Faster Than Your Bullets

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

Out of all the dreams that occasionally come back and haunt me at night, this must be the emptiest.
Bedroom. No Dad. Corridor. No Dad. Hallway. No Dad.
"Dad?" I called out for the fifth time. Of course, no Dad. What was I expecting, really? "Ellen?" I called for Mrs. Duncan instead.
"Yes, sweetie?"
Eleven-year-old footsteps flew down the flight of stairs. Eleven-year-old feet tripped over the mat placed at the end of it.
"Where's Daddy?" Knees still wobbling from the fall like a weakling an eleven-year-old can be, I blinked my eyes at Mrs. Duncan, preventing the tears that had already welled up and were waiting to burst into a warm flood of misery all over my unwashed face. Mrs. Duncan's eyes were more sparkly and sympathetic than usual, and I got the feeling I didn't want to find out why.
"Daddy's at work, Andrea." She smiled while looking so sad. Isn't it strange how people can be sad and still smiling at the same time? Like, smiling is the opposite of...whatever that represents sadness. Crying? Yeah. And yet I had seen people doing both at the same time: smiling while weeping and even saying "It's okay." No, sir-slash-madam, you are crying, and that is not okay. That is the most un-okay thing ever. That's why right now I was just sad and not smiling. Because I knew sad-but-smiling Mrs. Duncan was lying.
"Daddy isn't at work." I huffed, shaking my head, causing the loose pigtail that Daphne braided for me before bedtime to swing left and right. It was like the pigtail was shaking its, uh, body?, too, for Mrs. Duncan was a dirty liar. "He said he was going to the store and be home by ten." I pointed out, because I am not stupid. Unlike Carrie Heston, that girl sitting next to me who was always asking the most ridiculous questions ever and got praised for her stupid "curiosity and imagination". Nobody likes a bragger.
"Well..." Mrs. Duncan twisted her hands together.
"He said he's be back by ten, and now it's twelve." My feet started to do weird thing like kicking and jumping and kicking themselves and jumping other than just on one spot. "And I can't call him now, since ten." Oh no, the sobs decides it was their moment to shine, and that was what they did. I began to fall in convulsive sobbing fits for a minute and a half before turning to full crying mode. Even as a child, I knew. I had known it before Mrs. Duncan seemed to suspect a thing. Sure, she would have been told about it by now, but not two months ago. And Daphne was too busy trying to kiss Freddie Morgan to have noticed. I'd found the map in Dad's working desk, with NYC circled, an address scribbled near it in his awful handwriting. I'd found the paperwork, the plane tickets to NYC and the ticket cancelation papers in his drawers. I'd heard him talking to his boss about moving location, to his colleagues about me and Daphne and Mom, who died and whose death Dad had never really got over. And unlike stupid Carrie Heston or Daphne or gothic Freddie Morgan, I had a brain and could string them together to understand that he was going away on a trip. A business trip, I had thought. But it wasn't until now did I realize that it wasn't. Dad always gives us a one-week warning ahead of any business trip. This seems business-y, sure, but it isn't. He's going away and not coming back, not now when I'd just learnt from the nice lady in the phone that knows everybody's number that I couldn't phone Dad because his number no longer exists. This is abandonment. And I'm the abandoned.
"Dad's gone, isn't he?" I spit out between chokes.
Mrs. Duncan's hand rubbed my back and she pulled me close. "I'm afraid so, sweetie."
Dad was gone.
What I swallow tasted a lot like tears, but it probably was something grosser.
Dad was gone.
Mrs. Duncan is sighing. Why was she sighing? It wasn't her dad that was gone. It was mine. My dad's gone. Dad was gone, and voluntary gone. Not like Mom, who I bet would want to stick around a while longer.
But she didn't. She didn't stick around. She was gone. And now, so is Dad.
So is Dad.

"What-the-hell-Pam-it's-five." I grunt in answer to Pamela's excitement radiating from the phone. It can even be felt here, that's how excited she was.
I can barely comprehend what our four-sentence conversation is about in my half unconscious state, so after she finishes, I leave no other comment than a noncommittal "um" and a mumbled goodbye. I think her story have something more following up but was fortunately postponed to eight by me hanging up.
I certainly don't wish to stumble my way back to the dream, although I can hardly feel uneasy about it by now. The fact that my dad was a self-absorbed fuckup and that he exited out lives without a warning has been accepted and has been unable to traumatize me since so long ago. The only side effect of this inability is that just because Dad sees I'm not stressing over his sudden departure — a total dick move if you ask me — he assumes that all is well forgotten and buried and the fadedness of the event just magically granted him the right to lecture me about life and manners every once in a while, like I haven't has enough of the Jane Austen's philosophy bullcrap from school already.
Maybe it isn't the lonely or stranded feeling about the dream that I hate. Maybe it's just him. Just Dad. Maybe it's just him I hate. Sounds like an ungrateful bitch, yeah, but there's no other way to phrase it. Saying I dislike him is just hypocritical. He left, so he shouldn't be expecting much, to be honest.
Goal achieved. I somehow distract my brain and wake up two hours later without any other dream. Extinguishing the images of the day Dad left with an imaginary extinguisher, I clear room for the remembrance of last night to dance in. Sure, it was one hell of awkward night, but the party was really posh, and I'm sure as hell I'll crash some more of the kind. And speaking of more parties, I have to check my e-mails for Kim. The thing about Dad is, he requires personal e-mails to be delivered to him but never lifts a finger to bullshit away a reply. The work is tossed to Kim even though it's personal and seriously not that hard.
This is by far the longest weekend of my life, not counting the horrendous September's Friday the thirteenth, a long story whose result was me twisting my ankle and broke a finger (guess the myth is true). Anyways, a normal weekend of mine would usually consist of a party, work and schoolwork. Not witnessing two guys fighting over me (usually it's Pete and some random guy who was having a really bad day), or sleeping with Peter, or having a fight with him nor pretending to be Andrew Archer's wife. And it is not until now do I realize, there haven't been so many normal weekends lately. There seems to be a problem with Drew or Peter or both of them that I have to deal with or voluntary get myself involved, and as far as I know, solving them isn't good for my health.
After mulling over the possibilities of how to spend the day, I decide to just lie in bed for the morning then move to lie on the couch in the afternoon. Simple enough.
I open Facebook on my phone in desperate seek for entertainment, and sure enough, at the top of my Newsfeed is an article shared by five people: "Fatal food poisoning at Jefferson Hotel. Fifteen confirmed dead."
Wow okay. That's some messed up business.
Two scrolls into the article, my skin begins to crawl. The room where the event occurred looks strangely familiar. Big, fancy room which two long tables that make it looks like Hogwarts's dining hall, a marble dance floor stands in between. Bodies were found dead right on the party tables, some even face their faces planted into a plate. Journalists surely decided to be ruthless and rude when a couple of photos show closed up shots at people whose eyes were still open, staring straight at the camera even though they couldn't see anything. Normally, this type of articles would be taken down after a few hours. My thumb stops at the face of a woman: late in her sixties with pepper-and-salt flocks of hair hugging her pale face. The scary thing is: I know this woman.
I know this woman. She sat next to me last night! I remember her half glaring at me after my mumble about being sandwiched between "two whacky bats", although she turned out to be quite nice later. We exchanged a few words, but most of my attention was demanded by Jess.
Jess. I scroll in panic. She's not in the article. Which should mean she's still alive. Maybe, maybe not.
I sit stiff on my bed and stare straight the wall to recollect myself. The food poisoning... It happened last night. At the party we went to. Around ten. We left just some minutes before that. Some people died. The lady died. Died.
My God, it's hard to imagine how someone can be so lively, so real for one second and then just vanishes from existence the second after. How their eyes are closed and never going to open again. How their hearts and veins and blood won't keep their bodies warm and their skin glow and they will turn grey and lifeless. How their smallest of intentions will never be achieved and they just stop living, never finish what they were about to do. And it is harder to imagine that I could have been one of them. Yes, I could have. What would have happened had we stayed ten more minutes? What would have happened had Drew listened to me and my hunger and decided to hang around for snack? What would have happened if he hadn't gotten that text that made him turn so deadly serious?
The text. What was it about, anyways? What could have ruined Drew's perfect mood and plunged him into silence for the rest of the night? What could it have said to make him determined to leave the party? Strange things happen and they are all from his phone, the people he contacts and acquaints with. And whatever they are, they have been either threatening or saving my life without much different between the options. And sure, they might have nothing to do with me and it is none of my business, but at this point, curiosity is flaring up again, eating away all the patience left in me, strongly intensified by a new wave of panic that has just rolled in. So what if he told me to stay out of his way? So what if snooping around once again makes me a crazy bitch — something that I what accused to be? It doesn't take a genius to realize you cannot just drag people in and out of fatal twisted event and not expect them to be curious or furious or scared. No, I'm not scared, since I am hardly scared of anything and I will not be terrified by someone ridiculous like Andrew Archer and his shady business. Even when he dragged me to a party where people get poisoned just ten minutes after our departure. Granted, that does freak me out, but mostly triggers my demand to know what is going on.
So I am going to spy around a little bit, okay. But it won't hurt to try a more direct approach, will it?
So I copy the link of the article, paste it onto Messages, and send it to Drew with the words:
'What the fuck is this?'