Night of Terror

5

Seven days after Cayne locks himself away in his bedroom Sarah finds a scribbled note taped to the front of the refrigerator.

Don't want to be here. Went back to Boston to stay with friends.

-Cayne

Cayne lasted eleven more days in Autumndale than Sarah figured. She didn't even think he'd move to Autumndale with them in the first place.

"Thanks for letting me know you were leaving jerk," Sarah texts her brother.

"I needed to get away, it felt like the house was closing in on me," Cayne's reply comes back seconds later.

"What if I had wanted to go with you?" Sarah's fingers fly across the keys on the screen. "I miss my friends and I miss Ric."

"Not my problem. If you want to see him get a bus ticket and go to him," Sarah can hear the boredom of Cayne's tone through the text.

"You're such an ass," Sarah types back. Cayne doesn't reply.

Sarah angrily drops Cayne's note onto the kitchen table and reaches into the refrigerator for the half-full bottle of orange juice.

Condensation drips down the side of the plastic orange juice bottle meaning one of three things: someone left the refrigerator door open the last time they went to grab something, someone nudged the temperature control toward the warmer setting by accident, or the old, yellow refrigerator was about to kick the bucket.

Judging by the peeling label inside the refrigerator that read "1996," it was more than likely the antiquated appliance had gone to that big Hell's Kitchen set in the sky.

Sarah fills a coffee mug half full with the foaming juice and sniffs it suspiciously before taking a large sip. She promptly spits the liquid back into the mug and rinses the rancid taste of the juice from her mouth under the rusty kitchen sink faucet.

Grabbing a dry erase marker from the countertop Sarah wipes away Grace's schedule written on the whiteboard magnetically hung on the refrigerator and replaces it with her own note.

The fridge is broke and the food is spoiled. Fix this before I get home from school?

-Sarah

Unable to do anything else about it, Sarah grabs her messenger bag and her guitar case and hot foots it to the car, wanting to be gone before Pricilla gets up and forces her to wait and take Grace to school.

Despite being the county seat Autumndale sits on the southeastern tip of Maine and isn't much more than four streets and four intersections, only two of which have stoplights. In the town square sits a gazebo, reminding Sarah of the one in Star's Hollow on Gilmore Girls. Across the street sits the high school to the north, the courthouse to the south, a strip of small businesses to the east, and on the western side of the town square lies a massive white church. The church's steeple rivals the courthouse clock tower for the distinguished spot of the tallest point in town. The rest of the town is residential where not overrun with the trees whose brightly colored fall leaves led to the town's naming back in the late seventeen hundreds.

On the opposite side of town from her house, Sarah has heard the river feeds into the Atlantic Ocean, giving entertainment in the summer for those brave enough to swim in its' artic depths or lucky enough to catch fish from beneath the surface that when undisturbed is a window to the world below. To Sarah, that space where the land meets the ocean feels like the edge of the world with the water transforming into a portal to another world. She wonders if she were to dive in if she would surface somewhere else entirely.

Tav and Kerabeth wait for Sarah in the gazebo as she parks across the street from the school and slings her bag over her shoulder.

"You look radiant this morning," Tav stands up and ushers Sarah into his vacated spot.