Page 20 of Apathy
And who could blame us? The memories of May twenty-fifth kept crawling back into my mind, reminding me of the mess we made. And we couldn’t tell anybody. No one knew about the plan Zane made, or who was involved.
Zane was a wild card, always wanting more than he already had. He was the brightest one of all of us, but he was also the reckless one. When he came up with that idea… I still couldn’t understand why none of us said no. And we should’ve said no.
One of us should have been mature enough to dismiss the crazy shit he was coming up with.
Zane wanted to escape, to run away, but in order to do all that, he needed money. A lot of money. The kind of money none of us had, regardless of who our parents were. When he spoke about a life outside of Winworth, free from the clutches of our parents, free from all this darkness surrounding us, this suffocation we were all going through, we all said yes.
He wanted to fake his own kidnapping, and like reckless fools, we all agreed to help. Little did we know that the little prank we were pulling would turn out to be real. He was supposed to be kidnapped on May fifteenth, and his parents were supposed to be contacted on May nineteenth for the ransom. He wanted to fake his own death and get a new identity, but he never got to do that.
He never got to do that, because on May seventeenth, we lost all contact with him. He was supposed to be in Seattle, hiding out, waiting for the ransom to be delivered to the old amusement park on the East Side of Winworth. One of us would have to take it after they all cleared out.
But when he didn’t answer his phone, when all communication was lost, we knew that something was wrong. Kane even went to Seattle to see him in person, but Zane was nowhere to be found. We tried everything—his friends from Seattle, places in Emercroft Lake where he could’ve gone, but he wasn’t there. We thought he was pulling a prank on us, trying to scare us, but when the night of the party rolled over, when we were all gathered at the cabin owned by the St. Clare family, that’s when all hell let loose.
When the blazing inferno started illuminating the night, when we almost burned down with the house, we knew that somebody else was fucking with all of us. When the firefighters arrived at the scene, when the fire started reaching new heights, they pulled out the body.
A body that didn’t belong to any of us because we managed to escape.
A body that belonged to a boy I liked, to our bright star. We realized that playing with fire and trying to escape from this godforsaken place might be harder than we ever thought. In one night, our innocence burned away. Our dreams shattered as windows on the second floor exploded. The place we all loved burned with our friend, and the life we knew disappeared in front of our eyes, eaten by the angry red flames in the middle of the night. We never found out what really happened.
No one ever came out as a culprit, and all five of us kept our mouths shut about the plan we previously concocted. Police questioned us. Kane and Zane’s parents pretended to be devastated, but the truth was—they never even realized that he was missing.
We swore to take that secret to our graves, but not a day passed where I didn’t think about the future Zane could have had. If it wasn’t for six silly teenagers who thought that the world danced how they played, he would’ve been alive.
Maybe if I said something or did something. Maybe if we told them what we knew about his whereabouts when we realized that he was really missing, he wouldn’t be dead.
I had too many regrets about things we did and secrets we kept. But the problem with the skeletons we were keeping in our closets was that they never really stayed hidden. And even if they did, they ate you alive. They pulled your soul, they damaged your heart, and they made you paranoid to the point where you didn’t want to exist anymore.
I didn’t want to exist.
I just wanted to forget about everything. I wanted to forget about our plans, our dreams, and silly little promises, because they were all gone. They all burned away with that fire. Even though they said that he was dead before the fire, it didn’t help knowing that while we drank and partied inside the house, his body was in one of the rooms.
We hadn’t been there since that happened, and while we wouldn’t be going to the same cabin, it didn’t help that if you looked toward the other side of the river, you could still see the remnants of the cabin where our lives changed.
I didn’t think that any of us were ready for death to knock on our door, regardless of if it was for us or someone we cared about. I wasn’t ready to face the reality—I would never be ready. Zane was more than just my boyfriend. He was my friend. Him, Kane, Lauren, Danny, Rowan, Beatrice, and I, we all grew up together, and when he died, it felt as if a part of us died with him.
I wasn’t the only one feeling that way. I could see how Danny and Rowan watched his locker in the school. Or how all our eyes traveled toward the place where he used to sit in the cafeteria and in the crypt. We all missed him, but it was more than that.
We all blamed ourselves for what happened.
Unfortunately, none of us knew how to move on without destroying our own lives. At least, I didn’t know.
Self-destruction always came easily to me, and it always came in different shapes and forms. People often thought that self-destruction came in the form of drugs or alcohol, but that wasn’t the truth. When your mind was telling you that you shouldn’t exist, when everything you ever loved started feeling insignificant, you found ways to destroy little pieces of yourself so that nobody else would notice.
I was a coward who didn’t want to leave my brother. I was a coward who didn’t want to slit my wrists, because I always thought about the people that would have to clean up the mess. I was a goddamn coward because I did nothing when someone I used to care about was in trouble.
I was still a fucking coward because I didn’t want to help Kane, who was still struggling with the death of his brother. So, I destroyed myself.
Pills, alcohol, faceless strangers in the middle of the night, sleepless nights, and toxic thoughts, I used them all, because feeling nothing was better than feeling everything. When the drugs hit my system, when alcohol burned my tongue, I couldn’t remember the smell of burning flesh, or the screams echoing in the night. I couldn’t remember the tears on Kane’s face, or the fear on Lauren’s.
I couldn’t feel the searing pain in my soul, the guilt, because they numbed it all. They made me forget, and I didn’t want to stop.
Even whenhetouched me, whenhemade me do things, I couldn’t feel anything else but the pure disgust, because I allowed it to happen.
I played the game of a perfect little smile when Dylan asked me if I was okay, because I couldn’t let him see the depraved thoughts in my head. I craved violence because the pain of the body always quieted down the pain in my head.
“Skylar!” Lauren yelled, and I realized why.
I was standing on the edge of the cliff, where we could see a part of the river as it went toward the town. If I took one more step, this could all end—my life, my pain, their pain, memories, everything. This suffocation could cease to exist.
