She scrunches up her face and yawns. “What time is it?”
I laugh softly. “Around eleven, I guess. Eleven fifteen.”
“Okay,” she says, turning to go back down the hallway to our bedroom. “Night.”
I look at the TV once more and close my weary eyes for a moment. Then I turn it off and stand up, setting the remote on top of the set so it doesn’t get buried, and carefully pick my way to the bathroom, and on to bed. But I don’t think I’ll be sleeping anytime soon.
Five
Five minutes later and Rowan’s breathing sounds like she’s asleep again. I wish I could just drift off like that. Instead, I lie here watching the wall opposite the window, where faint pulsing light from our restaurant sign beats out a song nobody knows or hears.
The movie theater. The billboard. Now TV commercials. What could be next? Ten minutes crawl by. Fifteen. And I may as well get up and get it over with.
I slip back out to the living room and cue it all up again, staring at the TV like I’m in some kind of weird hypnotic zone, not seeing the movie at all. I rub my bleary eyes and hit slow play, and it’s there like before. A few seconds later there’s the close-up of the three body bags, and then it’s over and the commercial starts.
I rewind to see if I can pause the scene on the body bags close-up, which I hadn’t really noticed before in the regular-speed version. It’s like a hidden frame at regular speed, too fast for the human brain to comprehend.
I hit the slow-play button and then wait for it, and pause it at the exact right moment. It’s a slightly blurry shot, but it’s obvious what I’m looking at. I scan the picture, noting that one of the bags isn’t zipped up all the way. The plastic is folded over at the top corner, and the head of the dead body is exposed. I’m strangely drawn to it out of curiosity, rather than repulsed by it.
I squint for a better look. And then my heart bangs around in my chest and I lean forward, get down on the cluttered floor, and crawl to the TV to get a better look.
And then I suck in a scream.
The dead face belongs to Sawyer Angotti.
I scramble to my feet and stumble back to the chair, grab the remote, and hit the power button so many times I actually turn the thing off, then on, then off again before my brain can compute that I’ve gotten rid of the image from the TV.
My heart won’t stop freaking out inside my chest. “No way,” I whisper, as if that will take away the scene I just saw. “No way, no way, no way.”
I pinch my arm to make sure I’m not having a nightmare, and it hurts, so I think this is real. I pace in the narrow carpeted space that isn’t covered by hoards of junk, talking to myself, trying to calm down. But I can’t.
Why am I seeing this?
What the hell is going on?
I go back to the remote and turn the TV on, flinching and shuddering as I delete the movie. Then I delete a bunch of other stuff that Rowan will kill me for, but I can’t help it. I need to get these images away from me. I need to get this scene off my TV, off my billboard, out of my local theater, and make it go away.
When I hit the power button again, I’m enveloped in darkness, and I can’t stop thinking about dead bodies lying in wait under Dad’s piles of junk. It’s like a nightmare, only I’m not asleep, my mind playing tricks on me. I skitter to my room and get into bed where it’s safe, pulling my blankets up to my chin and hugging my pillow. My Sawyer pillow.
• • •
I toss and turn, checking the clock every few minutes. Willing my mind to go blank, willing myself to go to sleep, which makes it even more impossible. I have this ridiculous urge to call Sawyer to make sure he’s alive, but tell myself I’ll be mortified at school tomorrow if I do that. I mean, I just saw him alive this morning! There’s no way he could be dead.
After a while I hear Mom coming up the steps. She clatters in the kitchen, and then I can hear her moving things around in the living room, probably throwing junk away. A while later she makes her way to her bedroom, where she and Dad will sleep until nine thirty or ten, and then she’ll get up and do the restaurant thing all over again, with or without my dad.
Eventually, I calm down. Sometime after two I drift off, the vision following me into my dreams.
Six
Six a.m. comes fast. We three kids all stupidly get up at the same time every morning—hey, old habits are hard to break; besides, we miss each other so much after literally hours of being apart. Automatically Rowan and I kick ourselves loose from our blankets and race to the door. I whip it open, and there’s Trey emerging from his room. Expertly, and almost quietly, we jostle and shove each other in the packed hallway as we jockey for the first slot in the bathroom. Trey shoves his butt against my hip and throws me off balance, knocking me into Rowan, who almost pitches a whole stack of Christmas cookie tins over—holy shit, what a racket that would be! I swallow a snort and Trey strikes a triumphant Gaga pose in the bathroom doorway before sliding in and closing the door. It’s kind of like we live in that Silent Library game show and we’re all trying to be superquiet while competing to win at a ridiculously noisy challenge, which makes everything so much more hilarious.
But once I have a minute to remember what happened last night, the fun evaporates and I start getting this recurring wave of nausea. I can’t handle the thought of breakfast right now, so I pocket a granola bar for later. After an hour, when I’m waiting for Rowan to finish her makeup so we can go, I cautiously flip on the TV, hoping I can find the news and not a creepy encore of last night. Thankfully, there’s just some morning talk show. No mention of explosions or body bags. No weird vision taunting me.