Shadows of Ourselves (2016 Original Edition)

ONE: Crossfire

I've been able to feel lies for as long as I can remember.

The city is full of them. It lives on them. How easy is it for you to look the truth in the eyes while you let something else fall from your lips? How good is your poker face? Not good enough to fool me, I bet.

Not good enough to fool my mother, either—though she doesn't have an ability like mine—just eyes in the back of her head and too much time on her hands. "Where are you going?"

I froze at the sound of her voice. Melissa had been creeping up behind me for as long as I could remember.

I'd been about to duck out the front door, but I turned around to look at her. She kept most of the lights in the apartment off at all times to lower the power bill, and her pale face was cast in shadows.

She looked like part of the darkness, standing there with her messy blond strands tied back, her short, pudgy frame draped in an ancient pink silk housecoat. She wasn't empty-handed, of course. She was always rocking some kind of bottle. Her eyes, the same brown as mine, were dark and beady now. It gave me the hunch this wasn't her first beverage tonight. Well, that and nineteen years of firsthand experience with her drinking habits.

In one hand she held a glass of orange juice, and in the other she clutched a bottle of vodka. Drunk mom couture.

Melissa Davenport. My mother—she was nothing if not predictable.

"Trying for a head start at oblivion again, huh?" I asked. She didn't reply, just raised an eyebrow and waited.

I was pretty sure Melissa wouldn't try to stop me from going out—not that she really could at this point—but I was never sure with her. She swung from joy to depression like an anvil on a rope; constantly going back and forth, always ready to fall and crush me. I didn't want to start a fight. I had no energy for it tonight, and I'd taken too long to crawl out of bed already, sleeping half the day away.

If I was late the deal might fall through. And I needed this deal. The one I'd gone out of my way to hide from her.

I definitely couldn't tell my mother where I was really going.

I was short like Mom was. I'd inherited her light golden hair, her pallor and walnut eyes. I got my wiry frame from her, too—she'd been a stick once upon a time, even if it didn't show now. I was tiny and angular and I had an attitude, and so all of her eternally intoxicated friends told me I was her spitting image.

I must have gotten my brains from my father.

Melissa wasn't a good mother, but she liked to be able to pretend she was. So if I told her Riley's cousin was sneaking us into the nightclub where she worked because her boss wanted to meet us, Mom would try to keep me home. Even though I was nineteen—a legal adult. I was only really her son when it was good for her ego. Or when she could take away what I wanted.

It didn't help matters that she hated my best friend: Riley was one of the few people who saw through the fronts Melissa put up, and she called her out on it without hesitation.

So I lied, even though it hurt. Literally. "I'm going out east with Riley. We're gonna buy new art stuff. There's a sale on watercolours."

"Oh." She lost interest immediately.

I had to ball my fists not to wince from the pain that danced across my forehead and strained my muscles. I'd had plenty of practise ignoring the pain of a lie over the years, but even the smallest tick of pain and my mother would know that I was lying to her.

I saw the way her eyes dimmed, the way she glanced at her cup, just for a second. Mom didn't give a rat's ass about my paintings. "Fine," she conceded. "Don't be too late."