What you call something holds power. Words are powerful. Mine have begun to help me heal once again.
I wrote my first song only a week after everything happened. I needed a way to release some of the guilt I had for what happened to Stokes and Cline.
If Cline hadn’t been there at the right time, trying to tell us Pascha had been found dead—her body buried behind Lucie and Mika’s guest house—Stokes would be dead, and I wouldn’t have had a chance to escape.
I haven’t spoken to him since I thanked him for what he did. He’s been hard to reach, for Stokes and Lucie, too. Stokes says Cline’s depression came and went, but since Pascha’s death, he barely leaves his house.
I think he felt helpless, wishing someone believed him when he knew things were wrong.
I’ve lived with that feeling, too. I’ve felt so helpless through my life.
Arriving after the fatal stab that caused my father’s murder was the first. My inaction didn’t lead to harm that night—and might have been the only thing to scare Byron away from hurting my mom, but I felt useless anyway.
The night I found Alex’s pictures counts as another that had me feeling helpless. It’s something I never regained control over, and real justice was never an option. He got away with it with no recourse—until Ron came home. While Mom was with me at the hospital, he was having a talk with Alex, or so he called it. Soon after, the Hildens put their house up for sale. We haven’t seen them since. I don’t believe Carol knew about the pictures, and I don’t know if she’ll turn a blind eye and stay with him. I hope she’s left him.
But I’ve never felt the kind of helplessness I did last Halloween night.
I’ve written so many songs since then, but they’re poems for now. Nothing I could sing right now. Not for a while. Stokes asks to see them. And someday, I’ll let him. For now, they’re mine.
Haddonboro never broke up officially, but the last time they were all together—save for Royal—was for Pascha’s funeral. They all stood together, supporting each other, like they had while the details of her murder were shared with the public.
Royal had always wanted to be with Pascha since they met in college, and his territorial feelings for her never changed—not after she started dating Cline—and not when she confided in him that she was leaving the group and asked for a ride to the airport the night of the big fight.
He couldn’t let her leave.
Like Byron, he thought he could have the woman he wanted if someone weren’t standing in his way. Once Pascha and Cline were over, Royal saw his opportunity, brought her to Lucie and Mika’s guest house to confess his love for her, and she’d rejected him.
In a fit of rage, he’d choked her with one of the cords on the floor for their instruments. She died of asphyxiation and he buried her behind the guest house where he was sure no one would look for her after she’d told him how far she wanted to go from Auburn Hills.
Lucie was the only one who went to visit him in prison. The guys weren’t interested in hearing what Royal had to say, but that day at the funeral, Lucie told me Royal said he’d do anything to take that night back. That he didn’t know what came over him. He’d ‘seen red’ and acted on fear. He told her the guilt ate away at him, and that’s why he confessed, but we all know it was because of Jamie’s tip to the police. While police questioned Royal, they mentioned Lucie and Mika’s backyard neighbour saw him out there by the guest house that night, placing him at the scene of the murder. They had enough on him without the confession.
Lucie and Mika are putting their house up for sale soon. Lucie can’t live there anymore after what happened. She posts pictures of Pascha on social media once in a while, writing to her as if she might hear her—and maybe she can. Even if it’s just for the sake of unburdening her feelings and trying to connect with others through her grief, I can relate to that. I’ve bonded with Lucie over it, encouraging her to write her truth.
I stood with my mom and Ron at Pascha’s funeral, but I felt out of place. While I didn’t know her, and Cline had been right in a sense when he confronted me in my room that afternoon—I took her place—I can’t help but feel a sense of kinship with her.
I, too, considered that I might be able to have what I wanted if she weren’t in my way, but it was never a truth I could believe in. Pascha and I shared so many similar experiences. I didn’t know it when I saw her perform, and I didn’t see it when I read her songs for the first time, but I do now. I read her songs from a new perspective and I write my own to honour our journeys.
Stokes and I are close, closer than ever. No one else has been through what we have and no matter what now, he sticks around. I don’t know if we could have gotten so close if everything hadn’t unfolded the way it did. I don’t know if it’s more the trauma that has bonded us than our genuine friendship. I don’t know if we’d ever have spoken again if Pascha was alive and well.
I know that it’s good to have a friend who believes in me—believes me.
I also know that we’d do anything for each other.
After my mom arrived home with Ron, I’d shared the details with her of what happened to me on Halloween night. She didn’t fall into a shocked state or shut down again.
She held me at the hospital, and at home, and through my statements to
