Find Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book Two) (19 page)

I forgot,
they’re into that whole
Holistic Approach
thing
here...

“
So, Mr. Cox, are you
ready?
”

“No, I’m not.”

He puts a hand on my back, gestures me ahead.
“None of us ever are.”

He opens the door to a room that looks
simply like a teenage girl’s bedroom—a
young
teenage girl, even though Gina’s twenty-one or
twenty-two now. Pink walls, a dresser on the left with a hairbrush
on it. A photo of her parents. A canopy bed.

A black-haired girl sits on
it
, facing the window on
the other side, her back to me. She’s swaying left to right,
lightly, as if she were a twig on a tree being pushed by an early
Spring breeze.
Must be Gina
, I
think. Only, Gina was twice her size. This girl—in her over-baggy
white shirt—looks like a frame of bones.

“
I’ll stay with you, Mr. Cox,” the
Doc whispers.

We’re standing behind her, looking at her
looking out the window.

“Gina, Dr. Abrahams here. How are you
today?”

Gina
sways.
Twig in a tree.

“
We have someone here to see you, Gina.” He
edges me forward.

She sways.

“It’s Declan Cox, Gina. You remember
Declan?”

She sways, lightly.
Gentle breeze...

I get to the end of the bed, look at her
profile. Her skin is gray and gaunt, her eyes as deep blue as the
bottom of the Pacific. They quiver, wild and frantic—left right
left right left right. Up down, left right, up down up left
right—

Doc Abrahams: “Gina?”

She’s holding a
Rupert the Bear
teddy, stroking it, rubbing its head.
Stroking it like she’s looking into an endless abyss of flaming
madness.
Staring at the devil himself. Or god. Or god fucking the
devil
.

“
Gina? We have Declan—”

Her head cocks slightly to the left, then
it gimbals over to the right a little.
She looks at me. Spittle drops gently from the
side of her mouth, a trickle of it flowing lightly all the way down
to her sweatpants.

“
Gina?
Declan—”

She closes her mouth. The minutest of
twitches push
es her left
eyebrow down. The hand on
Rupert’s
head presses a little harder down on it. The
other—around
Rupert’s
neck—squeezes, squeezes, squeezes...

The hand on his head pushes down
further. And then it starts
squeezing it as well. Rupert’s ear pops in between her fingers. Her
middle finger is going into his button eye. Her head’s still cocked
left, looking at me. Expressionless.

“Gina. Do you remember Declan?”

And that’s when she bolts, upwards,
backwards!
Slam!
Hits the
back wall! Her eyes terrified! Frenzied! She starts to
shake.

And then...she
screams
.

I guess it’s
the sound a young girl would make if her face were
being slowly cut with a razor by a man with yellowing teeth and
breath smelling like old cat.

That’s the amoun
t of terror I hear in her shrill voice.

Two nurses come in. I swear I was
expecting a
Cuckoo’s Nest
scene here. But the nurses don’t even dress in white. They
gently coax Gina to calm down, and after a few minutes, the
screaming stops. We’re outside the room already. Doc is smiling. My
palms are wet and cold, my legs are weak. I feel like I need the
bathroom.

“
Well, I guess that was a bad
idea
—”

Doc looks up at me. “Mr. Cox, that was the
most progress we’ve had in over six months!”

My heart still hasn’t recovered.
Razor and cat’s
breath
is all I’m
thinking. “I’m sorry— What?”

He explains how there was indeed recognition.
A step forward.

“But she was scared out of her mind!”

“
Scared of what? Reality? We don’t know.
Our job is to help her face what’s here. Sure, when she saw you,
she probably didn’t see
you
,
she saw something else. But at least she saw
something
! There was perception,
recognition!”

“
Can I sit down? That was a
little...intense.”

He takes me to the nearest bench. “Mr.
Cox
—”

“
Declan, sir. Please, call me
Declan.”
Because
Mr.
Cox
was my
father’s name.

“
Declan, I’d need to confer with Dr.
Gehrig. But I think we’ll need you to come back here. With proper
counseling, we might be able to coax her
back
to reality with your help!”

I feel sick to the stomach and I don’t
know why. “Uhm, sure. I mean, it’d be the least I could do.” I give
him my number and he tells me he’ll be in touch with me as soon as
possible.

When I get outside, about a hundred yards
from the huge black gates, I hurl.

Then I hurl again.

On the third time, I’m thinking about
Gina’s last words to me:
You’re a devil, aren’t you, Deck?

I think that’s what she sees when she
looks at me. And who is the devil to
you
? And how would
you
scream if you saw him in
your
room, only a few feet away?

The thought makes me retch one more time,
even though there’s nothing left to come out except blood and
spit.

Back in the car,
I can’t join in with Skate’s enthusiasm about “the
hot blonde singer from
Red Lipstikk
and how she wants to fuck me.” All his words just make me
sick to the stomach.

That scream. God, that tormented
scream. And how long has she been living in that world? And was I
the one who put here there? How can you move forward from that
shit? Dino deserves to take a piece of me.
He deserves it. Blaze? No, he won’t
hurt her. But me? I won’t even put up a fight...

Trev and Skate wanna go out drinking, but all
I can think about is Blaze. I need her. I need her more than I need
air right now.

I pull out my phone and I text her. She calls
back instantly. “Deck, baby, you OK?”

“
Sure, uhm, of course.” I clear my throat,
the gastric acid from the puke is still burning me. “Why are you
whispering?”

“Uhm, my new BFF is in a drunken stupor next
to me. She’s really awesome. I’m so glad I met her.”

My mind drifts...
Scream!

“Deck?”

I
try clear some burning shit from my throat. “Uh, yeah,
sorry, I was just drifting...”

“You OK?”

Pause. “Sure. Anyway, I’m glad to hear your
voice.”

“Deck...hold up. I’ll call you back.”

She turns off the phone and I stare
blankly at the
drab
buildings, the cloudy sky.

She calls back.

“Deck, you wanna spend time with your
boys?”

No, I actually just wanna hold
you in my arms, and bury myself in you
. “Not really.”

“
I cleared it with Vikki. I’m coming
over.”

Thank god, because I’m
drowning
without you
.
“That’d be awesome.”

I must look like a ghost when Blaze walks
into my place. She places two cold hands on my cheeks and bends
down to kiss me on the couch. “Jesus, Deck, what happened to your
face?”

“
Skate and I got into a fight.”

Her jaw drops
. “No— Wh— Why!?”

“Don’t worry, Blaze. It’s like our way of
shaking hands.”

“
Was it because he left me? Because I swear
that wasn’t his fault—”

“
No, no. I’m not kidding. If we don’t throw
a punch at each other every few months we’re not ‘bonding.’ That’s
not the problem.”

“
You promise? Because he really looked out
for me—”

“
Blaze! I swear it. Skate and I are tight
as rain. Like
this
.” I put two
fingers together.

“
O—OK. Then... There’s something else. In
your eyes. And you’re pale...”

“I went to see Gina today.”

She stands abruptly. “Oh.”

And then I tell her about it.

“No regrets, huh? That’s what I said to you,
isn’t it? Before Dino threw a Molotov through your building’s
window. It’s easy to talk philosophical bullshit to others. Not so
easy to live it.”

“
Deck, it
wasn’t
your fault.”

“
It also wasn’t
not
my fault. I chatted to Clarissa at
Tom’s
today. She blames herself as
well. Says she was ‘complacent’ about Gina’s drug use. That’s about
the wisest statement I’ve heard about it. Do you stand by and let
your friends do drugs? Because it’s cool, maybe. Or do you risk
losing their friendship and tough-love it out with them? I mean, I
drop—sorry, I
dropped
. I’m
gonna keep that promise to you, Blaze. I swear.”

“
Good.”

“
But, it was only a week ago when I was
about to drop a few pills. Trev was there. He didn’t say shit about
it. I mean, he’s not happy about it, but he’s tolerant of it. I was
the same when he was doing it.
None
of
us get on Skate’s case. Technically, he’s the only one left of us
who’s still doing it regularly. We’re not gonna stop being friends
with him because of it. We’ve been through too much together. God!
Who am I to talk? Like I said, a week ago I was holding the damn
pill in my hand. I even had it to my teeth when your set came on.
So who am I to say I’ve ‘stopped’? If something happens between me
and you, I got no reason to stay clean.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen. I promise.”

“Don’t promise what you can’t guarantee,
Blaze.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen to us, Deck! OK?
Nothing!” She’s fearful in her eyes. I think of Clarissa’s own
eyes, talking about Skate. I don’t know why I think that, because
this isn’t the same, not even a little bit. But I do think of
it.

I put my hand behind Blaze’s neck. Squeeze.
“Good,” I say. “Good that nothing will happen. Because you’re the
only freaking thing going right in my life.”

She gives a wan smile, moves in to kiss
me.
It hurts, but I
don’t care. I’d kiss Blaze if it felt like razors were cutting my
skin.

I taste something in her.
“Booze?”

“
Vodka. A lot of it.
”

“You drunk?”

“
Was
drunk. Now I’m just a little tipsy. I think I’ll
have a hangover tomorrow. She gave me a gazillion gallons of
OJ.”

I pull her toward me one more time.

Gina’s terrorized face is front and center
in my mind
—eyes as cold
as lakes, hair like a raven’s coat. Gaunt.

Lost.

But as Blaze’s lips touch mine, her
tongue, her gentle caress, the face changes. The wraith’s hair goes
from black to gold, highlighted with green and pink. Her eyes go as
green as fresh leaves. Her arm transforms from pale to colorful,
symbols of a life etched on it.

In my vision, the girl
—
Blaze
—strips.

In life, I take off Blaze’s top. And I
ease my hands over to the hardening mounds of her tiny
breasts.

It’s dark. The last drops of sun
disappear
behind some
buildings. She gets up, eases her lithe body over to my
Asus
tablet. The speaker it’s
connected to plays a gentle
drip-drip
rumble. She’s put on Ellie Goulding’s
Only You.
She twists her body, her back to me, and
sways like a belly dancer to the gentle rhythm of the
beat.

Just enough to entertain, not enough to
distract.

But Blaze does distract me. She distracts
me more than a full-length nude of Scarlett Johansson slap-bang in
the center of a Times Square billboard ever could.

I watch her.

Each movement, each shake and sway of her
body, is a touch into an ethereal fabric which connects us. As she
bumps her hip right, I feel it in my ribs. She tilts her head
back,
and I sense it
like fingers caressing my throat.

I move like a cat behind her, my ribs
screaming as I do it
.

I want her so badly. The need to take her and
make love to her feels stronger than the need to breathe.

As she writhes
and twists her ass, it makes me needy.

I’ll wait.

I’ll let her finish.

But when she’s done...

She
turns, leans back against the tablet’s pedestal—breasts
pointing at me, her mouth seductively opened.