B. Johnson - Deadgirl

“I’m not trying to hurt you, you don’t understand—”

“Then explain it,” he shouted, and the hands on my arms rocked me with the force of his rage. “Explain why you would do this to us again. You know we thought you were dead the first time? Do you understand that at all? Do you even care?”

I didn’t have words. There weren’t words, were there? His heart had been torn apart in his chest, by me. What could I say to that? I’m sorry? I wish it had never happened? The words were true, but they weren’t enough. I felt that weight again, the sure knowledge that I would never make this up to him, or my mother. I’d broken something, irreparably, and even if it healed, it would never set right. For lack of a better metaphor, our relationship would always have a telling limp.

And in that moment, I knew not all of my suddenly fateful thoughts were my own. Somehow, in the same way I’d known the name of the bus driver who’d picked me up a few hours ago, I was half-thinking my father’s thoughts.

I clutched my mouth. The taste of salt flooded past my lips.

“Dad. I didn’t run away.”

“What? What does that mean?” Some of the hysteria drained out of his tone. Maybe, even under the anguish and rage, he was still no-nonsense, solve-the-problem Dad. God I hoped he was.

“Something…happened to me, Dad. Now it’s gonna sound,” I rubbed my temples and closed my eyes. I couldn’t say it to his face, could I? “…crazy. But you have to believe me. You have to trust me.”

I watched my dad’s eyes balloon. The fingers on my arms squeezed even tighter, and a pulse of blood ran up and down my broken fingers. My gorge rose at the pain, but I managed to keep what remained of my bile in my stomach.

“You want me to trust—”

“Dad, wait. Please, p-please just listen,” I said, my voice disintegrating with every word. “Zack and Morgan are in trouble. I can’t explain why, but please believe me.”

“I know,” Dad said. Something about hearing their names calmed him somewhat. “They’re in comas. No one can explain. Your poor mother is up there with Morgan’s mom right now. Trying to…comfort each other.”

“I know what hurt them,” I said, and in the lull of his rage, I managed to disentangle myself from his clutching fingers. “I know who hurt them. And I can stop it. Maybe I can even fix it.”

“Lucy, what are you talking about?”

His eyes were turning from angry to afraid. Desperately worried. And it wasn’t about the aforementioned attacker, I’m sure.

“Dad,” I said, letting out a long breath. “Someone who is after me…hurt them. To get to me. I don’t…I can’t explain more than that, not right now. Please trust me.”

I know what I sounded like to him at that moment—I’d been receiving random brain messages long enough to know firsthand, in fact. I sounded like a runaway drug addict. Which I looked like, in fact. I took Heroin chic to a whole new level.

“Lucy, I think you’re sick,” my dad whispered.

I clenched my fist, and felt another hot trail singe the ice from my cheek.

“Dad—”

He grabbed me by the upper arm and dragged me away from the car. I staggered along behind him, frozen in more ways than one. How could I stop him? How could I explain that if I didn’t make my run against Abraham, if I didn’t go into that hospital right now , people could be killed or worse and every one of them would be my fault?

“Dad!” I said, tugging at his arm.

He spun toward me. His other hand was digging in his pocket—he produced a slim silver cell phone and flipped it open.

“Dad, wait.”

His thumb paused over the buttons, no doubt either about to speed dial my mother or to inform the police to stop the search. Knowing my dad I expect he would call the police first—he’d always been such a good citizen.

“Lucy.”

He said my name as if it was a sentence all its own. As if it conveyed a meaning I should have picked up on. It wasn’t questioning or stern. It was just… Lucy . With the same tone you might whisper the word “help.”

“Dad, I know what you think, trust me,” I said, with a little pathetic laugh I knew would be lost on him. “But I’m not…well it doesn’t matter what I’m not. But if you ever trusted me at all, ever, if you ever thought your daughter was smart or useful or reliable…you have to let me go back into that hospital. If I don’t…you might regret it forever, even if you don’t understand what I’m saying right now.”

Dad watched me with those hang-dog eyes…and his wheels turned. It made a little bright hot spark of hope sizzle up in my chest, and I took half a breath. When I let it out, a puff of frost hissed out of my lips.

“Lucy, honey,” he said. “It’s time to go home.”

My eyes closed, but they did little to dam up the tears. I clenched my fist, and I grabbed his wrist with my good hand. He hissed and looked down at me in shock—his arm felt like it was running on magma instead of blood. I imagine he felt quite the opposite from my icy fingers.

“Lucy! Jesus!”

I looked him in the eye, and I knew what I had to do. Or maybe, what I had to try to do. I love my dad more than life itself…but that only applied to my life. I couldn’t afford to give away the lives of other people for that love. I didn’t have the right.

“Daddy,” I said, and I closed my eyes. “Give me a kiss, and I’ll go home with you.”

I heard him suck in another breath. It was an odd request—he hadn’t kissed me since I was eleven. Something about turning into a little miniature woman probably gave him the creeps or made him feel like a perv.

“Please,” I whispered, between frost-covered lips. “Then I’ll go, okay?”

I watched him lean down, and hesitate—I’m sure he thought it was the desperate urge of a high-out-of-her-mind potential drop-out. But like any good father, he couldn’t deny me. He pressed his flaming lips against mine—just a little peck. An I-love-you-baby peck. It was enough.

I sucked air until I felt my ribs creak. I thought of two things as I did, praying to God it would work. I thought of all the pain I’d given him because of my disappearance. Then I thought of this meeting, when he’d first grabbed me around the arm and seen my pale hypothermic face.

It felt like putting a snorkel in a hot oven and drawing in deep. Dry, scalding air seared my esophagus, my trachea, and shot flames into my lungs. My breath double-stuttered from the sudden agony, and I took a step back, clutching my mouth with both hands. My eyes filled with a hundred flashing images—it was a strange effect, because my eyes were open. I could see two different things at once—one unchanged, the sight of my suddenly-pale father, wilting like a flower on a hot day. The second sight broadcasted a hundred different images, flickering in front of me like a broken projector.

They showed me a film of suffering in the space of an eye blink. The hours on the phone, the hours in his car, driving around Anaheim in a desperate, unsuccessful effort to find me. The sight of his cracked palms, shoved into his eyes, his mouth drawn in a half-sob. My mother, wan and corpse-like, her hair long and stringy and unkempt, her eyes dark. Half of her fist shoved in her mouth as she stared down at the coffee table for the hundredth time. Examining nothing with a horrible intensity.

Then I saw our meeting, moments ago, in the very parking lot where the two of us were staggering, overwhelmed by branching agonies.

Heat flooded through me, banishing the otherworldly chill. I took a deep breath as the images faded away, and I managed to leap forward and catch my father before he hit the ground.