two
Harper Apple
“So, where is your sister, anyway?” I ask as I rifle through the clothes in search of something else that will fit my curves.
“I dunno,” Colt says, his voice serious as he lays back on the pillows again, an arm folded behind his head. “She changed her name and disappeared after graduation last year.”
I wonder if this is the first time anyone’s been in her room since then. If, for six months, no one’s even stepped into the room to think of her and wonder where she is. For some reason, it makes me sad, though I’m sure the second I’m gone, Mom will put a pool table in my room and convert it into a bar. I don’t care. It won’t be my room anymore. It’ll be just a thing.
But somehow, the emptiness of Mabel’s room feels forlorn.
“She didn’t tell you where she was going?”
“Nah,” Colt says. “We weren’t close. She hated being a Darling, and I was wrapped up in it. I cared about my image, about how the town saw me. She hated that.”
“She sounds cool to me,” I say, setting aside another shirt that fits.
“Mabel’s my half-sister, same dad. Dev was my half-brother, same mom. I was always closer to him and Preston than her, even though we were raised together. Everything’s just easier for guys, I guess. The town loved us. We were the golden boys.”
He sounds wistful, and my heart aches for him. In a small town like this, there are plenty of washed-up old football dads who still talk about high school as the glory days. But Colt isn’t even out of high school. The best years of his life shouldn’t be behind him.
“Your sister wasn’t a golden girl?” I ask, unsure if I should be ransacking the closet of a girl who blew away like a ghost.
“Nah,” he says. “She probably could have been. Preston’s sister is royalty at Faulkner High. But she didn’t want any part of it. The Darlings were the backbone of Faulkner, and she hated this town more than anyone you’ve ever met.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” I mutter as I pull on a pair of linen pants with a drawstring that actually kinda fit.
“Even before the Dolces, she couldn’t stand it,” Colt goes on. “To her, the Darling name was a trap. And once the Dolces got started, she found out just how right she was.”
“They targeted her just because of a name she didn’t even want?”
“That’s the fucked up part,” he says. “They didn’t care what kind of person you were. Mabel didn’t even want to be a Darling. She probably would have helped them take down our grandpa if they’d let her. But no. If you were a Darling, they had to make sure you wished you were dead before they were through with you.”
I let out a low whistle. “Damn. That bad, huh?”
I try to imagine a skinny, nerdy, female version of tatted up, smooth-talking Dynamo, but I can’t picture her. All I see is a faceless cutout of a girl who hated her name so bad she changed it on her way out of town, never looking back at the hellhole she was leaving behind. Though I’ve never met her, I feel a strange kinship toward her, and instinct tells me that’s exactly how she’d want me to imagine her.
Poverty’s not the only trap in this town.
“I sound like a broken record warning you about them over and over,” Colt says, flexing his scarred hand in the air above his face as he talks. “But yeah, they’re that bad. They tortured her, physically and mentally, until she snapped.”
I’ve always liked figuring people out, seeing what makes them tick, and yes, what makes them snap. It’s not just morbid curiosity. Growing up, it was survival.
It was knowing that Safe Mom was the obnoxiously affectionate drunk who came home at two in the morning breathing her vodka fumes in my face as she insisted on snuggles that invariably led to her falling asleep on my twin bed, leaving me pressed against the cold wall and unable to pull the blanket around me because she was lying on top of it.
Unsafe Mom was the cruel dragon who woke in the morning breathing flames of hatred, reminding me that I ruined her life, so I owed her some goddamn respect, and if I didn’t figure out real fucking fast exactly what she meant by that, I’d get my fingers smashed with a pan or my knuckles whacked with a wooden spoon or spend the day locked in a closet to think about it.
“Snapped… How?” I ask, my voice barely more than a whisper. I could have asked what they did to her, but I won’t make him say those things aloud. Even if they weren’t close, she was his sister. And last night I woke in a cold sweat, the fear holding me so tight I couldn’t move, the ache of the hard stone floor under my bare knees so real I couldn’t breathe. I know what they did to her.
I just don’t know what comes next.
“I wasn’t there,” Colt says. “I guess no one really knows but her and Royal.”
Suddenly, I wish I’d never asked. There comes a point where the desire to figure someone out becomes just plain masochistic.
Even though I recognize that I’ve reached that point, I also know I’m not a dumb bitch who walks away from answers because ignorance is bliss. Yeah, the truth fucking hurts. I’m a big girl. I can take it. I’d rather take the pain than sit in the dark like a dumbass because I’m too afraid to turn on the light and see the monster under the bed.
“It was Royal,” I say flatly, yanking my jeans back on. “Not the twins.”