It sucked.
***
She normally didn’t have a difficult time falling asleep, but that wasn’t the case lately. On the nights she did fall asleep, she’d wake up at odd hours of the night. It happened so often that it became her norm. However, all this dreamless sleep added even more stress to her survivor guilt-ridden mind.
Right now, she was wide awake in her bed. She was scrolling through the internet on her phone, scavenging around the internet for random factual information. The type of information that will never prove useful. As she continued her mindless scrolling, she heard her dad’s voice down the hall.
It was late, much later than the usual phone call should be. It was strange though, throughout the week her dad’s phone had rung at least twice around dinner time. Each time that happened, he would peek at the caller ID, then swiftly hang up as if it were the plague.
She wanted to respect his privacy, so she asked only about it once but he never really gave her an answer. Aria decided that it was definitely something personal and when he was ready to tell her, he would. However, that didn’t stop her curiosity or change the thinness of her walls.
“James,” her dad said in the same tone from the ER. “Don’t tell me it’s happening again. I won’t lose her too. It doesn’t matter. You can’t take back the past.” His voice was angry, while at the same time, laced with sorrow. “You can’t bring Lucia back.”
What? Mom?
Dread began to fill her stomach. Where exactly was this conversation leading to? Her mom has been dead for years. What would Adrian’s dad have anything to do with that?
“No, James. I lost my wife and our baby—”
Aria felt like the world was going to swallow her whole.
Mom was pregnant?
“I refuse to let my daughter—”
She felt sick to her stomach. She argued with a pregnant woman before she died? Aria was almost ready to accept the ‘Worst Daughter of the Year’ award. Not only that, but her dad wasn’t as put together as she initially thought. Then again, she didn’t stop to think about how afraid he must’ve been from her accident.
Who wouldn’t be?
“No, I don’t want you to understand.” His tone was much more hostile. “I want you to stay away from my daughter!”
Did she even have the heart to think about Adrian at the moment? Was this really the time and place to think about their doomed relationship?
“Your son? Look, James, your son seems like a good kid, but until you’ve lost your wife and child, you will never understand. Ashlyn told me everything I needed to know, that you are a risk . . .”
Risk? What risk would—
“Werewolves, hunters, nons, and lawless? Do you really expect me to believe that your community can keep that promise? They couldn’t keep it for Lucia, and I’m not going to let my daughter be the next one!”
What the f*ck? What is this, some telenovela crap mixed in with teenage fantasy?
“A chance? A chance at what? My daughter?”
She had never heard him sound so outraged.
“Maybe he doesn’t deserve it, but neither does Aria. She doesn’t deserve to be hunted down like an animal because of what you are. Call it prejudice, call it misplaced anger, call it whatever you want. I don’t care. Just keep yours away from mine.”
Aria never felt so confused. She really hoped that this was some whacked-up nightmare because she couldn’t handle everything that’s happening at once.
Nothing made sense anymore. Her dad was saying new terms like ‘werewolves’, ‘nons’, ‘lawless’, and ‘hunters’ as if they had some legitimate meaning. Aside from that, he was also getting calls from James, Adrian’s dad, at an ungodly hour.
Was Adrian somehow mixed into this too? And what did her dad mean by ‘you’? What kind of implication was that? Were they not the same? Clearly. But what does that imply for Adrian and his family? What was wrong with them?
Her dad spoke again, this time his tone was much more solemn. It was sad, filled with grief and regret.
“We were friends . . . brothers even, but you’re putting my daughter’s life in jeopardy. At one point if you had told me all of this, maybe I would have understood better. The life you lead and the life my Lucia knew so much about, but I don’t.”
Again her mom was mentioned, and Aria couldn’t figure out how to digest this. It was another layer of crazy to this insane bean dip. She could never forget the image of her mom on the white hospital bed. The lack of color in her cheeks, the stillness of her body, and the feeling of cold flesh. Nothing about that could ever be erased from her memory.
Why were they talking about her now?
It had been five years for f*ck’s sake.
“I can’t think about this now, James. I have other things to worry about.”
With that the call seemed to have ended, leaving her with questions she never wanted to ask. These were not the types of thoughts she wanted to have at the dead of night.
Aria wanted to believe that this was fake, that she was just in some REM dream her mind had conjured up. After all, hunters, nons, lawless, and werewolves? All that just sounded like fanfiction or some sort of plotline for a fantasy movie.
It was just too much to be real.
That was what she told herself as she tried to sleep that night. It failed miserably,
