We were all painfully conscious of what Friday was, and it was no surprise that I dreamed about it that night.
I woke up gasping, still dreaming of bringing a frying pan down on Robbie's head like in a movie.
Erika was sleeping with me and tried to embrace me but I was still in survival mode and this time it was I who punched her in the face, though not hard enough to do much damage.
Her "motherfucker!", while not directed at me, brought me out of it. I was drenched in fear sweat and couldn't catch my breath and tried to concentrate on her strong arms and the purple rose shampoo.
"Breathe," she said, squeezing me, which seemed counterproductive but which helped. "Breathe with me, love. Smell the rose, blow out the candle." Our old mantra from therapy. Especially funny to me because of the rose shampoo reference. She smoothed my hair out of my face as air slowly began returning to me.
"She got away," I said, because in my dream he was occupied with me, and Hadley was running for the front door. But in real life I let him get her and they were both dead because of it. And our lives were ruined.
I also secretly harbored a deep and irrational fear that because of what they'd been forced to do to him, if there was some sort of God and actual heavenly system, what if they were now locked out forever? Even though he'd been evil incarnate? You kill someone, you go to hell. It was pretty simple, according to a belief system I didn't necessarily subscribe to. But it was an ancient belief system, and hard to ignore completely.
My mind wrestled with reality and I pushed away from her so I could make it to the bathroom in time to vomit. I was shaky after. I splashed water on my face and rinsed my mouth out.
She had a Valium for me when I came back and that look of pity that I pretty much hated. Even had I deserved it, I didn't want pity. I let her gather me in her arms anyway after I swallowed the medicine and lay back down.
"It's not your fault, Dorienne." She kissed my head and I was too sad to care.
"It is," I said uber softly, but she heard.
She got mad. "It's fucking not, okay? You can't carry that guilt forever." She hugged me tighter. "How much do you think we have for not being there at all? For being there too fucking late? Walking in on what we could have prevented? That is my worst memory ever, bb. Ever. Out of everything." Her voice broke and I looked at her. She was crying, tortured. "You think we don't have all the guilt for what happened to both of you, because we weren't there to protect you guys?"
"You can't feel that way," I tried, hating that I couldn't fix it for her, hating her tears.
"No! No, you can't say that to me about my guilt but still get to wallow in yours. You have to fucking pick one!" She wiped her arm across her eyes angrily. "Either we're all guilty or none of us are."
"Don't cry, dude," I said. Even though I was too.
"It's not your fault," she repeated. "It's that motherfucking cocksucking fuck's fault, and if I could bring him back and torture him for the rest of his life I would in a heartbeat. I've done it a million times in my dreams, and if that makes me a terrible person and a psychopath like my birth father, fuck it. So fucking be it because I would."
I shook my head, meaning it didn't make her a bad person. I hugged her and she relaxed against me. I could feel her angst. "It's okay," I said, even though it was always going to be at least half a lie. "We all feel like that." Which she knew.
"What if he's wherever she is and she can't get away or something?" She whispered this as if it was too horrifying to voice out loud, because it was. It so was.
"No," I said, not even having had that thought before. "That could never happen." Could it? My mind would break if I thought about it any more. "Think about good things. Gage! Chocolate eclairs. Josh Dun on drums." You, my mind added to the list of happy things. "Clique art."
She sniffed and wiped her face with the sheet. "What genre even is Twenty One Pilots, anyway?" she scripted with a snooty look, playing along. "Is it not rap? Is it not hip hop? Is it just another attempt to play some Indie pop?"
I felt a foolish grin try to take over my face, despite the darkness in my heart. "It's called ukulele screamo and it's art," I said primly in Clique speak. She smiled a little too and we began the ascent from the pit of despair.
******
Of all the stupid fucking things to have happen, I then ran into Hadley's sister on Wednesday while out with Mara doing secret shopping.
"Oh fuck me," I said out loud when I saw her at the end of the aisle we'd just turned down. Adrenaline coursed through me. "Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
"What?"
Hadley was also a fraternal twin, though the similarities to Erika and Mohammed ended there. Her sister, Hannah, was a bruiser and was the opposite of everything Hadley was. Her IQ was in the normal range and her only talents were for torture and inflicting pain. The girls had been taken away from their parents when they were nine, but the constant abuse had broken both of them. Hadley didn't talk, much as Freak hadn't at first upon rescue.
Whereas Hadley's mental illness manifested as severe anxiety and crippling depression, Hannah was simply a psychopath and a pyromaniac, completely without conscience as far as we could tell. She was responsible for much of Hadley's abuse, as was their older brother who had left the state when he lost access to his sisters.
For the first year they had been placed in the same foster home, because it was wrongly assumed that Hannah was just as much of an innocent victim as Hadley, and Hadley couldn't say otherwise. So the abuse went on until my mom, as their psychiatrist, figured it out.
They were immediately separated into different foster homes, and her sister placed on antipsychotics when it came about what she did to Hadley as well as torturing any other child or animal she could get her hands on.
We had only had two real interactions with her. By the time the first one occurred, we were thirteen, and had earned Hadley's trust. She and Cam were already inseparable and the rest of us were her family. She was happy in her foster family. There was a restraining order in place against all of her blood relatives.
So when she came back from the art class she was taking, badly shaken, it didn't take long to get out of her that her sister had left her a note. In her backpack. While Hadley was in class in the next room. She wanted to meet her to talk about something, said it would benefit Hadley.
Erika and Evie and I went instead and handed her ass to her on a plate. It was the first fight I'd ever been in and as big and crazy as she was, it was practically fair.
When we were done and Freak was standing, chest heaving, one foot on the prone and bleeding body, she said, "Next time I see you, I will personally tie you to a chair and cover you in the most expensive starter fluid on the market, and then I will light you so much on fire, and use it to roast marshmallows, and eat fucking s'mores. You think you own crazy? I put crazy on my Cheerios. I walk crazy on a choke chain. I keep it in hives with a queen and, like, harvest the honey."
I hadn't known until that moment how I truly felt about her but I instantly fell so hard in love with her the rest of the way. It wasn't very far.
Freak kicked her hard, wearing Doc Martens. "You fuckin' hear me, you wannabe-crazy asshole? You realize we're doing you a favor right now even letting your disrespectful ass crawl away? Should put you out of your fuckin' misery, do the world a solid." She kicked her once more and spit on her.
When Freak had found her words, she'd found them with interest.
Evie and I watched in awe. She wasn't cosplaying yet but she loved elaborate makeup and had cat's eyes with turquoise glitter on her lids. And she may have been shy but she was a warrior same as the rest of us when it came to protecting our own, as shown when she added her own kick.
"You might think you can find us apart from each other at some point," Erika went on thoughtfully. She sounded calm but it was a deadly calm. She was on her own heavy meds for that rage but they didn't always work.
"No, no, I won't." Hannah's buggy eyes were wide, or at least the one not swelling was. Blood and mud coated the rest of her.
"You might," Freak assured her, sounding amused. "We're smart, though." She grinned. "Like Hadley-smart, ya know? Not to mention fearless. This girl got in front of a fuckin' bullet for one of us." She jerked her thumb at me.
Out of context, it did sound pretty cool.
She went on. "You think any one of us wouldn't do the same fucking thing for Hadley?" She looked scary thoughtful. "I guess what I'm saying is we can, and will, fucking kill you, and get away with it, and live happily ever after."
And we would do that very thing to Robbie, five years later. Of course the happily ever after part, not so much.
"Hey! Hey, what are you kids doing?" Some old guy was trotting toward us.
We left her there crying and blubbering in the parking garage where we'd met up. We never did find out what she wanted with Hadley, and we didn't see her for six more years.
She hadn't had the balls to make an appearance at the funeral, but the day after she'd shown up at my house. I remember opening the door and just being floored that she was there. I was speechless.
She looked like shit, strung out on meth probably, sores all over her arms and face, her dingy white tank top sporting tears and grime. She weighed maybe 110 and on her large, 5'11 frame, it made her skeletal. "Did she leave me anything?" she asked the question as she twitched on my porch, the wind blowing red and brown leaves down around her. "Any jewelry or anything?"
I could only stare and then Freak was there and they were tumbling down the stairs, Freak on top when they landed. She began pummeling her, and I feared suddenly for what diseases she might pick up from the open wounds and ensuing blood.
"Moey!" I shouted into the open doorway of the house, standing where Robbie had stood with the box of dissertations and restraints. "Moey, please!" I was trying to pull her off Hannah, desperate to get her away before some of the contaminated blood got on her. But she was so much stronger than I was.
Luckily her twin had fifty pounds on her and was also used to holding her when she was fighting someone. He held her back but not easily as she twisted and tried to break away.
Hannah lay there, dazed and bleeding. "Get out of here, you piece of shit!" I cried, kicking her myself. "You fucking piece of shit! You did this to her!" For she had indeed done all she could to destroy Hadley as a child, regardless of what had been done to her as well.
I was crying so hard and I tried to kick her again and then my mom was there and trying to lead me inside while the drug addict on the ground crawled to the sidewalk, stood, and began a loping run off down the street.
"Jesus," I wept in my mom's arms on the porch. I felt my mind breaking, the four days of trying to live without Hadley having already nearly destroyed me. "Jesus, Jesus, Mom, I can't do this."
"Shh, love, it's okay," my mom lied, and we were in the living room, and Cam was passed out on the couch with his wrist bandaged, heavily sedated to the point where he had heard none of it. The sight of him, days past his suicide attempt and still very suicidal, threatened to break me too.
My mom knew though and led me to the other couch, her body blocking him, and Mohammed brought Erika to us and my mom was hugging both of us while we grieved. I cried so hard I had to throw up, ugly crying that hurt my body and didn't make me feel any better once it was over. My mom gave us sedatives and we joined Cam in the Land of Nod, where the Bad Luck Club was sometimes just a distant memory.
******
Now my blood flooded my face as I recognized her. She was apparently clean now, sores gone and the weight back on and then some. She didn't see me. I didn't know what to do.
All the things she had done to Hadley, all the ways she hurt her, and here she was alive and fucking shopping for fucking tortillas and Hadley was rotting in a grave! I couldn't breathe.
Mara didn't know what was going on but she knew what to do. Abandoning the cart, she led me by hand straight out the front entrance to her car, opening the door in the drizzle, gently settling me inside.
I was shaking so badly when she got in the driver's seat my teeth were chattering. I hugged myself, trying to stop.
She didn't hesitate. "It's okay, Dory. Whatever it is, you're safe here. Should I drive somewhere else?"
She lit a cigarette as I nodded and took my unsteady hand and placed it between my fingers and held my hand up to my lips so I could smoke, which I did. It helped but made my head swim. "Lean over," she suggested, and I did, black creeping in the edges.
Good ol' Dorienne and her triggers. Fun for all occasions.
Then we were parking again and she leaned over and gathered me to her and patted my back. I realized I still had the cigarette and took a shaky drag. "Hadley's sister," I whispered. Agony squeezed my heart with what felt like a real fist. "Evil. Fucked her up bad." My adrenaline broke and the rest of the pain flooded me. "How come she gets to live," I asked, knowing it was pointless, knowing life was just fucking unfair all the time and we were fucked.
Three days from the anniversary and to see her, see her looking normal, I couldn't. I wanted to go back and kill her. I wanted to dig up Hadley's coffin and climb into it with whatever was left of her and just not do this shit anymore. I wanted Cam and Erika and everyone. I ached with the agony that was wanting Hadley.
Mara didn't try to comfort me with platitudes and trite shit, just let me cry.
"I'm sorry," I said, hating how easily I cried lately.
"There's no shame in sorrow, Dory," she said quietly. "I cry almost every day."
When I was better she let go and started the car, turning up the heater. It wasn't that cold outside but I couldn't stop shivering. At one of the lights she sent a text. I just sat there, not even knowing what music was on, just enduring until I could be home.
We arrived at my house just as the door opened and Erika was approaching the car and then opening my door and I was so glad.
"Hannah." I forced the word out. I was still shaking, with rage and the cold and the incredible slap in the face I'd sustained.
"Okay," she said. "That fucking cunt's still alive, huh." She leaned over to Mara. "I've got her now. Thanks, and all."
I wanted to tell Mara I was sorry for failing miserably to just be a normal person who didn't spend every third date in tears because of some fucking trigger. But I couldn't and I hoped she knew. I couldn't really see dating her much longer because I was such a mess and it was never going to stop but I would have to deal with that later.
She left and Freak led me in out of the rain and everyone loved on me and I felt better. "I can't believe she's still alive," I said, which we were all feeling. "After that last time. I thought for sure she was fuckin' dead." I hadn't realized I'd even come to that conclusion in my head but apparently I had.
Our parents came in and were rightfully indignant that the bitch still roamed the planet. Mo had made a lemon cake of some kind with custard and strawberries and I ate about half of that and passed out downstairs with everyone, Freak and I taking over the bean bag as was our right sometimes.