Later, I thought and went back to homework.
I picked up Daniel’s chem book and settled onto my bed, thinking that if anything were going to help me fall asleep, it would be chemistry. Besides, I figured I could successfully tackle a few of those assignments since I’d had that class last year. The only problem was that as soon as I flipped the book open to chapter ten, the memory of studying this assignment with Pete Bradshaw at the library last year overtook my thoughts.
I’d all but forgotten that Pete and I had not only been chem lab partners, but also friends, before things changed between us. Before I realized what kind of violent person lurked under his letterman’s jacket and that “triple-threat smile.” Before he agreed to help Jude try to turn me against Daniel. Before the night my car broke down in the city and he tried to trick me into thinking I was being stalked by the Markham Street Monster—just so he could pretend to be my hero. Before he attacked me in the alley between the school and parish the night of the Christmas dance.
But it wasn’t my fault he’d lost control. I wasn’t the one who made him an entitled jerk who thought he could have whatever—or whoever—he wanted. I wasn’t the one who made him get drunk and attack me the night of the Christmas dance.… And he obviously hadn’t learned his lesson very well. He and his friends had jumped Daniel a couple of weeks ago. And who knows what he would have tried to do to me that night I ran into him at the Depot.
The night he was later brutally beaten into a coma.
But he deserved it.
“No,” I told the wolf’s voice. There had been a moment when the wolf had succeeded in convincing me that what had happened to Pete was perfectly deserved. But it was the same afternoon that I had almost lost complete control myself—when the wolf in my head propelled me to Daniel’s doorstep and I practically attacked him in my frenzy.
You’re no better than Pete. Daniel should hate you for what you almost did to him. No wonder he wants to leave you.
The wolf was overwhelming sometimes in how quickly it could change its tactics, glomming onto any doubt that flitted through my mind. Clawing me apart from the inside.
Pete and I are different, I tried to tell myself. I’d almost lost control because there was a beast inside my head driving me to hurt the ones I love. Pete didn’t have that excuse. He was perfectly human.
Yet he was still a monster.
The image of Pete lying on that hospital bed, being jolted with electricity by the doctor, flashed in my head. His face had looked so different today. Like a distorted mask of who he used to be. So lifeless and pale. Pete did the things he did of his own accord, but he still didn’t deserve to die. For the last year, I’d told myself that I had forgiven him for all the things he’d done to me, but had I really?
And now it was too late.…
What would happen if I waited too long to forgive everyone else?
NIGHTMARE