On the fourth blow he fell to his knees. Pain rained down on him until he could feel no more and his body lay still. Red crept out from his figure like a halo. It was like I’d made a piece of artwork in reverse.
I stood over him and dropped the bat, now splattered with blood and brains. It made a hollow ker-thunk as it teeter-tottered to the ground. The broken, crumpled silhouette had twisted into a sickening fetal position.
As I watched him lying there, I swiped a dash of blood from my nose and touched it to my tongue. I smiled down at him, even though it kind of was a shame, because he’d had such a pretty face.
SEVENTEEN
Cassidy
The next day, I slept past noon and wallowed in my bed, dozing off and on for several more hours. Mom brought me chili and left it at the foot of my bed like I had a head cold. But I wasn’t hungry, instead waking up to a stomach full of regret.
The effects of the Sunshine had waned over the course of the morning, now leaving me feeling like I’d fallen hard into a mucky pit of despair and making me wish that I didn’t still have another one of the tiny yellow pills stored underneath the lid of my music box. A cruel temptation, it seemed, only left there to mock me and test my self-control before I’d even had time for coffee.
When I felt I was on the verge of developing bedsores, I hauled myself out from under the covers.
The sound of Ava’s leg snapping in half replayed in my mind, the memory of it getting louder and louder, sounding more and more like a gunshot. I might as well be dead.
I glanced around the room, looking for items that might be out of place, signs that pointed to what I’d done last night and where I’d been. But it was almost creepy how normal everything appeared. Like out of a catalogue.
I wandered to the bathroom to relieve myself, where I found a pile of black clothes, wringing-wet and lying on top of the bathtub drain as if they’d been soaked. I lifted them out and when I did, they dripped red water onto the white porcelain. A ring of pink stained the area surrounding the drain.
My insides clenched. I rushed to the toilet and emptied a couple tablespoons of stomach acid into the bowl.
This time there were no images that came unburied like they had with Dr. Crispin. I half contemplated making a return visit to him, but I didn’t have the nerve. Then I considered checking the backyard for … well, for something, but I felt my guts come unglued at the mere thought.
Eventually, I splashed water on my face at the sink. In the mirror was the same face that I’d been used to seeing for the last seventeen years, except I couldn’t help but think that something was different. There was a new hardness to my features. My pupils were pinpoints in my dark brown eyes. My eyebrows were arched at a steeper angle. Lips thinner and tauter. This all seemed impossible. But there was a sort of double vision, like someone had traced me and the lines on the two layers of paper didn’t quite match up.
The second game of the play-offs would be starting soon. I didn’t even know whether we’d won or lost last night. We’d be short a flyer at least.
My phone started buzzing from on top of my nightstand. Three short staccato bursts. I steeled myself for a giant Paisley I-told-you-so, but when I lifted my cell, there was a text message from a number I didn’t recognize. I slid my thumb across the screen.
Thought you should see this, it read.
My forehead wrinkled. I scrolled down to a picture and sucked in a hard breath when I saw that the photograph was of Honor posing before the mirror in my room dressed only in my lingerie. She used her inner arms to squish together her barely-there cleavage and she held a kissy-face for the camera.
A deafening roar started in my ears. My fingers pounded the letters on my cell. Who sent this?
The response was instant and painful. Everyone.
My heart throbbed like someone had smacked it with a hammer. Since when? I scrolled through a number of missed messages and checked one from Paisley, marked with a simple “FYI” and the photographs.
Who sent it first? I asked, returning to the nameless phone number.
That was my little sister in that photograph. That was all that mattered.
An ellipsis dotted the text box. Teddy Marks.
Sophomore. Basketball player. Teddy Marks. I rolled the name over in my mind. So that had been the boy my sister had a crush on, the one she was thinking about when she stood in front of my mirror and posed like she was thirty instead of fifteen. I would ask how she could be so dumb, but I knew it wasn’t that hard. After all, I’d suffered my own brand of stupidity. Besides, it wasn’t her fault that she’d wanted the wrong person to love her. Honor’s taste in boys probably didn’t fall far from the tree.