Preppy, The Life & Death of Samuel Clearwater, Part TWO (King)(2)

Ray paused as she was about to answer like she was considering my presence with a new kind of skepticism. She stared hard at where my hand was touching Preppy. Apparently, she was the only one who questioned my intentions, because the other three that were with her had disappeared from the doorway, leaving the two of us in the room alone.

NOT alone.

With PREPPY.

I squeezed his hand and let out a sigh of relief, sending out a few thank you’s into the universe along with a few choked sobs.

“He was...” Ray looked at the floor and shuffled her feet. She crossed her arms over her chest. “He was here the whole time. In Logan’s Beach,” she said, like she still couldn’t believe it herself.

I gasped. “Why? How?”

“We don’t know a lot of the details. Just that he was being held close by and that the guy who was holding him must have had a lot of people in his pocket to make us all believe he was dead.”

“What did the police say?”

It dawned on me how stupid my question must have sounded when Ray cocked her head to the side. “How well did you know Preppy?”

“Well enough to know it was idiotic of me to ask about police involvement.” I flashed her a tight-lipped smile.

Ray nodded as if I answered correctly. “King and Bear are on it. They’re not trusting anyone to look into it but themselves. They’ve been up most nights until the sun comes up going over theories and retracing everyone’s steps to find out who else could be involved.” She pointed to Preppy, “But only he knows what happened down there, and there isn’t any way a single second of it was something good. The only thing we know is that he’s lucky to be alive. We are all so lucky that he’s alive.”

“Yes, yes we are,” I agreed, turning my attentions back to Preppy whose eyebrows were pointing in toward the middle of his face in a sharp V as if he were having some a nightmare he couldn’t escape.

“You said you were a friend of his?” Ray asked again like she needed more clarification than what I’d given her.

That makes two of us.

“We met a long time ago,” I said, not knowing what the right answer was. I had no clue what we had been, only what we didn’t become. “Preppy saved my life once,” I told her for the sake of giving her something about my connection to Preppy. “more than once.” I laughed and wiped a fallen tear from my cheek.

Preppy suddenly sat up with a startled roar, his arms shot out and before I could swallow down the frightened sob threatening to escape from my mouth his hands were wrapped tightly around my throat. Squeezing, squeezing, until I saw stars and my windpipe was closing under the power of his relentless hold.

The pressure behind my eyes was building until it felt like they were going to pop from my head. I felt the blood vessels exploding in anger under his relentless hold.

I couldn’t even scream. Preppy pushed me roughly. My shoulder blades stung as I crashed into the wall. A colorful plastic clock fell from its nail and bounced off the top of my head before falling to the floor. An eerie rendition of ‘someday my prince will come’ played slowly from the clock as Preppy stared intensely into my eyes with all the chords in his neck taught and his teeth gnashed together. I search his eyes for some flash of recognition, but it wasn't there. I knew by the deadened look in his eyes that it wasn't me he saw, to him I wasn't even there. He squeezed my throat tighter. His hips pinned me in place. I grew weaker and weaker by the second. There was no fighting back. There was no way to win.

I was going to die, and if I could've laughed, at that moment I would've because my final thought was that at least I got to see Preppy before my death, even if he was the one killing me.

Using his grip around my throat as if his hand were a collar and his arm my leash, he lifted me off the wall and for a second I felt as if he were going to let me go.

Instead, he slammed me back, harder. This time it was a shelf of coloring books that rained down on us. There was shouting, an inaudible legion of voices both male and female, but they started to fade just as quickly as it came.

Suddenly, the pressure around my neck was gone, and I dropped to the floor, gasping for air I can't seem to find. The shallow breaths I did manage hurt like someone set fire to my throat. It was shitty breathing.

But at least I was breathing. My vision slowly returned and the voices that seemed so far away only moments ago were now right in front of me.

King and Bear had Preppy by the shoulders. They hauled him against the opposite wall toward the bed. He screamed, loud and awful. The sound shot right through me. It wasn't until they wrestled him back onto the bed when he spoke actual words. “Motherf*ckers, get off me! I can’t. I can’t!” His screams turned into sobs, and I watched as his resistance slowly left his body. His eyes rolled back in his head, and his body went limp. After only a few seconds his chest began to rise and fall steadily, and he became a passed out pile of thin limbs hanging off the mattress.

The second I knew he was safe I darted from the room, my hands wrapped around my injured throat. I bolted out the front door, temporarily blinded by the sunlight, and by HIM.

“Wait!” Ray called from behind me, but I didn’t stop. One foot in front of the other until I was in the car and speeding down the road at twice the legal limit.

I pulled over into the first parking lot I came across. A drug store. I killed the engine and dropped my head onto the steering wheel. Sobs escaped me. Cries of both relief and confusion erupted from me like a volcano of pent-up emotion. After sitting there in the car for what seemed like only minutes, I finally gathered myself together enough to be able to sit up straight and check the clock. Nope, not a few minutes.