She knew she was helpless to save her best friend and yet she couldn’t give up.
She stared at Hannah’s hazel eyes as they bulged, reddened, and began to dim.
She yanked at the hold Carl had on her, crying and screaming for them to stop. They had to stop. They had to listen.
“PLEASE!” she yelled, digging her nails into Carl’s arm and carrying away strips of skin.
He hissed in her ear and reared back to punch her in the side, right above her kidney. Sharp, blaring pain radiated through Elaine’s body, but she was numb to the sensation. She could have been sliced in two, right down the middle, and it would have hurt less than watching her best friend die before her eyes.
Donny’s grip stole the breath from Hannah’s lungs without thought or remorse, like a gust of wind taking a flame from a match. Elaine watched from two feet away as Hannah’s body slowly, slowly deflated.
Everything was loud, so deafeningly loud as Elaine’s screams ricocheted around the bathroom, and then there was no sound at all.
There was nothing.
Hannah was dead and she’d taken Elaine’s senses with her.
Carl and Donny scrambled from the bathroom and Elaine crawled toward Hannah’s lifeless body.
She felt nothing as her fingertips skimmed across her best friend’s pale cheek. She saw nothing as she gripped Hannah’s body and pulled her up, trying to shake her back to life. She tasted nothing as her salty tears coated her lips. She heard nothing as she whispered for her friend to come back to her. She could smell nothing, not the sweat coating her body or the spilled perfume coating the bathroom floor.
She needed to follow Hannah. She belonged with her in life and in death. They were entwined deeper than lovers and more intimately than family. Without Hannah to guide her, Elaine was a lost soul. She hovered in the twilight of life, begging for death so she could join her friend. Heaven or hell, it didn’t matter.
She’d cling to Hannah anywhere, always.
Chapter Forty-Five
Lilah
I wanted his words to be a lie. I wanted my life to stay neatly packaged. I wanted to wake up every morning and pretend that my mother, even with her problems, still had her redeeming qualities. Now, I had nothing left to cling to. Chase had ripped that away from me like he was ripping stitches from a fresh wound. Without the delusions to keep together, I was forced to remember the last time I’d ever seen my mom alive.
She had gone missing after Hannah’s death, but somehow I had known she’d be at Hannah’s funeral. Everyone had gathered at the Matthews' house so that close family and friends could share in their memories of Hannah’s life.
My mother arrived like a tornado. She was impossible to miss as she stormed in crying and screaming at all of us. The image of her oily skin and yellowed teeth haunted me. She looked nothing like the woman who’d tried to raise me for seven years before calling it quits. She looked wild, like a feral animal.
“You don’t understand! None of you understand!” she screamed, flailing her arms out, trying to get someone to listen. “It wasn’t supposed to happen!”
She staggered down the back stairs, sobbing incoherently, but the second her eyes locked on me, her insane delirium seemed to lessen.
“Lilah, come give your mom a hug. I miss you so much, baby,” she crooned, stumbling over her own feet as she tried to reach me.
Chase stood up and put his body in front of mine. Even at sixteen he was bigger than she was.
“Don't you dare come near her,” he threatened. “My mom wouldn't want you here! I don't want you here!”
She kept trying to come closer and I sidestepped Chase to get to her. She was my mom, but Chase wouldn't let me get by him. He held his arm out to block me.
“We don't want you here! This is your fault! You did this to her!” he yelled, and finally his words started to sink in for her.
She stopped her pursuit to get to me, a blank zombie stare tainting her bright green eyes.
My dad and Mr. Matthews rushed out of the back door trailed by two police officers.
“Elaine, what are you doing here?” my dad yelled.
Mr. Matthews bypassed the pleasantries. “Get the hell out of here! So help me god, if you don't get out of this house, I will kill you myself!”
I'd never heard Mr. Matthews yell in my life, but he wouldn't stop. He yelled at my mom to get out over and over again until I started to scream at him to stop.
My dad wrapped a hand around my mom's bicep and pulled her through the side gate before Chase or his dad lost it even more. I was in a daze, trying to comprehend the fact that I'd just seen my mother for the first time in a year and she’d looked like she was on the brink of death. Her sunken cheeks belonged on a skeleton, not the woman that had given birth to me.