* * *
Who: The Bandit
Where: The second-floor bedroom in the manor on the Davidson estate
When: 1:15AM; five years ago, one day after Echo’s thirteenth birthday
He wants her.
He fucking wants her.
And he wants her a lot.
He wants her so much that he couldn’t stop talking about her last night. He couldn’t stop asking me questions. How I knew her; what I was doing there with her; why was her foot on my thigh; was she hurt; should we go back and look.
He wants her like a lovesick puppy.
Like she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. Like her quirks, her love of pink, her synonyms, her honey-blonde hair, the fact that she has a diary makes something move in his chest. Because he keeps a diary too.
But he doesn’t, does he?
Because I do.
I keep a diary. And when I found out that she does too, things moved in my fucking chest. For the first time, those things weren’t laced in embarrassment, in shame that I keep a journal like a fucking pussy. A stupid fucking habit formed at a therapist’s office that has proven hard to break.
Not only that, I want her so much that the first thing I did when I came back to this hellhole town, to this nightmarish manor, was to go look for her, in the same woods, at the same time that I’d met her a year ago.
With a piece of jewelry in my back pocket.
That I actually bought with my own money. Well, from selling pot, but still.
And it makes me angry.
For so many, many reasons.
Firstly, because I want her in the first place. Enough to do the things that I just mentioned.
And it doesn’t make sense that I do.
She’s fucking thirteen. She’s a baby and I hardly know her.
And secondly, I’m angry because of how angry it makes me that my best friend wants her too.
So angry that I want to fucking punch his face.
I wanted to fucking punch his face last night to make him stop talking. I wanted to fucking stab his eyes for looking at her.
And since I couldn’t do any of those things, I warned him off her. I told him who she was and how she wasn’t the girl for him because she’s the staff, or the daughter of the staff anyway. Something me and him have been warned time and again to stay away from, by both our fathers. Apparently, you can’t consort with the staff.
Whatever.
That’s not important.
Important thing is that I warned him.
And not because of some stupid made-up rule but because I fucking hated how he was looking at her.
So yeah, I’m angry.