Broken

by A. E. Rought

  “You don’t understand!” Josh shouts, and fists his hands in his hair. “If you had any idea what I’ve done to be with you!”

  “I don’t.” I put every bit of venom and anger I can fit into my words. “And I don’t want to.”

  I leave him there, fingers knotted in his wiry carrot curls, eyes wide, haunted by ghosts of the accident that stole Daniel from us. Hell with that, from me. Josh doesn’t miss him, doesn’t mourn him like I do. Swearing under my breath and wishing desperately for Alex, I stomp across the street. Odd houses drift past my heavy-footed march on a side street parallel to the alley Alex had half-dragged me down yesterday.

  Where does Josh get off saying what he said? Daniel died and left him to judge who I’m supposed to date? And what in the world could he have possibly done to be with me? He lost out on that one long ago. Daniel beat him to it.

  Busy mentally bitching, the guy standing beside the old livery barn on the alley edge goes unnoticed until he wraps his arms around me. Instinct kicks in, flooding me with adrenaline and forcing a shout up my throat. A cuff-covered hand settles over my mouth and cuts short my yelp of surprise. The smell of leather fills my nose.

  Alex.

  I sag against him, then blindly turn and bury my face in his chest. I yearn for him to chase away the darkness eating like acid at my day.

  “Where were you?” I say over his heart. “I looked all over for you.”

  “Sorry, Em. I didn’t want my dad to see us together.” His fingers leave no tingle when they slide under my hair, but it feels wonderful anyway. Safe and comforted and cared for, despite what Josh said about me walking into trouble. When I look up, the shadows have returned under Alex’s eyes. His skin seems paler.

  “Hey,” he says and gives me a wan smile.

  “Hi.” I smile back. Yes, a warning alarm rings in my gut, screaming be careful, that something’s not right with Alex. But I’ve known that. If Alex Franks is trouble, I want it.

  “Come on.” He knits our fingers together, then says, “I know a place we can go for a while. His shift at the clinic starts soon.”

  I follow Alex down familiar side streets vacant of jack-o’-lanterns to a chain link fence that I’ve cut my finger on four times since June.

  “Memorial Gardens Cemetery?” Surprise drags my voice up a couple notches.

  “Yeah. My dad can’t stand to come near Mom’s grave.” The metal screeches in protest when he lifts the lever and pushes open the gate. “He didn’t even go to her funeral. It’s like if he denies it long enough, she’ll just come back home.”

  It isn’t until he’s inside the graveyard that he notices I’m not with him.

  My heart clenched the moment my fingers touched that cool metal. The rift, cobbled closed with moments with Alex, cracks and opens, visions of me and Alex tumbling into the dark Daniel left behind in me. This is my place. This is where I’ve mourned Daniel for months. Being here with Alex feels wrong. Memories, faulty and empty as they are, stand strong as the rusted fence between me and the guy beyond.

  “Emma?” Alex’s voice sounds miles away. “You okay?”

  In a vicious flash, dead-and-rotted Daniel is Alex, blood coursing in shiny red trails over his hazel eyes, then he’s gone. Still, I recoil when Alex’s hand reaches for me.

  “Hey,” he says, voice soft and soothing like he’s coaxing a feral animal. “Come on, Em, you’re freaking me out here.”

  “S-sorry,” I stammer. “It’s just that… well, I…”

  “It’s okay,” he says, and takes my hand again. “We don’t have to stay.”

  “It’s just that I used to stay here.” I jut my braced right hand toward the section of fencing I leaned on, mourning Daniel for weeks. “I came here every day.”

  “Why?” His mismatched eyes widen, the scar tugging at his left eye. The black freckle in that pool of hazel only makes me think of Daniel more.

  I sigh, and for once in four months, I breech the barrier between the living and the dead. A shudder ripples up my spine, coats my skin in goosebumps. I’m cheating on Daniel’s memory, I think.

  Once inside, my gaze plummets to the crushed gravel path leading off into the shadows by the trees. We walk together, but we’re worlds apart. Inside, I see all the times Daniel and I came here: the urn he knocked over and we straightened, the pot hole on the little drive that popped his dirt bike tire, and God, the mausoleum where we sat so many evenings.

  “Emma,” Alex prods gently, “why did you come here?”

  “Because…” Old sadness cinches my throat, itches my eyes. The gulf in my chest threatens to go full-blown and devour every little happiness I’d found with Alex. “Because this is where I came with Daniel. This was our place. Then, after he died…”

  The lump in my throat rises, and I can’t swallow it down. Alex steps off the path and sits on a mossy bench, dragging me down beside him. The angel I’d often stared at regards me with a look close to pity. Late afternoon light sits on the curves of her cheekbones like tears. Alex waits, patient and silent, giving me time. It only makes me want to cry more. Here I am mourning the boy I lost with the guy who seems willing to do anything to be with me.

  “Anyway,” I force pass the tightness and swallow again. “After Daniel died, his parents donated…” I lose the battle with the tears, and somehow it galvanizes me to finish my tale. “They donated his body to science. They cremated his remains, what was left, and keep them in their house in a stupid, shiny urn Daniel would be ashamed to be in. I can’t see them because his parents blame me. He would’ve never gone to that party if we weren’t dating.”

  I wipe at my wet cheeks. Alex catches my hands, and dries my face with the cuff of his hoodie. He says all the right things, “it wasn’t my fault, his parents aren’t being fair,” but they don’t sink in.

  “Daniel was everything to me, then he was just gone. Fell from my life like a comet shoved out of orbit. I didn’t have anywhere to mourn him, so I’ve been coming here since June.”

  “God, Em.” Alex says. “I had no idea. I’m so sorr—”

  “Don’t apologize. You’re not responsible for his death.”

  If I’m honest, here where Daniel should be buried, I can admit the darkest part of my heart believes somehow Josh is resonsible. He couldn’t drop the damn beer and grab Daniel’s hand fast enough when he fell. I reached the railing too late to save him, but with plenty of time to see him fall and hit the pavement below.

  “It’s not an apology,” Alex says, that soothing tone still in his voice. “I was going to say I’m sorry you’re still hurting.”

  “But I’m not,” I blurt. “Not as bad since you came to school.”

  His features twist with an expression that seems surprise tempered with sadness. It radiates from his eyes. The black freckle in his left eye more pronounced the way the sunlight hits his face.

  “Y’know… You kind of remind me of him.”

  When I look down, he’s inched away. Or, have I?

  “What?”

  Shock twists that one word, making it ugly and stunted.

  I would be shocked. But I’m too far gone to notice if he wants to hear it, like I’ve opened a vein for bloodletting and can’t stop spilling the truth.

  “Not in looks. Other than your eyes.” The left slightly more dilated, when I look. “It’s what you do. How you wink the same. How you opened my locker just like Daniel. The same push to the numbers, the same nudge with your hip.” Alex extends a long hand across the space between us, despite me comparing him to my dead boyfriend, and I have to think I’m the one moving away. “How did you know to do that, Alex?”

  “I don’t know,” he says slowly, taking his hand back, curling it into a fist and looking at it as if it’s untrustworthy. The shaft of air widens between us, his hand falling just short of mine, and his expression darkens. “I just did. It…felt right.” He prods his chest. “It felt right here.”

  It doesn’t beat for me.

  Alex’s hea
d pops up, ear tilted like he heard my thought. With a shaky inhale, he jerks upright suddenly, like a bone and vessel marionette, nothing muscle or fluid about it. Daylight has poured from the angel’s face. Still, she watches us, like we are Romeo and Juliet about to drink the poison and raise the blade.

  I shrink in on myself, suddenly wishing I were anywhere in the world but here. Why did I say those things? Alex didn’t really want to know. Guys never want to know the truth. They just ask to make girls feel better.

  Alex’s expression doesn’t. It makes me feel worse.

  He’s waking from the dream.

  His gaze trails from my face to my hands to his chest. It follows the length of his arms to his hands, open with the palms up and full of the late afternoon sun. When he speaks, I don’t think it’s for me. “Why do I do things like he did?” He shakes his head, paces, smashing the sleeping grass to death beneath his feet. “Coincidence,” he mutters. “Just coincidence.”

  “Daniel said there are no coincidences.”

  We both recoil, my words sharp and double-sided.

  “When did you say he died?” Alex asks. “How did it happen?”

  Why would he ask? I already said how Daniel died. My heart stutters, teetering on the yawning rift inside. When I look up, I expect to see Daniel’s echo sitting on the mausoleum’s porch. He’s not there. Alex stands in front of me, with the cloud-laden sky turning to blood and bruises when the sun slips beyond the cloud line.

  “It was right at the end of the string of disappearances in June.” Somehow I’ve gone cold and hollow, and the facts roll out. “We were at a graduation party. He and Josh argued. Next thing I know, Daniel’s screaming my name and falling. His skull cracked,” my voices catches, and Alex stretches a hand toward me, then to his head pushing his hair from his forehead. “The hospital couldn’t save him, and his parents agreed to donate his body.”

  “That must’ve been awful,” he says, voice sounding oddly empty. His expression is closed off, like he’s seeing something inside rather than out. Then, a contorting flash crosses his face, his left eye drifting closed before opening again. A sharp kind of clarity lingers there. “I think I should get you home,” Alex says suddenly. “I’m surprised your mom hasn’t texted you.”

  Mom? Home?

  The concepts are foreign. There’s only me, Alex, and the story of Daniel between us.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Standing, my toe catches in the crack on the path, the brittle grass rushes at my face. And Alex doesn’t catch me. I lay for a second, renewed hurt pulsing in my hand and my heart aching. The smell of dry earth coats my nose when I inhale. Not caring about my dignity, I scrabble to my hands and knees and see Alex staring at the mausoleum porch like he’s seen the ghost that’s haunted me since June.

  “You used to sit there,” he says, face in shadow, voice quaking. “You sat on the tomb’s porch, laughing…” his empty hand flexes at his side, holding nothing in a white-knuckle grip, “and drinking.”

  Does he see us, echoes of the Daniel and Emma that were? Shock and wrong siren inside me. The moment has taken life, and doesn’t listen.

  “How did you know?” I ask, voice hardly above a whisper.

  “I’m not sure. Good guess, I suppose…” A half-hearted shrug. Then Alex runs his hand over his hair, rubs the back of his head and pulls me to standing. “Let’s get you home.”

  His hood slides up, and casts his face into deeper shadows.

  He knows. I saw it in his eyes. He knows we sat there.

  I follow behind him, mind reeling in disbelief, hands brushing off the grass and dirt he was too busy staring at the mausoleum to notice. Silent tears fall, blurring my vision, adding to the aching haze my day has become. How could I say all that and expect him to just be okay with it? He doesn’t see me backhand moisture off my face before we step into the ring of the porch light either.

  A faraway look darkens his eyes. Alex stands on the middle step, and I stand on the creaking porch floorboards.

  “Em…” he says, voice soft. He’s wearing all his hurts in his eyes again, his scars only pulling the skin tight over the gouged-out boy. Resisting his open, palm-up hand is impossible. I can’t resist Alex like this—I can’t resist Alex at all. My toes on the edge, Alex envelopes me in his arms, burying his face against my chest.

  “Alex?”

  “Shhh.” He cinches his arms around me tighter. “I’m listening to your heart.”

  “It doesn’t beat for me,” I tell him.

  “I know.”

  I slide his hood from his hair, just skin on skin when I run my fingers under the long brown strands. Hidden scars reveal themselves to my fingers. He shudders as I touch them, touch him like he’s mine. I curl my head down until my cheek brushes his hair. We stand like that until I can’t measure time anymore. Eventually, Dad opens the porch door and says, “Almost dinner time.”

  “I should get going,” Alex mutters, suddenly gone tense and muscles tight beneath my fingers. “Dad will know if I don’t show up soon.”

  Alex’s fingers tighten on me, like his body refuses to do what his mind commands. Reluctance exudes from him, heavy as his rich leather scent. Alex’s arms release in little increments. The puddles under his eyes almost engulf the heterochromic hazels. When he walks away, with no promises of tomorrow, I wonder if Alex Franks knows that my heart beats for him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  After dinner, Renfield trails behind me, mewing for attention rather than skewering me with a disdainful glare. Darkness squats in the kitchen, Mom’s not there, no prep sounds for tomorrow’s cooking. Perhaps I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. Fine with me. I have no appetite, hardly even nibbled dinner. My stomach pitched over the edge and abandoned me along with my heart. Sure, it’s there, beating behind my ribs but in a very real sense Alex took it with him when he left.

  “Everything okay?” Dad asks from the arm chair by the TV.

  I should lie, slink past and climb the stairs. It’s close to bedtime and my cell phone is almost dead. Maybe there’s a text from Alex. Instead…

  “I’m not sure,” I say and perch on the edge of the sofa.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  With my dad? Oh God, no. The vein I cut open in the cemetery is still spurting truths, though, and I can’t stop now that I’ve started talking. “I think I committed a major dating sin.”

  “Oh really?” An eyebrow arches above his glasses.

  “I talked about my old boy friend with my current.” Then I realize what I said—Daniel as my old and Alex Franks as my new—and add, “Not that Alex is my boyfriend. We’re just friends.”

  “Oh. Of course you are.” I hate that parental father-knows-best timbre in his voice. The expression on his face a physical echo of the you-are-more-than-friends tone. “Look, Em. Daniel was a big part of your life. Any guy interested in you has a pretty big shadow to fill. If they can’t understand that, then they aren’t worth your time.”

  In some ways, Alex overshadows Daniel.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  I stand, and yawn as an excuse to retreat to my bedroom. Dad doesn’t know the depth of what’s going on, though I love that he can give me his angle on this. I don’t even know the depth of what’s going on. The line between Alex and Daniel has become so blurred, the question of who he is and why he’s so much like Daniel, I’m not sure there’s any separating the two.

  Renfield remains behind me, a slick white shadow. I bend to gather him into my arms, but apparently it’s not dignified to be carried like a baby. He uses his back claws in readjusting to an upright position in my arms. The sadistic beast is bent on making me bleed. The hot stitches in my arm are welcome, though, real physical sensations to draw attention from the tumult of emotions rattling like buckshot in my head and heart. I cradle the cat, stroke his ears and listen to his purr as I climb the stairs.

  I wish he could talk and explain why he likes Alex the way he liked Daniel. Maybe then I’d
know, too.

  Light lies in a puddle beneath my parents’ bedroom door, and I know Mom’s in there reading. I pause outside the door, then knock and open it. Sure enough, Mom’s leaning against the pillows, blankets pulled up, and her finger marking her place in her romance novel. A frown and a smile war on her lips, then she settles for one of her blank, tired expressions.

  “You didn’t answer my texts,” she says.

  “Phone’s dead again. I think I need a new battery.” I poke my toe at the door jamb, worried that she’s madder than she seems. Things need to be better between us. Especially with whatever’s going on with me and Alex. “I’m sorry,” for worrying you, I don’t finish.

  “It’s okay.” She fluffs her blankets. “I noticed you didn’t eat anything for dinner. You just pushed things around on your plate like you used to. You aren’t getting sick are you?”

  “I don’t think so.” Not physically anyway. Heartsick maybe, not knowing how Alex feels. “I just wsn’t hungry…”

  “Well, I hope that’s all it is.” Her tone implies she thinks it’s more, but won’t say it. “I would hate to have you missing school so close to Thanksgiving break.”

  “Me, too. Good night, Mom.”

  “Night, Emma.”

  Things aren’t perfect between us, but at least they are fixable. Mom’s one of the few constants in my life, and I want it to stay that way.

  My bedroom is a study in shadow and texture, dark and moonlight, hard and soft. I leave the light off. Once inside the bedroom door, Renfield leaps for the bed, paces circles on my pillow, then drops down. He regards me through slitted eyes while I plug in my cell phone, debate firing up my computer and then grab pajamas instead. By the time I’ve made it back from the shower, the notification light is bleeding red light into the shadows over my desk.

  One text.

  Alex Franks.

  My hands tremble as I open the message. He held me on the porch as if he needed me, and still fear burns in my veins, thinking I’d said too much, he had time to think, and this is the brush-off text. The letters hang innocuous and black on the screen, and my mind struggles to fight free of the thorny emotions of this evening and read. The first time through they are just letters, then I focus on what they say: