Better Left Buried (2 page)

“No, thanks.
I’m taking mine black.”

“We can’t keep going like this, Harmony. You know that,
right? Neither of us has slept in a week—”

“And you want to send me back, right?”

In Harmony’s experience, people didn’t work on problems, they pushed them far enough away to not have to deal with them.

“Send you back w
here? To your mother’s? No. Why do you always jump to that? I wouldn’t send you there if someone paid me. No food, no power half the time, not to mention her drunk and drugged boyfriends … there isn’t even a phone to call for help. Without the burner I bought you, your mother wouldn’t have even been able to call me that night.”

That night.

S
ome events are traumatic enough to be mentioned without specifics. Adam was talking about the night she intended to kill herself. She held up her hand, unwilling, as always, to talk about it.

“Don’t even go there.”

“You know, normally I wouldn’t, but you have no idea what you put me through and it’s about time you hear it. Your mother didn’t save you, Harmony. She was so high when I got to you she could barely keep her eyes open. She didn’t even call 9-1-1.”

“She has authority issues, Ad
am. You, of all people, should know that.”

“
You needed lifesaving medical attention.
I
shouldn’t have been her first call. I was soaked in your blood, Harmony, doing everything I could think of to save you and I just kept thinking that without you, there was no reason for me to stay in this shit world. I prayed for you to live.”

“That’s serious.” She needed to make light of the fact that Adam wasn’t the praying type
to avoid talking about what happened—to keep from admitting she wished he hadn’t saved her. “I guess it wasn’t my time.”

“It’s that cut and dry for you, isn’t it? I sat
, alone, in a hospital waiting room for over fourteen hours, covered in your blood, wondering if you were going to make it. I didn’t care about the people staring, or the fact that your mother didn’t care enough to stay. I only cared that you came back to me.” There were tears in his eyes as he said it. “And I wondered what made you so desperate in the first place.”

Harmony had almost no recollection of that night, having come to only once when she was being wheeled into surgery. She’d have explained the weight of a
miserable life if she could, giving Adam a detailed list to hold on to, something he could fix, but the truth of it was simpler.

“Even if there’s nothing after death, sometimes nothing is better.”

Adam set down his coffee cup and reached for her hand. “You don’t still feel that way, do you?” She debated whether it was best to placate him or be honest, and knew she’d stalled too long when he started to panic. “Harmony, answer me.”

“No
, I don’t.” She pulled her hand away and chugged her rapidly cooling coffee.

“You’d tell me
if things got that bad again, right? If you needed—” The words were on the tip of his tongue, but she knew he wouldn’t say them. She had warned him she’d leave if he ever tried talking her into medication again.

Three months on an adolescent psych unit cured her of ever taking behavioral meds again, no matter how bad things got.

The Spring View Psychiatric Hospital was hell dressed in roses, the kind of place you’d die to get out of if they’d stop drugging you long enough for you to finish the job. On the outside, it was a respite. A clean, caring place to heal. The inside would steal your soul. Kids shuffled down the halls wearing the same pajamas for days and weeks on end, so sedated they couldn’t tell you where they were if you asked them.

She hated the way the pills made
her unable to feel, dead, from the inside out, and knew Adam would have her back there in a second if he thought she wanted to hurt herself again.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ll get something over-the-counter to help me sleep and we’ll both feel better.”

“You mean it?”

No matter what she felt, she’d l
earned the right things to say. Adam would believe her because he wanted to.

“Yes
. I do.” She slid her empty mug across the counter and smiled. “Now refill me. It’s going to take more than one cup of coffee to get me through school today.”

Brea waited in front of Reston
High—a rural school about to graduate a class of one hundred fifty students in June. It had been a tough four years living in the kind of town that was too small to get lost in. She and Harmony had operated on the outskirts of a social experiment they had no place in, and were specimens beneath a microscope neither of them could get out from under.

Rachael Warren
parked her late model white Fiat. Several photo-ready clones filed out of the passenger’s side, each sipping their cup of designer coffee. Being on Rachael’s good side had perks.

Brea was
very much on her bad side, having inexplicably managed to catch the attention of Rachael’s on-again/off-again, current ex-boyfriend Jaxon Winslow. Rachael didn’t necessarily want Jaxon; she wanted the
option
of him. Brea, with her mother’s help, had somehow gotten in the way of that.

Jaxon’s
father owned a property developing firm that dealt with Brea’s mother for permits. Joan had all but forced the idea of dating Jaxon down Brea’s throat, insisting they weren’t
that
different. She had been homecoming queen all four years of high school and either wanted to live in denial that her only daughter was shunned, or somehow forgot not everyone could be popular. She threw Brea and Jaxon together at an end-of-summer picnic after his and Rachael’s most recent break-up.

Rach
ael had been harassing her ever since.

Brea kept her time with Jaxon a secret to avoid making that worse. Not even Harmony knew she was seeing him.

Rachael stepped out of her car, commanding attention with an air of control that came as natural to her as breathing. Brea couldn’t help looking at her. Five-foot-seven, blue eyes, and skin the color of light caramel—she was a born leader.

Brea’s diametric opposite.

Rachael met up with Amanda and Becky and exchanged exaggerated conversation.

“
Again? Really?
” and “
OMG can you believe it?”

Brea didn’t have to guess what they were talking about. She’d heard the news already.

The girls walked toward her, pointing and laughing, and only stopped when Adam barreled down the bus loop, tires screeching and white smoke pouring from the exhaust of the albatross of a truck he’d put together at his shop.

Brea called it “Frankentruck”, an amalgam
of Chevys bound for the scrap yard that Adam had painted flat black. He’d replaced the grill with chrome fangs undoubtedly meant to intimidate, and jacked the truck up on enormous tires worth more than the vehicle. He let it idle in a no parking zone and gave Harmony a long kiss.

Harmony shot Rachael a look that had her pulling Becky’s sleeve and walking the other direction
.

“I’ll see you at three.”

Harmony had to jump down from the truck to get out. “Unless I call earlier.” She hadn’t put in a full day of school in over a week.

D
eathcore vibrated through the speakers, rattling the license plates.

Harmony crushed out a cigarette under the heel of her calf-high black boots and waved.

Rachael rolled her eyes, still spreading
the buzz
.

“What the hell’s her problem?”
Harmony said.

Even through a layer of pancake makeup Brea could see the dark circles under
Harmony’s eyes. She was wearing a pair of fishnet tights, a pleated black and purple plaid skirt, a sleeveless top, and the boots that were possibly her defining wardrobe staple. She was shivering and the rows of bracelets covering her scars jingled. Brea took a black hoodie out of her backpack and yanked off the tags. “You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Take this.” She wasn’t sure how to break the news.

“We aren’t the same size.
It’ll never fit me.” Harmony, not one for taking handouts, pushed the sweatshirt back toward Brea. “What haven’t I heard?”

“I told my mother I needed a medium so I could layer. Take it.”

Harmony put the sweatshirt on. It fit perfectly. She wasn’t much for saying thank you. Brea didn’t need her to. Harmony would do anything for her and she knew it.

“What didn’t I hear, Brea?”

“I overheard my parents talking. Uncle Jim picked your mother up again.” Her uncle was a cop.

“Drugs?”

“Not this time. In and out with an appearance ticket for a drunk and disorderly. She got belligerent with Jack over at Rite Way Liquor.”

“He probably cut her off again.”
Harmony chuckled nervously, but Brea could see she was relieved. She needed to get through the next six months without her mother being incarcerated or else Child Protective Services was going to send her back to the foster family she’d made out to be the Mansons. “Dodged another bullet, right?”

“I guess.”
Brea started toward the entrance when the bell rang. “It might be a good time to get some of your stuff if she’s sober.”

Harmony rolled her eyes.
“Charity Wolcott is
never
sober.”

“Fair enough, but it’s going to be winter in a couple months. You at least need a jacket.”

“Look, if this is about the sweatshirt—” She started to take it off and her bracelets caught on the cuff.

“It’s not that. Do you
have any idea how many clothes my mother buys me that I never wear? At least it’s getting used. I’ll tell her I lost it at school if she asks, but—”

“But what?
Spit it out.”

“Maybe you’d
feel better getting whatever you have to say to her off your chest.”

“
What makes you think I have anything to say?”

“The bags under your eyes
, for one. It’s not all black eyeliner. What’s going on, Harmony? You’re wearing
me
out trying to stay up with you. Is it that nightmare again?” Brea opened her locker and grabbed her first period books off the shelf.

“It doesn’t feel like
a nightmare, Brea.”

“What does it feel like then?”

“Like a memory.” She let out a frustrated growl on the third time trying her combination.

“Here, hold these.” Brea handed
over her books and opened Harmony’s locker.

“
There.” She took her books back, watching Harmony sift through the disaster of a locker that looked lived out of.

“The same nightmare at the same time every night
. What if there’s more to it?” She handed Brea a book she had checked out of the town library. The water-stained cover had warped and the pages smelled like mold. Brea had to open to the title page to see what it was. 

“Entities: Spirits, Demons, and Angels.” She closed the book and gave it back to Harmony, uncomfortable with this particular brand of insanity.

“Harm, not again—”

“
Hear me out. I’ve been reading about the ghosts of people who don’t know they’re dead. What if the dream is someone’s way of trying to tell me something?”

“Someone dead?”
Brea raised her eyebrows. She knew better than to use the word “crazy” with Harmony, but it’s exactly how she sounded. “I like a good mystery as much as the next girl, but this is—”

The first period bell rang, kee
ping her from having to label her.

Maybe
I
am
crazy, Harmony thought, though Brea knew better than to use the word. Sitting outside of the run-down trailer she formerly called home, she couldn’t help thinking it was no wonder.

“Are you ready?” Adam cut the Chevy’s engine, silencing the rumbling exhaust.

“As I’ll ever be.”

It was Harmony’s first time home in months
. She postponed the visit as long as she could, but now that fall was giving in to winter, she needed warmer clothes and to address the thing she’d put off too long: the visit with the court-ordered psychologist. They were supposed to go on a monthly basis. Her mother only managed to make the first appointment and Harmony was out of excuses. Missing the next one for any reason was as detrimental as her mother going back to jail. Either way she was back in the system. Child Protective Services loomed as an ominous threat, one which had been in her life for as long as she could remember. She was wrong to think their interest in her would stop even this close to eighteen.

The security light on the trailer next door glistened ac
ross the frosty lawn, burning through the windshield like a spotlight. Her mother’s trailer was dark and she wondered if she was even home.