THIRTEEN
Masen steals a car. Not a nice car either. A beat up Cadillac the color of curdled milk, seats gone squashy as the upholstery leaks out of the cracked leather. He hurtles down the highway like a bullet from a gun and I'm trying not to think about what the fuck we're gonna do. We have precisely thirty two minutes before the police catch on that something shady went down. I still don't know why they had him locked away, but I'm pretty sure I blew up my house.
I don't even remember why I did it.
"You did it to prove something," Masen says and guns the engine.
"To who?"
"Yourself. Do you ever think about dying?" He flicks his cigarette out the window, a fire wash of sparks exploding behind us.
"A lot," I say but he shakes his head.
"You shouldn't. You shouldn't waste yourself like that." He sounds disgusted, like someone ran over his dog without stopping and left it all smashed and bleeding in the road.
"You can't appreciate life without it," I tell him and his face goes rigid, monstrous with rage.
"You really feel that way?"
"Fuck. My life is an inside joke and I'm not in on the punch line. Death would be a relief at this point."
"You want death? You've got it," Masen growls at me and jerks the wheel.
Spasm, hard to the right.
The car swerves into oncoming traffic.
I scream.
FOURTEEN
A car blares its horn and barely misses our bumper, hissing as it hurtles by with mere centimeters to spare. Screaming. Wailing within inches of life and death.
"This is your life, Edward, and it's ending! Every second!" Masen yells over the wind and the horns. A second car swerves to miss us and then another and it's only a matter of time before we end up cat food on the freeway. I yell at him to stop, but he just keeps smoking and laughing and daring those other cars to hit us.
All I can see are headlights.
All I can hear is Masen's manic laugh.
All I can see are fiery explosions of metal and shrapnel sprays of glass.
Maybe I'm just thinking of my house.
"Think about it Edward. The special-snowflake lies you've been fed, it's all just for show." He turns to look at me and for a second I think his eyes are bleeding. Whatever he's on must be kicking in because he's gone bloodless and pale and his eyes are wizard of oz green in pools of broken heart red.
"Death," he says. "Death is the true masterpiece."
I lunge for the wheel and try to yank us back but he locks his grip and I'm just pulling on nothing.
"Only in death can you finally appreciate joy," he shouts. "Or love or lust or just fucking the shit out of some girl because it feels so goddamn good. Death is the great leveler and life is no good without it."
Masen is preaching as though he has an audience. I look in the back seat but there's no one there and through the back window I catch sight of the pileup building behind us. Damming the freeway with a warped wall of wreckage. Destruction behind us and turmoil ahead. We are the bright little center of the universe. Untouchable, infallible. Hurtling toward some sort of glory.
Everything else is just smoldering shit.
I try to pull on the wheel again and Masen glares at me, face flashing dark and light and dark from the blazing high beams of the oncoming cars. He sighs over the wind and finally twists the wheel, nearly breaking my wrist to speed off the freeway. Flies the wrong way up an exit ramp. Blows through two red lights and three stop signs, near disaster in every intersection before screeching to halt in a dark alleyway, killing the engine.
The silence is deafening.
"Was that my near death experience?" I croak, breathing hard enough to punch my lungs right through my ribs and Masen just flashes me a sardonic smile.
"No, Edward. That was your near life experience."
FIFTEEN
We ditch the car and end up at a bar. Some shit hole in the wall with a crusted hooker patrolling the pavement out front. Masen struts in like he owns the place but he makes me order for both of us.
He also makes me pay.
It takes six beers and thirty seven minutes for me to really begin to appreciate the vast pile of shit I was now in. I had it pretty good, but then I went and fucked it up. I bought that sofa, that dining room table with eight chairs and an overpriced television. Sixty three square inches, too overwhelming to even look at. Even a thousand-thread-count duvet made by kids somewhere in China that started fraying the moment I opened the box. No matter my shitty job or my fucked up head or my unwavering lack of intimacy with anyone other than myself, I had my comfortable, boring home.
Despite everything else, I had that Ethan Allen couch. The Henkle Harris table.
My couch now looks like something they pulled out of Hiroshima and my table is in the trees.
"I fucking blew up my house," I say after a while.
"That's all just petty bullshit, Edward. Your couches and tv sets. Your clothes. Your precious, mundane human crap," Masen huffs. "Stop your fucking moaning. It's time to evolve. You talk like that damn sofa fucking owns you. You should not be owned by your life. You should own it."
"You are not your house," Masen says and I obviously hate my house.
"You are not your job," Masen says and I really hate my job.
"You are not your fucking khakis," Masen says and I hate my fucking khakis.
If I had a girlfriend, I would probably hate her too.
SIXTEEN
Masen lets me get through another beer and four stinging shots of whiskey. He's been trying to give me a pep talk but he's the worst cheerleader ever.
"You gotta shake this off, man. You're just wallowing in your own shit right now and your life is so much fucking bigger than that. You are going to waste."
"Tell me something I don't know," I grumble into my beer.
Masen shrugs. "Ok. I'm a vampire," he says like it's nothing.
"No fucking way."
He pulls back his lips and bares his teeth at me. Pearly white. Gleaming. A sharp set of canines dip into the black cavern of his throat. He hisses at me, tongues his fangs, and pulls his lips down over them. He looks so normal.
"Am I drunk?"
"Very."
"You just showed me your fangs."
"I did."
SEVENTEEN
"Are you allowed to do that?"
"Do what?"
"Show me those." I wave drunkenly at Masen.
"Not technically. No."
"Are there rules?"
"More than you would think."
"Tell me."
"The first rule is that you can't talk about it."
"You can't?"
"No. If you do, I'll fucking kill you."
"Ok," I gulped. "What's the next rule?"
"You can't fucking talk about it," Masen growls.
"But that's the first rule again."
"It's also the second."
"They're the same?"
"Yes. Because it's that important."
"Ok, what's the third rule? Please don't tell me not to talk about it."
"If you kill someone, it's all over."
"You don't kill anyone?"
"Not unless they talk about it." Masen almost smiles, but doesn't.
EIGHTEEN
We drink until I'm nearly falling off the stool. I throw up when the cool outside air hits my face, too hot and too cold. It's been so fucking long since I've slept. Masen stands across the lot and smokes while I empty my stomach, acid burning ragged up my throat and coming out nuclear orange. He flicks the butt away after I've wiped my face and eyes me like he wants to eat me.
He might.
"I want you to bite me as hard as you can."
"No!" I roll my eyes. I might be drunk, but I'm not that drunk.
"Just do it."
"I can't fucking do that. I'm not gonna bite you."
"Then hit me." He starts bouncing on his toes like a boxer.
"Why?"
"I just -" he pauses. "I just need you to do it. Just do it." He bounces some more and demands again. "Hit me."
"My hand." The guy looks like he's carved from marble. I'll definitely break my hand on his face.
"Fine." Masen rolls his eyes and swings. He clocks me in the jaw hard enough to make me see stars and spring that shitty filling right out of my molar. A cheap mercury version and I spit it out in a bloody gob between my feet.
"Ow! You fucker!" I yowl and clutch my jaw, lunging at him with my own fist. Fuck if his face will break it or not.
It does.
"Did you do it?" Masen is still poised for the hit, eyes closed and fists clenched as I clutch my broken hand.
"Yeah, I fucking did it," I hiss. "You couldn't feel it? At all?"
He looks really sad for half a second before he comes at me again in a snarl of fists and those fucking fangs. For a moment I'm sure he's going to bite me but he just hits me again. Flattens me with a single punch and I reel away, feet gone numb, teeth through my cheek and mouth full of blood before I even hit the concrete.
He wakes me up by slapping me hard across my face, double whammy, and when he picks me up the world is looping endless repeat to a steady, high-pitched whine.
"You ok?" He pats me down.
"I can taste my brain," I tell him. "Do it again."
NINETEEN
Masen lives in a fucking shit hole.
Buried in an unfriendly forest, dark as fucking night. It was probably a nice family home at some point but whoever took care of it had left a long time ago. I was almost sure Masen was squatting.
The house smells musty like something caught on fire and crawled under the couch to die. The carpets are gone, wallpaper torched and peeling. There's something that looks like a bloodstain on the floor in my new bedroom. The water runs brown, which explains his ever present grime and careless, worn-through clothing.
Only half of the lights work, but he can basically see in the dark.
I sit at the kitchen table and hiss through the sting of rubbing alcohol against my broken-open skin while Masen roller skates through a fine carpeting of pebbled glass from all the broken-out windows.
TWENTY
I go to the hospital out of habit.
It's Thursday and nothing has really changed but everything is different. Now, I'm not sleeping because of the pain in my side and the fact that my face feels like the steaming hot end of a nuclear missile. Now, instead of shitty coffee I drink my own blood.
The constant drip-drip-drip down the back of my throat.
I spot Bella loitering out front before the group meets to wallow in their collective torment. In twenty minutes we'll be asked to pair up and normally I'd sob my face off between Emmett's pumped up pecs, but I can't do that with her here. I can't do what I want to do, which is grab her and shake her hard enough to rattle her brain. Scream in her lying, smoke-filled face.
You heartless fake.
You wicked, bloodsucking girl.
Fucking tourist.
"Why are you doing this?" I ask her instead.
"What happened to your face?" she snaps, puffing on her cigarette. She's not even listening to me, just eyeing my mouth and running her tongue across her lips, chapped and peeling, between mouthfuls of smoke. My face is a fucking train wreck. Masen damn near broke my cheek and definitely shattered my nose. I'm wearing a clown mask of blue and red bruises.
"You don't need this, not like I do," I tell her. I want to tell her that it makes her no better than Masen. That it makes her a fucking vampire, but instead I tell her that it's the only thing I have that makes any sense anymore.
"You sound like a junkie." She blows smoke in my face and I wave it away.
"Why do you keep coming back?" I ask her and she ignores me again, just like Masen.
"Is that your blood?" She points at me with the smoldering end of her cigarette. I glance down at myself, a constellation of bright red splatters against the fabric, and shrug.
"Some of it."
TWENTY ONE
We go back to the parking lot every week, Masen and I, and every week there are more of them. One. Then two. Then twenty. White collar business suits and blue collar grunts. All of them itching to find release with their fists buried in someone's face. None of them alone in their chaotic flailing and broken bones.
Masen makes up rules. Maybe it's a vampire thing. He orchestrates every meeting. Names himself the ringleader of this fucked up little circus we're putting on. No shirts. No shoes. Two guys to a fight. If you knock someone out, the fight is over. If it's your first night, you can't fight.
And his favorite rule of all, don't fucking talk about it.
I don't sleep. I barely go to work any more. I don't go to the hospital.
I beat up strangers for sick, seductive pleasure of it.
Masen never fights. He just stands off to the side and watches.
TWENTY TWO
"What is this?"
My boss is wearing grey, which means that today is Wednesday. His shirt is pink, which means that it's the second Wednesday of the month. I haven't slept in thirteen days.
I smile at him, sure that my teeth are stained red. My eardrum is freshly burst and I'm having trouble swallowing. Half of my face is throbbing hot enough to scald and I'm certain that at least four of my ribs are fractured to the point of disintegration.
If my body is the hourglass, I am the unstoppable drainage of sand.
He's holding a piece of paper. Masen's rules. The ones he said no one would remember and asked me to type up. The ones that came out in a glob of meaningless symbols strung together in chrysalis haikus.
The kind that wither up and die before they've even unfolded their wings.
"What have I told you about wasting company resources?" He asks me and I snatch the paper away and I tell him that it's nothing.
I can't fucking talk about it anyway.
"You look like shit. Are you on drugs?"
I wish. If I was, none of this would be happening right now. I hope that one day my boss will show up on Thursday night so that I can beat the fuck out of him. I can practically taste his blood when his cheek bursts open and can almost feel the gummy give of his bones under my fist.
He's not even old enough to be my father, but he talks to me like I'm ten.
"Pull yourself together, kid. And go wash the blood off your face, you're freaking out the girls."
TWENTY THREE
I lose another fight.
Same old, same old.
The guy who works the graveyard shift of a liquor store beats me into the ground like an abandoned rag doll. My stuffing comes loose and the threads holding my eyes on break.
He's an overachiever and I leave with a cracked face, a ruptured spleen and a re-broken nose.
TWENTY FOUR
Bella shows up at the house just as Masen is setting my nose.
Every time you try to fix a broken bone, the resistance is magnified and by the time you get to the third or fourth or even the fifth reset, everything fights against you. I can hear the cartilage grind painstakingly back into place, echoing through my eardrums. We both look up at the harassing sound of her knock bulldozing through the house. I wave Masen away as I hold my bleeding nose and head for the door.
"Stay here." It's the first time I've ever told him to do something and not the other way around. He scowls at me.
"Why?"
"Just do it, Masen," I bark and try to gulp back the blood that's pouring down my face.
"Are you ok?" She asks me and I glare at her as much as my broken face will allow. I could tell her I crashed my car. Fell down the stairs. Slammed my face into the wall enough times to crush the bridge of my nose and stain my face with blood red bruises.
"What are you doing here?" I ask her instead.
"You didn't even come inside last time. Did you find someone else to cry on, sugar?"
"Fuck you, I have something better."
"I can see that. Tell me." She leans in the doorway, trying to peer down the hallway. I know for a fact that Masen is right around the corner, butt ass naked except for a pair of kitchen gloves and my old slippers.
Covered in my blood.
"I can't talk about it," I tell her, which is the truth.
"It's another group, isn't it? The insomniacs weren't pathetic enough for you? What is it this time?"
"It's exclusive. Not just anyone can join." I hiss and try to choke down the overwhelming urge to push her off the porch. Masen doesn't have a rule about girls, but I'm pretty sure I could make one up if I needed to.
"You look hot, all busted up." She eyes me for a moment, licking her lips and scanning my face in all its twisted, swollen glory. "Come back. It's not any fun without you."
"I'll think about it." I slam the door in her face. Not as hard as I want to. Masen is standing in the hall when I turn around. Still naked, still gloved and bloodied and he asks the very question I hope he won't.
"Is that her?"