"I just want to talk with you." I was leaning against one of the walls of the elevator, clutching the railing as the old thing buckled and flickered with bronze light.
"I get that." Blake was sitting on the ground and staring at the floor.
"You said you were going to come with me."
"I think I know what's wrong with you at this point, you know? I think at some point I realized that maybe this Hell wasn't much more than a bunch of humans with horns, and that anything odd about you had nothing to do with the afterlife."
"There's nothing wrong with me, Blake."
"Please." He paused. "I'm sorry."
"I just wanted to get you away from the group, okay? We should have gone in the city and stayed there, but now we're here, and we're going to Earth."
"Not through the portal, I notice. Won't this take us to a wasteland?"
"More trees than a wasteland. I just want to talk."
"When we arrive, I'm going to get back on the elevator and head back to Hell. Alone," Blake said, "I'm super sorry, just... I can't deal with you. I don't want to, and I think at some point I have to realize I don't owe you shit."
"Don't-" I squeaked, flinching. Oh God, that was the weakest thing I'd ever done. I was never going to forget it.
"Get yourself together. I mean, who are you? Who are you trying to be? I get this really big feeling you're always lying to me. You're certainly rude as hell, but you seize up the moment the littlest thing doesn't go your way. I'm sorry, but I'm sort of sick of you."
Getting told off by Blake was the next most embarrassing thing I'd been through after that squeak. It was absolutely mortifying for the first few seconds, where I held my head and generally felt shocked. Then it sank in that nothing about it was particularly mortifying- he was just being honest. He was correct, and I could recognize it as such, and-
A lot of me was ashamed then, that I was still thinking I was somehow above his judgement. He was my friend now. He knew me well enough to be correct.
I was just, in general, a fucking mess. That's all.
What I wanted to stay: 'I'm sorry'.
What I said: "If you come with me now, I'll leave you alone forever."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"I don't know if I want that either. I just need a break, and we're planning a protest in the square, and I'm not there, and-"
"Please let me go."
"That's probably a good idea."
We were quiet for a couple minutes.
"We're at th-" I started to say.
Blake interrupted, "I know how much of your emotional wellbeing rests on my shoulders. It scares me. You need to learn to take care of yourself, not just the one or two people you've imprinted on."
"I'm not a demon."
"Is that true?"
"Yes."
"Okay." Blake looked up at me. "I just want you to know that I don't hate you, and you should try not to hate yourself."
"I'm an deathless immortal who's been alive for two centuries."
"I've grown from knowing you," Blake said carefully, "I think you've grown too. But sometimes you run out of growth, and things get stagnant, and then there's no more point."
"Does friendship really have a point to begin with?"
"Friendship is about mutual trust, platonic love, appreciation, and connection. And nearly anything else. You were someone who grabbed me and dragged me places. Sometimes you lied, disappeared for long periods of time, and more than once your actions lead to violence. And actual, bloody deaths that I will never be able to wipe from my mind."
"You killed an old man."
"I pulled the plug on a tyrant while high on painkillers. You lead me into a blood stained room and the most traumatic event of my life."
"So we're at the end of the line. The last bud. You know, most plants can continue growing past the terminal bud if cared for properly."
"Why the sudden plant metaphor? But sure, yeah. Just not us."
"...I like gardening."
"You don't seem the type to have hobbies."
"That's really mean. Do you have hobbies?"
"Not really. Sorry, I guess. It's just, you're so ridiculously secretive about your past. I don't even know your last name."
"Ávila. If I told you, would you like me?"
"I'd only know."
"Fair enough."
The elevator always took ages. I started speaking:
"Back when I was more than a couple of years younger, I had three friends. They were the ideal trio for a children's novel, and I was off to the side, knowing them.
There were the twins, Michael and his sister, and Phin. Phin hated us calling him Phin, so naturally it's all we ever called him. I don't think I knew his actual first name for years.
We'd grown up in an orphanage, my past being a little less tragic- my mãe ran it. She was from a rich family in Brazil but took me when I was a kid and left for the States. When I was a baby, there were a few images of me with other kids- but it was a small town, too small to justify having an orphanage. I'm not sure why she ran it, how she came upon it. Her mind had started to go when I was still just a kid, so...
The twins' parents had been family friends of my mãe, and when they had died, she'd taken the children in. I'm not really sure the legality of it, but we were from Hornbrook- a small town, twinned with Deerfield, and never quite intent on following common law.
Phin had been left there by his father, when he was very young. Hornbrook was a friendly place, but a town smaller than most colleges proved suffocating for him. Being one of maybe three non-white people in a town where you had to drive forty minutes to get to a chain store felt a little off, too.
He was always going on about traveling. He had a plan to get on a plane to India. The plan ended there, somehow convinced that'd be enough, that he'd sit right down and his father would be the passenger next to him.
He left our family first.
Someone had been hosting a bonfire. When I had first heard of this, I had confused 'bonfire' with 'campfire'. This was a mistake. In the throughs of bitter January frost, the bonfire burned a circle of heat around it. I shed my coat within fifteen feet of the towering blaze.
I don't know which of us knew this person, I only know that we'd walked over one frigid night and ended up there.
I suppose it was a nice party though. It wasn't trying to be. There wasn't any music, and the alcohol didn't rare anyone up as it did calm everyone down. The air was drowsy, and if you wandered too far from the fire, smothered you in a chilly breeze.
Out of the three friends, I was closest to Phin. He was always a guy you could trust to think big. Not like it ever got him anywhere, but I liked how much he thought regardless. There was a sense his mind was never still, and even if he tended to drop goals as quickly as he had formed them, I admired his gusto.
When we were sixteen- well, we were a smattering of ages. When he was sixteen, the twins were fourteen, and I was fifteen, he told us we were going to be in France by the time he was finished with high school. If we all got jobs, saved every penny, and stuck to a binder he had allocated specifically for this project, we'd soon be walking the fields of Europe. Somewhere in France, probably.
This didn't happen. But I still liked the idea.
Phin was the smoothest talking teen this side of the mountains, I swear. He could get anyone hyped up, and even when he failed, we all really, really liked him. Every word he said felt like it was meant just for you. You'd only realize something was off when he'd slip up and tell you a story twice.
Phin once had this friend from school, Sycamore. She spent a lot of time with us as we grew older, and one day, got this idea in her head that soon she'd be leaving town. She was as broke as the rest of us, and eighteen years old, but suddenly she was dead set.
She started making a list of everything she wanted to do before leaving, like the world's most boring bucket list. She wanted to swim in the river, and go to the farmer's market. Still, Sycamore came to carry the list with her wherever she went- we'd be walking along, she'd spy an advert for a fair, and she'd rush to write it down.
When it was a month before her long-set departure date, she had a long list and little time to do any of it. And still she'd add to it, to hike the mountains and to ask the boy she liked out. But she never did get around to any of it, I think.
Phin was sad to see her go, but he took a keen interest in it. I didn't understand why, but I acted as though I understood. Her last day with us held no mention of the list, but rather a series of tearful goodbyes.
And the next day, indeed, she was gone. The police looked for her, but nothing was found for three days. They eventually discovered her body in a forest on a mountain, mutilated by wild animals.
And the twins cried, but Phin seemed as sturdy as always, if not a bit down. I didn't know why until the bonfire party.
He'd found himself a demon. I didn't know of such things at the time, but there was a strange man at the party, and something about him did seem... oh, I don't know- demonic? Strange? He looked like he could have been our age, vaguely, but in a small town like ours there weren't kids we didn't know.
No one bat an eye though, and he drank with us. He went by Crawford.
We followed him the second he left, urged by Phin. Crawford must have known- four teenagers in the snow are never good at keeping quiet. Still, we followed.
We were all angry at Phin, and he refused to offer an explanation. Crawford led us to a bed and breakfast a far ways down the road. After he'd had gone to his room, Phin took us inside and bought one room for the four of us. He set up a night watch schedule despite our protests.
I remember, when it was my shift, I just fell back asleep. I was leaning against the wall, ear to the door for the slightest sound, listening to the sounds of breathing. At the other side of the room, a stone fireplace brought heat and the scent of pine. And the window, left the slightest bit open, brought in a light breeze.
I was woken by Phin, who just shook his head and took the next two shifts for himself.
I always liked him best.
The next morning, we woke before Crawford, and Phin brought us breakfast to our room. Now that it was dawn, we were all fussy about school and my mãe noticing, and how long it would take before the sheriff would be called, but Phin promised he had taken care of it.
He got on a bus out of town, and so did we. When he walked into the woods, we followed. It was not subtle. Deep in the woods, we came to a structure about seven feet tall, made of grey concrete, with not clear doors or windows. Crawford climbed on top of it, and jumped in.
Phin ran after him, and followed suite.
We were all a little spooked out, no longer feeling so silly about all this. We looked among ourselves- at fifteen, I was the oldest after Phin. They never really thought of me as the oldest though. That claim went to Michael.
He followed Phin. His sister and I looked at each other. Wordlessly trying to figure if we were supposed to disappear like that too.
Michael came back soon after he left, and he offered no explanation of what had happened. He returned, and we left.
I did miss Phinny after that. But it made sense that he would be the first to really get out there and see the world.
The twins and their family were an odd bunch. A mixed bag of insurmountable odds and bad luck. The first father had left when the twins were five, perhaps because the third son was an obvious bastard. Less than a year later their mother was remarried. This is the father that died, later, after the youngest had been born.
The way Michael told it, he had been raising his brothers since he was five. It was very, very difficult to not doubt this. But he didn't talk about it in any other way, so I guess that's how he remembered it.
Again, I'd known him since I was born, but arguing with him felt cruel.
He told me of nights in alleys, sleeping under cardboard boxes. He told me that when he was growing up, he read his siblings stories from a book on the romans- but of course, I knew he was nearly illiterate.
He said he found chalk one day, and covered the alley they slept in with columns and birds, and deep in the cold nights he used to promise them that they were nothing more than lost royalty, soon to be reclaimed.
It was so silly, but something about me felt happy with him. We were close. I held his hand once, and it was warm, and on the occasions he wasn't lying, he was a good person to chat with.
He liked birds. He liked music. He liked everything. He liked me, and I liked him, and it'd been that way for years. He played the violin, which is a thing people do sometimes, and it always felt like he was playing for me.
He always was trying to give me everything, so I always felt obligated to be there for him in return.
When I was a kid my mãe told me all about Brazil. I grew up speaking Portuguese, but no one else in Hornbrook spoke it, and soon it only became good for understanding mãe when she forgot who she was and began to ramble. She used to make feijoada and bacalhau but soon it became too much effort to drive out of town and get all the ingredients, so we'd eat pasta and soup almost every night.
Every New Year she used to get the hose out, and even though the gravel driveway was covered in a thin layer of snow and ice, I'd put on my warmest clothes and jump seven waves, sometimes slipping and falling on my face, but that was okay.
And I'd wish for nothing and everything in my life to change, to leave this country but also never leave this house, that we could stay in the cold winter's night jumping the waves forever. Cause we'd both laugh when I fell, and she'd laugh when I asked her to jump with me, and I got to feel special, so special, as the twins watched from inside and unseen fireworks crackled across the sky.
When I was still so little, she'd tuck me in and sing to me songs I've since about forgotten, and I felt loved back then, I guess.
My mãe died when I was nineteen. She'd been going for years, forgetting things and drifting off. I began to think more and more about the stories she'd told me, stories about her life. Places she wanted to take me. And I always was sitting on her lap thinking, mãe, you could. You could, you could, you could.
I'd been half homeschooled, never graduated, and the discussion of college had never been a thing. I might never leave this town. I'd probably never leave this state. I would die here. Okay.
The twins were seventeen. Technically, I might've been their guardian- I wasn't sure. The law never stopped by in Hornbrook. Nothing changed when my mãe died. We just had an influx of flowers delivered to our door.
Over the summer, Michael's sister had gotten a job at a radio station. She was a quiet girl, with a soothingly low voice, and everything about her suggested jazz fit her aesthetic entirely. Still, sometimes she'd stop the music and play a tune on her ocarina. I don't think it made her a particularly popular DJ, but then again, who was listening?
Besides me.
About a year in, the fall after she turned was eighteen, her family and I gathered at her station.
Michael had decided it was time to head to college. His sister didn't want to head anywhere, but the other brothers agreed with the oldest. Only the twins were even old enough to attend college, of course, but it seemed the other siblings were just restless. They just wanted to see another town.
I was unsure why I was even here, so I left them arguing.
I didn't see them for a week after that. They had left, I guess. But then they returned. There were just four of them then, a number short of perfect, and Michael asked me if I had seen his counterpart.
I had not. He grew worried and stressed in the day he spent searching, tearing through town and searching the woods. But she was nowhere to be found. He clutched his heart tenderly, complaining about an ache. He knew somewhere, long before he arrived, that it was too late. She was dead.
You know how twins are. Especially identical ones.
The next step, logically, was to learn what had happened. We went out and bought five candles, and the five of us sat in a sort of pentagon, holding hands.
The younger brothers were all nervous, their hand clammy. Michael, the once twin, was for once calm. It was a new part of his personality, the first of many: first he would calm down completely. Then he'd forget.
He lit the candles. He read from a book. He summoned her spirit. And in his head, I really believe he heard her voice. And that was all he needed to be satisfied.
We made her a little boat out of driftwood and lit it on fire in a lake. Michael called it a proper roman funeral. None of us wanted to risk correcting him.
He left, and he never did tell me if he got into college or where he was staying now. He didn't ask about me either. He was cleansed, and I think that was when he left me behind for good.
When I went home, I tuned the radio to an evening of sleepy jazz and the occasional, rude, ocarina solo.
Oh, but before all this happened, we were as thick as thieves. But that time came and went.
I've been trying to avoid speaking of myself so far, and I think I'll keep up that habit.
But once they left, my life didn't really change. They were much more friends with each other than they were with me.
When I think about now, really, it's nearly how hilarious how successful all of them became while I've just been wasting away in the same town, and the city below it, yet to leave this state.
I had a small garden in the orphanage. I looked after the dog. I looked after the building.
And later on, I went to Hell."