Prologue
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The girl laid on her bed, facing the night sky painted on her ceiling. Her father used to tell her that every single star was a guardian angel that was assigned to a human. That angels would fall down to their human in a time of need. She held onto that thought throughout her childhood, knowing that even in times that seemed scary and hopeless, even when her mother was on her death bed, her guardian angel would come to her when she really needed it.
Now, as a girl of sixteen, she wasn't so ignorant.
The once faithful man had turned to sin after his wife passed away. His grief had taken away the faith that he once held so dear. Yet the congregation couldn't bear to replace him, or at least they couldn't find another man to do the job. He spent each day preaching hypocrisy. Her pastor father had come home drunk the past three nights. She was counting on a fourth, but for now, she could revel in the emptiness of the house.
She could blast her death metal and her father wouldn’t tell her to turn her “music from hell” off. She could feel the thump of the base guitar shaking her room lightly.
She closed her eyes slowly, the night sky on her ceiling shrinking until there was just blackness. She let her inhibitions flow away from her just as the deep red blood flowed from the thin marks on her forearms. One for the boy who tripped her in the hallway, one for the failed grade in chemistry, two for the last time she looked in the mirror…
She hadn’t done this in a long time. She’d let it build up, like water behind a dam, but eventually the dam had to give. She knew it wasn’t a healthy way of coping, but she wasn’t going to lie and say that she didn’t like it. Cutting filled her with a certain angst and sorrow that she thrived on. Her body was already far from perfect, what difference would it make if there were a few scars on her arms and legs?
The girl opened her eyes reluctantly and turned them towards the window above her bed. The late summer day had now turned dark, the temperature dropping so that a light fog formed on the glass window panes. The lyrics of the song were pounding in her ears. I’m holding on to a life I’ll never get back, it’s too hard to get back. I’m on the right train but the wrong tracks, trying not to derail.
The fog on her window was turning into small beads of condensation. They slowly dripped down the glass pane until they collided with another drop, morphing together to form a master water droplet, terminating anything in its path, only to leave a string of small droplets behind to repeat the process.
The girl was brought to her senses by the sound of her bedroom door hitting the wall. She jolted up and looked at her father’s furious face.
“Turn that Satanist music off,” he ordered gruffly. The girl was frozen in fear at the state of her father. His clerical collar was undone, his black shirt unbuttoned messily. The fingers on his left hand were loosely wrapped around a handgun, which he now aimed at her.
“Daddy,” she choked out, her voice hoarse with fear.
“Shut up, Lucy,” he said and turned his arm, shooting the stereo, turning off the music permanently. He sighed, “Thank God for silence.”
Lucy’s mouth was agape. She’d never seen her father resort to such violence. He had always been such a good and holy man, except, of course, of late.
“It’s late, Dad, you should get some sleep.” She suggested. She knew how well it would go if she told her father that he was drunk. In this predicament she might even end up with a bullet in her brain. The thought of her own father doing that to her sent an ethereal shiver through her body. “Come on, I’ll make you some tea.”
She tried pushing past him into the hallway, but it was as if his feet were glued to the floorboards.
He stopped her. “What’s that on your arm?”
Lucy glanced at the dried blood on her forearm, having momentarily forgotten about it. She crossed her arms over her chest, hiding it from him. “It’s nothing…Mrs. Nealey’s cat scratched me.”
Her father wasn’t buying it. “Wrath is a sin, Lucy, especially when inflicted upon oneself.”
Lucy didn’t dare look up at her father’s raging face.
“So?”
“So? Do you want to go to Hell?”
“No,” she grumbled, “but I bet it’d be better than this.”
“What was that?”
Lucy looked up at her father. The man was glaring at her through his menacing eyes, but she swallowed her fear and took a few steps back. “Hell would be better than living like this. You coming home drunk every night, for God’s sake, you’re a priest! You can’t do that! Just because mom died-“
“Don’t you dare, Lucinda.”
“No! Yes, you lost your wife, but I lost my mother, and I’ll speak of her if I want. What you’re doing is an insult to her life and her death! Drinking every night when it was a drunk driver that killed her. You’re just a hypocritical bastard!”
Lucy’s father stayed quiet for a moment before sighing, “Very well.”
She raised her eyebrow, “What?”
“You’d rather be in Hell than live your awful life with me…who am I to stand in the way of that?” he shrugged and raised his gun, pointing it at her.
Lucy froze, but her mind was running faster than ever. She didn’t even have time to look to her bedside table, where a picture of her mother rested, before the loudest sound she’d ever heard boomed, followed by the most extreme pain. She let out a strangled sound, sinking to the floor.
She watched her father drop the gun next to her and then leave the room altogether.
“Dad!” She screamed, over and over again, tears rolling over her cheeks and staining her face. The man wasn’t her father anymore, but her murderer.
She started sweating as her breathing became labored. She always thought that she’d be able to think of her favorite people in her last minutes, but as the air inside of her collapsed in on itself, all she could think about was pain. She tried to stay awake, tried to grasp on to the last bit of life that she was left with.
But as the searing pain of the bullet spread so that she was unsure of the exact spot she had been hit, it became harder to hold on to the thought that living was worth it. If she had a father who’d shoot her and a mind that would slash at her wrists, what was the point.
She let her lead-weighted eyes fall closed, thinking of the first kiss that she would never get to have, of the high school graduation that she wouldn’t attend, of the husband that she would never have.
Lucy became aware of a pool of thick dark blood around her, her own blood, though she couldn’t bear to open her eyes and see it for herself. She could feel her throat closing as she grew more and more desperate for air.
The last passing thought before she slipped from the world was not an apology to those whom she had done wrong to. It was a spiteful thought of revenge. She deserved revenge on her father, but that would not come in this life.
She went to sleep with that on her shoulders, never to wake again as a human.
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Lucy Carlile died at 1:23 on the morning of August 27. She would not get to start her Junior Year at Louis Hill High School. Though there would be a memorial page dedicated to her on Facebook, no one would really miss her. She had never really made sense in the school climate. In a morbid way, her death restored balance to the small community.
Her Reverend father carried no guilt with him while he continued preaching to the congregation. No one spoke a word about how his father had passed in such a disgraceful way. Suicide. Found with marks on each arm and a gun just feel away from her. No one knew the truth, not the whole truth anyway.
But there was one boy, Nate Bachman, the Carlile’s neighbor, who remembered lying awake, dreading starting school the next day. He knew that he’d heard his neighbor Lucy screaming for, or at her father, but if the police report said suicide, that must have been the truth.
But Nate couldn’t shake that feeling that something was wrong with Reverend Carlile. The way he walked quickly to and from Church, never going anywhere but there and his home. At first he thought it was grief’s doing, but as he let his imagination roam, he could smaller things that didn’t quite make sense.
It became harder for him to just go on living normally, knowing that something was wrong with Lucy’s case. Knowing in his gut that it wasn’t just a case of suicide.