by Hart, Callie
+1(564) 987 3491: All alone for the night. How sad. Poor Second Place Silver.
My blood runs colder than Lake Cushman.
Second Place Silver.
I’ve known exactly who has been sending me all of these hateful texts. It’s been obvious, but for some reason I’ve been unwilling to accept that Jake would be dumb enough to do it. The messages are a very permanent trail. They’re evidence, and Jake’s always been careful about avoiding that at all costs. They’re impossible to deny now. He’s the only person who calls me by that name. Jake has been texting me, threatening to kill me, and now he knows that I’m all alone?
Me: Get a life, Asshole. Leave me the hell alone.
I shouldn’t antagonize him. It was sheer luck that I managed to unbalance him and take him to the ground outside the locker rooms. He’ll never allow me to get the better of him again. The chances of me hurting him like that a second time are a big fat zero. I want him to slip up, though. I want to rile him just enough that he’ll confirm his identity in a text.
+1(564) 987 3491: Doesn’t look like Moretti and your old man are gonna be around for a while. Feel like playing me a song?
How? How does he know Alex or Dad aren’t here? I could be sitting on the couch with both of them right now, for all he knows. There’s only one way he can possibly be so sure, and that’s if he’s seen it with his own two eyes. He’d have to be sitting outside the house, spying through the windows, watching the place…
Oh. Holy. Fuck.
No, he can’t be. He wouldn’t be so stupid. If someone saw his car here, it’d spell disaster for him. He’d give my story credence and destroy his own credibility at the same time. He would never, never do something that stupid. He’s fucking with me. Screwing with me. Trying to mess with my head. Still, I should probably—
Bang.
Bang.
BANG.
The sound: a sledgehammer pounding on hollow stone.
It rings down the empty halls and abandoned rooms of the Parisi household like a death knell. It clangs off the rafters and vibrates deep within the bones of the home where I grew up long after the sound fades and dies.
There is someone at the door.
“No. No, no, no, no, no.” The word tumbles from my mouth, spilling out of me, rising up and overflowing from a deep well of fear. This isn’t real. I’m imagining it. I’m making a big deal out of nothing. This has nothing to do with Jacob Weaving.
It's not him. It’s not him. Just ignore them. Whoever They’ll go away if you don’t make a sound.
My phone, clutched against my chest, buzzes, and panic snaps through me like ten thousand volts. I choke on my own breath as I look down at the screen.
+1(564) 987 3491: Rude, Silver. Come down and let me in. Thought *I* was the coward?
Oh my god.
The time for lying to myself has come and gone. How did I not know this was going to happen? The texts stopped, Jake started ignoring me in the halls for one fucking day, and I thought that was it? The end of it? How fucking stupid have I been. Jake never gave up on his let’s-destroy-Silver-Parisi campaign. No, he’s been biding his time, waiting for me to be alone so he can come torment and hurt me inside my own damn house.
I can barely see the screen properly as I pull up my conversation with Alex and fumble out a message.
Me: Come to thehouse. He;s here. Q2ucik.
The words are jumbled. Full of typos. Legible enough, though. It’s going to have to do. There’s no time to fix the message before I hit the blue button and shove the phone into the pocket of my flannel pajama pants.
I need to move.
Dad’s room’s at the end of the hall. I have to pass the top of the stairs to reach the door to his bedroom, which gives me a perfect view down toward the frosted glass in the front door. Shit. There’s some there—a shadowy dark outline, lurking on the doorstep.
It's him.
Jake.
What the fuck are you doing, Silver? Call Dad. Call the fucking cops!
I fly down the hallway toward Dad’s room and throw myself through the door, slamming it shut behind me. Heading straight for his closet, I’m shaking like a leaf as I duck down, pulling out shoebox after shoebox, trying to locate the gun I found hidden here a couple of years ago.
Only…the gun isn’t here.
A loud crash shatters the silence downstairs—the sound of breaking glass. My hands cover my mouth of their own accord, trapping the scream building in my throat behind my fingers.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I need Alex here right fucking now. Common sense kicks in, though; I can barely hold the phone in my shaking hands as I dial 911.
“SIIIIILVERR…”
Jacob’s voice echoes up the stairs. The sound of broken glass hitting the floor tinkles prettily downstairs as I kick the shoe boxes aside and crouch down inside Dad’s closet, shutting myself in. I can’t…fucking…breathe…
“911, what’s your emergency?”
I screw my eyes shut. “Home…home invasion.” God, I sound so fucking loud. “Someone’s breaking into my house.”
On the floor below me, in the hallway, the front door slams.
He’s officially inside.
“What’s your address?” the 911 operator asks.
…paralyzed…
…can’t…
…speak…
“Ma’am? Your address? I’m gonna send a car out to you, but we’re going to confirm your location.”
“Fif-fifteen twenty-three Barkley Meadows Circle.”
“And your name?”
“Si—it’s Silver.”
Inside the closet, my whispered words are as loud as exploding bombs. I press my forehead against the door jamb, gritting my teeth together, straining to hear what’s happening downstairs.
Is he coming up here?
He’s going to find me.
There’s no way out of here.
I’m going to die in my father’s fucking shoe closet.
This is not how I was supposed to go.
“SILVER!” My name rips through the tense quiet that’s blanketing the house. I jump, nearly dropping the phone.
“Was that the intruder?” the 911 operator asks.
“Y—yes.”
“Is the intruder known to you?”
“Yes. His—his name is Jacob Weaving. We go to school together.”
“Do you believe Jacob to be armed?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“All right, Silver. Sit tight. A cruiser’s been dispatched. They should be with you any moment. Stay on the line with me while we wait for them, okay?”
“Okay.” It’s reassuring that there are cops on the way, but how long are they going to take to get here? Five minutes? Ten? Jacob’s already let himself in. He’s not the smartest, but it won’t take a genius to figure out where I’m hiding. Under the bed; in the closets: these are the first places people always look. I left Dad’s bedroom door open. Jake might have seen me flit across the top of the landing before he smashed the window in the front door. Even if he didn’t, there are only two floors to the house. Once he’s done searching the ground floor, it won’t be long before he’s stalking up here to find me.
Jesus Christ, this can not be happening. This can not be happening.
I shouldn’t have attacked him so viciously outside those locker rooms. I should have thought it through. I should have known he’d snap and come looking for me. I should have just fucking run.
Beneath me, a series of loud barks emanate from the kitchen. Oh, Christ! Nipper! I haven’t been shutting him in the living room like I’m supposed to. Every night for the past week, he’s been grumpily nudging my bedroom door open at about two o’clock in the morning and jumping on the edge of my bed, shooting me a belligerent sideways glance before knotting himself into a pretzel and falling asleep next to my feet.
He’s down there now…
With Jake…
My eyes begin to burn. Just let him be okay. Dear God, p
lease, just let him be okay. I stifle a cry of horror when the barking downstairs is cut of, replaced by a pained squeal, Everything falls threateningly silent again.
Nipper’s probably okay. Jake probably just kicked him to shut him up. Dread presses down on me, crouched in the bottom of the closet, though. The seconds tick by and Nipper doesn’t make another sound.
“Silver? Silver, are you still there?”
I haven’t dared breathe for the past two minutes; the emergency operator’s obviously making sure I’m alive. It’s a risk to answer her, even in a whisper, but I chance it. “He’s downstairs. I think…” A tear streaks down my cheek. “I think he hurt my dog.”
Shaking like a leaf, I lower the phone, hiding the keypad so I can pull up my texts while still keeping the operator on the line. I hit Dad’s name, opening our conversation stream, and quickly tap out a desperate message.
Me: Jake in th house. Hiding. Police on way. Come home!
Lord only knows what he’s gonna think when he reads that Jake’s broken into the house. For such a common name, Jacob Weaving is the only Jake at Raleigh. There’s no mistaking who I’m talking about. Like everyone else in town, Dad follows high school football it’s a certified religion, and just like everyone else in town, he thinks Jacob walks on water. After the rape, I would rush to the bathroom and run both taps full blast to hide the sounds of me violently throwing up every time my father paid the sick fuck a compliment.
Unlike Jake, however, my father is smart. He’ll put two and two together. He will figure out why I’m scared of this boy breaking into our house, and he will come running. The question is when? I don’t know where he went tonight. He was so secretive. He could be in the middle of a late-night movie at the Regency. They have an eleven thirty showing on Friday nights. If my father’s on a date and that’s where he chose to take her, then his phone will be switched off in his pocket. It’ll be—
“Silver! What the fuck? I thought you were some kind of badass now. Why don’t you come out and face me? You don’t realize how lucky you are. I know plenty of girls who’d kill to spend their Friday night with me.”
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, fear scattering my thoughts to the wind. I’m not coming out of this closet by choice. No fucking way. Whatever violence he has planned for me will not be good. The text messages he sent were dark. They grew worse, more graphic and ruthless each time my phone chimed. There are no limits to Jake’s frightening imagination, and I have no plans to walk willingly into whatever violence he has in mind for me.
Slow, steady footsteps ascend the stairs. The steady thum, thum, thum sounds like nails being hammered into the lid of a coffin.
My mind flashes, dragging me back to that night in the upstairs bathroom of Leon Wickman’s house. Jake’s crazed, half-mad eyes. The weight of him bearing down on me. His fingers gouging into my flesh, driving my legs apart. Such shame, surging around my body, carried along by the reluctant push and pull of my heart every time it beat in my chest.
“You’re nothing. Worse than nothing. You’re a piece of meat, put here on this earth for our pleasure. Don’t you know how this works, you dumb fucking cunt? Me and my boys? We’re from different stock. Purebreds. We do what we want. Say what we want. Take what we want. You should be fucking grateful we even deigned you worthy of our attention.”
He'd believed that. He’d believed, forcing me into submission on the cold tile of that nightmare room, that I should have been grateful that he’d noticed me. Months later, so much pain later, and here we area again, Jacob Weaving forcing his way into my home, convinced that I should be thankful he’s paying me the visit.
The guy’s a fucking psychopath.
“Just stay hidden,” the operator advises quietly. “Don’t make a sound. Not long now.”
I keep quiet. Jacob’s on the landing now. His boots find every creaky floorboard possible as he slowly makes his way toward me.
“I came here once, remember?” Jake’s voice is closer. Softer. He’s not shouting anymore. He knows that I’m close and I can hear him just fine. “Your twelfth birthday or something. You had a movie night, and your dad turned the basement into a make-shift theater. Hot dogs. Popcorn machine. Red vines. I told everyone I thought it was dumb, but you wanna know the truth, Silver Parisi? Your movie theater birthday party was the coolest party I’d ever been to.”
So…fucking…close…now…
I close my eyes, trapping the breath at the back of my throat, trying to hold back tears.
“Meanwhile, my dad had this assistant, Susannah. It was part of her job to remember when my birthday was. Dad paid her to keep track of what was cool with kids my age and buy an appropriate gift when the time came around. She was also in charge of organizing all of my parties. Figuring out new and interesting ways of celebrating every year. For my tenth birthday, Susannah actually sent my parents invites to the party she arranged, like they were distant relatives or some shit. And…” Bitter laughter floods the upstairs landing. The footsteps, worryingly, have stopped. “D’you know what happened? My mother RSVP’d very courteously. Said she was sorry but unfortunately she had a prior engagement and wouldn’t be able to attend. My father came. It was a baseball party, and he showed up wearing an L.A. Lakers shirt, then proceeded to fuck Susannah in my mother’s walk-in closet. I found him grunting over her like a sweating, hairy pig and thought he was trying to fucking kill her.”
“Hello? Are you still there, sweetheart?” the operator whispers.
I am silent as the grave. I don’t make a sound.
I’m gripped by a bottomless terror that knows no end.
“That movie theater party probably didn’t cost your folks much. I told everyone your family must be poor if they couldn’t afford to even hire a D.J. or book a venue for you. We laughed behind your back about it for weeks. Truth was, I was jealous. You were so happy that night. You were beaming from ear to ear. You were stoked to hang out at home with your mom and dad, and all your friends. You spent most of the night laughing, happy as a pig in shit, and I…I couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever laughed like that with my parents. I couldn’t remember a single time when my dad had put away his work for five minutes, looked me in the face, and saw me.”
Jake sighs heavily. Wearily. His boots scuff against the bare floorboards again…as he steps into my father’s bedroom.
“Your dad didn’t just look at you like he was seeing you, Silver. He looked at you like you were the most important thing in the world, and it made me so fucking angry. None of that matters now, I guess. He isn’t here to see you tonight, is he?”
When the door to the closet opens, it isn’t a theatrical reveal. Jake doesn’t rip it off its hinges, trying to surprise me. He opens it slowly, letting the lacquered wood swing open. He stands there with his hands driven deep into the pockets of his Raleigh High sweatpants, disappointment mingling with boredom on his handsome, blood-streaked face.
His shirt is soaked in blood. His bare forearms are coated red.
The bruises I gave him when he attacked me at Raleigh haven’t faded all that much. Leaning against the wall beside the closet, the captain of the Roughnecks football team, king of Raleigh High, is a terrifying sight to behold.
“Silver? Silver?” The operator’s hushed voice whispering out of my cell phone’s speaker sounds worried.
Jacob arches a sardonic eyebrow at me. “Hang up the phone, Silver. You and me, we’re going for a little ride.”
26
ALEX
“What the fuck were you doing in there?”
I slam the driver’s side door, abandoning all attempts to be quiet. Cam’s already in the passenger seat beside me. Zander’s casually sprawled out across the back seat, long legs bent at the knee while he hikes his hips up and zips the fly on his jeans; I barely gave him enough time to stick his legs inside the damn things before I was dragging him out of the pool house and up the long driveway, spitting out curse words in Italian between my bared teeth.
These are the first words I’ve been calm enough to utter in English since I realized it was Zander inside that bed and not Jacob.
“I told you I’d found myself some sweet digs, didn’t I? I would have explained everything the other night outside the Rock, but you weren’t feeling particularly friendly, were you? This is on you, bro.”
“On me? Fuck you, man. You’ve had plenty of opportunities to tell me what the fuck you’re up to since then and you haven’t breathed a word.”
The Impala’s engine roars to life, snarling in the dark. I don’t even bother to wait and see if a light goes on inside the Weaving’s main residence. My blood’s up; I don’t give a shit about being covert anymore. I only care about dragging Zander Hawkins’ carcass somewhere secluded, so I can beat the living shit out of him for fucking up our take-down.
Next to me, Cam hasn’t said a word. He’s been quiet ever since I forced him to lower the desert eagle he was aiming at Zander’s head. His eyes are distant, a deep, miserable frown forming two lines between his brows.
I peel out of the Weaving’s driveway, glaring at Silver’s father out of the corner of my eye. “What? No sarcastic commentary?” I demand. “No, ‘what the fuck’s going on?’ No, ‘who the fuck is this?’”
Cameron blinks. “Not worth it,” he responds tightly. “I also don’t care.”
“You don’t care.”
“No. The kid’s annoying as fuck, but he’s not Jacob. We need to find Jacob. That’s the only thing I care about. I’m going to fucking kill him, Alex.”
“You sure are hanging out with some weird types these days,” Zander comments. “I mean, I know they told us at Denney that spending time with older, wiser people might help us make better choices, but for real, yo. This guy’s talking about murder. I wouldn’t call that a smart choice if you’re looking for some Friday night entertainment. I heard they’re having some sort of lucha libre event over in—”
