“Where’s Charlie?” Eddie yells, spit flying out of his decaying mouth. “Where is he? What did you do to him?”
I don’t answer. I run through the snow and then I’m back at the old flat.
I’m no longer five.
I’m thirteen. Tall, skinny, underdeveloped. My anger has just started to eat at me, and the world is poison. Mr. Arnold has me cornered in my mother’s old bedroom. She’s lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling like I’m not there.
She didn’t save me when I was five. She wouldn’t save me now.
I face the wall, too afraid, too disgusted to look at my foster parent as he approaches with greedy hands.
“Don’t tell Pamela,” he says to me, voice dripping with lust. “It’s our secret.”
His hands close over my throat but I don’t turn around.
I cry.
I haven’t learned to hit back yet.
When I do learn, he’s sent to the hospital.
His wife Pamela says I’m a black seed. That I made her husband do it to me.
And I’m sent away again.
Now I’m at the Hillside Orphanage.
I’m twenty years old.
My bony arms are covered with scratches.
I scratch them some more.
I’m dying on the inside.
My teeth are being ground away, falling out of my mouth like sugar.
In front of me, at the headmaster’s desk, sits Charlie.
His back is to me.
He’s not twitching.
He is deadly still.
Charlie is never ever still.
“Charlie,” I hiss at him. “Charlie, do you have any?”
But Charlie doesn’t move.
I step toward him, my limbs jerking, uncontrollable.
Charlie has what I need to make it stop.
The craving.
The ache.
The emptiness.
Everything that resides deep in my bones.
I put my hand—ghostly white and peppered with bruises—on his shoulder and spin him around in the chair.
He stares at me with dead, glassy eyes, blood running from his nose.
It drips onto the stuffed lion he holds in his hand.
In a flash, he moves. Charlie is in my face. Empty eyes. Bared, rotting teeth.
“You’re not just going to leave me here,” he utters, sounding like a child. “You cannae do that, Lachlan.”
The next moment I’m lying in an alley.
Charlie is crumpled beside me. One of the dogs is sniffing his face. Gives him a tentative lick. Charlie doesn’t stir.
Charlie is dead.
I close my eyes.
And I am dead too.
***
When I wake up, I’m drenched in sweat and clawing at my sheets. My breathing is shallow, and I’m hungry and desperate for air, as if it could clean out all the dirt inside.
I smell urine. For a moment I think I’ve pissed myself—how about that for regression—but then I remember the dogs. I remember last night. I remember where I am.
Who I am.
I sit up and try to get a hold of myself. I haven’t dreamed like that for months and its return unhinges me.
Inhaling deeply, I swing my feet out of bed and wince when they land in something wet. I groan and look down to see a faint yellow puddle. I wonder which one of them did it. I’d told Kayla that they must have had homes at some point, but that doesn’t mean they are housebroken.
“Hello,” I call out softly, walking to the door and peering out into the living room. There’s a pile of shit on the carpet and another in the kitchen.
Both dogs are sleeping on the couch, entwined with each other. That sight alone makes up for the fact that I’m going to be in shit myself if I continue to let them destroy the place.
I put on a pot of coffee and absently scratch at my arm, a bad leftover from the dream. I pull my hand away and force my brain into a better place. I saved those dogs last night. There is hope for them, hope that I’ve given them.
But, of course, that’s not the only thing that happened last night.
Kayla.
That tiny sprite.
I kissed her.
I fought and I fought and I fought against it.
But there was nothing I could do.
She’s a riptide.