Dead Girl Walking ― Aaron Minyard

67. the view between villages (extended)

left at the graveyard
i'm driving past ghosts
their arms are extended
my eyes start to close
― noah kahan

♦

KEVIN DID NOT GO TO RIKO'S FUNERAL. Instead, he, Mara, Jean, and their immovable entourage drove to Evermore that day and gathered their things. 

The Nest was little more than a ghost town as a security guard let them inside. It had taken one phone call from Wymack to Edgar Allan's president for them to be allowed inside to retrieve their personal belongings. It wasn't like Kevin, Mara, and Jean couldn't survive without the meager amount of things they'd each left behind, but sentimentality was finally a concept they could afford to believe in. 

Stepping back into the dark halls of the Nest was the worst kind of homecoming Mara could imagine. Returning to the stadium last week for the championship game had been torture enough, but the court had nothing on the scars the Nest had dug into each of them. Even Neil, despite having only spent a few torturous weeks here, could barely seem to repress a shudder as they descended the red-lit staircase. 

At the intersection, where practicality said they should have split up to head to their dorms in their respective halls, they all went to Kevin's dorm first. 

They all knew how Riko had preserved Kevin's side of the dorm like a museum piece dedicated to the art of lost brotherhood, but seeing it was another thing entirely. Kevin stopped fully in the doorway, taking several moments to look into the room that held the majority of all his adolescent memories. Kevin's postcards, his pictures and mementos had been untouched. His history books sat untouched and unmoved on the shelf. 

Kevin was the first to finally step inside, but it was Andrew who was the first to move into action. "Put whatever you want to take on the bed, we'll leave the rest to the clean-up crew." 

It was just the deadpan encouragement the lot needed to get going. 

Mara went to Kevin's wall and started carefully taking down his photographs and postcards, putting together the ones she knew he'd want to keep and setting aside the ones he might not. Some of them were from trips she'd been on—photoshoots and professional games and even their trip to the Olympics a few years before Riko broke Kevin's hand. They were never true vacations, but anywhere that wasn't the Nest had been a nice reprieve. 

Between the six of them, it didn't take long at all to gather all the things Kevin would be taking back to Palmetto—most of his postcards and pictures, half of the books on his shelf, and a handful of the clothes out of his closet. All of it fit into the duffle bag he'd brought, though none of them were truly surprised. 

Bag over his shoulder, Kevin left his room without looking back, and the rest of them followed suit. They left Black Hall behind and headed into Red Hall, where Jean and Mara and every other Raven had lived. Mara and Jean's was the last dorm on the left, the door closed but not locked, given that they'd never been permitted to have a lock. 

Really, the Nest hadn't been all that different from Mara's childhood home. 

In the months since Mara fled, Jean hadn't been given another roommate—whether that was a blessing or a curse was up to the day and what Riko had in store for him. 

Mara's side hadn't been preserved and mummified the way Kevin's had. Her things had been packed away, her bed stripped and left bare. All evidence of her having lived there had been taken away.  

But she could see the echoes of her life here. The faint, almost erased pencil line on the door frame where she'd once made Jean mark her height with and without her heels, all so she could make sure the shoes would make her taller, for once, than Riko—a petty attempt at revenge, but she had been fifteen, so she forgave herself for the juvenility.