Illusions That May (Court High Book 2)

by Eden O'Neill

  The boy pursed his lips, clearly in debate here. In the end, I figured he decided to give me what I wanted. He pocketed hands. “You’ve got fifteen minutes. It’s in the back. Password for the lock screen is ‘Call me Ishmael.’”

  A Moby Dick quote, cute, but I didn’t linger. I headed toward the back through the books, the tiniest library I’d ever seen in possibly the tiniest town I’d ever been in. Maywood Heights wasn’t huge, but it was bigger than this. I wondered quite a few times over the past two weeks I’d been here why Royal had decided to give me a bus ticket to this town out of anywhere.

  He wanted you buried. He wanted to bury you.

  He wanted me away. He didn’t want me and no doubt had freaked out about the whole abortion news. It was the only thing that made sense, which was stupid. That had nothing to do with him. Whenever I thought about all that, him, and how he’d handled things by letting LJ come to me, thoughts of fuck them all came to mind. After that, I let myself stop caring. I had to in order to move on with my life and the day. I stopped caring about a lot of things since getting on that bus, but one of the few I still did was the subject of an email I got when I used the library boy’s password to get onto the computer. I got to see how my baby was doing today, finally.

  Rosanna had attached a picture of Hershey to her email this evening, Hershey and her. We used to FaceTime. That was until my phone died. I had no charger, and since I couldn’t currently afford one, all contact these days was through the local internet cafe. I usually logged on there to check into the rest of the world. They had a couple computers.

  “We’re both doing well,” Rosanna’s email said, my saving grace and how she’d tried to talk me off that bus when I called. It’d been the first thing I did when I got on, wanting Hershey to be okay. She took her in, of course, but only after asking me a million questions I still refused to answer. No, I couldn’t tell her where I was. No, I wouldn’t be coming home, and no, I didn’t care about how my dad felt about it. He tried to tell me several times with phone calls I didn’t pick up, texts and the like. Aunt Celeste did the same thing, but the two weren’t getting anything from me. They said how they felt, and I’d heard it in bounds the day of my sister’s memorial service. They both could move on to living their lives now that they didn’t have me anymore, and wasn’t that what they wanted? Others had been a little harder, Shakira, Kiki, and especially Birdie. I didn’t call Birdie right after I ended our call, and she freaked out. She kept calling, kept texting, and the others too. Eventually, I answered them all. I explained I was staying in LA, was busy, which was why I didn’t get back to them right away. I felt I had to lie to them so they would back of, but they didn’t. They came with more questions.

  My phone couldn’t have died any sooner.

  “They wrote up a nice piece about your sister today in the paper. I attached it. Please check in soon, and I can send you money for a phone charger if that’s what you need. I can even send you a charger if you send me your address,” Rosanna’s email continued. I flat-out refused to take any money from her, and she’d unfortunately have no place to send the latter, considering I was homeless. I was getting by staying at the local shelter, but with my altercation at the local convenience store, I cruised right past the hour to get in there tonight. I was on my own this evening.

  Wouldn’t be the first time, I guess.

  My attention drifted to the news article Rosanna referenced, my heart squeezing. I opened it but couldn’t quite read it, not ready.

  “One minute.”

  My verbal alarm came behind me, the boy as he stepped from behind the bookshelves. He had on one of those bags guys strapped across their chests, a set of keys in his hand. “I’m locking up.”

  He looked a little young to be running a library, but could have been older than me. I couldn’t really gauge his ethnicity on looks alone, but most people were a lot darker than me out here in the desert. If I had to guess, I would have said white mixed with something else. Maybe even a few something elses. The Hispanic population was more prevalent in this area, so that was a possibility.

  My time up, I asked if I could print something before I left and he charged me ten cents a page. I guess this was one of those emergencies.

  Nine

  December

  I had a long night ahead of me, a long night of wandering the streets and trying to keep warm. It got surprisingly cool out in the desert, and I eventually took my travels beneath a bridge, a few others there too, bundled up. They had a turned-over trash can or two with fire in the center, but I stayed away from those, letting others keep warm. I’d never camped out here before, but why I chose the place at all was because I saw kids. They were curled up with a woman, and I stayed near them, safety in numbers.

  The woman watched me, smiling a little, but she did hold her kids close. I didn’t blame her. They didn’t know who I was at all, and for all I knew, she could shank me in the middle of the night. I kept my distance, using my shoulder bag to sit on as I curled myself up into my hoodie. I unsheathed one of my stolen grain bars, still managing to stay vegan out here. It was actually harder to be omni if one could imagine. Anything animal product related required heat to eat, and since I didn’t want that anyway, I was good. I got by on whole foods for the most part, the initial stash I bought with the cash I first arrived with holding me over for quite a few days before I started panicking. I’d recently started to ration. Hence, the stealing.

  I wet my lips, trying not to fall into the depths of my decisions. If I did, I thought about all of them, my sister and Royal included. It was best to stay present, but I couldn’t help going down memory lane when I unfolded the printed paper from the article Rosanna sent me. I wanted to see my sister.

  And I sure did see her.

  She was so lively, her face already starting to fade from my memories. The paper was a memorial piece, the life and times of a youth gone too soon. That town didn’t care about her, probably just wanting a story. In the lead-up to the memorial, all kinds of things came out in the papers, major publications too considering how it happened. They’d been slandering my sister, saying how reckless and broken she was, the result being what happened to her. I didn’t read them all, but I read enough, washing my hands of it all before this.

  I brushed my hand over her image, my sister smiling in her Windsor Prep uniform with her books in hand like she actually liked school and classes. The paper had quotes from other people, “friends,” they said but not one of them was Royal and the guys.

  Until they were.

  They had so many pictures of them together on page three, all of them, Jax, LJ, Knight, Royal…

  My throat thickened at seeing Royal’s arm around her, happy with her and not so stone-faced. She was happy too, the two in their sports uniforms and running across fields together. In fact, there were so many photos I thought maybe Royal may have submitted some of them.

  That would require him to be a decent person.

  “Things with you and him… they just got too hot.”

  I called bullshit on that. I called bullshit on it all. I hadn’t known what Royal and I were, but not once had I ever pressured him. Yeah, I asked him to go away together, but he didn’t have to. He had a choice.

  I guess he made it in the end.

  I hadn’t cried since that day, not once. I hadn’t wanted to give him the satisfaction. Tears showed I actually cared. Tears showed he mattered to me.

  Sniffling, I moved on from his photos with my sister, trying to read what they were saying about Paige herself. My eyes blurred with tears, I finally came across some photos without Royal and the rest. My sister was young, really young. Maybe freshman year? Paige was in the hallway with a few girls and a woman I’d seen before. Birdie had said she was the headmaster’s wife.

  The woman wore a necklace, a silver emblem. Her arm around Paige and the rest of the girls—the caption read, Mrs. Hastings (former guidance counselor at Windsor Preparatory) and other students from Windsor Pre
paratory remember a valued student.

  The article had quotes from those other students, all of them saying nice things.

  She will be greatly missed, said a quote from Mrs. Hastings. She got the last quote, the article over.

  Ten

  December

  “Holy hell, girl. Finally. How are you? How’s LA and what’s this number?”

  I circulated the area of the payphone I currently broke down and made a call at. I told Birdie I’d call her sometime, just hadn’t told her when.

  I watched a tumbleweed literally tumble down the street and pressed the phone to my ear. “Good. Things are good, and this is a payphone. My phone charger is still broken.”

  A half-truth, of course, my phone charger was broken, but I lied about how things were in my life currently. Oh yeah, and the little white lie I told her before about where I was. Keeping up the lie about all that felt best in this situation, though. In all honesty, I trusted Birdie, but telling her anything did put pressure on her. It was just easier to keep things to myself for the time being.

  “Oh, awesome,” she said. It sounded like she was at a game or something, a lot of activity in the background or maybe practice. She and the other basketball players were currently off season but they had intramurals. “It’s good to hear from you. The others have been asking about you. Well, literally everyone is asking about you.”

  I bet they were, the new girl coming to the school to rescue her sister only for said sister to turn up dead. The rumor and gossip mill had been ridiculous when I’d been there, and now that I actually gave people a valid reason to talk about me? I shook my head. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You coming back soon? We all miss you over here.”

  I knew they did, my smile faint. She and the others had become pretty good friends to me in my short time there. We had our drama moments a little bit, but eventually, we’d gotten over it. Things had been good until they weren’t. I turned with the phone cord. “Probably not for a while. Things are nice here, you know? Easy?”

  I felt all that was self-explanatory, and Birdie agreed with me, her soft “Mmmhmm” into the phone.

  “I get it. I do,” she said, then stopped. “Well, I don’t… You know what I mean.”

  I pushed my hand through hair that hadn’t seen a shower in over twenty hours. I showered at the local YMCA or the homeless shelter, but since I hadn’t made it in last night… I gripped my arm. “I do know what you mean.”

  A pregnant silence filled the line, as awkward as this conversation. I mean, what did we say to each other? I was lying to her, and she didn’t know how to deal. There wasn’t a manual on how to console a friend when they were literally on the cusp of a breakdown.

  Which I was…

  “Things with all that, what people were saying before you left is starting to blow over. I’m sure, by the time you come back, it won’t be a thing.”

  I turned with the cord again. All that, a decision I made in another life, was the least of my worries. That happened when you were trying to figure out how to keep food coming when you didn’t have a lot.

  “So I’m just saying if that’s the reason why you’re not coming back… If that’s why, it’ll all blow over. People aren’t even really talking about it anymore.”

  She could be lying herself in an attempt to get me back, but even so, I wasn’t buying. That wasn’t the reason I wasn’t coming back.

  It just helped my case.

  “It’s not,” I said. “And I’m sure it will.”

  “It will.” She sounded hopeful, her voice hard to hear with all that going on in the background. “And oh, I almost forgot to mention. Your dad asked about you. Well, talked to my dad who talked to me. My dad cleans up at the building your dad works at, I guess, so they work together kinda.”

  I froze, not knowing what to say.

  “He said he hadn’t heard from you?” she stated, allowing the air to release from my lungs a little. “Anyway, he requested if I talked to you to have you reach out. I won’t, though, if you don’t want me to.”

  Why Dad even bothered when he didn’t care I didn’t know. “I’d prefer not. I ghosted him for a reason. I need time to deal with everything.”

  “Gotcha. I’m sure Royal will be talking to you about it too. I saw him talking to your dad outside the school the other day. I assumed he was asking about you.”

  “What did Royal say? I mean.” I paused, wrestling my hair around. “Did you hear anything?”

  “Not really. Want me to ask?”

  Asking would only open up more bullshit, and deep down, I really didn’t care about what was exchanged between him and my dad. They were both irrelevant to me.

  As irrelevant as Maywood Heights.

  *

  “You know computer usage is limited to one hour, right?”

  Beanie Boy no longer wore his beanie, his head a wash of thick curls as dark and umber-toned as his eyes. He looked different today, less get-the-fuck-out-of-my-library and more evening cafe in his acid-wash jeans and dark sweater. He pushed the sleeves up his golden arms. “Just want to make sure you know.”

  I apparently had a time Nazi on my hands, but I guess I had been here an hour or… four. I supposed I got wrapped up with what I’d been doing.

  My nod firm, Beanie Boy finally stopped eyeing me long enough to go back to returning books on the shelves. He reserved judgment for me the moment he noticed my return to the library, and though I didn’t blame him considering our first interaction, it still sucked. I wasn’t a thief. At least not generally.

  Shaking my head, I went back to the computer, planning to wrap things up. I’d been searching news articles about my sister, which led me down a total rabbit hole considering how many there’d been. I’d been surprised by that, my sister’s story well traveled. I guess I ignored a lot of those initial publications when they came out. I’d been too raw, too hurt, and though things hadn’t gotten much better, I wanted to see my sister’s face again. I wanted to see her happy and bright, and that offset some of the, quite frankly, bullshit the media spewed about my sister and what happened on the night in question. They didn’t really know what happened, but they sure as hell believed they did. My sister having too much to drink that night turned into a news story about a young teen with drugs in her system and a night of mistakes. Those mistakes had cost her the young life she had, and each publication only spiced the article up more. Some people didn’t even have her name right, all of this complete bullshit.

  I too still had a lot of questions about that night, questions I hadn’t gotten to ask considering I wasn’t currently speaking to Royal. I wanted to know more about that girl that set everything off for my sister, and as far as I was concerned, what happened to Paige had been her fault. Paige may have gotten drunk and wandered some train tracks, but this girl had sent her there.

  I guess she’s irrelevant too.

  I couldn’t really do anything about her where I was right now, neither physically nor mentally. At the present, I was forced to figuratively let ghosts die, and my chest hurt, pained with every article I continued to read.

  “Fucking tragic,” came from behind me, the library boy with his unruly hair and familiar sour expression. He kept that strong on me, tipping his chin from where he stood at the bookshelves. He’d been putting books away, his long reach toward the top of a shelf. “That news story? Crazy it made its way all the way here.”

  “What do you mean?” I pushed back from the computer. He knew about this? What happened to my sister?

  On the toes of his Converses, he returned to his feet, tugging down a shirt that revealed a clear sliver of abs. I didn’t know why, but that surprised me. Maybe because he was in here and not out with the land of the living on a Friday night. He shrugged. “What happened out there went down in my hometown.”

  What the fuck?

  “Your hometown?” I tried to sound aloof, but what were the fucking odds of that happening?

  Library boy seemed c
asual about it, crossing long arms and lounging back against the shelves. He really was tall and didn’t even need a step stool to reach to the highest bookshelf. “Yeah. Crazy, right? Can’t believe that happened.”

  “What do you know about it?” Aloof again. I had to be as to not raise suspicion. I didn’t know this guy, nor who he knew. Maywood Heights wasn’t huge, and we very well could know some of the same people if he was originally from there.

  He frowned. “Not much. Just that a girl died on the train tracks. How did you come to know about it? Just searching the web?”

  I nodded, his look passive when he bent to pick up more books. He’d been deliberately reshelving them around me on and off in the time I’d been here, and that I knew. He had his eye on me, this boy.

  “Anyway, yeah, it was messed up,” he said. “Not surprising considering where I lived. People there are on a different level of drama and craziness. Needless to say, I was happy I got out when I did.”

  I didn’t like what he said in regards to my sister, but I couldn’t disagree with him about all the drama in Maywood Heights. I’d been the target of enough myself, and I hadn’t even been there a full semester.

  “Why did you leave?” I asked, and he turned, books in his hands.

  “Wasn’t really a good fit,” he said, frowning again. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.” I passed it off easily, turning around and scanning more articles. The boy didn’t move right away behind me, but eventually he moved to the shelves toward the right of me. He placed more books.

  “You in school or anything?”

  Shit.

  I moved my jaw. “Why do you ask?”

  A shrug and then a look. “Just wondered. You came in here today when most people who look your age would be at school.”

  How motherfrickin’ observant of him? I clicked aimlessly. “Yeah, I’m in school,” I lied, exaggerating what I said to make my school status sound obvious. “You?”