CHAPTER 32

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I apologize beforehand. What happened next, I don't remember clearly. I remember bits and pieces of the whole thing, so this is mixture of what Faye and my brother told me happened, mixed with the flashes in my head.

"Riley? Come on, get up, we have to take you to the hospital." I heard her saying. I was too out of it to put any of what was happening together inside my head. My brain couldn't make sense of any of the stimuli around me.

"What?" I managed to whisper.

I felt a slight push on my cheek, while the voice asked again. "Riley, get up."

Another voice, a thicker one, spoke, it sounded far away. "Riley, come on."

As I opened my eyes and tried to sit up, my sight became blurry and I felt the nausea building up in the pit of my stomach. I rubbed my eyes to try and clear the image a little, which seemed to work. In front of me, sitting on the floor with me, was Faye. She had one arm around me and was using her free hand to slap me softly in the cheek to try and make me snap out of it. Next to her, was the bottle of alcohol I'd drank the night before. Behind her, standing up, was Connor. He had one hand on his waist and the other one on his chin. His eyes were red. If I didn't know any better, I'd said he'd been crying.

I sat up slowly, feeling my stomach revolting and my head about to explode.

"Come on, we got to take you to the hospital," Faye repeated.

I didn't understand why. I couldn't remember much about what had happened and even though my brain doesn't work well sober, inebriated it simply doesn't work at all. "What?" I asked. "Why?" My voice was thick and dry; I almost couldn't recognize it.

"You're bleeding," she replied.

I frowned, lowering my sight to see if what she was saying was true. Then I saw the blood in my hands, on my clothes; that's when I remembered. The Colonel jumped. I was there. I held his lifeless body covered in blood and I couldn't keep myself together after it, which was why I bought a bottle of what looked like vodka under the light, and drank it all.

As soon as I remembered what had happened to the Colonel, I stood up, ran into the bathroom and emptied my stomach's whole content; what little alcohol it managed to retain. I frenetically tried to wash the blood off my hands and my face. Faye came in and saw me rubbing it off, as if it were poison.

"Baby?"

"It's not mine," I said. "It's not mine."

"Are you sure?"

I didn't answer. I didn't provide any gesture to indicate I had heard her. I just kept rubbing the blood off my knuckles and my fingernails.

"Riley, I need you to stop and look at me, okay? We're worried about you."

"I'm fine." There was no blood in my hands anymore, but I kept rubbing and rubbing. I threw water at my face and my elbows. Then I took my shirt off and started washing my stomach and chest, were the dry blood was sticking to my skin.

This calmed Faye. Taking a good look at my body, realizing I wasn't really injured made her take a deep breath. But my behavior was still too compulsive, too erratic to let her guard down. As I scrubbed my chest trying to remove the blood that got even into my bra, she placed her hands on mine, made me turn to her and whispered. "It's me, okay? It's me. Everything it's going to be okay. Let me take you home. You can take a shower and have some rest, okay?" That shook me out of it. I sighed and cooled off.

"I can't go home. I won't do that to mom."

"No, I meant my home. My mom's. I'll ask her not to say anything, okay?"

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