chapter ten

My brain was pulsating when I regained consciousness. I didn't open my eyes but groaned over the nausea and pounding inside my skull. And before my brain could string together any thoughts or recollections, my stomach bubbled and my eyes shot open to look for the bucket on the side of my bed. The contents of my stomach burned on their way out and the sun that shone through my window made my skin feel hot. There was a lot in my stomach to begin with but I hiccuped and heaved until I spit something out.

In the middle of my puking and dry-heaving over the side of my bed, a warm hand was placed on the small of my back. At the touch, the cells in my body were electrified and I shot up and pulled my fist back and plunged it into the nose of the intruder.

Embry stumbled back, hands cupping his nose and groaning. At the sight of him, I gasped, cupping my mouth with my hands in surprise. And it all came back to me, throwing rum in that girls face, seeing Bear in the woods, crying on the ground until Quil called Embry. My face flushed and I felt so stupid I could cry at the memory of my own voice begging, don't leave. I figured Embry was pretty annoyed, going from me begging him to stay to punching him in the nose the next morning. "Fuck, I'm sorry! I forgot you were here."

"Ugh," he moaned, rubbing his nose. He looked up at me with glossy eyes and chuckled. "Damn, Remy, maybe you're the one on steroids."

Everything always happened too early in the morning, many hours before my brain was up to appropriate processing speeds. I had to take a minute to gape at Embry, who was standing in the middle of my room with gym shorts and a hoodie and messy hair and my face turned beat red at the memory of him carrying my limp body into my house and the question of where he slept last night. "You stayed all night?"

Now it was his turn to look sheepish, avoiding eye contact and taking a step back. "I was just worried. You threw up a lot last night and no one else is here and, I dunno, I just didn't want anything bad to happen." I stared at him with narrowed, skeptical eyes. "I just slept on the chair," he said quickly, gesturing to my desk chair, "and you asked me not to leave, so I thought it was okay."

"Alright," I settled on, knowing I didn't really have the right to feel outraged and also, I guessed I wasn't really that upset in the first place. There was something nice and warm about a boy I barely knew sleeping in an uncomfortable chair all night just so he could hold my hair back while I vomited. And there was something about the softness in Embry's face that made me think I didn't really have the capability of getting that mad at him. "Um, thanks, then, I guess."

Silence settled between the two of us and I stared at him, wondering if he was going to leave, or just continue to stand there. His mouth was puckered and brow scrunched and he looked at me with an unreadable expression before he spoke again. "Hey, can I just ask you something?"

Instantly, my stomach was filled with nerves, because though I remembered the big pieces of last night (which were embarrassing enough on their own), I was sure there were smaller, worse details that Embry remembered. "Uh, yeah, sure," I said hesitantly.

Before he spoke, I kept thinking in my head, please don't ask why I called for you, please don't ask why I called for you, because I didn't really have any sort of answer for that. I didn't even know why; all I knew that, in that moment, there was nothing I wanted more than to be with Embry and just talk to him, and I would have rather shoot myself in the fucking foot than say that to him. Worse than that, the feeling never really went away. "Um, last night, before you went to sleep, you said that you saw your brother."

My limbs felt weak and my jaw locked. "So what's your question?"

Embry sighed. "I was just wondering if you could like, I dunno, explain more? Like, what happened?"

I chewed on the inside of my cheek and looked around the room. Before I answered, I asked myself if I could trust Embry. Even though he was making more and more frequent appearances in my life, and he was the first thing on my mind when I started puking, I didn't really know him. And I had to keep reminding myself of that little fact, because when he was standing across from me and I was looking into his deep and dark eyes, I felt like I've know him for my whole life, like I'd known him in other lifetimes. "You won't tell anyone?" I asked.

"I won't tell a soul."

I shuffled to the edge of my bed and Embry sat back down on the chair. I took a deep breath and looked in his eyes because I knew that for whatever dumb reason they calmed me down. "I was outside with Bobby and her friends, and I was arguing with one of her friends and then while she was talking I looked past her and I just saw him there. And like, I knew it was him when I first saw him. Then he turned around and walked back into the woods and I followed him. That's why I was in the woods when Quil found me."

Embry's expression was stone cold. "Was there anything different about him?" he asked, voice sharp and jagged and unlike anything I had ever heard come out of his mouth before.

"What?"

He sighed and moved closer to me. "Like, anything about the way he looked? Was anything different about him? Like his eyes or something?"

I stared blankly at Embry. "I tell you I saw my dead brother alive and well in the woods and that's the first thing you ask me?"

Embry's eyes softened at my words. "Oh, shit, Remy," he let out a heavy breath, "are you okay?"

And I cursed myself, because his first question was a lot easier to answer than his second. Seeing Bear at the edge of the woods felt like a lot of different things, and all of the emotions were too fleeting to even catch onto. I didn't know if I should be hopeful or heartbroken or registering for a therapist. "I don't remember, because at that point I had an entire bottle of rum, and I didn't really get close to him," I answered, feeling a bit more reserved than before.

Embry bumped his fists into his knees while he kept his lips in a tight line. "Remy," he said, and then leaned back in the chair and pressed his palms into his knees. He leaned forward again and rubbed his eyes and it was like I could almost see the war he was raging against himself in his head. "I'll help you find him."

My eyes widened. "What?"

Embry leaned forward so his face was close to mine and his voice was soft and gentle like he always was. "I'm gonna help you find your brother. I''ll help you figure out what happened to him and where he went."

"And what if it wasn't real and it was just some hallucination I had?"

"Then I guess we'll find that out."

"And what if I say I don't need your help?"

"Then I would help you anyways."

There was blood in my mouth as I chomped off bits of my cheek. I didn't like how this was making me feel, or I didn't like that it was making me feel good. There was so much and it was so overwhelming and Embry just kept looking at me with those dumb glossy eyes and I wanted to trust him so badly. "Alright," I agreed.

"I promise I'll do whatever I can to help you figure this out, Remy," he said with such sincerity it made my mouth dry.

"Okay, but can you leave now? I rolled around in dirt and threw up everywhere last night so I'd really like to shower," I rushed, standing. I was starting to feel uncomfortable with the genuineness. There was this certain intimacy with which Embry said his words that made me feel vulnerable in front of him, like he had emotionally undressed me.

He stood with me. "Okay," he said with a warmness in his voice, and stared down at me for a moment before grabbing me in his arms and pulling me into the tightest hug I could imagine. His skin was scalding, and his hold on me so tight I thought he had cracked my back. I kept my arms down at my side while my cheek pressed against his chest. He pulled away from me, looking flustered. "Um, I'll see you later," he said with a little smile, and then jumped out my fucking window.

Embry Call made my head hurt.

The shower water was so hot it fogged up the mirror before I even stepped under the water. The hotter it was, the cleaner I felt. And as I scrubbed every spec of dirt off every inch of my body, I thought about Bear in the woods, and the probabilities and possibilities. There was one thing I knew for sure, that that was my brother. And from the way he moved and the shadow he cast, I was confident in the fact that it wasn't a hallucination. But I was also confident in the fact that a man with plastic gloves presented my entire family a pile of dirt covered bones they promised was Bear. And I couldn't deny that.

And even if those bones were someone else, some one else's son, there was no good explanation for Bear being stuck in the woods. He loved his family, he loved me, I knew that much. And even if by some weird circumstance, he got lost in the land he had lived and explored his entire life, there's no possible way that he went a whole year without anyone seeing him. The woods were littered with hunters and hikers and people sneaking around to smoke weed. He couldn't have been avoided for that long. And even further than that, if Bear was standing at the edge of the woods at someone's house after being lost in the woods for two years, he wouldn't turn around. Especially not after seeing me.

The only logical thought I could muster was that something happened to change him. Something got to him and twisted around his insides and fucked up his brains and made him different and that's the only thing that could have possibly made him walk away from me and when I thought about what those things could have been, I threw up again. I couldn't bear to imagine the fucked up things that had happened to him.

And I didn't want to get my hopes up, but I had settled on one definite thought, and that was that Bear was alive. My big brother was alive, and I was going to find out what happened to him.

My phone was ringing when I stepped out of the shower and I didn't have the number saved. I answered it with caution. "Hello?"

"Oh my god Remy, last night you were perfect!" the low and raspy voice of Bobby shouted into my ear. "I mean, the whole running off into the woods thing was a little weird, I'll admit, but almost no one noticed because Wendy was throwing a fucking fit. She left like, right after and so did Amber. God she's such a bitch. Anyways, it was great, I owe you one."

"No," I chided, "you owe me fifty-dollars."

There was a laugh on the other line. "Right, I didn't forget. Do you wanna hang out tonight? I'm kinda in the mood to go to Port Angeles, cause there's this new art-house film about this doctor who has to chose a member of his family to kill and I heard it's really good."

My head was spinning. "Um, I don't know if I'm still grounded or not."

"You said you were grounded until Friday. It's not Friday anymore. Okay? You're coming."

I groaned. "Why even ask if you're just gonna make me?"

"To be polite. I'll be over your place around six." And she hung up on me.

There must have been some weird trait about me that attracted forceful girls that liked to talk a lot. And then I thought of her.

Thinking of Kim was always a mistake, because when I thought of her, I didn't think of the girl with a raw voice and bloodshot, teary eyes. I thought of the girl who hugged me late at night in my bed, while I screamed and sobbed and cried over my brother's dead body. And the girl who listened to my long and probably boring rants about the screaming matches my parents got into. The girl who invited my to sleepover her house every weekend and watched Ghost Hunters with me even though she thought it was stupid, and laughed with me until she snorted at three in the morning over something dumb and forgettable. I thought about the girl she was before Jared.

I tugged at the ends of my wet hair and looked through the last couple texts she had sent me, begging me to talk to her. I promise I can fix this. You're my best friend. I miss you, Remy. Please call me back. I thought that maybe that girl was still in her somehow.

I typed out, Can we talk? And stared at the message for a long time before I erased the message and threw my phone down on the ground.

"Have you ever seen a movie with such perfect scoring? I mean, most horror movies use really sharp string instruments in every scene, but it didn't even feel like an intrusion on the scene like most scoring does. It just enhanced it so well."

"I didn't know you were so into movies," I said, sipping on the extra large slushie I got and didn't finish that made me get up to pee three times during the movie. "I appreciate the twenty-minute critical analysis though."

Bobby was bouncing down the sidewalk like physiological thrillers gave her an adrenaline rush. She wore this cute little plaid skirt that moved with her and her hair flowed behind her, straight and perfect. "I'm sorry I just haven't see a film that good in a while. I mean, it was like, the whole time you knew what was gonna happen, but you were hoping for something else. Like, imagine that? Imagine knowing you're gonna have to do something horrible to someone you love and there's nothing you can do to stop it?"

"Hmmm."

"Alright," Bobby said, exasperated, "if film's not your thing, what is?"

It was dark out and there was a lot of people on the streets. I felt uneasy. "I'm into philosophy."

"Okay, so give me your philosophical perspective on it. What does Remy the philosopher have to say about it?"

"I dunno, it's like one of those like, ethical thought experiments, I guess. Like, what's the most ethical thing to do in that situation, emotions aside. Is it more ethically justifiable to kill one member of the family to keep the others safe, or to do nothing, and let them all die?"

Bobby grinned at me. She was my height, and it was nice, for once, to line up perfectly with someone, instead of having to tilt my head back up at them. "So what's more ethically justifiable?"

I kicked a crumbled up bit of trash and bit on the straw. "Well, that depends on what you belief. Utilitarianism is one stance, which basically means everything you do has to serve utility. Like, every action you do has to help the most amount of people. So I'd kill one member of my family, doesn't matter which one, and serve the most amount of utility. If I was deontologist or believed in rights-based ethics, I wouldn't kill anyone, because what matters more was that I didn't violate anyone's rights, and my intentions in not killing them were pure."

"Yeah, but what do you believe?"

I shrugged. "I guess I'd pull the trigger. What about you?"

"I'll say that I would kill one of them, but I think that if it came down to, I wouldn't be able to do it. I don't think I'd have the ability to actually kill anyone, nevermind someone in my family, y'know? Like you said, it's like a thought experiment, but thought experiments are also so different from reality."

I had to laugh. "Yeah, dumbass, that's why they're called thought experiments."

Bobby pursed her lips and gave me a playful little shove with a giggle but I was sobering up at the light of flashing blue lights and the crowd of people a little bit behind the parking lot her car was at. "Wait," I said, grabbing onto her arm and halting her next to me. She faltered, looking over the cop cars. We shared a look, and then rushed over to the scene.

There was a thick wall of people blocking the center of the commotion, and I stood on my toes to try and get a glimpse at what happened. "What's going on?" Bobby asked me, holding onto my wrist.

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head.

With Bobby attached at the wrist, I pushed past the crowd and wedged my way up to the front. But when I saw limp pale hand that had dangled out from a white bag, I felt like gravity was pushing down extra hard on my shoulders. "Holy shit," Bobby gasped beside me, tightening her grip on wrist. "Oh my god, Remy."

The skin was so pale. I couldn't stop looking at it. It was unnaturally white, like every drop of blood had been drained. I felt dizzy. "We gotta get out of here," I said to Bobby, feeling breathless.

She nodded. "Let's go."

We didn't say much to each other on the car ride home. Her knuckles were tight against the steering wheel, and my throat feel dry. "Well that sucked," I mumbled after a while.

"At least the movie was good," she said, not looking away from the road. "You know I gotta say, that was the most eventful night I've had in a while." She chuckled. "And even considering the dead body, it was still more fun than anything else I could've been doing tonight."

"Did you see how white the hand was? It was like there was no blood or anything."

"Remy, that's just what white people look like." I gave her a sharp look. "But you're right, I guess."

I could see the moon from the passenger window, and I watched it as we drove down the smooth pavement. I wanted to focus on something else but I kept thinking about the limpness and the whiteness and maybe Bobby was right but it didn't feel natural. Or maybe I was just unsettled about seeing a corpse in the middle of the street and I wondered how that person could've died on a busy city street on a Saturday night without anyone doing anything to stop it.

We didn't talk again until she pulled into my driveway and said, "I promise the next time we hang out, there won't be a dead body."

I hopped out of the car. "Then I'm not coming," I joked with a weak little smile, and slammed her car door shut.

another chapter cause i can't stop writing. what do we think? also, i've been thinking about writing a chapter from embry's perspective. let me know if that's something yall would like or not. im excited for ur feedback! lov u