Sage was already waiting in the old Chevy truck when Curtis opened the front door the next morning. She was slouched in the passenger seat, smartphone in hand, ear buds in place.
The cab door squeaked as Curtis pulled it open and folded his long frame behind the wheel. His backpack joined Sage's in the center of the scuffed leather bench seat.
Sage's ink-stained fingers paused over her phone and her eyes flicked to his, checking.
He nodded once. Status normal, no disasters on the horizon.
Yet.
The truck rumbled to life, and they left the house behind. Country dirt roads, clover-filled ditches, and tree-lined hedgerows for the next ten miles.
"Are you okay?"
He looked to Sage, startled. She was usually a silent texting fiend on the drive to school. The quiet suited him fine. The quiet didn't require anything except reciprocal reticence.
The concern in her large, dark eyes was unnerving. Not the status quo.
"Yeah," he said, unclenching his fingers from the cold steering wheel and stretching them quickly.
"You look tense."
He looked at her and raised a single eyebrow.
She raised both of hers in response. "More tense than usual."
"I am not usually tense," he replied. "I'm usually quiet. That's not tense. That's aloof."
She rolled her eyes. "Whatever, Curt. I think you've got a screwed-up definition of 'not tense,' but whatever. Be as weird and aloof as you want."
She tucked her petite, sneaker-clad feet up on the dash and went back to speed-texting.
Curtis studied her from the corner of his eye as she scowled at her phone, her fingers moving too fast to follow. She only called him Curt when she was annoyed.
She was probably just projecting her own worries on him. Because he had nothing to be worried about. He was not rattled from last night. Last night was just one more standard brick of crazy in the hundred-acre crazy courtyard that was Life with Dad. Nothing more.
And that thing with the trees? That feeling that the whole place had called to him? Had wanted him?
Weird crap happens in the woods, he told himself sternly. Whatever. Let's not get dramatic about it.
And the whispers he'd heard through the window?
Well ...
"You take the gun away again last night?" Sage asked.
He looked back to her, frowning slightly. She was asking a lot of questions today. It wasn't like her. Sage's head was usually firmly in one of her invented worlds. That or holding court with her crowd of fashionably misfit friends. That was a good thing. A simple thing.
He approached the turnoff for the main road to town, and the windshield caught all the morning glare at once. For a moment, he wanted to keep going straight, just point the truck into that bright point of fire cresting the hill and never come back.
Curtis realized she was still waiting for an answer, her fingers hovering over her phone, fine dark brows raised.
"Yeah." His fingers clenched over the skinny knobs of the old steering wheel.
What's gotten into her today?
"Why do you even bother?" Sage asked, pressing her bottom lip between her teeth. Her finger dug at a crack in the door's buff vinyl upholstery, like a child prodding at a scab just to feel it throb. He could feel that she wanted something from him. Some combination of words or facial expressions. Something she could either lean into or assault. He came up empty and decided to stick with silence.
Sage stabbed at the upholstery, finger crooked into a tiny claw. "He never goes through with it anyway," she said, her voice just on the empty side of bitter. "I think he likes the feel of the barrel on his forehead. Just another one of his weird rituals."
"It's not his fault, you know," Curtis said before he remembered that he was going to stick with silence. Sage didn't remember what their dad used to be like. She didn't remember the father who bought Curtis a dirt bike when he was five years old, who taught him to ride, to be fearless, and never once laughed or yelled no matter how many times Curtis screwed up. She didn't know who Dad was before his illness took everything.
But she wasn't wrong about the gun. Last year, Curtis had gotten very drunk and thought about the matter from all angles. He'd concluded that his father needed this ritual. In the midst of manic episodes, paranoid delusions, and constant skull-splitting headaches that made migraines look like all-expenses-paid beach vacations, Tom Garrett needed to contemplate ending that perpetual agony—contemplate it, and every night choose not to end it. It was his only comfort in a world that had turned sideways on him.
And Tom didn't like it when that comfort was denied him.
"Maybe the doctor needs to up his meds," Sage suggested in a softer voice, like she was trying to make up for her earlier bluntness. Her fingers played with the almost-black hairs at the nape of her neck.
"Last time they did that, he slept for three days straight," Curtis replied, shaking his head.
Sage pressed her fingers down her neck and didn't answer.
"He's been fairly even on this cocktail. We shouldn't mess with it." He turned the truck onto Willowhaven Drive, the outskirts of the faded town. By all accounts, Willowhaven used to really be something, but now it was just dying by slow degrees. Half the shops on Main Street were closed and boarded up; the other half were going under. Houses stood for sale until they were given up for lost causes and left to rot. Curtis glanced to Sage. "You remember what happened last time they tested some shiny new combo on him, right?"
She grimaced.
The last time the doctors got experimental with their father's meds, he'd gone nuclear during a drive to Kingston. That was five years ago. He'd gotten it into his head that his heart would explode if a single car passed them. Two hundred kilometers in a hundred zone, three cop cars, and one stun gun later, Kingston's finest had hauled Tom Garrett into the fifth-floor ward of Kingston General and strapped him down while Curtis and Sage watched.
And that was what came of trusting doctors.
They'd spent the next week with Uncle Frank and Aunt Olivia while the "experts" evened Dad back out onto his previous course of meds.
He pulled into a parking space, and the crumbling red stone Victorian monstrosity that was Willowhaven High filled the wind-shield. He sighed, already done with the day. He could feel Sage's eyes on him, wanting something from him. He twisted the keys from the ignition with a sharp movement, feeling the cracks in his chest, the utter lack of whatever it was that she needed.
I'm not enough, he thought.
"See you later," he said, swiping at his close-cropped hair.
"Yeah," she said faintly.
He shoved open the truck door, seizing his backpack and pitching it over his shoulder. He slammed the door and strode toward the front entrance as people got the hell out of his way.
People always got the hell out of his way. Something about the leather jacket and the aggressive rhythm of his stride. That was fine with him. He had everything he needed.
He had everything he could handle.
A group of girls clustered around the entrance eyed him as he neared, their eyes flicking to him like he was something fascinating.
You wouldn't last a week, he thought as he strode past them. He yanked the door open and their voices resumed, nervous laughter skipping out against the walls. They thought he was dangerous and exciting.
But Curtis knew the truth—whatever it was they were looking for, it wasn't inside him.
Some days he wondered if there was anything inside him at all.
