NOCTE (Nocte Trilogy #1) (3 page)

But
what a waste of a beautifully renovated space.
 

My father is unfazed.
 
“You and Finn are going to college in
the
Fall
anyway.
 
It’d be extra income.
 
That
was our original plan, anyway.”

I’m still stunned.
 
“Well, good luck finding someone who
wants to live here.”

Right
next door to a funeral home and crematorium.

“If you know of anyone, please let them
know,” my dad continues, ignoring my pessimism.
 
I scoff at that.
 

“You know I don’t know anyone.”
 
I don’t go into the depressing state of
my social life, which is nonexistent and always has been.
 
It’s always been something that worried
my mom and dad, although Finn and I never much cared.
 
We’ve always had each other.

Finn bounds down the stairs, his hair
wet, interrupting our conversation.
 

“Since I smelled like sweaty feet, I took
the world’s fastest shower,” he announces as he breezes past us.
 
“You’re welcome.”

“Drive safe!” my father calls out
needlessly as he heads inside.
 
Because
of the way my mom died, among twisted metal and smoking rubber, my father
doesn’t even like to
see
us in a car,
but he knows it’s a necessity of life.
 

Even still, he doesn’t want to watch
it.
 

It’s ok. We all have little tricks we
play on our minds to make life bearable.
 

I drop into the passenger seat of our
car, the one my brother and I share, and stare at Finn.

“How’d you sleep?”

Because he doesn’t usually.
 

He’s an insufferable insomniac.
 
His mind is naturally more active at
night than the average person’s.
 
He
can’t figure out how to shut it down.
 
And when he does sleep, he has vivid nightmares so he gets up and crawls
into my bed.
 
 

Because I’m the one he comes to when he’s
afraid.
 
 

It’s a twin thing.
 
Although, the kids that used to tease us
for being weird would love to know that little tid-bit, I’m sure.
Calla and Finn sleep in the same bed
sometimes, isn’t that sick??
 
They’d
never understand how we draw comfort just from being near each other.
 
Not that it matters what they think, not
anymore.
 
We’ll probably never see
any of those assholes again.

“I slept like shit.
 
You?”
 

“Same,” I murmur.
 
Because it’s true.
 
I’m not an insomniac, but I do have
nightmares.
Vivid ones, of my mother screaming, and broken
glass, and of her cellphone in her hand.
 
In every dream, I can hear my own voice,
calling out her name, and in every dream, she never answers.

You could say I’m a bit tortured by
that.
   

Finn and I fall into silence, so I press
my forehead to the glass and stare out the window as he drives, staring at the
scenery that I’ve been surrounded with since I was born.
 

Despite my internal torment, I have to
admit that our mountain is beautiful.

We’re surrounded by all things green and
alive
, by pine trees
and bracken and lush forest greenery. The vibrant green stretches across the
vast lawns, through the flowered gardens, and lasts right up until you get to
the cliffs, where it finally and abruptly turns reddish and clay.
 

I guess that’s pretty good symbolism,
actually.
 
Green means alive and red
means dangerous.
 
Red is jagged
cliffs, warning lights, splattered blood.
 
But green… green is trees and apples and clover.
 

“How do you say green in Latin?” I ask
absentmindedly.
 

“Viridem,” he answers. “Why?”

“No reason.” I glance into the
side-mirror at the house, which fades into the distance behind us.

Huge and Victorian, it stands proudly on
the top of this mountain, perched on the edge of the cliffs with its spires
poking through the clouds.
 
It’s
beautiful and graceful, at the same time as it is gothic and dark. It’s a
funeral home, after all, at the end of a road on a mountain.
  
It’s a horror movie waiting to
happen.
 

Last
Funeral Home on the Left
.
 

Dad will need a miracle to rent the tiny
Carriage House out, and I feel a slight pang of guilt. Maybe he really does
need the money, and I’ve been pressuring him to give it to Finn or me.
 

I turn my gaze away from the house, away
from my guilt, and out to the ocean. Vast and gray, the water punishes the
rocks on the shore, pounding into them over and over.
  
Mist rises from the water, forming
fog along the beach.
 
It’s beautiful
and eerie, haunting and peaceful.
 

But it’s also a prison, holding me here
beneath the low-hanging cloud cover.
 

“Do you ever wish we could move away? Like
far
away?” I muse aloud.
 

Finn glances at me.
 
“Berkeley isn’t far enough for you?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.
 
I’m talking someplace
far
away.
 
Like Italy.
 
Or Scotland.
 
It’d be nice, I think.
 
To get away from here.
From everything we know.”

From
the memories.

From
the people who think we’re weird.

From
everything.
 

Finn’s face stays expressionless.
 
“Cal, you don’t have to go around the
world to re-invent yourself, if that’s what you want.
 
You can do that in California.
 
But you don’t need to change yourself at
all.
 
You’re fine the way you are.”

Yeah.
 
Being known as Funeral Home Girl is
fine.
 
But he’s right.
 
No one will know that in
California.
 
I can get as good a new
start there as I can anywhere.
 
I won’t be surrounded by dead people
, and people won’t
always be asking
How are you feeling?

We drift into silence and I continue
staring out the window, thinking about college and what my new life there might
be like.
 
Since my father has agreed
that Finn and I should stay together, there’s nothing scary about it.
 
It’s just exciting.
 
And it will include a lot of expensive
shoes and pashminas.
 
I’m not
exactly where what pashminas are, but they sound sophisticated, and so I need
them.
 

“Well?”

Finn’s insistent tone brings me out of my
thoughts.
 
He’s obviously waiting on
an answer to something.
 

“Well, what?”

“Well, did dad decide?
  
About the
carriage house.
 
We could
just share it, you know.
 
I’m sick
of smelling like formaldehyde all the time.”

For
real.
 
I can’t even count how many times I’d
hear snide girls at school whispering as I walked past, old tired jokes like,
“I smell dead people.”
 
I always
wanted to tell them to quit ripping off old movies and come up with something
original, but of course I never did.
 
To them, I was Funeral Home Girl.
 
But I never gave them the satisfaction of knowing that their words hurt.

“We don’t smell like formaldehyde,” I
assure Finn.
  
We smell like
flowers.
 
Funeral flowers.
 
It’s not much better.
 

“Speak for yourself,” he grumbles.
 
“Can we, or not?”

I shrug.
 

“Apparently, dad’s going to rent it out,
after all.”

Finn stares at me for a second before
returning his gaze to the road.
 
“Seriously?
 
I didn’t know we
were that hard up.
 
We have mom’s
life insurance money, and the money from the funeral home.”

“College is expensive,” I murmur.
 
Because that’s the only explanation I
can think of, other than maybe dad just wants to follow through with something
that he planned with mom. Finn nods, because it’s an acceptable answer.
 
Obviously, sending two kids is
expensive.
 

We’re quiet as we drive the rest of the
way, and still quiet as we walk the sterile halls of the hospital, our Chucks
squeaking on the waxed floors.
 
  

“I’ll meet you back out here in an hour,”
Finn tells me casually, as though he’s going shopping instead of going to talk
about his mental illness with other mentally ill people.
 
Like always, Finn carries his cross like
a champion.

I nod.
 
“I’ll be here.”

Because
I always am.
 

He walks away without looking back,
disappearing into a therapy room.
 
As
I watch him go, I can’t help but think, for the millioneth time, that it could’ve
just as easily been me born with SAD.
  
It’s a thought that makes me feel
panicky and guilty at the same time.
 
Panicky, because sometimes I still worry that I might get it, that it
might show up out of the blue.
 
And guilty, because it should’ve been me in the first place.
 
Finn is a better person than I am.
 

I’m the one who was born first, the one
born bigger, the one born stronger…regardless of the fact that Finn really is
better.
 
He’s funny and witty and smart, and his
soul is as gentle as they come.
 
He’s the one who deserved to be healthy.

Not me. I’m the snarky, sarcastic
one.
 

Mother Nature is a bitch sometimes.
 

I find a nearby bench in the sky-lit
atrium, and curl up beneath an abstract bird painting, pulling out a book to
read.
 
Having my nose buried in a
book accomplishes two things.

1.
 
It lets people know I’m not in the mood
to be talked to.
 
Honestly, I seldom
am. And 2.
 
It kills the boredom
while I wait.

The sounds of the hospital fade into a
buzzing backdrop, while I immerse myself in blissful fiction.
 
Fiction is best served alone.
 
It’s how I survived my school years,
reading through lunches and awkward classes when no one talked to me, and fiction
is how I survive waiting for Finn during long hours in the hospital psych wing.
 
It’s how I can ignore the shrill,
multi-pitched yells that drift down the hallways.
Because
honestly, I don’t want to know what they’re yelling about.
 

I stay suspended in my pretend world for
God knows how long, until I feel someone staring at me.
 

When I say feel, I
literally feel it,
just like someone is reaching out and touching
my face with their fingers.
 

Glancing up, I suck my breath in when I
find dark eyes connected to mine, eyes so dark they’re almost black, and the
energy in them is enough to freeze me in place.
 

A boy is attached to the dark gaze.
 

A
man.
 

He’s probably no more than twenty or
twenty-one, but everything about him screams
man.
 
There’s no
boy
in him.
 
That part of him is very clearly
gone.
 
I see it in his eyes, in the
way he holds himself, in the perceptive way he takes in his surroundings, then
stares at me with singular focus, like
we’re somehow
connected by a tether
.
 
He’s
got a million contradictions in his eyes…
.aloofness
,
warmth, mystery, charm, and something else I can’t define.