These Games We Play

chapter twenty five:aftermath

Jameson left, and I didn’t follow him. He left a letter on the sink and ignored it. I didn’t hold back my tears now as I collapsed onto the floor. I’d been shot at, I’d been injured, and I’d been kissed. Grayson was convinced that this family destroyed everything they touched. So did Thea. Nan believed that I needed to tell Jameson how much I cared which I had failed to do. I hadn’t told him how much I cared. Instead, he told me this was a game and I told him nothing. I let him leave. So, I sat on the floor and cried. I cried when I decided to read his letter. I cried when I read it again. I wasn’t even sure what I was crying about anymore.  It only got worse when I finally processed Jameson's secret. That he was the last one to talk to his grandfather. The last thing he had been told was that the greatest thing a Hawthorne could do was to love and to win.

“Footsteps,” I muttered as I solved the riddle, he left me. The more you take, the more you leave behind. What am I?

I wasn’t sure how long it had been when I finally got up. Right now, all I wanted to do was find Cam and Lia and drink hot chocolate. Like we always did whenever one of us was upset. I didn’t even have my phone to tell them I was okay. Because in my dreariness I had forgotten to get my phone.

I made my way back into the bedroom. Even though I’d calmed down a little, I still scanned for threats, and I saw one: Rebecca Laughlin, standing in the doorway. Her face looked even paler than usual; her hair as red as blood. She looked shell-shocked. Because she overheard Jameson and me? Because her grandparents told her about the shooting? I wasn’t sure. She was wearing thick hiking boots and cargo pants, both of them spattered with mud. Staring at her, all I could think was that if Emily had been even half as beautiful as her sister was, it was no wonder Jameson could look at me and think only about his grandfather’s game. Everything is a game. Even this. Especially this.

“My grandmother sent me to check on you.” Rebecca’s voice was soft and hesitant. “Since you didn’t follow Jameson after he came out 30 minutes ago.” 30 minutes I had been crying for 30 minutes. Which wasn’t all that bad. But I wasn’t focusing on that right now all I was focused on was my need for a hot chocolate and a hug.

“I’m okay,” I said, and I almost meant it. I had to be okay.

“Gran said you were shot.” Rebecca stayed in the doorway, like she was afraid to come any closer.

“Shot at,” I clarified.

“I’m glad,” Rebecca said, and then she looked mortified. “I mean, that you weren’t shot. It’s good, right, getting shot at instead of shot?” Her gaze darted nervously from me toward the twin beds, the quilts. “Emily would have told you to simplify and say that you were shot.”

Rebecca sounded more sure of herself telling me what Emily would have said than trying to summon an appropriate response herself. “There was a bullet. You were wounded. Emily would have said you were entitled to a little melodrama.”

I was entitled to look at everyone like they were a suspect. I was entitled to an adrenaline-fueled lapse in judgment. And maybe I was entitled, just this once, to push for answers.

“You and Emily shared this room?” I said. That was obvious now when I looked at the twin beds. When Rebecca and Emily came to visit their grandparents, they stayed here.

“Was purple your favourite colour as a kid or hers?”

“Hers,” Rebecca said. She gave me a very small shrug. “She used to tell me that my favourite colour was purple, too.”

In the picture I’d seen of the two of them, Emily had been looking directly at the camera, dead centre; Rebecca had been on the fringes, looking away.