Page 70 of Dirty Roulette

I follow the trail, and the screaming grows louder by the second.

I pass the opening of the women's bathroom with shrill cries. I storm in to see Payton pressed against the wall, with both hands wrapped around Brittni’s wrist. She’s holding something sharp.

Payton shakes all over, fighting to get it away from her face.

They scream at each other. Payton headbutts Brittni, spinning herself around and slamming Brittni's hand against the wall.

“Help me!" Her voice trembles. "Someone! Please!” She's struggling to get a knife out of Brittni’s hands. “She’s gonna kill me!”

“Stop! Brittni, Stop!” I race over, the knife swinging in all directions, and I grab Brittni’s arm as quickly as I can.

“Drop the knife!” Using both hands, I try to stabilize Brittni’s arm, but her adrenaline must be pumping with how strongly she fights back, and the knife punctures my shoulder pads forcing my back to crash into the wall, and she yanks it out with her red rimmed eyes quivering.

“No! It should have been her!” Brittni shrieks in my face. I hold her arms as firmly as I can, reaching for the base of the knife and ripping it out of her grip, finger by finger as she breaks her windpipes open.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her! You have to believe me!” I snatch the knife and chuck it across the floor, and it slides under one of the bathroom stalls. I wedge myself between them.

Brittni stumbles back into the wall, crumbling to the floor, with blood splatters on her white shoes. “I didn’t mean to!” Brittni fists a handful of her hair, her chest heaving in and out as she slams her head to the back of the wall and sobs.

Out of instinct, I cradle Payton in my arms, cupping the back of her head with my palm as we step away. Even through my football gear, I feel her heart beating. Footsteps stomp down the hallway and officers round the corner into the bathroom with guns pointed directly at all three of us.

“Suspect with a weapon has been located!” One talks into the radio hooked to his vest. “Stand up! Put your hands in the air!”

***

Tires roll along the asphalt of an ambulance flashing their lights and leaving the stadium parking lot. They managed to stabilize Mr. Clorox’s condition, but he was stabbed four times. His real name is Patrick. All this time I just called him Fatso, and a brittle regret digs deep into my lungs.

Guests were forced to leave, and the game was postponed until further notice.

Brody is loaded up in the back of a police vehicle in cuffs, and he’s kicking the metal bars inside the police car. Brittni fights against the hobble restraint as police yell at her to calm down, shoving her into another patrol car.

Payton sits on the edge of another ambulance with an ice pack resting on her lips. Officers have stood next to her, taking down notes and asking questions I can’t hear for the last twenty minutes.

I wanted them to stop hovering over her for two seconds, but a medic needed to be sure the knife didn’t puncture my skin. I told them that the padding caught the blow, but they insisted.

When police stroll back to their vehicles, Payton is alone and I finally take the hard steps over to her.

My hands rest in the pockets of my jersey.

A brittle ache sits in the back of my throat, tearing through the warm meaty flesh in my chest. “Hey...” I say, biting off the dry skin on my lips to the point I taste them bleeding.

“Hi Crab...” she says back, swallowing hard but not daring to look me in the eyes. She’s holding it all in.

“Je t'ai trouvé,” I say, tilting my head to the side to catch her eyes and hoping she might meet mine.

“You always find me.” Her lips tremble, and she pushes herself off the back of the ambulance and in two seconds she collapses into me. Her fingers dig into my jacket as she buries her head into my chest.

I run a hand through her disheveled hair kissing her forehead. A stench of iron stains her cheer uniform, and I can’t tell if it’s her blood or not. Mascara and eyeliner smudge down her cheeks. There are bruises under her eyes, and I can see the fingerprints on her wrist from the struggle.

“I should have gotten there sooner... I’m so sorry,” I stammer, my voice breaking like burnt skin. I stare into the darkness of the parking lot. Other team members hang around surrounded by officers.

“I didn’t think she would go that crazy!” I say and gather the courage to look Payton in the eyes, they glisten with it pooling at the rims. She uses the back of her hand to wipe her face. There is even blood on her arms. It starts to hit hard. “I love you, I'm so sorry.”

She bites her bottom lip, her cheeks burn red. “I know you do.” Her bottom lip trembles and she sucks in a deep breath, her chest hitching as she lets out a quiet cry. “I just wanna go home.” There is begging laced in her voice, but I don’t think the police are done talking to her.

“I’ll take you home soon, I promise.”

“Excuse me...” An officer says behind me, his boots crunching underneath the gravel.

Barbed wire wraps around my lungs and heart as I clench down harder onto Payton’s shoulder as if someone else is going to try to rip her from me.

“You’re Sebastian Henderson?” He swallows, and his lips press together.

“That’s me...”

“May I have a word?”

I clear my throat. “Yeah...”

Something awful settles in my stomach with the way the officer asks the question.

A dreadful voice in my head tells me to prepare myself now.

It’s lodged into my cranium like a bullet.

It’s the cold sad expression on the officer’s face as he holds his belt and the soft and slow movements of his footsteps crunching on the gravel as he positions himself.

“We tried going to your parent’s residence, but no one was there and...” He starts and runs a hand against his face. “It’s your sister...” He pauses for a moment running a hand over his five-o-clock shadow.

It’s those words. The way he says it with care and the sadness leaking off his tone.

She’s dead, I just know it. A crown of thorns placed on top of her head.

Payton’s grip tightens around me, like her lungs are being constricted as much as mine.

It’s like atoms stop fusing, I’m drowning in the trenches of the Atlantic sea.

Everything grows heavy, my brain fogging over wanting to shut down entirely.

His eyes are fragile like spilling the truth is the hardest part of the job.

“We found her. She’s alive...” The officer clears his throat.

I can’t breathe. There’s no air. Just water pooling into my lungs. I’m sucking in all the oxygen in the world.

“Alive...” Payton stutters out the word, and she clings to my arms as I weep.

“We’ve been working under the radar and received a call earlier tonight from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

She woke up, and she was talking. From the incident tonight, we have reasonable belief that Brittni Thomas attempted to take her life.

She was medevaced the night of the concert.

No one could identify her in the condition she was in.

She was asking for you, and Payton... but more adamant for someone named Noah. ”

“Ryder! She’s alive!”

“Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, God!” I weep out the words. The weight on my chest is being lifted. I grasp Payton by the cheeks kissing her on the lips and she cries with me, with the same smile of relief.

***

We drove to the hospital the second we rounded everyone up. The Jeep cramped with all four of us – Payton, Noah, and Mom. We took turns throughout the night to switch who was driving. I start counting the white dotted lines, and each set of bright headlights passing us in the opposite direction.

Even when we switched, I still didn’t sleep.

My eyelids would close, but the hum of the engine and the tires rolling across the road kept me awake.

The minutes left on our GPS did us no justice as time stood still.

My thoughts keep going to Charlie. When she was first found, they checked her in as a Jane Doe in critical condition.

Once she stabilized, UC Davis Medical Center thought it would be best to transfer her to a specialist in LA.

Trees zip past us in blurry patches, and the sun started to rise once we hit LA.

Traffic is light and we get mere glimpses of the oceanfront before getting deeper into the city.

When I finally roll up into the hospital, I place the Jeep in park and the car sits in pure silence.

Payton’s eyes are far away, as she stares at the lot filled with a different assortment of vehicles and people strolling down the sidewalk to the double door leading up to the hospital entrance.

Mom leads, holding a death grip on her purse as she stares at the map and follows each direction to Charlie’s room.

Payton laces her fingers into mine when we walk along the squeaky clean floor with fluorescent lights reflecting off the linoleum.

Nurses stroll down the hallways rolling patients in wheelchairs.

Doctors in their white coats make rounds as we wander through the hallways.

“You seriously only have tapioca pudding? Y'all got people dying up in here and you don’t have chocolate pudding!” There it is, her snooty voice, and I feel the smile perking up on my lips. “You gotta be shitting me. I don’t wanna eat no slimy-ass balls.”

I step into the room and Payton’s fingers tighten around mine.

Mom’s eyes water as her purse drops off her shoulder to the floor.

The nurse huffs, throwing her hands on her waist as Charlie continues to rant about the pudding on her food tray.

We must have been standing there for a whole minute before Charlie’s eyes finally dart in our direction and she sees us.

I never thought I’d hear her complaining again, or see her being the typical obnoxious little sister with no manners. The biggest smile forms on her lips, and I find myself choking up.

Bruises still scatter across her face. Her nose was battered with cuts. There is swelling underneath her eyes and a set of stitches on the side of her forehead. “Sebastian!” She kicks the thin hospital sheets and scoots to the edge of the bed, “Payton! Oh my God, oh my God!”

“You can’t be getting up!” The nurse lectures her, but Charlie’s doing it anyway.

“Mom!”

Charlie’s cheeks redden as she scampers across the floor with socks too big for her tiny feet.

She grasps the IV pole tangled in wires and tubes.

Her hands paw for my shirt dragging me into a hug, pulling Payton with her and Mom.

Her arms aren’t big enough to hold us all, but it’s the best hug and probably the only one she’s given me in the past ten years.

Noah steps in with a hand resting in the pockets of his skinny jeans and a small bouquet of flowers in the other. Charlie gasps as she whispers, “Noah?”

We step aside, as she wraps her arms around his neck. I forgot about the backside of hospital gowns and I’m granted a view of her white ass. She kisses him on the lips and he is gentle enough to stroke her puffy cheeks.

“Hey trouble,” Noah smiles as he says those words.

“I’m so sorry, I’m sorry,” she buries her head into his chest as he cradles her head with the palm of his hand.

“You don’t need to apologize to me. I’m just grateful we’ve found you,” Noah says to her.

We don’t chat about the concert. Not a word is said about what happened to her.

We listen to the rant about the gross food they’ve been trying to feed her.

The doctor ended up pulling Mom outside of the room, and I only caught some bits of Charlie’s condition and understood something about a coma and that there is memory loss from the head trauma.

She’ll need physical therapy, but the rest is muffled with mmhmms and okays.

Payton and Noah agree to take the Jeep and grab something to eat other than trashy hospital food. I sit on the edge of a plastic chair, hunched over as Charlie studies the remote in her hands struggling to change the channel on the fat-boxed television planted on the wall.

She smacks the back of the remote, grumbles, and throws her head into the pillow. “It might need new batteries, let me see.” I push myself up and take the remote attempting to change the channel myself. I have to press hard on each button to activate the TV guide.

“Please tell me Payt’s your girlfriend now.” Charlie clears her throat and I stare at the channel numbers and all the movie titles in small print. I turn to her, and she dips her head to the right, smiling, her pale skin causing me to swallow hard.

I drop my eyes to the floor, staring at my sneakers and listening to the soft beeping of her heart monitor. “I might love her more than you do.” I give her a brief half-smile and see her toothy grin in return. I scroll through the different shows and click on a channel having a marathon of Friends.

“You can’t beat me.” She jabs a finger into her chest. “I grew up being her big sister, don’t you forget it. I’ll always love her more.”

I chuckle and place the remote down on the mattress next to her. “I didn’t realize loving her was a competition.”

“Promise not to fuck it up.” She holds up her pinky wiggling it at me.

“I think you’ve known the entire time she’s been the one for me,” I say, wrapping my pinky around hers.

“So you’ll make her my sister for real?” she asks.

“Yeah, if she lets me.” I shrug my shoulders, sitting against the edge of the mattress, and stare at the plain wall with the shadows of the blinds swaying side to side.

Charlie’s eyes glue to the television and the subtitles popping up on the screen. “I’m sorry for being a complete bitch... I...”

“You had every right to be upset, and you don’t need to fill me in on the gaps of Roulette, and what the game put you through, but just know, Payton did a number on Brody. He’ll never haze anyone again,” I say.

“About that...” She curls her lips under her front teeth like she’s debating on what to say. Her eyes wander all over the plain white hospital room.

“What?” I ask.

“I had pretty bad amnesia. I couldn’t really even figure out my name.

..” Charlie scratches the edge of her hairline and sucks in a deep breath.

“Some cranky old man in the other room really likes football and it happened to be your game. I heard Noah singing and it all came back. My whole life fell back into my chest. The nurses couldn’t get me to calm down, I was screaming about what happened to me and what Brody did. ..”

“And seeing the game brought it all back?” I scrunch my brows together.

“Yeah, it’s kinda weird how our brains are wired. My missing person flyer popped up, and I guess I should be dead.” The different pictures from the television screen reflect in her irises and there is a hint of sadness in them.

“You are alive, that’s all I could ask for.”