Mum must’ve heard the commotion because she barrelled into the room next, and when she saw me crying, she started too.
“I knew it was too soon. They sent you home, didn’t they?” She always did know what was going on before I could tell her, and if Brodie was here, he’d have filled in the extra gaps. I never did have any secrets in this house.
“They don’t want me,” I managed to splutter through the sobs. “I can’t do it anymore.” I meant that I couldn’t keep holding it all together, but from the petrified look my mother gave me, she thought I was checking myself out for good.
“Harper, love. You need to see someone. I know you think you’re coping, but you’re not.” Mum was clutching at straws to try and make me see things her way, and Dad was crouched down next to me, giving me a side hug as I tried to reciprocate but pulled away at the same time, wanting to right myself. “It will help to talk to someone about what happened. I know it was a shock after they told us about the aneurysm-”
I shut down, hearing that conversation start up again. I knew what I saw that night. I knew why my brother died. I didn’t need to hear about the complications that’d happened afterwards. It was hard enough getting my head around the fact that he was gone, let alone hearing about brain aneurysms and all the other medical jargon they filled my parents’ heads with at the hospital afterwards.
I sipped my disgustingly cold tea to give me something to do and then, when mum had got her little rant off her chest, I told her about the head teacher referring me to occupational health.
“That might be a good thing.” She gave me a sad smile. “They have their own counsellors, don’t they? If you don’t want to see Meredith with me, maybe someone there could see you?”
I shrugged. If it’d help to relieve some of the stress for her, I’d play along.
“Maybe. I’ll ask them.”
She seemed happy enough with that answer and let it go. I was glad. I had absolutely no intention of arguing this point any further.
Later that night, I sat up on my bed, afraid to go to sleep in case I missed my night stalker, or even worse, fell into another Brodie dream, reliving his death over again. The sun had set hours ago, and now the shadows of the trees outside danced across the walls of my room like sinister dark strangers that were slowly becoming my only friends.
I had my window open and I focused on the rustle of the breeze as it blew through the trees. The simple sound helped to soothe the sting from the barbed-wired heart inside my chest that pierced me every time I took a breath. The chill of the air numbed my heavy, twisted lungs. These were aches I’d never be truly free from, I knew that, but zoning out helped to dull them somewhat.
“You’ll never be alone. You were born with a best friend. Even in the womb you had your other half, always there, always looking out for you.”
My grandma’s voice echoed in my ears.
“Do you remember the time Brodie cut your hair so you’d look just like him?”
I heard her laughter reverberating through my mind and immediately an image of my mum, looking totally horrified, sprang forth. And there stood a five-year-old Brodie, grinning from ear-to-ear with the kitchen scissors in his hand.
“Harper looks just like me now. We’re proper identical twins.”
He’d laughed, Mum had screamed, and Dad tried to calm everyone down and assure Mum my beautiful blonde hair would grow back eventually.
Suddenly, I jolted awake, feeling my neck crick as a result of falling asleep in such an awkward position. All too soon, the surge of pain overwhelmed me again and I stood, walking over to the window.
And there he was.
Skulking in the shadows, hiding in the dark with all the other fucked-up creatures that only came out at night. Vermin, that’s what he was.
The grief I felt in my zombie-waking state turned to fury. I spun around, flinging my door open and barrelling down the stairs.
He didn’t get to come here and lurk in the night, scaring us and making us feel like prisoners in our home. He had no right to walk into our garden, intimidate us, and flaunt the fact that he was still alive, still breathing air into his traitorous body. He didn’t deserve any recognition, any acknowledgement, and I wanted him gone. He’d taken my brother’s life, wrecked mine, and now I was spiralling out of control. On a fairground ride that I couldn’t get off, and he was driving. Forcing me to the brink of insanity.
When I got to the back door, I ripped it open, making the handle bang off the wall, but I didn’t give a damn. I just stalked outside, ready to face whatever hell he wanted to unleash.
“I know you’re out there,” I bellowed into the darkness. “You don’t get to win this time.”
I didn’t care what happened to me. I wasn’t thinking straight. All I wanted to do was face him. Stand in front of him and tell him how much I hated him. No, despised him. Hate wasn’t a strong enough emotion for what I felt when it came to Brandon Mathers. I wanted to pound my fists into his face this time. Make him hurt as much as I did.
“Come out and face me, you murderer. Come out from your hiding place, like the scum you are.”
I stood in the middle of the garden shouting down to where I’d seen him before, but he wasn’t there. Like always, he’d run away.
“You can run, but you can’t hide. I’ll find you.”
As I walked towards the edge of the garden where the trees were, the ground underneath my feet went from soft dewy grass to hard stones and dirt. I didn’t care. The pain beneath my feet was nothing compared to the pain in my body and my mind.
“I saw you. Where are you?” I shouted, pushing the leaves of the fir trees to the side. I dropped to my knees, scrambling around on the floor to find something, anything that’d give me a clue to where he was.
“Harper, what on earth is going on?”
I heard my parents behind me, but I stayed where I was, dragging my fingers through the dirt and trying to focus through my tears.
“He was here,” I said without turning around.
“Who was here, love?” Dad crouched down to where I was, trying to pull my hands away from the soil, but I shook my head. I wouldn’t be deterred that easily.
“He was here. I saw him. He watches me.”
“Oh, God. She’s lost it, Andy,” I heard my mum say. “We need to call the doctor.”
“No doctors, Tanya. We’ll deal with this ourselves,” my dad snapped back. “Come back inside, Harper. There’s no one here. If it makes you feel better, I’ll go over every inch of this garden, but there’s no one here now. You’re only hurting yourself out here. Please, just come inside.”
My dad put his arms around me and scooped me up like I was still a child. I had mud under my fingernails, and I couldn’t stop shaking. But I knew what I’d seen. I wasn’t going insane.
He was watching me.
He wanted to break me.
Trouble was, I was already broken.
I hated them for what they’d done to me. I had no one I could call on. No one was on my side. Like a piece of trash, they’d thrown me away. It was easier for them to forget I ever existed. Why would anyone want a fuck-up like me in their lives?
But I watched them.
I watched how they went about their lives with fucking smiles on their faces. Not a care in the world.
Emily was living with Ryan’s family, and the pair of them made me sick. Their little displays of affection whenever they went out made my stomach turn. It didn’t matter to them that they’d royally screwed me over to get what they wanted. I’d put everything on the line for them, and how had they repaid me? By making me look like a fucking fool, shitting all over my feelings and turning their back on me.
Had I really told my best mate’s girlfriend that I loved her?
Because at the moment, I could barely stand to look at either one of them.
I wasn’t done with them yet, though. I wanted to make them pay. My best friend and the girl I thought I loved needed to know what they�
�d done. Their happiness came at a price I wasn’t willing to pay.
As for Zak and Finn, they were happy enough to wipe out my existence as well. Go about their business and start the parties up again. I’d have expected more from them, especially Finn. I’d always gone out of my way to help him, nurture him, build him up in a way no one had ever done for me when I was at rock bottom. I suppose Jensen fucking Lockwood had been right. I was born in shit and I’d die in shit. I certainly had the shittiest friends of the lot. And now, every night, when I laid down in my piss-stained sleeping bag in the squat, I pictured each one of them in my mind and gave myself comfort thinking of all the fucked up ways I was going to have my revenge.
My time would come.
I wasn’t going to fade into obscurity to suit their agenda.
I had a plan.
Multiple plans, in fact.
The Lockwoods wouldn’t escape my wrath either. They probably thought they’d beaten the pride out of me years ago, but they hadn’t. I was only getting started when it came to their fucked-up crew. But the one thing that ate away at me the most was Brodie and Harper Yates.
I lost everything because of them. My childhood, my friends, my stake in the parties, and my fighting. I was a living ghost, surviving in the shadows. I couldn’t go home, couldn’t make anything right whilst she was there, haunting my dreams and taunting me every hour of every day.
I wanted to make her suffer.
I wanted her to lose everything like I had.
Her brother wasn’t the innocent man she made him out to be. He’d come at me in that fight, ready to take me out. I took him first. That was the deal. Now? She was going around town painting me as some kind of villain. A devil not worthy of anyone’s time. Saint Brodie was being immortalised, and for what? For being a bully? An abuser? A fighter with no morals and no credibility? Because that’s what he was. He was the scum, not me. He deserved everything he had coming to him that night.
Do I sound like a fucking psycho?
Probably, but that’s because I am.
I’m pissed at the world. Pissed at my friends. Hell, I’m pissed at the whole fucking town of Sandland. But most of all, I’m pissed at Harper Yates for whitewashing what was a fucking set-up.
I was set up.
I was framed for a murder I didn’t commit.
I wanted to make her pay, and so I watched her. I hid in the shadows and used the darkness as my friend. I wanted to see her suffer. Make her feel like she was losing her mind just like I was. I had plans for her, and I was biding my time. Waiting for the moment I could strike and finally break her. But it turns out, fate was a cruel motherfucker.
Who would’ve thought it?
Harper Yates was even more fucking broken than I was.
I thought I’d hit rock bottom when Brodie died. I thought the funeral and everything that came after it was the bottom of the fucking barrel. I was wrong. Turns out, rock bottom has a basement, and that’s where I was, lying on the cold, hard floor with no way out.
After my epic meltdown in the garden, my dad had brought me inside, and I spent the night in their bed with Mum, whilst Dad slept in the spare room; close enough that he could hear us and come in if we needed him, but far enough away to give us the space we needed.
I was a fucking mess. Even I could admit to that.
Was I seeing things?
Had he been there watching me at the bottom of the garden?
Or was my mind so focused on revenge it’d sent me spiralling into some fucked-up alternate universe where I didn’t know which way was up and which was down?
I didn’t know.
I didn’t have any of the answers.
But I knew I couldn’t go on like this. Hell’s basement was lonely and played tricks on your mind. I’d had enough of those games to last me a lifetime.
“Harper, love, we need to talk to you about some things, but we need you to stay calm, okay? It’s important that you listen and take this all in. I know you’ll want to react, we all do, but we don’t want you hearing this from anyone else but us.” My dad was back to being his cryptic self at breakfast.
I stared at him blankly over the breakfast table, nibbling on my toast but struggling to swallow. My eyes were puffy and sore from lack of sleep. I had managed to get some rest lying next to Mum as she tried not to let on that she was crying. I didn’t get a lot though. The nights were always the worst. Even the good dreams about Brodie made waking up that much more unbearable. Like a cruel reminder of what I no longer had dangled in front of my eyes and then ripped out of my grasp when I awoke. Awake, asleep, it didn’t matter; life pretty much sucked ass and then some.
“I’m not made of glass. You can tell me.” I glanced between them. Mum was biting her lip and looked rougher than I did, like she was continually balancing on the edge of an emotional cliff, ready to dive off. And Dad? He was right behind her, ready to jump in after.
“We’re trying to hold it together as best we can,” she said, taking steady breaths to help her get through what she wanted to say without breaking down. “We lost your brother, and that is the single most painful thing we’ve ever been through… well, are going through, in our lives. But we still have you, Harper. We need to stay strong for you. We can’t lose you as well.” Her voice broke and she came to sit next to me at the table, reaching over to take my hand in hers.
I knew what she was saying. They thought I was breaking. That I’d end up following Brodie and leaving them both childless, but I was stronger than that. How can you be a loser when you never quit? I would never quit.
“I’m not going anywhere, Mum. I might be struggling to get through, but I’m not down for the count.” They both paled at my use of the boxing term. “I just need time. Everything is tough at the moment. I just have to ride it out, I suppose.”
Dad tensed up, dropped his head forward and then stared at his hands in a daze as he spoke. “It might get a bit tougher before we find ourselves firmly set onto that road to recovery.” Another deep breath. “The police rang us yesterday. We didn’t want to tell you after what’d happened at school. We didn’t think you could take anymore. But if we don’t tell you, someone else might, and we need you to hear this from us.”
I braced myself and waited for him to continue.
“They’ve taken all the statements they need, seen all the mobile phone footage from that night, and they’ve decided to drop the charges.”
I gasped, feeling like the walls I’d built around myself for safe-keeping were crumbling away with his words, creating irreparable damage faster than any wrecking ball.
“They said all the evidence points towards accidental death. He took the hit, he moved away, stumbled on the uneven ground and fell. The fall damaged his skull and… Well, we know the rest. We lived it. The aneurysm must’ve given Brodie blinding headaches for months, but he never told any of us. Throw that into the mix and it just fortifies the case for the defence. His balance was off. He tripped.”
“It’s bullshit. If Brodie had an aneurysm, I’d have known about it. I’d have felt it.” I could feel the rage bubbling up inside of me. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to keep that shit down. “I saw what happened. He didn’t trip. He was murdered.” It didn’t matter what anyone else’s mobile phone footage showed, the film reel in my head was as clear as day. He went down because of that punch.
“We can’t prove that. They can’t prove that. Harper, I know you want justice for Brodie, but he wouldn’t want this.” Dad looked over at Mum as he spoke. “I think as a family we need to face up to the fact that he stepped into that ring, he agreed to the fight, and now we have to deal with the consequences of his actions.”
“We face the consequences, but his murderer gets off scot-free? What kind of fucking consequences is he facing, huh?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Every day there were hurdles appearing in front of us, like potholes in a retro platform computer game ready to trick us and call game over. It was a
fucking joke. We didn’t stand a chance. All the odds were stacked against us.
“He’s probably suffering in his own hell,” Dad said. “I’m damned if I know. I hope he is. The police still have no clue as to his whereabouts, and I hope he never shows his face in Sandland again. But we need to accept there won’t be a trial. There’ll be no one we can pin our grief and anger onto. Not publicly, anyway.”
I slammed my fist down on the table, making my parents jump at my outburst. I couldn’t believe Dad was giving up so easily. Where was the hunger to fight back? Brodie was a fighter, and so was I. So, why were my parents lying down and taking this?
“There is someone to blame and he needs to answer for what he’s done. He can’t get away with it.”
“Harper.” Mum squeezed my hand to get me to look at her. “It’s not healthy to think like that. You have to let this go, or at least try, for all our sakes. It’ll be hard for me and your dad too, but as a family, we have to. For our sanity.”
I shook my head vehemently.
“No. No, I won’t. I can’t, Mum. I can’t just get on with my life and pretend that fight never happened. Pretend Brodie wasn’t killed at the hands of someone else.”
Mum glanced across at Dad and he ran his hands over his face in exasperation.
“We aren’t saying to forget,” he said quietly. “We know it’s harder for you. You were there. You saw it all. We can’t begin to imagine how awful that was for you. But if you keep that anger inside, then ultimately, it’ll destroy you. I won’t let that happen.”
“I wasn’t the only one there. What about Jensen, Chase, and the others? Weren’t their statements taken into account? They saw it exactly the same as I did.”
The Lockwoods held a lot of power, even I knew that. Surely their word meant something in this case?
My parents looked at each other again, exchanging a strange glance that I couldn’t read.
“They retracted their statements,” my dad admitted, not able to look me in the eye.
“What? But that’s insane. Why would they do that?”
Tortured Souls (Rebels of Sandland Book 2) Page 4
