“I just want to see him,” the boy says quietly. “I know he didn’t mean to hurt that other boy. Alex isn’t bad, Mom.”
Urgh. Poor, naïve, innocent, sweet child. Maybe the realities of a prison will scare some sense into him. She’ll go with him in the morning, and she’ll do nothing to shield him from the horrors of an underfunded penitentiary. There’s every chance—
SHIT!
Red.
White.
Startled, wild brown eyes.
The impact rocks the car, the sound a deafening roar.
The windshield…gone.
Glass, shattered, raining down like diamonds.
The woman wrenches at the wheel, stunned, reacting blindly, steering the car, left, left, left…
Weightlessness…
Darkness…
The desperate, frightened, thin scream of a child. “ALEX!”
So much fear. So much terror.
White, spiraling into the black.
Another impact. Jarring.
Breathless, winded, jagged, sharppain… pain…painpainpain…p…p…
Ticking metal.
Hissing steam.
They…they’re off the road. In a ditch. Accident. There’s been an accident. A deer…out of nowhere. It came out of nowhere.
“Ben? Benny, are…you okay?”
Nothing.
The woman tries to turn and sees the shard of metal protruding from her chest. It doesn’t make sense, that piece of metal. It’s a part of the car’s fender. How? It shouldn’t…be inside the car. It shouldn’t be inside her.
“Ben? Ben, answer me, baby? Can you…hear me? Are you okay?” It’s impossible to spin in the seat; the twisted piece of fender won’t allow for that kind of movement. Instead, the woman has to use the rearview, angling it to the left and down, in order to find the boy on the back seat. His head is open, blood pouring down his face. It looks bad enough that when she opens her mouth and tries to cry out, no sound comes. His eyes are open. He silently blinks at her, his small shoulders shaking…
Oh god.
The boy’s shoulder’s dislocated. And she can see white showing in amongst the beautiful thick waves of his hair—the kind of white that should never be showing.
A small, voiceless whimper comes out of his mouth.
“Oh god. Oh…god, Benny. Hold…on, son. I’ll…I’ll get…help.” Each word is harder to form. Each breath is harder to take. Her insides feel wet. It feels like she’s breathing water. With both hands, the woman takes hold of the sharp metal pinning her to her seat and she slowly begins to pull. There isn’t much time. If she tries… If she really tries… If she hurries…
The pain nearly robs her of her last moments of consciousness. If she was alone, the pain would be enough to force her into submission right here and now. She would gladly throw in the towel, admit defeat and sigh out her last breath, knowing that it’d be a reprieve from the staggering wall of agony that’s slamming into her. She isn’t alone, though. There’s Ben. He’s hurt, and he needs her. If she doesn’t make it back onto the road, then he isn’t going to make it…
The broken piece of fender, slick with blood, makes a hollow clanging sound as it falls into the footwell. Warmth spreads down the woman’s chest, staining the ‘Aloha Kākou!’ sweater she bought at the airport a dazzling shade of red.
The door won’t open on her first try. It won’t budge on her second attempt. The third time, the woman lays her shoulder into the busted plastic housing of the door, and the metal groans, swinging open, depositing her out onto the ground in the snow.
Get up.
Save him.
Save your son.
Your son…
Your son…
Your son…
With her life pouring out of her into the cold, relentless night, the woman manages to crawl halfway up the slope that leads up to the road. Dizzy, disoriented, fighting for breath, her brain feels so damn muddled all of a sudden.
Why was she climbing up the slope again?
She rolls onto her back, dazed and numb, and laughs silently as she coughs up blood.
Wow. The night is so beautiful. The snowflakes, swirling down from the heavens, so thick and fast…they really look like stars.
1
SILVER
Guilt’s an unpredictable beast. It doesn’t behave the way you assume it will. When Kacey Winters was still undisputed queen of Raleigh High and I was yet to be cast out of the Sirens, she encouraged us to be as hateful as she was. The meaner we were, the more arrogant, the more we established our dominance over the lower echelons of the socio-economic student body, the more we pleased Kacey. The pursuit to win her approval was a full-time job that required a level of dedication and determination most high school students are unfamiliar with. But I was never as cruel or unkind as Zen was.
Fiercely competitive, Zen was always willing to take things that one step too far. By rights, she should have been Kacey’s favorite. It never worked out that way, though. I laughed along with the jokes, I made spiteful comments under my breath whenever Kacey prodded at me to tease someone, and I made sure to mock the girls on the cheer team whenever one of them fucked up. In hindsight, I was the John Lennon to Zen’s Colonel Gaddafi, but that was irrelevant. I was Kacey’s favorite.
I never felt guilty about the malicious acts I participated in under Kacey’s reign of terror. Not until long after, once Jake and his bastard friends held me down and hurt me.
This morning, however, I’m choked with guilt. I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t constructed a fake body in my bed out of lumpy pillows and a wig and snuck out of the house in the middle of the night. Mom and Max are in Toronto for the next six weeks, visiting my Aunt Sarah. Dad gave his permission for me to stay at Alex’s apartment. I don’t have to be home until midday, but…it’s Christmas morning. It feels like I’m breaking some kind of rule, waking up here in bed with Alex, blissed out and deliriously happy.
We spent last night with Dad, decorating the entire house, arranging our gifts by the fire place, wrestling ornaments out of Nipper’s mouth and drinking eggnog, but I still feel bad that my father’s going to wake up this morning to an empty house for the first time in twenty something years. It just doesn’t seem right.
The sun ekes in through the window next to the bed, washing my skin in cool winter light. It’s still early, just after dawn. If we get up and get dressed now, there’s still time to make it back to the house before Dad’s finished with his morning shower. God knows what Alex is going to say about leaving his warm, comfortable bed, though. His arm tightens reflexively around me, his body hot as a furnace, his smooth, hard chest rising and falling beneath my head as I lay nestled into his side. For the past fifteen minutes, I’ve been lightly tracing the tips of my fingers over the lines of the extensive ink that covers his torso and spreads down his arms, admiring the complexity and the beauty of the work, and he hasn’t even stirred. Once he passes out, there’s very little that can wake a sleeping Alessandro Moretti.
I take the opportunity to study him. Usually, I’m careful about the length of time I allow myself to stare at his handsome, artfully drawn features. When he’s awake, he’s highly sensitive to the weight of another person’s eyes on him; he knows the moment he’s being watched, and he isn’t afraid to call me out on it when he catches me scrutinizing him. Plenty of times I’ve done it unwittingly—risked a sidelong glance at him, just to see what expression he’s making, or to gauge the look in his eyes—only to wind up mortified when he curves one of his dark eyebrows and angles his face toward me, smirking like the bastard that he is.