Page 63 of This Blood That Breaks Us

“You’re not going to share what it is, are you?”

“Nope. Secret. Come on.” Luke grabbed the collar of my shirt, and the world spun.

“Will, get the bottle!” I shouted.

“Got it, yourMost GloriousJackass.”

I blinked, then we were in another fancy room. They all looked the same, especially when I was drunk, but this one had a similar layout to ours. Bed on the bottom and a loft, but a lot more books and shit all over the ground. Luke hated clutter. He’d never let it fly.

“This isn’t Ezra’s room,” I said.

I knew because I’d been brought to his room many times to be scolded.

“Oh, you’re right,” Luke said, grabbing our bottle and taking another sip, then I did too.

“You took us to the wrong room?”

“The doors all look the same.”

“Wait, whose room is it?”

We all dispersed. I tripped over a stack of records on the floor. Every surface was covered in dust like it had been abandoned. I opened a wardrobe, and the smell of a familiar cologne jogged my memory.

“Akira.”

Luke and I shared a look, but there was no pain. The alcohol was doing its job to keep every bad feeling shrouded beneath numbness. I plucked a record from a suitcase record player.

“Akira listened to K-pop?” I snickered. “And Duran Duran?”

“Look at this.” Thane pulled a shirt from a drawer. Some boy band.

“I found a diary!” Luke held up a linen-bound notebook.

We scrambled toward the bed where Luke was sitting.

“Get your ass off me, Calem.” Will pushed me.

“I don’t think I can move.” I’d somehow lain across the laps of both Thane and Will in my mad dash to read the diary of some dead guy. “Yeah, I’m toast. Give me a sec.”

I lay my head on Luke’s arm because the room was spinning. “Tell us what it says.”

“It’s a lot of poems.”

Ashley loved it when I wrote poetry for her. Only, it was a little bit fucked because I was shit with words and didn’t actually write them. Luke helped me with all of them. I’d rifle off what I wanted to convey, then he’d take a little blue gel pen and scrawl it out on a piece of notepad paper. She loved it. I was eventually gonna tell her it wasn’t me. I wanted it to be me. I knew how I felt but not how to put it into words. It didn’t matter anymore.

“What do they say?”

“She is fortunes high. Marvel at the throne, and behold the coming of the prophecy.”

He flipped another page. “This one is just the phraseI adhere to The Divine Pathover and over again.”

“Blah. Blah. Blah,” I mumbled.

“And he called me an ‘altar boy.’ I fuckin’ hate this place.” Will shifted under me. “Move your ass or quit your wigglin’.”

Luke flipped another page. “There’s a drawing of a . . . I don’t know who that is.”

I snatched it without looking. “Let me guess, it’s the queen.”