Put Me Back Together (21 page)

I felt his eyes flick to my face, felt the heat of his gaze like rays of sunlight against my skin. Until he looked away.

“I was just telling the truth,” he said. “It’s a beautiful painting.”

“That’s not what I’m thanking you for,” I said, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew they were the wrong ones. Because they made him turn to me, his eyes falling on me for real this time. I’d only wanted to express, that the kiss, his kiss, had meant the world to me. I’d meant it as a goodbye. But instead he was reaching for me, one hand grazing my cheek while the other nudged my hip, pulling me toward him. My hands pressed against his chest, stopping him from pulling me in any farther, but it didn’t matter. I was already in his arms.

His scent surrounded me, a mixture of laundry detergent and the woodsy smell of his cologne and something else that was just him. I breathed it in greedily, as though it was my oxygen, as though I knew that the second I turned away from him I would be unable to breathe. I had to store him up for later. I hate to take in as much of him as I could just to survive.

“Katie…” he murmured, sending a thrill through my body.

He tried to coax me to raise my eyes to his by tugging lightly at my cheek, but I wouldn’t. Instead I stared at his lips, those lovely, soft lips. I felt wobbly all of a sudden just looking at them, and a second later I realized why. I was going to cry.

“Katie, what happened?” Lucas asked me as I retreated from him, pulling my body away from his. It felt like wrenching off one of my own limbs. “Just tell me. Talk to me.”

But what could I say? How could I explain? There was no way he would ever understand that the girl he thought he knew didn’t exist. The Katie Archer he knew wasn’t real. There was just me, and I was far more trouble than he could handle.

His fingers were still caught in the ends of my hair, his body still just a hand’s breadth away. He still thought I was with him, but I was already gone.

“I’m sorry,” I said, grabbing my things and pulling away for real. My eyes were wet but the tears hadn’t yet started to fall as I looked at him one last time. Then I walked quickly down the hall away from him.

13

When the day finally came, I felt nothing.

I’d taken to sleeping on the couch, not only because I’d been staying up watching movies later and later into the night in an effort to make the days last longer, to stop tomorrow from coming, but because it was like an island in the middle of my apartment. From the vantage point of the couch, I had a good view of the two biggest windows so I could watch for intruders with ease. And since it was only five feet from the door, I could more quickly make an escape if I needed to. But I wasn’t paranoid or anything.

It had been days since I’d gotten a text from the unknown number, which didn’t fool me one bit. There was always a calm before the storm. But it had been a nice little break. A girl could only be called a “motherfuckinglyingbitchwhore” so many times before she developed a complex. And I was already sporting a pretty big complex of my own. I didn’t need any extras.

Now, as I sat up on the couch on the day of days, I gently palmed my cell from the coffee table and took a breath before turning it on. Nothing.

Phew.

Well, no threats from the unknown number anyway. There were three calls from my mother and a call and two texts from Emily, all of which I ignored.

Lying back on the cushions, I gazed out the window across from the couch at the gray day outside and marveled at my own calm. I felt numb, really. I felt nothing. It reminded me of an article I’d read once about a Japanese man from Osaka who’d been the only person to survive the bombing of his neighbourhood during World War Two. He’d described how he’d walked aimlessly through the rubble afterwards, all alone, and that for many hours that day he’d believed that he had died while everyone else had survived. He’d thought he was a ghost.

That’s how I felt when I woke up that day. As though I wasn’t real. As though I hadn’t survived, although I had. As though I was nothing.

I walked to school through a drizzle that left my hair in a frazzled mess. I’d left my phone at home for the day, marveling that I’d never thought of this solution before. Let Mom and Em worry about me if they wanted to—I was going incognito. To someone passing me on the street I’m sure I looked like any other person rushing to get out of the rain, going about their errands and daily life, as if the day had no meaning at all, which was amazing to me. The only difference in myself I could really feel was a trembling, not of my limbs, but deep inside me. I felt as though a strong wind could bowl me right over.

All the rules were in place today. This was, after all, the day they were made for. I avoided my coffee shop, knowing it might have the radio playing, wore my biggest noise-cutting earphones just in case, and inside the school buildings I kept my eyes averted from every TV screen. I spoke to no one, took copious engrossing notes in class, and tried to emulate my morning self as much as possible: say nothing, feel nothing, be nothing. Before I knew it, my school day was over and I was on my way home.

My only mistake was stopping at the newsagent at the edge of campus to buy a Snickers bar—my reward for not staying home all day hiding under the covers. The daily papers were all stacked neatly on the counter, ready to be taken away to wherever unpurchased newspapers went at the end of the day, and as I struggled to fit my change into my wallet I happened to glance down at them. The headlines jumped out at me, all reporting the same thing, all in bold, block type. Because this was the biggest news story of the year. And it was right there in front of me.

Evil Gets Cut Loose

Killer Walks Free

Kid Killer Comes Home

The coins fell through my fingers and scattered on the pavement.

“Are you all right, miss?” the old man behind the counter asked, glancing down at the change that I hadn’t bothered to pick up.

My inner tremor threatened to take over my entire body as the awful memories pulled at me, trying to drag me back there—Brandon’s dirty fingernails as he gripped the knife. Tommy’s high-pitched scream ringing in my ears. My dirty running shoes pounding on the forest path as I ran and ran and ran—but I resisted with all my strength. I didn’t want to go back there ever again. I wouldn’t.

“I’m great!” I said with forced enthusiasm, jamming a bite of chocolate into my mouth and chewing as though my life depended on it. Then I turned away and left the headlines and the memories behind me, where they belonged.

As I pulled open the door to my building I noticed the sun was going down. I’d made it through the day in one piece. Nobody had attacked me. Nobody had found me out. I’d survived this day just as I’d survived every day leading up to it, and I was going to keep surviving. The day had just been one long boring bout of nothing.

In a sick way, it was kind of a letdown.

In the doorway I quickly checked my mail slot, spying a manila envelope waiting for me through the little holes in the metal door. My name was printed in small, neat writing on the front, and there was no stamp, which meant that whoever had left this for me had been inside the building. I set the envelope down on the table in the lobby, staring at my pale face in the mirror hanging above it.

Evil Gets Cut Loose.

Maybe Brandon hadn’t sent me a text today because he’d planned to leave this for me instead? I knew logically that this wasn’t possible. It would mean his travelling all the way from Vancouver to Kingston in just a few hours. He’d only been let out this afternoon, and I was pretty sure the terms of his release barred him from leaving the province. My nagging worry that he had an accomplice made my fingers shake as I picked up the envelope again. I knew I was being silly. What danger could an envelope possibly pose? It was light enough that I felt nearly certain it contained nothing other than paper. So no bomb to blow me to bits, then. Another empty threat, maybe, written out by hand this time? I’d never know unless I opened it, and yet I couldn’t seem to convince my fingers to tear the seal.

As I approached the stairs, dragging my feet now, all my earlier excitement doused in anxiety, I squinted down at my own name. The handwriting seemed familiar to me, which meant it couldn’t be Brandon’s. I’d never seen him write anything down. I puzzled over this for a moment until the photo of Turner I’d taken on my phone flashed through my mind and I suddenly knew whom the envelope was from. All that extra anxiety lifted from my shoulders and floated away. I knew his handwriting because I’d watched him writing out his name on the missing cat flyers we’d plastered all over town. The envelope was from Lucas.

It had been nearly two weeks since the moment Lucas and I had shared in the hall outside of class. Since then we hadn’t spoken once, and he hadn’t called or texted me, either. I was back to my old tricks, avoiding any places on campus where I thought he might be and keeping my head down in class so as to not catch his eye. But this time I noticed he was doing the same. He’d even skipped class last Friday. And earlier this week when we’d had our closest call, somehow managing to end up at the door to the art studio at the same moment—keeping your eyes down all the time did have its drawbacks—I’d stepped back, murmuring an apology, my eyes drifting up to his face, but he’d kept his averted. His demeanour had been one of annoyance, as though I’d been holding him up. His face has been stonily blank as I’d walked passed him through the door, just inches from his chest. The gravity that always pulled me toward him had screamed at me to throw myself into his arms, but I’d held back. Gut-wrenching as it had been to have Lucas look at me like I was a stranger, it would’ve been like an actual knife in the stomach to have had him peel me off his body, that same stony expression telling me he wasn’t interested, he never had been.

When his coldness came back to me, freezing my heart solid, I had to remind myself that I was the one who’d told Lucas to stay away from me. He was just doing as I asked. And when I was out grabbing a bite Sunday night with Em and her friends and spotted him across the room with that redheaded vixen Taylor plastered to his side, I had to remind myself again. And again and again and again. This was what I’d wanted. This was what I’d asked for. He was moving on. He was doing just what I’d told him to.

“That Taylor’s so full of herself,” Melissa offered, pushing her basket of fries my way. “I’m sure he doesn’t want her around.”

“She throws herself at everyone,” Sally agreed. Then, in a moment of real clarity, she added, “I should know, so do I.”

“I know he misses you,” Em said.

But it really didn’t seem like it. Later that night Anita accidentally mentioned that she’d seen him at a couple of parties, hanging out with Eric and Oleg. He was out with his old friends, whatever had been holding him back apparently no longer an issue. It occurred to me that maybe what had been keeping him from his other friends was me. Now that I was out of the picture he was free to go back to his real life, the life he fit into just right, the life that had been waiting for him.

I thought bitterly,
He’s probably glad to be rid of me
.

So then what the heck was in this envelope, and why had he sent it to me?

I still hadn’t opened it when I reached the top of the stairs and found Mariella and Ethan at my door.

“Oh thank God, Katie!” Mariella said as she looked up from her phone. “I’ve been texting you like crazy. Stefano’s totally going to fire me. I’m already thirty minutes late and you know how he gets.” I did know. Mariella was always going on about her Nazi boss at the spa where she worked as a masseuse. She was sure he had it out for her.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” I said, glancing nervously at Ethan, who looked back at me with a blank expression of extreme boredom. Count on a five year old to find his mother’s hysteria totally uninteresting.

Mariella hefted her enormous purse back onto her shoulder. I was always wondering what the heck she kept in there to make it so heavy.

“I know it’s a total imposition,” she said, “but my mama’s sick and my stupid brother, Ray, took off on a road trip to the Maritimes—like winter’s the best time to go sightseeing—and if I don’t make it to my shift, Stefano’s going to fire me for sure and give all my shifts to that skinny biatch Cecily. So I’m begging you.”

She looked at me pleadingly as I tried not to show the rising panic I was feeling inside. She hadn’t actually said the words yet but I could see where it was going. I felt my windpipe closing up, my ability to breathe dwindling as I gripped Lucas’s envelope in my fingers, crinkling the paper. Today had been going so well. I might have even called it a raging success. I’d planned on spending the evening sketching and eating cookie batter and maybe, if I felt up to it, calling my mother back. My grand plans shattered at my feet as I looked into Mariella’s pinched and worried face.