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28: Thirteen

28: Thirteen

Getting back isn't as simple as Graham makes it sound. I don't feel like there is anything left for me to return to—nothing that will bring me comfort because everything has been slowly warping into an image I no longer recognise. I don't know the man I'm supposed to call my brother, and what I thought I knew of my actual brother is slowly becoming a lie. I wonder if they'd made me blind to it on purpose, when Graham takes my hand and leads me back to the car—left me in the dark, defenceless when knowledge is power.

It isn't as easy as getting back into Graham's car and going home. It's not going to be sitting around a table with parents that are frightened to say two words to me. It won't ever be walking through the halls of high school—deluding myself into believing the outside world is a Big Bad I won't have to face for quite some time. There are things I know and things I have yet to understand. What I know is that the same man who sits next to me in this car, playing music from bands that sold CDs in scratched cases at his baseball games—is someone capable of getting twisted in Devin's web, of falling prey to Idris's manipulation tactics, now a person able to commit statutory rape.

There are also things I wish I didn't know, too. Like the way I know how Caggie's slowly burning resentment has scalded my skin and left me sore. Of how she loathed me so much she turned her back on me, of how this attempt to get things back to where they were is both of us stupidly wanting to hold onto a thing that neither of us benefit from. Of knowing how someone I thought my best friend sold me to the devil when she thought I wouldn't have enough time for her.

I wonder if it ever isn't going to be Devin. If it isn't going to be a girl with blonde curls and bright eyes that is the reason why I'm questioning my own mortality. She shouldn't have such power over everyone—it's been months since she's died, and it's like she's still here, blood red nails cupped under her chin as she enjoys the mess that we make of ourselves.

But we've reached a standstill. And without Devin to say the word go and put things back into action, the only thing left to do is wait for someone else to step into those hollow shoes.

It's a pause in a journey I'm not too sure I want to continue, the dust is ready to settle and the picture it could form scares me. I'm too far gone from the starting block to return—to settle into something comfortable, warm, to a thing that will let me pretend that everything is okay and nothing has changed and that my world isn't about to be set alight—yet too fearful to take the steps towards a destination I can't see. It's lingering glances in the car with Graham, the way he wants to assure me that he hasn't just become a whole other person that terrifies me—that he's my brother.

"Kas," he sighs, scratching at the beard on his chin—the scars on his left fist glint at me teasingly—tempted to reach out for me but we're on two drifting islands. His words get caught in the air between us—if they make it much further than the tight clamp of his lips. He lets me get out of the car outside of Caggie's house, slipping away in a breeze which chills the skin at the nape of my neck. I'm sick of carrying the world on my shoulders, of having the pressure of everyone in this stupid town bear down on me so I do something right. I see it in the way Graham's shoulders droop, when the consequences to his actions attack him from all sides, head falling to rest on the steering wheel—the new world we're living in not very appealing.

"Just come home soon, okay?" My shoulder lifts in a shrug, not secure enough to give an affirmation. I don't know if I even want to go home, if there even is one for me to turn to that isn't frozen in a state of people waiting for my dead brother to walk back through the front door and pretend that everything is okay. It's not the same, and I'm certain that it never will be—no matter how hard everyone else tries. It's the reality of watching Graham drive away from me—of Byron no longer existing, of having to consider whether or not my ex-boyfriend is capable of ending someone else's life.