Hailey
I came to in the middle of chaos—writhing in the center of somewhere I didn’t recognize.
Everything hurt—not enough to keep me pinned to the ground but enough to panic about. For a while I couldn't tell the difference between choking on crop dust and crying.
Every breath stung and burned the insides of my lungs worse than the whites of my eyes. But the pain was only half the equation in a full-blown break down ‘cause everything aside from my bones felt broken.
My life, my parents, my way back home—everything. I'd ended up smashed into the dirt, miles underneath a deceptively beautiful blue sky, waiting to wake up from a terrible mistake. But mistakes are just bad dreams realized, and mine were tattooed across my body in purple-blue bruises.
No matter how many times I closed my eyes hoping to wake up somewhere familiar, nothing changed. The air stayed stagnant, and I stayed crushed underneath the ugliness of an inescapable reality.
Boa-constrictor-panic tightened around my throat, but I lifted my legs to stop the shock from knocking me out a second time. Part of me expected to look down and see my legs gone or mangled like in the war movies.
They still were there, but God were they ugly. The cuts looked worse than the bruises, but nothing was stitch worthy. Fingers crossed.
Once the muscles in my back stilled, I tried getting to my feet. Big mistake. The second I stood up a bout of post-crash vertigo hit me so hard I keeled over backwards. I free-fell, hopelessly dizzy, arms flailing, and neck flying back far enough to send my head crashing into the dry packed dirt.
A gasp hitched in my throat. Trying to breathe in Virginia heat was like sucking a milkshake through a coffee straw. The longer I tried to convince myself that I'd be okay, the less I believed it.
I figured being alone like this for long enough would eventually wear away at me, until there was no composure left to pick at. D.C private schools didn’t teach you how to survive outside of the stock market.
The most they taught was how to pay attention. I'd learned to pay attention—only six hours too late.
Something snapped within feet of where I'd landed, and the summer cicadas broke into a panicked frenzy. Their hissing exploded into deliberate chaos and spread through the nearby cornhusks like a warning system. Trouble was coming.
I stayed low to the ground, hoping I could spot whoever it was before they could spot me.
The stalks rustled again—this time the snap-crackle-crunching sound of dead husks much closer than before. I stood up faster than fast and sprinted in the opposite direction before the stranger’s footsteps got too close for comfort.
I followed rising smoke trails in the sky until I reached the clearing where they'd come from. The crash had set fire to the air.
Tufts of smoke towered over the crumpled red truck turned belly up with its wheels spinning skyward. The Chevy had flattened the cornhusks in its wake leaving every sign of a horrific accident but no sign of Liam or Caleb.
Fast flames shot out of the hood as I staggered around the truck searching for a body. Running would've been easy work if I hadn't caught sight of Caleb hanging upside down in the driver’s seat between twisted metal and broken glass.
He didn’t deserve a chance. I didn't owe him one. I didn’t owe him my time, attention, or help. I’d spent every minute of the ride down from D.C. thinking of ways to put miles between the two of us.
I'd thought about screaming on the bus or making a scene at the Manassas station. But the minute my dad set the police out for me, he stole any chance I had of calling for help. Who do you call when the police are out to get you?
Walking away now meant walking straight back into the palm of my dad’s hand. Leaving someone to die meant turning a blind eye and knowing I could've been the difference. Criminal or not, I didn’t need anyone’s blood on my hands.
I took off the tattered t-shirt he’d given me, wrapped it around my hands, and dropped to my knees to move towards the driver's side. Sweat tumbled off the edges of my bangs the closer I got but I blinked away the sting.
The heat of the rusted door handle seeped through the thin layer of cotton covering my fingers. I let go, terrified of allowing the burn to blaze my skin. But choking wasn’t an option. Not when mistakes made the difference between living through the day.
The smoke sucked all the spit in my mouth dry. I dug my feet into the dirt, yanked the handle back, and the old metal screamed as it split in two. The door burst open, and the heat from inside the cabin rushed out faster than liquid flames.
Caleb was stiller than the dead. He didn’t breathe, he didn’t move, just hung suspended in the air like a ragdoll wrapped up in his seatbelt.
I pushed back against the rising fear in my chest, ravaged through wreckage to find where he was strapped in. The heat beat against my skin and singed my fingers when I pressed against the seat belt button to set him free.
Click.
He crashed down from his seat so hard the sound made me sicker than the smoke. I wrenched my arms underneath Caleb’s and spattered out what little oxygen I had left trying to pull him into the clear.
The ash stained his skin black and stuck to the blood spilling from his face. Criminal or not, if he died, I was as good as dead. I pressed my head against his t-shirt and listened for the steady beat of his pulse beneath burnt fabric.
His heart whispered into my ears, but I didn’t know what to do to keep it beating. I didn’t know how to fix a broken boy, but I could try to keep him breathing.
I pressed my mouth against his. His lips were still warm—warm enough to give me some hope to hold onto.
Still not breathing.
Maybe I’d screwed up, done things wrong, maybe he’d—
Caleb’s eyes fluttered open out of the blue and he burst into a coughing fit.
I did it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have.
The half-hearted thrill of seeing him breathing again dissolved into a quiet fear of his reaction. I waited for the razor-blade gaze I’d seen back at the train station, for him to turn on me at a moment’s notice, but he stared at me, panicked, his eyes wider than the cornfields.
He mouthed something to me, but his voice stayed mute from the smoke.
“Li—am.”
Every sound in the field went quiet. Even the air stopped breathing. Nothing moved except for the cornhusks beneath the feet of a predator. Liam appeared blacker than ashes out of the smoke, his beady blues ablaze with the thrill of the hunt, and a grin sinister enough to tear his lips at the seams.
Liam snatched me by the hair, and grated his nails against my scalp until I screamed. I shut my eyes and waited to feel the cold promise of his knife against my skin, but he let me go.
The sickening thud of bones against dirt rattled the ground next to me. Caleb had Liam pinned. Both knees around his torso and two hands around his throat, he looked angry enough to kill. But he was a shadow, too small and too frail to keep up with Liam in a fight.
I couldn’t move. My limbs went limp, and my eyes stayed glued to the chaos building to a breaking point. Caleb turned to me, his eyes a wild blue.
“What are you doing? Get the hell outta here!”
In less than seconds, Liam flipped Caleb onto his back and slammed him into the dirt hard enough to crush the air out of his lungs. He sent his fists crashing into Caleb’s face, one after the other until the light in his eyes flickered out. He was gone in seconds.
A riptide rush of adrenaline sparked to life in my blood, and I rushed at Liam blindly, my legs lethargic and clumsy underneath my weight. I sunk my nails into his back and tore away the skin through his shirt like it would stop him.
It didn’t.
He whipped around, snatched me by the wrists and trapped me in a gridlock grip to keep me still. He smiled at me, mocked me, taking deranged pleasure out of my helplessness. There wasn’t a way out, no cops, no Caleb, no little doors or rabbit holes, just danger. Just darkness.
“It’s best to let dead dogs lie, Hailey. We haven’t got time to mourn strays.”
Liam dragged me through the dirt and across the remaining length of the field while I screamed out to the silence for help. No one would hear me. No one was listening.
He pulled me onto the main road, scraping my bare heels across the gravel as he walked. I stared up at him, searching for a semblance of a human being behind the blood and grease on his face. But he didn’t turn back to look at me once, like he was numb to everything but his own nervous desperation.
Each time I fought to free myself, he tightened his grip, and pulled me towards an abandoned rotting wood building looming in the distance.
***
Liam shoved me through the worn wooden archway of an old slaughterhouse at the end of the field. The inside of the place smelled of ammonia and old blood. He looked like he belonged here—a condemned death factory left alone to die.
The air inside was thick with dust and sparsely furnished, a hollowed out hallway laced with makeshift lights and amateur carpenter’s work. Some sort of commonplace was set up at the far end of the house, complete with mismatched handmade chairs and tables with a steel kitchen space behind.
There were others who lived here; the walls were lined with bunks and mostly empty bookshelves. Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath lay open on a lopsided nightstand. The margins were black with what looked like the scrawlings of a modern madman.
The people who’d made a home of this place probably clung to words of dead men like manifestos, and I'd somehow become a part of their creed. This was desperation, the reality of a dying American dream.
Dizzy and delirious from the heat and shock, my eyes wandered up into the high arches of the rafters. I found freedom in the spaces where the light came in. Lines of dust-speckled light drew my mind away from the shadows.
Mom would’ve found this place beautiful if it hadn’t been home to my disappearance. She would’ve painted and framed it on a wall in the house somewhere along side her other pastel memories.
I needed her. I missed her.
I missed the eccentric comforts of her home, our home. I missed the lingering smell of jasmine incense, the bright colors on her walls, and the peace her world gave me.
My mistake stole that solace from the both of us, and the reality of never getting it back or seeing her again clinched to my conscience tighter than a chokehold.
With an imagination like hers, Mom had probably worried herself halfway to Wonderland by now. I kept picturing how her face must’ve looked while she waited for a daughter-less train to arrive at the Charlottesville platform—flowers in hand, day adventure at heart, only to have me turn up on the news.
Dad probably didn't give a damn, but as far as my Mom went, I wanted her to know that I wasn’t missing, just misplaced, that I’d catch the next train home to her, be back for brie and crackers by five, and not to worry if I came in a few minutes late.
I wanted to believe in those misguided promises, ‘cause pretty little lies were easier to swallow than terrifying truths.
By the books, I’d probably already earned my place in the annals of potentially dead people—another one down on my bucket list. In about four days or so, I’d show up plastered on scotch-taped jars in grocery stores my parents would never go to.
Alms for the guilty, pocket change for the dead.