Ford, my counterpart at Laughlin’s company (and probably my clone, if such a thing were possible), made it look so easy—just stop caring. Do what needs doing. Shut off the consequences and the fear and the guilt.
I’d managed to do exactly that for a while, but the relief of that emptiness wasn’t to be found today, not with anxiety and anticipation warring within me, my body tired and my concentration stretched too thin.
Not to mention the all-too-familiar high-pitched nattering filling my ears.
“—and then Cami told me what Trey said. Too high maintenance to be worth it? Seriously? What does that even mean?”
My eyes snapped open against my will on the down motion of a sit-up, showing me Rachel Jacobs perched, as usual, on a swivel chair just outside the glass door to my room. With her ankle wrapped around one of the casters to control her movement, she spun a few inches back and forth, like a child.
She’d been here every day after school for hours, for almost two weeks now. Dr. Jacobs’s master plan. Forget waterboarding, spikes under my fingernails, or strategic electrocution; Rachel’s presence was worse punishment than any of those. She was a constant reminder of my old life, what I’d had and lost, what I’d deluded myself into thinking could be mine forever. It was a finger poking into a still bloody wound, making it impossible to ignore.
I hated it. I hated her.
Which was exactly what I suspected Dr. Jacobs wanted. I just wasn’t sure why.
“Someone to keep you company,” he’d announced cheerily before her first visit, and damn him and my stupid broken heart that wouldn’t stop hoping for miracles, I’d thought for a second that maybe it was my father or somehow…Zane. Even though I’d left him bleeding out on the pavement in a Wisconsin park.
But then Rachel had entered the hallway beyond my cell in a swirl of her trademark red. Dr. Jacobs set her up in the chair outside my door and left before I could pin down his thoughts beyond the noise of Rachel’s. My telepathy was spotty at best, even worse around a broadcaster like her. She was so loud; she drowned out everyone else.
Rachel had glared after him, still pissed, but she sat down, anyway. He was, after all, paying her to be there, according to her thoughts. All she had to do was talk. And she hadn’t shut up since.
“Just because I know what I want,” Rachel continued huffily. “What’s wrong with that?”
Rachel shook her head as though I’d responded, her shiny dark hair tumbling forward over her shoulder as she tapped away at her phone. I didn’t know what she was doing; it wasn’t as if she could get any kind of signal down here.
I imagined the flood of waiting texts that would soar from her phone, like evil flying monkeys released from the holding pen of her outbox, the second she ascended to a point where phone service kicked back in.
“And then Trey wouldn’t even apologize! He acted like I was the one with the problem. He’s never done that before.” She sounded almost hurt, if she were capable of such emotion.
In the beginning, Rachel had done exactly as I’d expected, taunted me, said every mean thing she could think of, even repeated a few that she was particularly proud of. All trying to provoke a reaction, just because she could. She thought she was safe on the other side of the door. She wasn’t, but I had zero interest in diverting my focus just to scare her. (Okay, the thought did cross my mind, but only for a moment. I didn’t want to give Dr. Jacobs the satisfaction.)
After a few days of insults and taunts, though, something changed. It was as if Rachel had forgotten I was there or she didn’t care. She’d turned the threshold of my cell into a confessional, treating these afternoons like one long series of free therapy sessions. Either way, for some reason, her monologues were harder for me to ignore.
Maybe because they showed she was human, much to my dismay. (I was half human, after all, and frankly that was already too much in common with her.) Or maybe because, as usual, Rachel had no idea that what she bitterly complained about were things others would be overjoyed to have.
Like the guy who loved her still being alive but shunning her (rightly so) for being too demanding.
“I mean, whatever. It’s not like I care or anything,” she continued in that tone that screamed anything but. She was a child who wanted sympathy over a toy she’d broken herself.
Rage welled in me, breaking past the barriers I’d erected so carefully over the last few weeks, and spilling into the empty, emotion-free zone.
Zane was dead. He’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was there because he’d cared about me. And Rachel was bitching because she couldn’t manipulate Trey into playing one of her popularity games? The injustice of it made me want to scream until I was hoarse.
“His loss, you know?” she continued, blithely unaware. “I can do better.”
As if love was disposable, easily discarded and forgotten, just as easily replaced.