Page 14 of This Might Hurt

I know what it is before she lays it out on the table.

This is really fucking unfair. I have to pick and choose when to look at this photo.

It’s been three months since Diane helped Lena mail me one of her senior pictures, a glossy printed photo like no one makes anymore, and I still haven’t gotten used to it.

When I see it, I hear the monitors beeping in her ICU room, my mom sobbing, the feeling of my dad dragging me out of the room without letting me say goodbye.

I cross my arms on the tabletop and tuck my nose in the crook of my arm.

“She looks just like you.” I can hear Ramona’s sad smile. She can’t tell I’m staring at the red clay tiled floor instead of the picture.

“Really? That sucks for her.” I’ve never met the girl in that photo, even though she has my sister’s eyes.

Her brilliant, dimpled smile feels familiar, but her thin face looks tired and mature, like she grew up five years in the space of one.

Her waist-length brown hair has been cut to skim her shoulders, and she’s wearing a soft blue wrap dress that doesn’t get in the way of the thick strap around her middle.

She told me the best part of her motorized wheelchair, the one I helped pay for by cleaning truck cabs and stealing their pills and cash, is that our parents don’t always get to decide where she goes anymore.

The chair isn’t the part I can’t handle. It’s the way I never got a chance to watch her change, to rest my head against her shoulder and listen to her explain what her new life looks like. We’ve shared everything together since the day she was born—except this.

“She had to repeat her senior year.” Words leak helplessly out of me like a broken tap that I can’t seem to shut off.

She’s the sunshine princess of our family, and I’m the mediocre first try that didn’t turn out like anyone wanted.

But I never minded because I had to exist so that she could come into the world.

“She’s gonna graduate in a few weeks and go to Montana State in the fall to become a youth therapist.”

“She sounds very strong.” Ramona hums thoughtfully. “I bet she learned some of that from her big brother.”

My bruised eye throbs as I quickly reach out and fold up the photo without looking at it, then shove it in my back pocket. “Can we…um—” I grab my spoon and start hacking my cold spaghetti into smaller and smaller pieces until it’s more like a paste.

“I got the newest Thursday Murder Club book last weekend,” she offers effortlessly, like the conversation never happened. “I stole it for us before it goes on the shelves.” She claims that ordering books she wants to read first is her right as the town’s only librarian.

It’s like one o’clock now. She must be exhausted. But I can’t make myself tell her to wait until tomorrow. “Thank you,” I mumble, stirring the noodle-paste in circles until Ramona gently pries the bowl away and goes to the sink to wash it out.

“Go say hello to Buckley. He missed you.” Her bossy tone wraps me up like a gentle blanket that warms me and holds me still until I can’t fight anymore. “I’ll be right there.”

The giant holes in my socks are driving me crazy, so I yank them off and chuck them in the trash, then shuffle on bare feet into the living room.

In the yellowy light of two floor lamps, I flop on the big green antique couch and poke a pile of knit blankets with my finger. “Hey, Buck. You in there?”

A massive gray and white cat squirms out of his lair at the sound of my voice and arches his back with a wide yawn.

He glares at me, his fur all mussed, then headbutts my bicep with a thunderous purr.

No one knows how old he is, not even Ramona, but she says he’s been around at least twenty years and will live forever because he’s powered by spite and the souls of murdered houseplants.

I murmur nonsense at him and let him rub and nip my fingers until his mistress comes in and grabs a hardback off the coffee table.

We don’t have to talk through the arrangement, because we’ve done the same thing every night for the last year whenever I’m around.

Whenever I think we’ve finished all the cozy mysteries in the universe, she somehow finds another one.

She sits on the end of the couch and drapes a blanket over herself, even though it’s warm, then pats her lap.

Splaying my legs wide so Buck can sleep between them, I lie down carefully with my head resting against her.

The cat stretches out one massive paw and kneads his claws deep in my calf with a sharp, comforting pain.

“I don’t remember what happened in the last book,” I confess, feeling my body finally, finally uncoil into stillness. Her body against my cheek, the fluffy paw on my skin—this is all I have left. Everything else is gone.

“Oh, they’re all the same.” She flaps a hand dismissively as I take the book and smooth it open to the first chapter. “Someone gets murdered, and some detective has relationship problems. We’ll figure it out.”

I laugh weakly into the blanket, even though scrunching my face hurts like hell.

The words are already swirling on the page as I start reading aloud, and there’s too much space between them for me to examine how much of my life is left and how little of hers, and how alone I’m going to be when she’s gone.

But she pets my hair gently like I’m the cat, so I fight to stay here as long as I can, because I never want it to stop.

When I jerk awake in the dark, cold and disoriented, I stare at the faintest blush of early dawn creeping through the half-drawn lace curtains. Everywhere Andrew punched me throbs in time to my heartbeat, with a stabbing pain when I breathe. But I don’t have the energy to go find pain medication.

Ramona must have sneaked off to bed hours ago, tucked in her little room upstairs under the slanted eaves that literally couldn’t be worse for a woman in her mid-seventies.

Buckley followed her, leaving a warm patch under my legs.

When I pick up the book crumpled on my chest, I realize we only made it three pages and I don’t remember any of them.

Scrubbing my face with the collar of my filthy t-shirt, I stumble to my feet and limp into the half bath by the kitchen. Fucking “Country Roads” is back in my head again, but only the two lines I can remember, over and over.

After I piss, I stop by the fridge and tuck the glass leftover container of meatballs under my arm.

I head outside, shutting the door silently behind me.

Even though the sun is at least thirty minutes from actually cresting the horizon, I can start to get a sense of the gently rolling grassland dotted with rocky bluffs and cut through with dirt roads.

Swinging my leg over the wobbly porch railing, I prop my back against a post and eat half the container of cold meatballs with my fingers, nothing but the sound of my own chewing to keep me company.

Then I switch to sitting on one end of the long porch swing, which I can’t actually swing because the chains squeak.

I go to light a cigarette, but no matter how much I dig through my pockets I can’t find my lighter.

“That was my fucking favorite one,” I gripe as I flop back and half close my eyes, hoping I might fall asleep again but knowing I won’t. “Are you home yet?” I roll my head sideways and stare at the silver mug still sitting there. “I need to forget about you, okay?”

It doesn’t say anything back. I pick it up and flick the lid open, surprised by a rush of heat and steam.

When I pour some coffee in my mouth it tastes old, like it got made half a day ago, but it’s still plenty hot.

“Damn,” I murmur, propping my forehead on the lip of the mug.

“This is a really great cup. Did you know that? You’re gonna wish you kept it for yourself. ”

I told myself I wouldn’t do this, but I think I need to fucking understand him even a little before I shut the door on him.

My phone barely has any battery left, but I turn the brightness up anyway and Google the name on the back of his watch.

I figured I might need to add some more keywords to get any hits, but the page fucking floods with thousands of results in an instant.

“Jesus.” I rub the sleep out of my eyes and click on the top news story, a headline that’s just a jumble of financial-sounding buzzwords.

The Innes Group, a privately owned luxury conglomerate founded sixty years ago by Scotsman Hugh Innes, drew attention in the business world this week as they passed an estimated valuation of 200 billion dollars.

On the brink of a highly profitable marriage and merger with Meridian Industries, they are set to double their value and eclipse industry giants in less than a year.

I try to picture a billion dollars in a pile in the front yard.

It would probably take up more space than the fucking house.

Then I try to picture two hundred of those, plus two hundred more.

Of course I can’t. That kind of money isn’t even real; it doesn’t mean anything but numbers on a screen, and yet somehow it’s worth never feeling safe or loved, good or normal.

A video autoplays at the top of the article, showing four men in suits and sunglasses walking out of a skyscraper in New York City and getting into a black SUV.

There’s a craggy, short old man in the middle that they all orbit like he’s the sun.

Behind him I can make out a towering man with auburn curls, a slender guy with dark hair, and the last man—shit, this was a mistake, because I whimper at the full body jolt of seeing him again.

He’s the only one not wearing sunglasses.

As he rakes his eyes expressionlessly toward the camera, I can see a hollow, empty look, like his soul isn’t inside his body.

This is unreal. Like literally, no one sees this shit in real life outside of a TV screen.

I thought he was the understandable kind of rich guy with a BMW and a nice watch.

But seeing them all striding down the steps like a perfectly dressed flock of dark birds looking for prey, unreadable and endlessly far away, I can’t comprehend it.

When he offered me millions of dollars’ worth of credit cards, it must have been like throwing a penny into some street performer’s hat.

The guy probably made it home safely by now, but I don’t think I care anymore.

I can’t. I think the man who held me to his chest naked in that car is dead after all, despite everything I told him.

He tried to tell me. Now there’s just me, the loser with an empty gun drinking old coffee in the dark, and whoever this is, the guy in a gray suit with no soul inside his body.