Page 90 of Apathy
After finding out about Ash’s family, I started realizing that I wasn’t the only one hiding the truth. But why would he?
I sneaked away from the library and took that book home with me, trying to decipher the Latin text woven throughout, and the stories about our families, but nothing really made sense. Okay, I basically stole the book, but I couldn’t exactly tell Mrs. Montgomery that I needed it with me because I thought my family was involved in something sinister. The articles I discovered about the Crowell family were scarce, and the only thing I could find was a newspaper article from the Seattle Daily, mentioning the death of the Crowell family—a mother and a father and their two sons.
But they weren’t dead.
Maybe Ash’s mother and father were gone, but he and his brother were very much alive. I wouldn’t be thinking this way, if he actually told me this himself.
The name of the fifth family was always kept from us—not that we asked—and I didn’t know why. The more I read about the history of Winworth, the more I started realizing that there were things I never wanted to discover.
Things that made my blood run cold, while my brain battled with the horrible picture all those stories painted. And the worst thing was that I couldn’t talk to any of my friends about what I had found.
Kane was already behaving like he was close to a nervous breakdown. Lauren pretended everything was okay, and every single time I tried to bring up us finding Megan’s body, she shut me down.
Danny and Rowan were on a mission to drink themselves to death, and Beatrice and Hailey were doing God knows what.
The only person I was spending time with was Ash, and I hated these suspicious thoughts filling my head every single time I even thought about him. My own heart was torturing me because it didn’t want to believe that he had some nefarious plan. But with everything that was happening around us, with the cloak of darkness that fell over Winworth, I started suspecting everyone and everything.
We agreed to study in the school library today, and even though he was sitting right across from me, I had a feeling he was a million miles away. It was as if after I found out that he belonged to one of the founding families, everything changed.
He behaved the same, but I knew things now. Things no one else knew, and I feared that the deeper I went, the darker it would get. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see everything that book was hiding.
I was hoping that I would be able to find out who the hooded figure was, who the attacker was, or at least who left me that note in the locker, but I found a lot more than I was looking for. I found an intricate world woven with lies, secrets, and betrayals.
Only a couple of pages of the book were innocent enough, talking about the area, and where our families came from, but the more I read, the more I realized that there were borderline insane things happening in Winworth.
Words likesacrifice,Samhain, andritualskept being repeated over and over and over again. On the fifteenth page of the book, a black-and-white photograph fell out from between the pages—three kids, all standing in front of the altar I saw in that photo I received. Their faces were robbed of smiles, while three hooded figures stood behind them, with their hands on their shoulders.
I didn’t have to be a genius to know that those kids weren’t there of their own volition.
What bothered me the most was the fact that the book wasn’t simply written and left alone. No, different handwritings were etched on its pages, and when I turned it to one of the last pages, the date written was October 31st, 2007.
It was the date of my fifth birthday.
“Is everything okay, Skylar?” Erin Dagonn, the girl sitting on my left side, asked, pulling me back to reality and away from the thoughts of a certain malicious book. We had a couple of classes together, and we studied together from time to time.
I wanted to tell her that nothing was okay. Nothing would ever be okay. But I could feel Ash’s burning gaze on the side of my face, and instead of voicing what was really wrong, I smiled at her, and closed the biology book I was holding.
“I’m okay.”
We had a test next week, but no matter how much I tried studying about genomes and all the other things we were going to have on the test, I just couldn’t. Every time I looked at the pages of the book, trying to study, different text appeared in front of my eyes, and I gave up.
I was here today only because I promised Erin, and because I agreed to spend some time with Ash after we were done.
I’d been avoiding him as much as possible, and he knew something was up, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him about the things I’d found. Maybe it was from fear. What if I looked him in the eye, telling him all these things I’d found—about his family, all our families, actually—and he wasn’t looking back at me?
What if he started hiding his midnight eyes from me, afraid I would see the truth there? Afraid that I would see the secrets he’d been hiding.
I kept my eyes on Erin while she talked about her sister studying in Toronto and how much she missed her, but if she asked me to repeat everything she said, I wouldn’t be able to.
My body was in tune with Ash—my Ash—silently staring at me, while Erin talked my ear off. I could already imagine the storm swirling over his face because I was ignoring him. I’ve been doing this for days whenever somebody else was with us, and I was avoiding staying alone with him.
I dreaded the moment when we would be left alone, because then I would have no choice but to look at him, to talk to him, to really miss him.
Because I did, miss him, that is. I missed him when he was gone, and I missed him when he was with me. And now my father knew about Ash.
He knew I wasn’t working on gathering information about Kane’s parents, and he was livid.
“All righty.” Erin suddenly stood up and started collecting her things. “I have to head out. My mom wants me to come home before dark today. They’re all spooked about—” She bit her lip as she looked at my scarred arm. “Well, you know what they’re spooked about.”
