,” He said. “But we don’t need that… we need pessimism.”
Carolette nodded solemnly before addressing Natalie.
“Yeah,” She said. “He’s right. We do.”
Natalie rubbed her forehead, trusting their diagnosis. I had absolutely no clue what they were talking about, but I didn’t really care. I kept having to keep myself from staring at Sandra standing next to her. I kept having to keep myself from staring at the spot where someone else usually was.
“Let me go with you,” Roman suddenly said after some silence.
“No.”
Natalie immediately squashed the notion and returned her hands professionally to her sides.
“No,” She repeated. “It’s fine. Thank you for telling me.”
There was a silence that hung, and its teeth began to bare as Natalie continued to stare at him. She had worked herself over a hurdle that I didn’t know the meaningful height of, but it somehow seemed like she was just one vault away from a much taller one as her eyes softened on him.
“You can leave if you want…” She basically whispered with the softest voice I’d ever heard her use.
It made me sick.
Roman’s gaze drifted away from her, but as he stared back towards the floor, he shook his head and remained positioned in the circle.
She nodded and turned to Robert.
“Same goes for you.”
He stared at her without responding. His expression was less gentle. She still accepted it just the same as she looked away.
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“Sandra is here,” Natalie said. “ Obviously …”
Sandra waved her hand softly to the rest of the assembly without really looking at anyone.
“Um… I don’t know if… you wanna kind of just go for it…“ Natalie mumbled to her.
Sandra nodded and stepped slightly forward. Everyone focused their attention silently to her.
I tried not to scream.
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“This is ultimately up to all of you for how you would like to continue from this day forward, but I would not recommend making Evelyn leave the house anymore.”
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Evelyn wasn’t here. Roman kept staring at the ground.
“I just don’t have any avenues for management. Anything radical at this time would just be cruel to her. Her jaundice is already doing enough without me trying to pointlessly diagnose the stages of her decline… if you want my clairvoyance without the technology to confirm it to you physically… her bile duct is far past compressed… I don’t know how she’s functioning at all.”
Step nine:
“I would say that five weeks is generous.”
This is how I learned that Evelyn has terminal pancreatic cancer.
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Some form of evil stars aligned in my head as I was, somewhat unintentionally, the first person to speak.
“… what are you talking about?”
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I felt nauseous with words. Sandra looked at me awkwardly, but with an appropriate tinge of annoyance.
“I’m sorry, I know it’s hard to hear,” She said patiently to me. “I… don’t know if you have a history with this, but-“
“-no… that’s not… how do you even know you’re right?”
Natalie began to step forward, and I think Sandra saw it, as she immediately began responding before Natalie had the chance to decimate me.
“Her skin is yellow, Cody. She’s vomiting more than she’s keeping down. She can barely sit up let alone stand, and…”
I saw her glance towards Roman nervously, before looking back to continue her grotesque description of his adopted mother’s decay.
“She’s never weighed much but… she’s down to bone… I’m not going to describe her stool to you.”
I didn’t think Sandra was lying. I really had never lied to Sandra, and I believed that Sandra never lied to me. That wasn’t the issue. I felt myself letting go and I made my issue quite well known.
“Why didn’t you see it before?! Where did it come from?!”
She sighed.
“I did see it. I brought it up for the first time over six months before you even showed up. I can’t conduct an operative procedure here. I just can’t. I don’t even think I’d trust myself to perform it properly if I had the facilities, and in the hypothetical instance that she was hospitalized in the real world, with everything at their disposal… it would still be petty time they were saving.”
“Time is time!”
“Not borrowed time. This is just something that’s been coming for a while. She’s eighty-one years old. Old people get cancer. Humans get cancer. It happens, Cody.”
“Well then why didn’t you let anyone know it was happening?!”
Elijah cleared his throat.
“She did,” He said shortly. “She just told you she did. This wasn’t a secret. Nothing is a secret to this group.”
“EXCEPT FOR ME?! WHEN YOU TOLD ME ABOUT EVELYN, DID YOU THINK I WOULDN’T WANT TO KNOW THAT?!”
I was looking at Elijah’s other half. It stared back at me.
“Why did you think you were here, Cody?“
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They… preemptively replaced her? They made me meet the woman they wanted me to fill the spot of before she died? That’s what this was? That’s why I’m a “member” of this backwards fucking oligarchy?
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I felt a hand on my shoulder before I could continue screaming at Elijah. I turned to see Roman behind me.
“I’m sorry,” He said. “I wanted to tell you… I did. Not just today, and not just yesterday… it shouldn’t have been Sandra’s responsibility to tell people… I should’ve told-“
I suddenly brushed his arm away from myself. Natalie stepped forward before Roman held his hand out to her. Carolette stepped around him as Elijah walked past me to whisper something to Natalie. They were the ones that were like flies. I was like a carcass.
“Cody, calm down,” Carolette said. “This isn’t the place for this-“
“-What’s the place for it?! What’s the place for me to collectively scream at you all for constantly manipulating me?!”
“Manipu-Cody, no one is manipulating you,” She said. “That’s not fair and you know it. This isn’t about you.”
“EVERYTHING IS ABOUT ME! AM I SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE YOU ALL ACT THE SAME NOW AS YOU DID BEFORE I WAS HERE?! EVERYTHING IS ABOUT ME!”
“Yeah,” Robert said in the back. “You’ve made that pretty clear by now.”
“NO!” Carolette yelled over him to me. “That’s not true! You’re being unreasonable! Look at us! Honestly, look at us!”
I backed away in fear, not wanting to look at any of them, but taking notice of all of their eyes on me.
“Cody…” She said. “I need you to listen to me”
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Ten easy steps to destroying Cody Camargo: Written by Buzzfeed.
Step ten:
“… we all care about you.”
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“… you care about me? You care about me?-“
“-Cody-“
“-SHUT UP! FUCK EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU! SHUT UP!”
Tecca sneered.
“Do you think we’re not used to you yelling irrationally by now?” He said. “That’s not gonna change what she’s saying.”
“WELL IT FUCKING SHOULD! YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHO I AM! I KNOW YOU DON’T CARE BECAUSE YOU CAN’T CARE! IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY!”
“We’ve had this conversation before, dude,” Elijah said lazily. “You’re being dramatic.”
My crazed eyes shot to him.
“… dramatic?”
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As a new layer of self-defense materialized in my blood, I pulled it up out of myself, dripping with flesh and viscera. I felt it wet in my bumbling fingers, hating it for a moment, and loving it like an infant the next. I felt it become me.
I let it become me.
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“DRAMATIC?! I WONDER IF I’M MORE OR LESS DRAMATIC THAN THE BIPOLAR FREAK WHO’S SCARED OF HIS GIRLFRIEND GETTING FUCKED BY HER SOUS CHEF! YOU THINK I’VE GOT HIM BEAT?!”
Elijah didn’t respond, he just stared at me with tired eyes.
The same as Tecca did as my vitriol shifted to him.
“OR MAYBE THE GUY WHO CAN’T BE CONVINCED THAT EVERY SINGLE LIVING HUMAN ISN’T OBSESSED WITH HIS SEXUALITY?! LIKE EVERYONE IS CONSTANTLY WAKING UP TO THINK ABOUT WHO HE WANTS TO HAVE SEX WITH! YOU’RE ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS LATE TO BEING A MARTYR FOR THAT SHIT! MAYBE YOU’LL HAVE THE RIGHT ONCE YOU ACTUALLY ATTEMPT COMMITTING YOURSELF TO SOMEBODY!”
The same as Robert.
“OR MAYBE THE SAD OLD MAN WHO THINKS HE’S BEEN THROUGH SO MUCH, THAT HE’S JUST TOO GODDAMN WEATHERED FOR ANYONE TO UNDERSTAND HIM, SO THAT MUST BE THE REASON WHY HE’S ALONE! YOU EVER THINK THAT MAYBE YOUR ADOPTED DAUGHTER MIGHT FEEL THE SAME WAY ABOUT YOU THAT EVERYONE ELSE DOES?! MAYBE SHE JUST DOESN’T SAY IT BECAUSE SHE KNOWS THAT SHE’S THE ONLY PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE THAT ACTUALLY CARES ABOUT YOU! THAT’S NOT LOVE, IT’S ENTRAPMENT!”
And Sandra.
“HOW ABOUT THE WITCH DOCTOR WHO THINKS SHE’S HOUSE M.D. BECAUSE SHE LET HER PARENTS FORCE HER INTO NURSING SCHOOL?! YOU WANNA ACT SO FUCKING NONCHALANT TO ME ABOUT THE CYCLE OF DEATH BUT WANNA SHOVE YOUR INABILITY TO SLEEP AT NIGHT INTO ANYONE’S FACE WHO WILL FEEL SYMPATHY FOR HOW HARD YOU WORK! I BET THAT MAKES YOU FEEL REALLY WARM AND IMPORTANT DOESN’T IT?! THANK GOD NO ONE ELSE HERE HAS AN INKLING OF A CLUE ABOUT MEDICINAL PRACTICES!”
And Vernon.
“Have you… GENUINELY… EVER… TAKEN A SHOWER IN YOUR GODDAMN LIFE?! DID YOU LOSE ANY CREATURE COMFORT WHATSOEVER WHEN YOU ENDED UP HERE?! WERE YOU RAISED IN A FUCKING SEWAGE RUNOFF?!”
I finally looked towards Carolette, whose eyes were plagued with a true sadness that no one else’s had been.
“YOU KNOW WHAT CAROLETTE?! SINCE YOU’RE SO SMART, AND SO UNDERSTANDING, AND SO COMPREHENSIVE OF PEOPLE’S NATURE, I’LL LET YOU TAKE A GUESS WHAT I WOULD PROBABLY SAY TO YOU HERE! DOES THAT POP ANY IDEAS INTO YOUR HEAD?! FILL IN THE BLANK! TOP TEN ANSWERS ON THE BOARD!”
Carolette didn’t stay silent like the rest. She shook her head in utter confusion.
“Why are you doing this? You’re scaring me.”
I went up a gear. She still can’t get it through to herself. She thinks it’s a character. She thinks it’s lashing out. That’s not what this is.
You don’t know what this is.
“I’M SCARY?! DO YOU SEE THE BUILDING YOU’RE STANDING IN?! I DON’T KNOW HOW ANYONE COULD EVER FEEL THE LIGHT OF GOD IN A PLACE SO FUCKING DARK!”
“Hey!” Natalie finally interrupted.
I did not listen.
“THE ONLY THING SCARIER THAN THIS CROOKED BLAIR WITCH MONUMENT IS THE CATHOLIC CHILD RAPIST THAT’S HEADING IT UP!”
I shoved my hands in Otto’s direction.
“I MEAN IS ANYONE CONVINCED THAT THIS GUY IS ALLOWED WITHIN THIRTY FEET OF A PLAYGROUND?!”
Natalie pushed past Roman before he grabbed her arm. She shoved her other one towards my face.
“Do you understand that your entire tenure here is because of a lost little girl?” She said, putting a God-particle of energy into controlling her volume. “I will throw you out with the same song and dance as before, see what new bargaining chip you can somehow weasel your way back in again with. The next time you stepped outside those gates without the cart, you’d be as good as dead to me.”
I took a second to breathe. I felt the burn in my lungs that I hadn’t felt in a month. I didn’t cough. I liked the way it lined the walls. I liked the way it forced itself intravenous. I felt the high reach my head, as a smile slowly creeped across my face.
A smile that must have been eerily similar to Natalie’s right after I had punched her.
“Well don’t throw me out yet,” I said vilely . “I haven’t gotten to you and the mountain here. I mean, I don’t even think I have any material left for you guys! I must have said it all! BESIDES, I’M MORE INTERESTED IN THE GIRL FROM THE RING THAT YOU’RE BOTH HIDING IN ROMAN’S HOUSE! YOU THINK I’M MORE DRAMATIC THAN HER SELF-PITYING, ATTENTION SEEKING ASS!? I MEAN, SHE CLEARLY HAS NO GODDAMN INTENTION OF WORKING TO GET BETTER, AND YOU KNOW WHAT?! I BET THE TWO OF YOU WOULD BE A LOT LESS TENSE IF SHE GOT IT OVER WITH AND JUST OFFED HERSELF!”
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I didn’t love it anymore.
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Roman let go of Natalie, probably wanting to let her have her way with me, but for a moment, she didn’t move. I don’t think she was breathing.
How could she? Her head was on fire.
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I returned, and became myself, or whatever I like to tell myself that is.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” I said shakily.
I knew it was such a pitiful thing to try after that, and I didn’t know if I was saying it to her, to the room, or to God. I just knew that I was terrified of Natalie Shachiro. I now also knew that saying I’m sorry was a huge mistake, as her face began to twist. I guess I should have assumed as much. I remembered what Elijah said to me once:
She doesn’t like giving or receiving mercy.
I can’t believe I had even wasted my own mental energy considering saying sorry to her so many times about so many things. I should’ve known exactly what would have happened.
I should have known it would end up with her hands around my throat.
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Natalie was not trying to scare me at all. The second her fingers found the circumference of my neck, they were dredging through my flesh so belligerently, I immediately had breathed what she considered my last breath.
The purple oceans were molting. Her face was empty of herself. Her brow wasn’t furrowed. It’s like she wasn’t even conscious outside of the hands that were abbreviating my throat.
Like I’d daydreamed once, Abel hadn’t had shit on her.
I wasn’t even struggling. My legs were the only part of me that was fighting, but they got the memo. I crumbled to my knees as she followed me smoothly down to the floor, holding me in a way that forced my eyes to stay locked on hers. She was hyper-focused into dissociation. The entirety of her perception was functioning only to witness the moment that the life would leave my eyes.
There was no way she was going to miss it.
Or miss it.
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“Natalie!”
The first voice called out after what felt like an hour, so I’d assume it was a minute. Everyone else had just been letting her jive.
“Natalie! Not for you! Not for your promise!”
It was Otto’s voice. I wished I had been dead before hearing it. She didn’t listen at first, I’m not even sure she’d heard him.
“NATALIE!” He screamed.
In the pitiful blurring vision I currently resided in, I saw him appear over her shoulder, the same one he grabbed to try and rip her away from me. She was obviously much too strong for him, but she actually let go.
As I let in a massive breath, I just barely saw Natalie lurching around to punch the almighty shit out of Otto. I heard him fall to the ground. I choked and hacked. I blinked the waterfall of tears out of my eyes to try and find the world again. As I did, I saw Natalie staring down at Otto as he curled up on the floor, holding his hands over the blood that was shooting from his likely broken nose. She stared down at him, looking like she wanted to do more.
I kept waiting for someone to step in and stop her, because I had no reason to believe she wouldn’t continue if she wanted to. But no one touched her. No one spoke. Everyone just stared at her.
At her. Not at me. Not at the guy who had just horribly shattered any little semblance of good faith he possibly had left with them, just to prove that he could. No, they didn’t care about that guy anymore. They didn’t even remember he was in the room. They just cared about her. They just cared . They were sad. Like they’d expected this, but the preparation didn’t make it any easier. Then I knew. I knew they could care about me if they wanted to, no matter who or what I was, because I was staring at the most horrible beast that they still loved unconditionally.
That beast turned back around to me, as I realized why Roman had really let go.
All these people loved her, it’s clear that they did. Everyone in R&E cared deeply for Natalie, because she cared deeply for them, and that was unmistakable. She was the protector, to whatever isolating end that meant. But as I looked at how everyone there was unanimously scared of Natalie, I realized that it wasn’t exclusive to this moment. Natalie was the epitome of a necessary evil. Nobody wanted to be scared of her, but she was erratic, and angry, and her love by itself could not excuse her funny way of showing it. It was real love, but even in everyone’s constant recognition of that fact…
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Natalie was alone.
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Everyone tried to change that, day in and day out, but they couldn’t. Something had clearly disappeared inside of her that had once given her the capacity for reciprocation. Now, she knew what she was, and knew what she looked like to everyone here. So she just let that paint swallow her.
You want me to feel like a bitch? You think you’re trailblazing by making me feel like I’m evil? Such a complex and original idea.
As I stared at the fire in Natalie’s eyes, realizing there was absolutely no apology that could extinguish it, I felt the beginning of a genuine sympathy towards her.
Sympathy isn’t a good word. Pity is better.
Privileged little shit I was.
“Outside,” She said. “Now.”
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She stayed gargoyle-still as I took way too long to shake myself up and began to try and stand. My legs almost buckled, but I used my fear to crutch the weight, and began to walk. I tried to make eye contact with the rest of the group, tried to silently apologize, but everyone was either looking at her or looking at the floor.
The only exception was Sandra, waiting for Natalie to pass before kneeling carefully down to Otto’s shaking body on the ground.
As I walked away, I felt like I was drifting off the coast in a boat with no paddle. The current was pulling me slowly away from the hope of ever seeing human life again.
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I stepped outside of the church and awkwardly turned around, watching her follow me out into the false-daylight. She stared at me for a moment, but seemingly only to wait for my begging to begin again. I stayed silent.
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“Walk back to the house.”
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“I… I think Sean might be there.”
“I don’t care.”
I counted my blessings that saying that name hadn’t immediately broken the surface tension of whatever hellish stasis-mode she was in right now, and forced my shaking limbs to set off towards the house. Our house. Our fucking house.
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The town was a blur as it passed. I tried to appreciate every step I took, every step where I wasn’t yet isolated with whatever horrible circumstance was about to lock me in with itself. What should have been a five-minute walk felt like forty-five seconds at best, as I found myself standing before the entrance, pseudo-instantaneously.
She didn’t need to touch me. As I fought with my ability to move in front of the door, I felt her presence looming over my back. I reached for the knob and opened it.
I stepped into the “living room”, thousand-mile staring as I heard her close the door behind us. Every single second, I was waiting for the nerve-jump of feeling her body lunge onto mine. She stepped beside me, not even looking in my direction. She pointed to the pillar next to the stairs.
“Sit down.”
I stared at her for a second, but before she even made an attempt to meet my eye contact, she turned and walked upstairs, leaving me alone. The floor creaked above me, as I heard her entering her room, and beginning to rummage for an object I was already set on the identity of. Assumption was safe here. I turned around, looking toward the door. There was no lock on the front of our house. I could’ve ran, could’ve hidden… like someone else I know. I could’ve attempted escape.
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It’s not that I didn’t want to. I wasn’t feeling brave, and to be honest… hadn’t felt accepting of the notion of death for about a week and a half.
The idea of Natalie returning downstairs to dispense me was just as stomach-churning as it should have been.
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But I didn’t run. I sat down. I faced the couch.
After she stopped rummaging, I heard the faintest vapor of Natalie whispering to herself upstairs. I couldn’t make out the words.
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She came back down. I felt her waiting just outside my field of view for a moment before stepping in front of me. The gun was in her off-hand. Left, when it had always been right.
“Look at me.”
I couldn’t. I kept staring forward.
“Look. At. Me.”
She didn’t punch me. Didn’t press the gun to my head. Didn’t scream. She just stepped between me and the couch.
“Look up at me, Cody.”
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I did.
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I was sure I was going to die then. The only thing I could do to calm myself down was to look at her body. The way it towered over me. The way it eclipsed my worthless little self. I liked it. I tried to be soothed in its warm proximity. I opened my mouth, offering a place for her to rest the barrel. I felt horny. More than I had my entire time here. I wanted her to do it. I wanted her to touch me again.
Even if it was through the reach of the bullet.
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She didn’t.
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She stood there for a while before I realized that her eyes had drifted away from me into space. She wasn’t looking anywhere close to me when she started dragging the barrel over my forehead.
Brushing. Left. Right. Left. Right.
A little higher to the hairline. Left. Right. Left. Right.
Her arm went slack. It went into a pendulum swing. Back. Forth. Back. Forth.
My head felt cold without it.
“Hey,” I said.
Was she even in the same room?
“You’re really annoying me.”
Without responding or looking, she lazily pushed it right up to the bridge of my nose. She shoved my head back against the pillar and kneeled down onto the floor. Her eyes slowly drifted back to mine, and stared so deeply into them that it didn’t even feel like eye contact. I aged seven years in seven seconds.
The little inverted pyramid of her widow’s peak was so perfectly hinted at behind her bangs.
“Pooooowwwwwwww…” She whispered.
The beretta’s phantom recoil blew to the ceiling as she stood and walked away from my un-blown out brains.
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She turned on her heel and plopped down on the couch. Both arms on either knee. The gun hung between her legs. Her chin rested on her other palm. The weapon twirled in meditative circles as she watched me from across the room.
She was silent for twelve minutes and twenty-one seconds.
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She pulled up her legs to the cushion. Criss-cross with her hands in her lap. Her expression remolded as she watched me across the room.
She was silent for two minutes and twenty-six seconds.
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She dipped her left leg and sexily draped her right over it, her foot bouncing mid-air. She ran her free hand over her thighs as she watched me across the room.
She was silent for nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds.
I was hungry.
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She stood and walked to the kitchen. She sat up on the counter with her legs dangling. She tapped the gun against the marble as she favored staring at the fridge to staring at me.
She was silent for five minutes and thirty-one seconds.
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She sniffed and jumped down to her feet. She strafed past me to the front door.
She was silent as she exited and left me alone.
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I didn’t look at the door. I didn’t let the words “Escape” or “Run” stay for any longer than they deserved in my stream of consciousness.
Natalie was gone for ten minutes and twenty-six seconds.
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She opened the door to find me in the same position. I didn’t look at her until she gracefully folded onto the ground in front of me. She placed a plate in front of me. She put her own in front of herself. A Caesar-wrap for her. A plate of eggs and no fork for me.
She picked up one of her halves and silently began to eat.
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I stared at her in confusion for eleven seconds before her eyes looked up to mine. She immediately pulled the beretta back out of her waist and held it to my face while still chewing.
“Do you think I care?” I hissed.
She nonchalantly responded by pressing it against my groin. Not aiming it towards my groin , pressing it into my groin .
I tried to pretend it didn’t faze me for sixteen seconds before picking up a hand-full of eggs. She brought the gun back to her waist and let her eyes abandon me again, before spitting into the pile of eggs, a little piece of her wrap joining the saliva.
I shook a little as I forced myself to begin to chew in spite of that.
We ate silently for eight minutes and five seconds.
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She scratched her nose before taking our cleaned plates. She stood to walk them to the typically untouched kitchen sink. She swung back around, crossing her arms and staring into space.
Just staring. For six minutes on the dot.
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She sighed and brushed her bang aside. The way I loved.
“… go apologize to Roman.”
She walked past and towards the stairs.
“When you’re done, go to the cell. Sleep there tonight. Wake yourself up to go tomorrow. We’ll talk when you get back.”
She climbed the stairs without another word.
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“What?”
I mean…
“What the actual what-are you joking?”
She didn’t respond from upstairs as I heard her door close.
There’s just no… and I mean… no goddamn way.
I immediately stood and followed her upstairs. I reached the door and pounded on it as ferociously as I could manage.
“OPEN IT, NATALIE!”
Until my hand hurt.
The door opened. The gun wasn’t on her waist anymore. Her face was empty of anger. Empty of anything really.
“Not today. Tomorrow-“
“-WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU NOW-JUST DO IT! DO IT! ”
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“GODDAMMIT SAY SOMETHING! ”
“I just did-“
“-SO WHAT?! YOU’RE CALM NOW?! DID YOU SUDDENLY DECIDE YOU’RE A PACIFIST?! DID THAT HAPPEN BEFORE OR AFTER LAYING OTTO’S SHIT OUT IN FRONT OF EVERYONE?! BEFORE OR AFTER YOU HAD A DEATH-GRIP ON MY THROAT?!”
She tilted her head a little.
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“When did you talk to Jen?”
I was really tempted to start fighting Natalie.
“I FFFfff, WHO… FUCKING CARES?! YESTERDAY, DOES IT MATTER?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”
She crossed her arms and looked away.
“I can’t believe you.”
That. Makes. Two. Of. Us.
“IT WASN’T MY CHOICE-ROMAN BROUGHT ME THERE- INTO HIS HOME! SHE WALKED DOWNSTAIRS WITHOUT HIM EVEN KNOWING-SHE STOOD RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME WITH A KNIFE! I DIDN’T WANT TO TALK TO HER! SHE TALKED AND I ANSWERED!”
“But you answered.”
“NATALIE, WHERE IS THE GUN?!”
She looked back at me.
“What?”
“‘ WHAT ’?! YOU’RE SAYING ‘ WHAT ’ LIKE YOU’RE GENUINELY CONFUSED?! ARE YOU DOING IT, OR NOT?! ”
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“I can’t.”
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“You… can’t?”
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“I won’t .”
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She turned away from me and walked to her bed.
“Why… how many people have you killed? Do you expect me to believe that you suddenly have some moral quandary that’s restricting you from backing up what you say?”
She sat down on the bed and stared out the window behind it, ignoring me silently.
“What if I started hitting you?”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I do.”
“NO YOU ABSOLUTELY DO NOT!”
“… then just do it.”
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Look at me.
Look. At. Me.
Look back at me, Natalie.
“… I want my phone.”
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Her head turned slightly, but she barely had turned away from the window.
My voice was shaking.
“I want my phone!”
I waited a reasonable amount of time as she stayed silent.
“I’M EXERCISING MY RIGHT TO ASK IF YOU FUCKING HEARD ME?!”
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She looked towards me, the smallest sliver of anger finally breaching her expression.
“It’s dead isn’t it? What do you even want with it?-“
“-if it’s dead then what’s the point in not giving it to me?!”
She looked back away to the window.
“FUCKING LOOK AT ME!”
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She did.
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“I know there’s electricity here, and I know with all the garbage you collect from random corpses coming in, that you probably have a phone charger by now! What if I need a flashlight?!”
“You have one.”
“What if I didn’t anymore?!”
My voice was hurt again. My tonsils burned. I didn’t care about the flashlight.
“What do you want me to say, Cody? I’m not giving you your phone.”
She turned away again.
“And I’m not gonna keep looking at you when you’re being like this,” She said. “It’s fucking embarrassing.”
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I tried to raise my fist. I tried to take the first step towards the back of her head.
I never would have made it all the way.
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“You know… I… I could just leave.”
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She tapped on the window with the back of her middle finger.
“Is that supposed to be bargaining?”
“I want my fucking phone! What does it matter if I have my phone or not?! Just give it to me!”
“Nothing matters with you, Cody. You’re not a member of the community, we’re just harboring you. Whatever small amount of freedom you have, it’s not an indicator of whether or not I care about what you want… and certainly not what you need or deserve. You don’t even want your phone, you just want me to hand it to you.”
Why are you so scared to die? You practically did it already. Just let her finish it.
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“I wanna make it clear, and I know you won’t believe me…” She said. “You’re only here because Elijah seems to trust you.”
Now she’s trying too hard.
“So I guess when you say ‘Me, myself, and I” make the decision, you really mean ‘Elijah’ makes the decision? And that’s why you and nine other confused diplomats stand in that church to make ‘decisions’ together?”
She stood up. She approached and planted herself three inches away from my face. I tried to hold the gaze as it continued for an uncomfortable span of time, but pussied out and looked away after 15.36 seconds.
“Do you want me to punch you?” She asked. “Like are you requesting it? Would it make you feel better? I’m wholeheartedly asking you. Do you like it or something? Is that what this is? Do you think it would make you feel better if I punched you right now?”
I don’t know.
“Just do it… just once…”
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She did.
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It wasn’t as hard as I was expecting, but it knocked me back to the doorframe. I caught myself with the wall, and held my hand to the now stinging right side of my face. She was holding back. We both knew.
I looked at her as she shook her hand, lowering it. I wondered if it made her feel better. It didn’t work for me.
We stared at each other for far longer than I think we ever had. Neither of us spoke. I stopped counting seconds.
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“You want your phone?”
I tried to stand normally.
“… yeah.”
She nodded silently.
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“You’re gonna go out with me tomorrow.”
Twitch. Right now? Really? Shut up.
“I’ll give you your phone before we go,” She added. “If you come back, you can keep it.”
No.
“If I… come back?”
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“You mean… if I make it back?”
“You have five seconds to-“
“-Okay. Let’s do it.”
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“Good… just go apologize to Roman.”
I have no fucking idea what I just agreed to, but I think it was a bad idea.
“… we’re done?” I said.
“Cody, please go… close the door.”
“I want to talk about-“
“-GET. OUT.”
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I kept eye contact with her as I backed away, closing the door behind me again.
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I tried to walk down the stairs, but I couldn’t move. I felt like I wanted to burst in again for the third time this week.
Before I could will myself to do it, she came back out, sticking her head through the crack of the door to see me standing there.
“Cody, I’m so serious. Apologize. I’ll know if you didn’t.”
She closed the door.
And I tried.
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I tried to imagine that a new me had stepped outside when I closed the front door to our house.
I tried to imagine that Natalie wasn’t watching me out the window as I walked towards Roman’s house.
I tried to think of what I would say to ameliorate.
I tried to not turn around the second I saw his front door.
I tried to walk towards it.
I tried to reason with myself that I had no way of knowing he was even home, so why would I knock on his door? I’ll just wait until the next time I see him.
I tried to stay stationary for the amount of time it would take to have a hypothetical conversation, so when I passed by Natalie’s window again, it wasn’t too soon for the lie to check out.
I tried to not walk back inside and tell her that I couldn’t do it until it sent her the rest of the way over the edge.
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I tried to not throw up when I saw the front of the cell for the first time in weeks.
I hate to say that any part of Elijah’s teasing was correct, but it did feel bizarrely nostalgic. I wasn’t exactly happy about that, but… you know. The heart wants what it wants.
I wanted a room that wasn’t flooded with oil.
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I think it was around 3:30 when Elijah came in. The door opened much more quietly here when it wasn’t latched from the other side.
I was lying on the table, staring up at the ceiling. I barely dragged my head towards him to see his underwhelmed gloom. It was still the “secret” Elijah. I could smell the caesar dressing of my Margo-meal from the plate in his hand.
“Just for reference,” He said. “I didn’t want to give this to you.”
I immediately looked back to the much more appealing ceiling.
“Then don’t give it to me, Hyde. I already ate today.”
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I heard him set the plate down on the ground.
“Did you apologize to Roman?”
Is that her full-proof plan for “knowing if I didn’t”? Sending her little pet to ask me if I did?
“You can pass it along for me. I don’t know where he is.”
“That wouldn’t really make it much of an-“
I swung my legs quickly and sat up.
“-dude, if you wanna hit me or something you can, but I’m not gonna listen to anything else you have to preach today. You saw what happens to preachers earlier. I’m over it.”
“Right, you’re over the issue that you decided to start.”
I hardened my glare.
“You know… who do you think would win if we fought?” I asked. “No prep time. Spontaneous catalyst. To a total knockout.”
He smiled slightly before shoving it down.
“Do you even know how to fight?” He said tiredly. “Had you ever even been in a fight before-“
I’m not doing this.
I swung my fist towards Elijah’s geeky little face, stopping short as he flinched backwards instinctively. I smiled so wide my cheeks hurt.
“I’m crazy. I’d win,” I said. “You know what other crazy person would probably beat you to a pulp?”
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“You’re such a wimp,” He said.
I laughed.
“What-EVER, dude. It’s what I’ve always wanted to be.”
I laughed a little more. He shook his head like he was my father. Like he wanted to be.
“Carolette isn’t happy with you-“
“-Elijah dude, shut… just the actual fuck up. Go apologize to her for me too. You’re my corporate sponsor, right? How about you go do some PR cleanup?”
I hopped up from the table and stood in front of him.
“You ratfuckers are getting so goddamn boring about it. I remember when I had to be scared of an army of eldritch pipe-cleaners breaking into our outhouse sanctuary in the floor of Tartarus. Now I sit here listening to you all argue about the same things everyday of each week until you explode on Sunday and make up the next Monday before moving to the next thing. If Natalie had finished in the church, there is absolutely no way I would be the first person to get killed by a human inside these walls. How you all have not started shiving each other already is beyond me. You all just constantly suck, but in the most utterly predictable way. Do you ever feel like being a waste of a survivor is getting any more boring for you? I’d like to see a timeline where this place is full of actually interesting people, instead of the ones that The Staff got too disinterested to keep chasing.”
PTOO
Elijah spit in my face.
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I’ll be honest, it kind of made me like him more.
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“Roman is too mature to kill you, so I wouldn’t put too much hope in that plan… if I were you…”
I wiped my face as he turned and walked out. I smiled even wider as I didn’t feel regretful for a second. I even began to chuckle and laugh to myself.
For a hysteric moment, I didn’t feel bad about any of the things I had said to anyone in that place. Even as it ended, I wasn’t thrust into any kind of disgusting guilt just yet. I hopped up and retrieved my plate.
“I’ve lost fork privileges, huh?”
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I think the dream was purple. Well, that would make sense. It’s always purple. Lavender maybe, but probably purple. Lazy. Geese and doves. In a giant whirlpool of aviation, circling. Vents filling with wings. Every screen in the one-screen-office is a neon square of purple. Young monsters. Outsourcing always ends with this. Under three weeks is all it took for this place to become a zoo of influenza. A perfect silhouette walks in. Flawless. Originally, I had thought it to be Hannah. Really though, Hannah had never attracted me quite that same way. Knowing it was the purple electrical fire that haunted me outside the dream state, I felt the incredible need to hide under the desk. Wings so melodic. Hair down to her feet. Eternal hair. No one ever comes into this office unless they need to yell at me. Yellowstone Volcano is in the southeast corner of the room going insane. Obviously Hell is awesome, but I’m not sure anyone thinks that once they’re in it. Unless you count Satan, but I’m pretty he’s not having as much fun as we think. Everything is on my desk, but only because everyone was fired last week. A pile of A4 is helping to guard my figure as she advances past the doorway. Truthfully, no one was fired, and it is completely vice versa. Me being the squatting hunchback I am, I’m just still here. Yank my body under the desk. A volley of hair draped over the edge, like a lure for me to hook myself onto. So far I’ve been able to keep myself away from things like that this year . Sadly, I’ve truly run out of the stamina to keep starving. Just because she’s hunting me doesn’t mean that I’m game. Everyone should get a chance to explain their motive. Killing birds is easy when you don’t understand how difficult it is to keep yourself eternally airborne. You’ve never flown, and maybe that makes you envious. Long hair. Like, so long that I think the whole silhouette was composed of nothing but that same beautiful hair.
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Cody Camargo: Fifty-Eight Days In
I think you’d expect me to tell you that it didn’t feel right waking up without Natalie across the hall. I don’t know, it’s not like I feel at home in the house, but it’s obviously more hospitable than this softcore-dungeon. After my… again… strangely improved circadian rhythm fished me out of some weird dream I’d been having, I stepped outside that morning to find her already leaning against the wall.
“Hi…” I offered.
She kicked off and walked up to me. She threw me my backpack as I tried to hide my morning breath from her. She handed me a bottle of water. I drank half as she reached into her pocket, but kept her hand in it before pulling it out.
“I want to expound on what I said yesterday,” She said. “You’re going to do everything I tell you to do. Full stop. If you end up back here today without me feeling like you adequately achieved that requisite… I am the most supremely actual kind of serious when I say this… fuck the phone. I will never let you die.”
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What am I supposed to say? Yes, Ma’am ?
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“Just tell me what to do.”
She sniffed and stepped a little closer. She slid my phone out of her pocket and held it out to me. I stared down at it, a little surprised that it wasn’t a bomb, before taking it back for the first time in weeks. Holding it between us, I ran my thumb around it nervously. I’d forgotten how cracked the screen was from the fall. I saw the reflection of her face splitting wildly down around the glass.
“Go talk to Vernon. He’ll start it up for you. Stay there with him while it charges.”
I looked up from her reflection to her full presence.
“To… Vernon?” I said. “Where is he?”
“In his shed, the same as always. That’s the only place where something can get charged here. You’ll see what I mean.”
“I don’t…”
…want to be in an enclosed space with him for any more than five seconds.
“ We don’t really have the time for it to charge, do we?” I asked. “I don’t need it now, I’ll just-“
“-it will only take ten minutes.”
Ten minutes would smell… sorry… feel like an eternity with Vernon.
“And don’t think about time,” She said. “We’ll have enough, since we won’t take an unnecessary one hour break.”
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How did… but… what?
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“… that’s… I don-“
“-Not right now. Just stop. Please… I don’t care right now. Just go to Vernon’s.”
She began walking away.
“Wait, are we not going together?”
“I have to take care of something. Just go to the gate when you’re done.”
She disappeared behind a building almost instantly. I rubbed my neck and sighed.
“You couldn’t have taken care of it before I woke up?” I attempted to say entirely to myself.
I heard her footsteps stomping back towards me. I almost had a heart attack as she reappeared around the corner.
“Come here.”
I nervously obeyed and stopped in front of her.
“Listen,” She said in a somewhat calm voice. “Don’t let anyone see you with that thing. Put it in your pocket until you get there, seriously.”
I blinked a couple times.
“Yeah… okay.”
She nodded and went back to walking away.
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My neck was hurting as I walked through town. I had been sleeping in a bed again for long enough to forget how much I appreciated it. The table had tangled almost every muscle I had last night. A heavy dose of a half-remembered, horrible dream seemed to heighten what would have already been a “mid” slumber.
I had a slight migraine. I took a moment to stand in the shadows between houses and rub my temples. I wasn’t ready to talk to Vernon. I would’ve rather talked to Roman.
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That’s not true.
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I made sure nobody was walking around outside the alley before pulling my phone out of my pocket. It was dead of course. I stared at my reflection through the splintering. I looked around at the shadows and made a mental note.
I needed to do something before I went to the gate. While Natalie wasn’t watching me.
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(Continued in 3/3)