“Do you want to know something, Ellie? Something I’ve never told anyone before?” He’s not even looking at me. The tears are falling faster now, an unreal amount of them, as though someone has turned on a faucet inside his face. He has one arm behind his back. “He didn’t just go to sleep.” Sean shakes his head and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “That’s how I thought it would be for him, y’know? Just like going to sleep. But it wasn’t. I went into his room and I held him down. He was a really heavy sleeper and didn’t even wake up when the needle went in. But at the last second, he opened his eyes and looked at me. He had this look of horror on his face, Ellie. His last moment on this earth was spent looking his own brother in the eye and knowing what I did to him.” Sean takes a deep breath and takes his arm from behind his back. There’s something in his hand. Stark black barrel, shining dully under the motel’s fluorescent lights. Cartoonishly menacing. A gun. Sean looks down at it, then back up at me, then down at the gun again. “I got this for myself,” Sean says. “For, y’know.” He raises the gun to his head, jerks his head to the side, and then sticks out his tongue. “It’s supposed to be hard to get a gun, but if you have a lot of money, it’s not really hard to get anything, I guess.”
And he looks up and smirks, as though he expects me to laugh. “At first I couldn’t take it, the guilt, you know. And Nina was gone and I couldn’t handle it alone. Then, Thanksgiving break, a few months after it happened, I came home from boarding school. Normally we would spend Thanksgiving at our house in Big Sur, which, hey, you’ll think this is funny, that’s actually the house where that band dropped your sister, but anyway, we didn’t go that year because it was like my brother’s favorite place on earth and my dad and stepmom thought it would be too hard to be there without him. So it was just the three of us at my house sitting at that giant table, staring at our plates, at all this food the cook made that we weren’t eating. And I just…I missed him, which was so crazy. I just started thinking about how different dinner would have been if he was there. And how cool he was and how funny he was. It was like that was the first time he really felt like a brother to me and it made me sick, so I excused myself, which no one really minded. And I went up to my room and I got the gun out of this box in my closet. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to load it right. I’d just read this tutorial on the Internet but it’s not like I really had any chances to test out shooting before. So I did what the website had said and then I held the gun up to my face and I was about to squeeze the trigger when suddenly it was like someone was talking to me directly inside my head. I don’t know if it was God or my brother’s ghost, but the voice told me not to do it, not to kill myself, because that wouldn’t make things right. I wasn’t really the one at fault there, see. I wasn’t even the one that killed him, they were my hands, but doing what she wanted. Your sister was the one who did it to him.” Sean looks to the side and presses his lips together. “It was her fault and I was the only person on earth who knew that. Before that I’d been looking for your sister for months. But after that moment I stopped looking and I just waited. I knew if I waited long enough, I’d get a chance to make things right because it was fate that I should. It was hell, all that waiting. But I never lost faith and I never gave up hope and then when I finally saw you at that party that night at the Mothership, I knew my wait was over and that you’d been sent there for me, to lead me to her, to help me make things right. But then I started falling in love with you.” Sean tips his head to the side and smiles like he’s telling a story about something beautiful. “I thought that maybe that was the reason I was at that party, not to find Nina, but to find you! So I thought if I could just let the past go, then it would all be okay. That’s why I told you she died, so we could move on…together.”
Sean looks up at me then, staring me straight in the eye. “Stop looking at me like that,” he says.
I don’t move.
“Do you know what I’ve been through, Ellie? Can you even imagine? You think you have suffered for love? I have suffered for love and so there I was, waiting for the love I’ve earned to come back to me. And then there you were. Dear, sweet, beautiful you who looks so much like her, only you look at me differently than she ever did, and then when you told your friend to leave I knew she had never loved me the way you do. You are the reason I knew it was okay to let her go. Because I had you now. Someone to look at me the way you did. But you are not looking at me like that anymore.” Sean’s nose is practically touching mine. I can see the muscles twitching in his jaw.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.
“Look at me like that again.” He is begging me. There’s a vein throbbing in the center of his forehead. “Please, Ellie, just look at me like that again, the way you did before.”
And I try. I try with every fiber of my being to look at his face and see what I saw before I knew the truth.
But I just can’t do it.
“You look disgusted,” Sean says. His breath is hot on my face. “I didn’t have a choice, Ellie.” He takes a quivering breath. “Tell me.” His voice is quiet now, barely a growl. “Tell me you understand why I had to do what I had to do. TELL ME!”
“I understand why you had to do what you had to do,” I say.
“And tell me you understand why I have to do what I have to do next,” he says. There are tears in his eyes, he’s nodding slowly.
My whole body goes cold. “What is that?”
“You already know,” Sean says. “I already told you the story.”
“The story?”
“The one about Nina in the parking lot.”
“But that didn’t actually happen!”
“That didn’t actually happen…” A tear drips down each cheek. “Yet.”
My mouth drops open. I cannot speak.