Locked (18 page)

“I’m trying to deduce what I could have done to upset you,” he says.

Why is this so hard? It shouldn’t be this hard. “You didn’t. Upset me. I have to go.”

“Irene,” he says. “I don’t understand.”

People are staring at both of us now. I’m reminded sickeningly of our staged breakup from before.

“There’s nothing to understand.”

“If you tell me what I’ve done, I’ll stop doing it.”

It doesn’t matter because I don’t love him. I pull away. My wrist slides through his hand. My head feels so hollow I can almost hear my heartbeat echoing inside it. “I’m going to lunch.”

“Did Mycroft say something to you?” Sherlock’s face changes like a whiplash—one second the hurt is exposed, and the next second he looks like a weapon.

“No.”

“Then it must be something I’ve done. I thought you liked—”

“You?” I say. I’m emptied out. Automatic. Like someone pre-recorded my words and now they’re just playing through my mouth with no input from me. “You didn’t do anything specific. You’re just not that likable.”

He actually takes a step back. The look on his face makes me feel like I’m floating. In a bad way. A drifting underwater, seconds from drowning way.

“Bye,” I say mechanically.

He doesn’t respond.

It doesn’t matter because I don’t love him.

|||

After school, I visit Carol.

I haven’t been inside the graveyard in months. Not since the funeral. There’s a few flowers, but they’re old. Wilted. I kneel and brush one with my forefinger. All the petals fall off at once.

Carol Adler. 1992 – 2013. Loved by all who knew her.

“That’s nice. I don’t remember who picked that out,” I say aloud. “I wonder what they’ll put on Sherlock’s gravestone.
Hated by all who knew him. Except Irene Adler.”

I rub a dry petal between my fingers, destroying it.

“This is dumb,” I say.

No comment from the gravestone.

“I wish I hated him.”

A breeze rustles the grass at its base.

“I really really don’t hate him.”

I sit cross-legged on the ground and trace the engraved J. “I hope I’m wrong about him. I hope he doesn’t have a heart, like everyone else believes. Because I saw his face today after I told him he wasn’t that likable, and if he has a heart, I think I broke it.”

I touch the headstone. It has nothing of her on it, except her name. Not her laugh, or the green nail polish she always wore, or the way she’d slam her door when I annoyed her. “I’m not crying. I’m sorry. I’m bad at graves. I was bad at it after your funeral. I didn’t know what to do. They’re not people.”

It’s so quiet. It might be nice to lie down, right here, and sleep under the sky.

“Who even thinks that,” I whisper. “I’m such a mess.”

“Irene?”

I jerk back, twisting around, and scrub hard at my eyes. Of all the people in the world, Ethan Thomas is walking toward me, picking his way over a few flat headstones set into the ground.

“Ethan?”

“Hey,” he says, wide-eyed. He wasn’t expecting to see me either. His sweatshirt is zipped up to his neck. “I’m sorry—I didn’t know you’d be here—are you crying?”

“Flower allergy.”

“Oh.”

There’s a long stretch of silence in which I realize pretty much everything bad has happened because I pretended I was going to sleep with Ethan Thomas. “Why are you here?” I ask.

Ethan crouches, wrapping his arms around his knees. A few clouds have rolled in over the sun, darkening the both of us. “I, uh. I was friends with your sister. I come here sometimes.”

“You were friends with her?” I ask, startled. “I never knew.”

“We didn’t exactly hang out with the same groups.” Ethan kind of smiles. He has a nice smile. Not ironic or vampirish or pure sunlight the way Sherlock’s smiles are, but just—a smile. “We connected somehow. I come here when I need to think, you know? She’s easy to talk to.”

I waver between deciding if this is creepy or touching, finally settling on the latter.

“But I don’t see you here very often,” he adds.

“I don’t come here very often.” I sit back on the ground, probably getting dirt on my pants. “I guess that makes me a bad sister.”

“No, no.” And then we’re both quiet for a while as he obviously struggles for something to say. Normally I’d be doing the same thing, but I’m just too tired. “Hey, uh…I feel like I should tell you…Daphne was my ex.”

I can’t say
I know
, so I just nod.

“But she wasn’t my ex when we almost hooked up.”

“I’m not mad, if that’s what you’re worried about.” I don’t think I’ll ever be mad ever again. It’s too much of a color. “It must have been hard for you when she died.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it still is.” His eyes are fixed at the base of my sister’s gravestone. “We broke up just before then, and I was so relieved. I was relieved at the thought that I’d never talk to her again. And then suddenly I really wouldn’t ever be able to talk to her again. It was like—like I’d killed her by feeling that way.”

“You didn’t kill her, Ethan. Some really terrible person did that.”

“You’re right,” he mumbles at the ground. Then he jolts. “I don’t mean it’s Sherlock. I’m not one of the people who think Sherlock did it. If the police let him go, he must be innocent.”

His name. Just his name ruins me. “I don’t want to talk about Sherlock.”

“Why not? I thought you were dating.”

I put my head on my knees. I’m in a graveyard and I’m sitting six feet above my sister’s body with a boy I almost slept with and who even cares what I say. “Ethan, if you—if you cared about someone, and you knew they could never feel the same way about you, and all you wanted to do was be near them but you knew that couldn’t happen—what would you do?”

“I guess I’d try to help them from a distance,” he says quietly. “If I couldn’t do it from up close.”

“I hate it.” Suddenly vehemence pours out of me. “I hate caring about people. It’d be better if I’d never met him. It’d be easier if he was gone. If everyone was gone. If everyone at school would just—disappear.”

“Do you really think that?”

“Sorry.” I rub my face with the back of my mind. “I’ve had kind of a depressing week.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, you’re just as easy to talk to as your sister.”

“Except I’m not dead. Even if it feels that way.”

Gingerly, he puts his hand on my back. I let it happen. “I think—I think you’ll be okay. You know? It sounds like this Sherlock guy is hurting you, even if he doesn’t mean to, and maybe it’s for the best if you can’t be with him anymore.”

“Yeah,” I echo. “Maybe.”

A drop of liquid hits my cheek. I look up. It’s raining. Just barely.

“Don’t worry.” Ethan holds his hands over me like a joke umbrella. “It’s supposed to stop before it gets dark, Carol—oh. Oh no. Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you—you look like her, that’s all.”

No one’s ever said that to me before. I smile at him. “You’re a good guy, Ethan.”

He smiles back. “And you’re a good sister.”

|||

When I get home, there are boxes stacked outside Sherlock’s door.

I think,
good
.

“But the colors came back when I met you.”

|||

(written on a receipt for Campbell’s Chicken Soup)

Third hypothesis disproven.

|||

That night, I dream about him.

I’m standing alone by the ocean. It’s wide and empty, no wind, the water like glass except for the tiniest of waves rippling at my feet. It’s nearly night, but there’s no sunset. The sky is the almost-dark blue that signals the coming stars.

It’s a stupid place to be, so close to night. I have no idea how to get home.

“I can take you home,” says a deep, familiar voice.

I turn. He’s standing behind me. And I realize why the sky is the color it is—it’s the exact shade of Sherlock’s eyes.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you anymore,” I say thickly.

He just stands there, waiting.

“It’s better this way.” I close my eyes. I don’t want to see dream Sherlock anymore. “Even besides all of what Mycroft said. I was right when I told him everything you do is dangerous. I’m sick of caring about people who only do dangerous things. They die.”

There’s a warmth against my body. He’s stepped forward and he’s holding me, and somewhere in my mind I know this would never happen, because it’s Sherlock, but that doesn’t stop me from pretending it’s real.

“I won’t die,” he says.

“I’m not good at death. I think I should be careful to make sure I won’t care about anyone else ever again who is going to die.”

“I told you,” he murmurs into my ear. “I’m invincible.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m never wrong. You have to trust me, Irene.”
      

“I don’t want to trust you,” I whisper.

“You do,” he whispers back. “You want to trust me so badly I can feel it on your skin.”

Maybe. Maybe, maybe.

“If you trust me,” he says, “you can have me.”

I want him. Not in a sex way, not in this moment. I just want to stay here forever with his arms around me.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll trust you.”

His arms tighten, and just for a moment, I’m exactly where I want to be. Then he steps back. I open my eyes.

A blossom of red has appeared on Sherlock’s white shirt. It darkens and spreads and starts running down his chest. He smiles with bloody teeth, half in the ocean.

“Never trust anyone, Irene.”

|||

I wake up tangled in my blankets, sweat soaking my back and stinging my eyes. When I realize I’m gasping, I fight to control my breath. It’s dark and I’m half on the floor and I shut my eyes and grind my teeth. Not this again.

I stay in the horribly uncomfortable position for a minute, unwilling to put myself back in bed just to lay there unsleeping for the rest of the night, until I smell smoke.

It makes me furious. Sherlock is smoking just to make me furious, the night before I leave. He probably has a fan set up next to the window, pointed at my house.

I struggle upright, limbs as weak as if I’d run a million miles, and squint. There’s an orange light creeping around the edge of my curtains. Is it really morning already? Which means—I did it. I’ve slept through the night for the first time since I talked to Mycroft.

But the light is flickering. Sunlight doesn’t flicker.

I suddenly become aware of the heat in the room. I hadn’t just been sweating because of the nightmare. A sick feeling begins in the pit of my stomach and spreads to the very tips of my fingers. I stumble to the window and throw open the shades.

Sherlock’s house is on fire.

I’m dreaming. Still dreaming. Have to be.
Never trust anyone
. But I’m not. I’m awake. The flames engulf the house, blazing orange like a miniature sun. Shooting out of the upper window. Where he sleeps. Where Sherlock, the strange and incredible person who’d seen straight through my heart, seen how broken it was and liked me anyway, sleeps.

I’m halfway down the stairs by the time I finish dialing 911.

“What is your emergency?” says the bored girl on the phone.

“House fire at the end of Panadero Street.” I’m running but I keep my voice clean, so every word is distinguishable.

“Okay. Help is coming. Is it your house? Are you and your family members—?”

But my phone slips from my fingers on my way out the door. I don’t stop to get it.

Outside, the heat rolls over me in a wave. Ethan was right. The rain is gone. It’s windy. The wind strokes the flames higher, higher. Only on Panadero Street could the fire have gotten this bad before someone called 911. My house is the only one in sight of his, and Mom takes so many sleeping pills that nothing short of a nuclear bomb could wake her up.

But it was fine. He’d definitely gotten out.

Even if he hadn’t called 911.

He had probably left his phone inside.

I’m sprinting across the road, the gravel stinging my bare feet. Maybe he’d passed out from the smoke and that’s why he hadn’t called 911. Or knocked on my door. But there’s no dark shape on the lawn.

“Sherlock?” I call but the word doesn’t come out, so I cough and try again. “Sherlock?”

He couldn’t still be inside.

He couldn’t.

“
Sherlock!
”

No response. Just the angry crackling of the house I’d lived next to my whole life being eaten alive. I’d been to a bonfire once. This was different. This was a fire doing exactly what it wants to, without anyone to stop it.

I told him not to smoke inside. I told him so many times.

The air simmers and he is nowhere. This is wrong. He can’t die tonight. He’s supposed to move away and be safe. I can live with that. I can’t live with this.

How long would the fire truck take to arrive?

Too long.

I’m not an idiot, I know I’m supposed to keep something wet over my mouth, but there’s no water and no time. I yank my T-shirt over my nose. Approaching the house is like pushing against an invisible balloon of heat. I open the door, burning my hand on the knob, just like I burned it on the casserole I made for him before I even knew him, and run inside.

The smoke is as thick as butter. Worse than all of his smoking sprees put together. Worse than anything. My eyes hurt immediately. I squint.

“Sherlock!”

The fire is like a thousand snakes, crawling over the walls and ceiling. Bright oranges, reds, yellows. Glowing. My lawn chair is melted, twisted. The couch is a ball of flame. A mug left on the counter has cracked in half. Mycroft’s coffee mug that Sherlock never put away. It’s Sherlock’s house if Sherlock’s house was hell.

What do I know about fire? Heat rises. Smoke inhalation usually kills you first. And now I know why—it’s impossible to breathe, the smoke heavy with anything but oxygen. With every gulp of it, my lungs starve and burn.

I just have to find him and get out. That’s all. How long could it take? Minutes. People go minutes without breathing all the time. I pull my shirt higher on my face and dash up the stairs, careful not to touch the rails, because the fire is eating them.