Contents
Title Page
Copyright Smashwords
Dedication
1. Entering
2. Bones of Birds
3. Room a Thousand Years Wide
4. Halfway There
5. Sweet Euphoria
6. Ugly Truth
7. Holy Water
8. Searching with My Good Eye Closed
9. Let Me Drown
10. Nothing to Say
11. Mood for Trouble
12. Rusty Cage
13. Mind Riot
14. New Damage
15. The Day I Tried to Live
Wait, Just One More Thing Before You Go
About the Author
Also by Rasmenia Massoud
Tied Within
Copyright © 2020 Smashwords, Inc.
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 9781005380052
Cover photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash
Book design by Olivier Massoud & Rasmenia Massoud
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. All characters and situations are products of the author's imagination.
For the seekers.
1. ENTERING
WE’RE TALKING ABOUT nothing again when someone asks if I know what terror feels like. A familiar voice, an echo, reaches through the smoke. Behind the guitar assault grinding and growling though a blown speaker, I know someone is talking to me. I summon the effort to focus my attention on the voice’s face.
“So, do you?” One of the twins, the one who parts his hair to the left, passes me the joint. He looks like one of those guys from A-ha. His twin brother, who parts his hair to the right, looks like the other A-ha. Holding the joint out to me, he tosses his head back, shaking hair out of his eyes. “I don’t mean a little bit startled. I mean stark terror. Unable to scream. Shit your pants scared.”
I take the joint from him without answering.
“I know what that feels like,” Dom says, twisting the cap off a bottle of beer. “When they brought my grandpa home after his stroke, I was still real little. When he tried to speak, it totally freaked me out. I ran away. Almost pissed myself. It took days before I’d go around him at all.”
The sides of Dominic’s head are the color of uncooked dough, making a stark contrast with his tanned face. His Mohawk is less than two days old. When he dyed it black, some of the black dye dripped and oozed onto his scalp and forehead. If you stand close to him, you can see the scabs on his scalp where he tried to clean the dye off his skin with Clorox bleach. It cleaned so well that he ended up speckled with the evidence of his most recent transformation. That’s Dominic for you: working hard to be badass, but ending up with something hilarious and absurd.
Dom’s like a lot of people, I guess.
Next to me on the worn, itchy sofa, Bronwyn shakes her head. “Your poor grandpa. Jesus.”
Dominic’s shoulders droop, and the wave of shame that washes over his face resonates through everyone in the room. “Yeah, poor old dude. But, I think all grandpas know how dumb little kids are. I bet he doesn’t even remember it, as far gone as he is now.”
We’re on joint number three. In between hits and spacing out, I’m rubbing my ankles because my feet are killing me. “What is this we’re listening to?”
“Soundgarden. They’re new. You can take your shoes off if you want to,” Left-parted hair says.
“More new shit? What were we listening to the last time I was here?”
He shrugs. “I don’t remember. Maybe it was Alice in Chains. Luke was playing that one nonstop a few weeks ago.”
Then I get things straight in my mind again and remember that left side is Roman. Right side is Luke and I know confusing the two as often as I do makes me some kind of an asshole because I’ve been fucking Luke since graduation a few weeks ago. None of us have a plan for what the hell we'll do with ourselves for the rest of our lives, and nobody here except Bronwyn even has a job. We need the distractions. Even if we can’t remember which distraction is which.
“Man, I don't like all this new shit.” Bronwyn picks up a plastic cassette case, opens it, and pulls out the lyric sheet. “All this Seattle stuff. Everything’s changing and it’s weird.”
Luke laughs and gives her a nudge. “You're just sad because nobody wants to listen to Winger and Poison anymore. Is that what your terror feels like? No more hair metal?”
Smirking, she holds up the lyric sheet from the twins' Soundgarden cassette. “Yeah. This terrifies me.”
“So, Ivy.” Roman prods me with his elbow. “What about you?”
I pull my shoes off. My cheap black suede — okay, imitation suede — ankle-high boots. I take a drink, trying to think of what terrified feels like, what shit-your-pants scared does to a person, besides covering themselves with their own shit.
“This one time,” I say, “when I was maybe three or four, my sister Indra’s hamsters got loose. She kept them in one of those big plastic Habitrails they run around in, with all the tubes and shit. Well, some of those tubes, they didn’t go anywhere. They had all these dead-ends with plastic orange caps to keep the hamsters inside. Those caps, they popped right off. One day, or maybe it was night, my mom was in the bathroom, fixing herself up, putting makeup on in front of the mirror when she hears this scratching. Claws digging at the wall just in front of her, but she can’t see anything, so she starts screaming bloody murder. She ran out of the bathroom like she was being chased by a fucking axe murderer. We all started screaming because she freaked everybody out with her running and screaming and arms flailing everywhere.” I take a sip of my
