Homewrecker

33 - 𝓻𝓲𝓭𝓮

I turned my phone off when we were almost about halfway home, even though my screen hadn't lit up with any text messages or phone calls yet. The Solidays probably hadn't even realized that I was actually leaving, not just going to cool off at an ice cream parlor or having Indie drive me to the Starbright Drive-In instead of Andi.

I didn't care if I was blowing them off, almost certainly getting fired from the job Amy arranged for me that probably wasn't even about me, finding new friends or getting out of the house. It was about their image, their reputation, just like the morning news segment or living an hour away like it was some sort of distant, foreign country they couldn't reach me from my whole life. Pretending me and my mom didn't exist until she finally didn't, and they had no option but to legally acknowledge me.

But I had enough of it, enough of my life spinning out from underneath me like tires on black ice in the winter, or debris, pieces of homes and lives and people flinging through a wind so strong and destructive, it was black. Someone strangled my mom, hated her so much for a reason I didn't or couldn't understand that she was actually dead because of it, and then a tornado scattered everything that remained, collapsed structures, drowned what my had life had been outside of my mom in its flooding.

There was nothing I could do about those things, but there was something I could do about living with the Solidays.

In one mile, I would be home.

Indie hadn't said much during the drive, but I thought that was because she probably didn't think that I was serious about this, about moving back to Shiloh. Instead, she probably thought I just needed to be dramatic and believe that I was doing this, wake up the next morning and feel better. Go back. But I wouldn't.

I knew I couldn't stay with her and her parents, but I had practically lived on my own before, knew how to pay bills or file for social programs. I would end up like my mom, sans the kid and drug addictions, but that was more appealing to me than becoming like one of the Solidays.

The scent of the pine needles in the air was like a refreshing, deep breath of air in my lungs when Indie pulled into the trailer park around an hour later, like the air here was the real oxygen I needed to feel alive. Everything was dark, the silhouette of pine trees in the woods behind the park, some with needles, some stripped, some like a stake sticking out of the earth behind the moon.

It was quieter than I remembered it being, the campfires I was used to seeing in the early summer nights were gone but it was like everything surrounding the gravel paths was kindling. Most of the mobile homes were demolished, still crumpled into heaps of plywood and furniture, including my own when I found its muddied tangerine walls under the beam of the flashlight app on my phone.

Indie was still following me, cautiously, glancing around the woods like she expected the pine trees to envelope her and take her into the still night.

"When you said home," she said after a moment, our shoes crunching against the gravel the only sound echoing throughout the park, "I thought you just meant Shiloh. I didn't think you actually wanted to come here."

I reached out, touched the dried mud on one of the shudders, barely dangling from a rusted hinge. "This is my home," I told her. "I'm kind of used to seeing it as a dump, anyway."

"This place is creepy in the dark."

I looked down at the shattered clay fragments of my flowerpots, the crackled eggshells I used for fertilizer still clinging to the inside even though most of the dirt and the plant itself were gone. "Then you didn't shouldn't think about how my mom could've been strangled here."

I glanced up at the dilapidating walls, metal rusted and bent, slumped unnaturally, the glimpses of the living room and kitchen I could see from outside, and I wondered if that might have been true. Detective Marsh told me the trailer had been searched before, while I was in Shelridge, but days had passed since the murder—and tornado—and nothing conclusive was found.

Rainwater and wind had washed everything away, if it happened there. If it happened there, in our home, where our lives had happened. Where she could've slept every night on a futon someone could've strangled her on, or reheating takeout in the kitchen someone could've attacked her in. I wondered if every day, she walked and did all of these normal things, never realizing that something so horrifically abnormal would happen one day she did them again.

I wondered if she was immediately scared, or if it all happened so suddenly. If she had a feeling she didn't trust or maybe she was sitting with someone she did. I wondered what she thought when she knew, if any of those thoughts would've been about me, what they would've been. Was she thinking about what would happen to me if she were gone, or would she just be relieved that I was at school, away from everything happening, wishing my friends and teachers a good summer while she was being murdered.

Or was she hoping that I would come early for some reason, find her with hands around her throat and stop it. I had always saved her before, flushed pills down the toilet or dumped bottles down the drain, drove her to AA meetings or home from bars when she was too drunk. I filled out the benefits paperwork, mailed her unemployment forms, paid our bills. The night she came into my room and told me she messed up, tearfully explaining that she needed my help and my ATM card. I always saved her. Except the one time it really mattered. And maybe she spent her last moments, waiting, pleading, hoping that I would do it again.

Instead, I sat at a curbside in front of the high school, cursing her out for being late again.

Stop, stop, stop.

I wasn't sure if the voice barreling through my mind was my own or my mom's, maybe the last words she ever said.

I sniffled, rubbing the back of my hand against my nose as I looked over at Kingston's darkened trailer. "You can go home," I told Indie, pulling out my phone and turning it back on, seeing that none of the Solidays had texted or called me since I turned it off. Good. "I'm going to see if Kingston wants to hang out or something."

"Yeah, I'm not leaving you in the sketchy, abandoned woods by yourself, Bronwyn. I've seen horror movies before."

For a moment, as I typed out a quick text message to Kingston, sending him back in Shiloh, staying. You want to do something tonight?, I thought back to what I watched of It Follows on the fifth screen at Starbright the night before, not sure if Jay eventually ended up alone in the woods somehow or not.

Then, for a split second, I remembered Ethan eagerly going on about it until all the screens had rolled their credits and the last set of taillights left the property. I wasn't sure if he was working that night or not, if he was still supposed to be showing me the ropes or not, or what he would think of me ditching my shift. The whole job, actually. But what kids from Shelridge thought of me didn't matter anymore, shouldn't have mattered in the first place.

They never got it. Never would.

A text lit my phone, a response from Kingston. Wow, really? Ok. I'm at a friend's, you need a ride?

I smiled, because I didn't need them to get it. I already had friends who did.