..??IT’S TOO LATE??
Chapter 39
…….
I crawl out from under the house. It’s real dark out now, so that means I’ve been under the house for more than an entire day now. I don’t think the men would ki|| my mom and dad and then stay at our house for more than a whole day, so I think that means they’re probably gone now and it’s safe for me to go inside.
When I try to stand up, I fall back down. My legs are tingly and my fingers hurt. I crawl up the back stairs and that’s when I realize my clothes have mud all over them. I’m scared to get the floor dirty. I try to wipe some of it on the rug, but I just keep spreading it around on my clothes.
I grab the door handle and pull myself up. I still can’t feel my legs very well, but they’re working now. When I open the door and walk into the house, I can see my father’s dead body. It’s in the recliner in the living room.
I hold my breath. I’ve never seen a dead body before and I really don’t want to see one now, but I know I have to make sure it’s my dad and not the men. I tiptoe into the living room and I’m so scared, it feels like my heart is beating in my neck.
When I reach his chair, I take a deep breath and then step around it to look at him. I’m a little surprised to see that dead people don’t really look all that different from the people who are still alive.
I thought he’d have blood all over him, or be a different color-like a ghost. But he still looks the same.
I lift my finger to touch his cheek. I heard dead people are colder than people who are alive, so I press the tip of my finger into his cheek to see what his skin feels like.
His hand goes around my wrist and he squeezes it. His eye pop open and it scares me so bad, I scream.
My dad’s eyes are real mean when he looks down at my clothes. “Where the hell have you been, boy? You’re filthy!”
I thought he was dead.
He’s not dead.
“Under the house where you told me to go yesterday. You said you’d come get me.”
He squeezes my wrist real tight and he leans forward and says, “Don’t ever f-__-king wake me up from a nap again, you little bastard! Now go get in the shower, you smell like a goddamn sewer!”
He pushes me away from him. I step back, still confused how he’s alive.
I thought the men came. I thought they ki||ed him.
He squeezes the back of my neck and shoves me until I stumble out of the living room. He said he would come get me, but I don’t think he even remembered I was under the house.
I can feel my eyes start to get warm, so I run out of the living room. I can’t cry in front of my dad or he’ll get really mad.
I walk down the hallway toward the bathroom , but really all I want to do is eat something. My stomach has never been this hungry before. When I pass the bedroom where my mom stays most of the day, her door is open. She’s asleep in her bed, so I walk inside her bedroom to ask her if I can have something to eat. I shake her and try to wake her up, but she just groans and rolls over. “Let me sleep, Asa,” she says.
I don’t like how much she sleeps. She says she can’t sleep very well on her own, so she takes lots of pills that help her sleep better. She says the white ones are for the nighttime, but she takes them when the sun is up sometimes. I’ve seen her do it.
She has some yellow ones, but she says those are her special pills. She says she saves those for the days when she wants to go somewhere else in her mind.
I look at her bottle of pills and I wonder if she would notice if I stole one of the yellow ones. Because I want to go somewhere else in my mind. I don’t want my mind to be inside this house anymore.
I pick up her bottle of yellow pills and I try and try, but I can’t get them open. I’m not very good at reading because I’m only in the first grade, but I finally figure out that the lid says I have to push down and then twist it open.
When I do that, it opens this time. I look at my mom but she’s still facing the other way. I hurry up and take one of her yellow pills and I put it in my mouth and chew it. My face crinkles up because it’s the grossest thing I’ve ever eaten. It’s real bitter and makes my mouth dry. I take a drink of my mom’s water so I can wash it down.
I hope she’s right. I hope this pill takes me somewhere else in my mind, because I’m getting really tired of being in this family.
I put the lid back on the bottle and I sneak out of my mom’s room. By the time I get to the bathroom to take a shower, my legs already feel like they aren’t mine again.
So do my arms. My arms feel like they’re floating in the air.
I look in the mirror after I turn the water in the shower on, because it feels like my hair is growing. It doesn’t look longer, though. It looks the same. But I can feel it growing
,…….
My toes start to tingle just like my legs. I feel like I’m about to fall down, so I hurry up and sit down in the bathtub. I forget to take my clothes off, but that’s okay because my clothes are really dirty. I think my clothes need the water, too.
I wonder how long I was under the house for. I probably missed a day of school. I don’t really like school that much, but I really wanted to go today so I could see what Brady’s mom packed him for lunch.
Brady sits next to me at the lunch table and he brings a lunch box every day. One time his mom packed him a piece of coconut cake. He doesn’t like coconut cake, so he told me I could have it. It was so good. I went home and told my mom how good it was, but she still hasn’t bought me coconut cake.
Sometimes Brady’s mom writes notes and puts them inside of his lunchbox. He reads them all to us and he laughs because he thinks they’re dumb. I never laugh, though. I don’t think the notes are dumb.
One time I saw one of the notes he threw in the trash and I picked it up. It said, “Dear Brady. I love you! Have a great day at school!”
I tore the top of the note off that had Brady’s name on it and I kept it. I pretended my mother wrote it for me and sometimes I would read it. But that was a long time ago and I lost the note recently. That’s why I wanted to go to school today because if Brady had another note from his mom, I wanted to steal it and pretend it was for me again.
I wonder how it would feel to have someone say those words to me.
I love you!
No one has ever said that to me.
I feel dizzy. It feels like my head is floating on the ceiling and my eyes are looking down at my body, sitting in the bathtub. I wonder if this is why my mom likes the yellow pills? Because it makes her feel like the important parts of her are floating high in the air where no one can reach her?
I close my eyes and whisper, “I love you,” to no one while I float in the air. Someday I’ll find someone and I’ll make them like me enough to want to say those words to me. I want it to be a girl. A pretty girl. One my dad doesn’t think is a wh-_-re.
That would be nice. Maybe she’ll love me enough to make me coconut cake. I really like coconut cake.
If I ever find a girl who says those words to me and makes me coconut cake, I’ll keep her. I won’t throw her away like Brady throws away the notes from his mom.
I’ll keep her forever and I’ll never let her leave me. I’ll make her tell me she loves me every single day.
“I love you, Asa,” she’ll promise me. “I’ll never leave you.”
ASA-POV
I’ve never ki||ed anyone before. Not until just a few minutes ago when I shot the guy upstairs for trying to take what wasn’t his.
I’m still not sure how I feel.
I should probably be worried, because murder comes with repercussions. I should also be pissed, because as soon as I shot the guy and pulled Sloan into this room, the rest of those f-__-kers I hired scrambled like eggs.
I guess they’re scared I’ll $h00t them, too.
I suppose I am a little worried about the repercussions and all that $h|t. Normally when a gun is fired, someone calls the cops. Which means they’re probably on their way here right now, thanks to a nosey goddamn neighbor.
And I’m referring to the real cops. Not this poor excuse sitting in front of me right now.
I’m disappointed this isn’t going down how I had planned. I $h00t one guy out of self-defense and the rest of them just give up on their f-__-king duties and scram? That means Jon, Kevin and Dalton are no longer being detained by them. Which means at least one of them is about to come beating on this door, wondering why the f-__-k I set them all up like I did.
Which means…I’m kind of in a bind right now. I’m running out of options. I think the only option I really have left is to $h00t Luke in his goddamn smug face and get Sloan out of here while I still can. Sure, she’s going to be a little traumatized. But we could go to therapy or something whenever we get settled again. She’s going to need it after being brainwashed like she was.
It’s kind of sad that I’m only left with one option and I only have a minute or so to follow through with it, because I really wanted to hear Luke tell me what it was like when he f-__-ked Sloan.
Not because I would have been turned on by it. I’m not f-__-king morbid.
I wanted to hear it, because I need the vision. I need to know what he said to her to make her fall for it. I need to know if he had to talk her into it like I did. I need to know if she made the same noises that she sometimes makes when she’s with me. I want to know what position he f-__-ked her in. Was he on top? Was she? Was he behind her?
…….
just need to know so I can make sure I don’t do or say any of the things he said to her when I make love to her in the future. I need to make sure I never f-__-k her in the same positions he f-__-ked her in.
But now I’m out of goddamn time, because someone is beating on the door and Luke still hasn’t opened his mouth.
“Asa!”
It’s Dalton.
I’m still not sure what to think about Dalton. I really like him. He’s coke, everybody likes coke. But everyone knows cocaine is one of the most widely impersonated drugs there is. A whole hell of a lot of imposters. Dealers selling crushed up aspirin on street-corners to half-dead crack-addicts who can’t even tell the difference.
Dalton may not even be cocaine. He’s probably a bottle of f-__-king Advil, crushed up and poured into a baggie.
“Asa, open the door!” Dalton yells.
I reach behind me and make sure the door is locked. “Where did everyone go?” I yell to Dalton. “It’s quiet out there!”
“Open the door so we can talk.” He’s right on the other side of the door now.
I laugh and repeat myself. “Where is everyone, Dalton? Where are Jon and Kevin?”
“They left. They got paranoid and left.”
Of course they did. f-__-king best friends for life. @$$h0les.
I look over at Sloan. She’s sitting at the head of the bed, her knees pulled up to her chest. She’s watching me, wide-eyed.
Luke is watching me, too. It doesn’t matter where I’m standing or what I’m doing, his eyes are always f-__-king on me. Have been since the day I met him. The day Dalton introduced me to him.
I tilt my head until my mouth is close to the crack in the door. “Why are you still here, Dalton? Waiting on your backup to arrive?”
Dalton isn’t so quick to respond this time. After a pause, he says, “I’m here because my friend is in there. If you let him go, we’ll leave.”
I can’t believe I f-__-king fell for this. Months of practically living with these f-__-kers and all they were here to do is destroy me.
Kind of feels like my childhood all over again.
At least Sloan loves me.
At least.
I drag my eyes across the room until they land on her. “Remember when I was in the shower earlier and you asked me if I wanted anything from the grocery store?”
She nods, but barely.
“I told you I wanted a dessert for the celebration. Did you get one?”
She nods again. “Your favorite,” she whispers.
“Coconut cake?”
She nods.
See? She f-__-king loves me.
“Dalton,” I say, demanding his attention. Not that it ever left me.
I should probably move over. He’s right on the other side of this door. Wouldn’t put it past the f-__-ker to $h00t me through it.
I step against the wall and reach down to make sure the door is locked. “Do me a favor, will you? Bring us the coconut cake.”
Again, Dalton pauses for a moment before responding. “You want cake?” he says, confused. “You f-__-king want cake?”
Why does that sound so ridiculous?
“Yes, I want cake! Bring us the f-__-king coconut cake, @$$h0le!”
I hear Dalton’s footsteps fade as he walks into the kitchen. Luke is staring at me like I’ve lost my mind.
“You got a problem?”
He shakes his head and opens his mouth to speak. Finally.
“There’s medication that can help you, Asa,” he says.
Medication?
“What the f-__-k are you talking about?”
Luke glances at Sloan and then back at me. I h@ťě it when he looks at her. It makes me want to rip his f-__-king eyes out and swallow them like my mother’s yellow pills.
“You’ve checked the lock on the door fifteen times in the last five minutes,” he says. “That isn’t normal behavior. But it can be controlled. Just like your father’s behavior could have been controlled.”
This is where I cut the f-__-ker off. “Talk about my father again, Luke. I dare you.”
His eyes meet the gun that’s pointed straight at him now, but for some reason, he still doesn’t shut the f-__-k up.
“Did you know he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was only twenty-seven? I read it in his file. He never took his meds, Asa, not even once. The things going on inside your head-they can stop. It can all stop. You don’t have to be like him.”
I stride across the room and press the f-__-king gun to his head. “I’m not like him! I’m nothing like him!”
Before I pull the trigger, Dalton beats on the door.
“How am I supposed to give you the cake?” Dalton yells.
…
T..B..C