ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(4)

He paused his thumbs over the controller. He knew exactly what I was going to ask without me having to finish my question. “Just because you like to do something doesn’t mean you should do it,” he said, repeating the same sentence he always started with when this subject came up. “Is it getting worse?”

I tipped my chin down and gave Cody a single nod. He was staring at the TV, my pink character paused mid-jump. Cody shut his eyes tightly and sighed. He pressed his lips together. After another beat, he started the game up again like nothing ever happened. All traces of worry gone from his expression. Without looking over to me, he replied, “We’ll figure that out, too. Just promise me you won’t tell anyone else. ESPECIALLY your parents.” He finally looked over to me after my character’s life ended on the same hill his green one had. “Seriously. I mean it. If your parents ever found out about it, if ANYONE ever finds out, they won’t just take you to head shrinkers, they’ll…they’ll lock you away.”

“I know,” I said. Google had told me just as much.

Cody reached over, intertwining his fingers with mine. A sense of relief washed over me as comforting as aloe on a bad sunburn. “As long as I have you. I’ll be okay,” I said.

Cody nodded. “That’s right. I won’t ever let them take you from me, but you gotta promise that I’m the only person in the world who will ever know.” He squeezed my hand. “You gotta promise. You gotta say it.”

“Just you,” I agreed. “I promise.” The thought of being taken away didn’t bother me as much as the thought of being away from Cody did.

“Together,” Cody said again with another squeeze of my hand. He flashed one of his superhero kind of smiles before picking up his controller and continuing our game.

I didn’t know what love was, but I thought that how I felt about Cody might be as close as I could ever come to something like love. What I did know for sure was that I wasn’t going to let him down.

Maybe, if I did a really good job faking it, the worried look on my parents’ faces might finally turn back to the happy faces from the pictures lining the hallway.

Pictures from before I was born.

Mom and Dad had been putting their own lives on hold more and more in order to “deal” with their troubled daughter. The doctors’ appointments, the sleepless nights worrying over me, the shared glances at the dinner table they thought I never saw. But I did.

I always saw.

It was for those reasons and hundreds more why they could never find out the truth.

I didn’t want to think what it would do to them if they ever found out that their one and only daughter…yearned to kill.





CHAPTER TWO




Hope

Sixteen years old


Through the moon roof, the stars twinkled overhead in the clear night sky. The tall, thin, pine trees rustled overhead, bending down at extreme angles even though the breeze was slight at best. Crickets serenaded us from the nearby brush. A nearby sprinkler shot out from the ground, hissing to life, filling the air with the scent of sulfur, which to me always smelled like rotten eggs. From the center console, some old country love song played on Cody’s iPhone.

It was all mocking me. All of it.

Even the f*cking crickets were a reminder that I was a failure.

At life. At love.

At friendship.

At normalcy.

“Here, turn around,” Cody said. I twisted as much as I could in the small backseat. Cody zipped up my dress, snaring a few of my hairs that had fallen free from the pins. He planted a kiss on the nape of my neck.

Still nothing.

I took a deep breath and tried to remember that Cody was my best friend. My ONLY friend. I trusted him. Nothing was going to change between us.

Except that was a lie, because everything was about to change. For him. For me.

Because I was leaving.

Tonight.

The second I turned around to face him, Cody was going to know the truth. I couldn’t hide it, especially not from him. He’d always seen through my lies and that night was no exception.

“Hope?” he asked in a whisper, his excitement over what we’d done moments before in the backseat of his Honda, in the middle of the closed Caloosa State National Park, completely deflated from his voice when our eyes met.

I flashed Cody a small smile, hoping against all odds that maybe he couldn’t see what I was feeling inside.

But he always did.

I was a horrible actress and an abominable liar, but when I told Cody I was leaving Lilly Heights for good after prom, he wanted me to try one more thing, for him. Truth was that I wanted to give it one last try too. The normal thing. I owed him that much. I owed myself that much.

So we did what normal teenagers did after the prom.

And during, I felt nothing.

And after, I felt nothing.

“Hope?” Cody asked again, studying my face.

“I’m here, I’m with you,” I said, trying my hardest to turn my fake smile into a real one, because deep down I wished it was real. I looked down to my lap and twisted my hands, picking at my French manicure.

“Bullshit!” Cody snapped, drawing my attention back up to his face and eyes, which reflected a mixture of hurt and anger. I’d known him since he moved in next door when I was four years old and never before had I seen him so distressed. He was my best friend.