Dead Girl Walking ― Aaron Minyard

48. dead girl walking

world is watching me,
the dead girl walking.
keep my ghosts from talking
and the mask won't fall
― jensen mcrae

[trigger warnings: nathan; references to past violence; mention of drug overdose & suicide; mentions of knife violence]

♦

WITH HER LIFE ON A STRICT TIME LIMIT, Mara saw no purpose in worrying all that much about academics, but if she wanted to play Exy for the last few weeks of her life, she had to maintain her GPA and her obligations. 

She asked to move her tutoring sessions from the library to an on-campus café. She told herself she just wanted a change of scenery, as if she could gaslight herself into believing it was for any other reason than not wanting to spend any length of time in a place that had been hers and Aaron's go-to when they were still... something. 

God, she was pathetic. 

Mara pretended to understand whatever math concept her tutor was trying to explain, but listening to a guy named Bryson talk about derivatives was fairly low on her list of priorities at the moment, so it was difficult, and distractions in the bustling café were abundant. 

The impatient tapping of a pencil on her near-empty notebook page tugged Mara out of a one-sided staring contest with the barista, dragging her focus back to the task at hand. 

"Are you even paying attention?" Bryson asked, visibly annoyed. 

Mara sighed. "Sorry," she mumbled. "What were you saying about... logging in?"

Bryson rolled his eyes. "Logarithmic differentiation," he corrected, sounding defeated. Mara wondered how many other math-blind students he had to tutor on a daily basis. "It's a method of simplifying—"

The harsh and sudden buzz of a phone on the tabletop cut him off, and Mara bit back a wince as she realized it was her own. 

"Sorry," she muttered again, turning the phone over to see who it was. 

Her blood ran cold at the sickeningly familiar 410 number. 

She swallowed hard, sure she would be sick with the slightest movement. With tense fingers, she went to silence the phone when Bryson spoke again. 

"You should answer that," he said, sounding as perturbed as he had for the last half-hour. "Your father isn't a patient man."

It took two seconds for his words to register. 

And then she almost was truly sick. 

She stared across the table at her tutor, at the near-stranger she'd been seeing since the beginning of the semester, who'd never asked for or offered any personal anecdotes, who she never would have expected to be—this. 

She'd gotten rusty at her father's games, but she recognized his game-ending moves now. 

Bryson—of fucking course.

Without taking her eyes off him, Mara forced her hand to move, her finger to press the answer button. She pressed the phone to her ear. 

"Elizabeth!" her father said, the artificial delight in his voice sending a chill so deep into her bones she could feel it shaking her down to her very marrow. "You aren't busy, are you? I didn't cut into your tutoring session?"

Mara didn't—couldn't—respond. 

"You know, I think I've actually met your tutor," Nathan continued on, as if this was a normal conversation, as if he was just a doting dad checking in on his college-bound daughter, as if Bryson was just an old family friend he'd just remembered having. "Bryson Fisher, right?"