Volition (21 page)

I didn’t care.

I didn’t want them there.

I only wanted one person. He was there for the thirty seconds it took me to walk across that stage, and then he was gone. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen him at all, except I felt him there.

He followed me to Vanderbilt.

I never knew why, but it was a problem when our strange magnetism started up again after a year apart.

“Guys, you’re going to have to stop me,” I told my roommates, Malin and Haley. “I’m probably going to try to run to his dorm or something.”

“You won’t,” Malin promised me. “That’s really weird anyway. He’s a baby compared to us. Don’t worry. There will be guys at this party, guys with trust funds bigger than ours.”

I didn’t care about trust funds.

I wanted Catherine. She would know what to say.

I didn’t know where Colin was. He would know what to do.

Oh, right, Catherine was in New York.

“Colin?” I just wanted to get to him. He’d make it all better.

Haley led me up the stairway in the Beta Phi house.

“He’s in here somewhere. We’ll find him.”

There was too much noise, and I wasn’t sure how I was this drunk. Nothing made sense.

Colin.

I needed Colin.

I left Haley and Malin in the kitchen with thousands of bottles on the counter. I bobbed my way up the staircase, weaving around people having conversations. My hair was too long, and I couldn’t see because it kept flopping over my eyes.

There were too many rooms. I kept looking for Colin, but I couldn’t find him. Finally, I decided to sit down in the middle of the hallway on the third floor because that seemed like my best option.

I didn’t want to be alone, but I needed my best friend. I screamed his name as loud as I could, and I felt my vocal cords crack. If they could bleed, I knew they would have after the sound that ripped from my body at that moment.

My eyelids started to droop shut, and I let my head lull. The sound started to return as people resumed their conversations around me. I had failed. I was going to die alone here in the middle of the Beta Phi hallway. I was only twenty. I didn’t deserve to die here. I guessed it didn’t matter. My parents died young, why couldn’t I?

I felt warm arms come around my shoulders and under my arms to hoist me up.

“Tate, what are you doing here?”

I squinted at Colin after he turned me around to face him.

“What did you take?”

I shook my head.

I didn’t care enough about myself to know what anyone had given me in hours past. I wasn’t even sure where I’d been, but I assumed I’d been to many other parties before this one since it was well past midnight.

“I’m going to die here, Colin. Just let me die.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re not going to die.”

He picked me up and carried me to his room. Once again, everything went dark because my hair created an impermeable curtain around my face.

“This is so much worse than the peyote, Colin,” I mumbled as he set me down on his bed.

“I wouldn’t mind some peyote,” I thought I heard him say.

I snuggled into his pillow as he pulled the blankets over my body. I barely felt it, but I knew he was doing it because he was Colin. My Colin.

“I want Catherine,” I whined, pushing my hair back so that it wasn’t suffocating me any longer.

“Join the club,” he said before taking a swig of whatever was in his hand. “But she went to New York and left us here, so we’re shit out of luck.”

I pouted and grabbed his free hand. “If you don’t stay here with me, I’m going to go to him.”

He knew what I meant. “You’re a buzz kill, Tate McKenna.”

“I’m a buzzkill, Colin Conrad, but you love me.”

“But I love you.”

I heard him set his drink down as he stumbled on the bed beside me on top of all the blankets.

“Stay here, Tate,” he said, the warning tone in his voice crystal clear.

He knew me. He knew my body would take me there whether I wanted to or not, so he had to convince my mind to be stronger.

Too bad my mind wasn’t strong enough.

I awoke later to a quiet house, but the lights were still on. Colin was snoring beside me, his hands behind his neck.

Jesse.

I knew I wasn’t very drunk or high or whatever I was anymore, but I wasn’t in control.

Something pulled on my heartstrings and on every bone and muscle and cell in my body, and I had to go. I climbed over Colin and found my shoes. When had my shoes come off? And my sweater? Colin had folded it neatly on his desk chair. I pulled it on and shut the light off on my way out.

I walked out of the Beta Phi house and across campus, and then I found the dorm I knew he lived in.

I didn’t know which room it was, so I just stood there.

I stood there outside of his building like this was some kind of horror movie, and I stared. I stared at each window, wondering which one concealed him. I didn’t know how long I stood there, looking at the holes in the building that were covered by glass and blinds, when one of them moved.

One of the blinds was pulled to the side, and a face appeared, staring straight back at me.

I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen the ghost or if I was the ghost, but I ran.

I turned and ran, and I didn’t look back.

Now

The New York Times

The Bones
by Tate E. McKenna

“Batter up!”

One of the McCallum boys was yelling far too loud. The children had explicitly been warned never to wander by the Evers Plantation. Too much history there. Too much left unknown. Nobody went near that old house, now covered in vines crawling in and out of the windows that someone had boarded up years before. The gates that had once kept out the Union Army now lay unnervingly ajar, leading to a winding road nearly grown over. A nightmare for any caretaker, if there were one. The only part of the house that was not broken down or completely overtaken by nature was the doorway. An empty white stone entrance led to a mausoleum. A solid door may as well be there. No one was brave enough to go near it. The darkness inside kept any living soul out.

More than a century had passed since the Evers Plantation was overturned. Catherine and Lee Evers had lived there with their daughter, Delilah, for as long as anyone could remember—up until the slave revolt. The neighbors watched in horror as Lee and Catherine were hanged from the big black oak tree out back that night. Beau Morgan, Delilah’s fiancé, heard the screams and thought Delilah was in danger. He charged in on a white stallion to save her, but he soon joined her parents on the tree. The slaves lived in the big house until Delilah returned home from finishing school the next day to find them all dead.

Rumor had it that Delilah fled the South. That house had been rotting ever since she left, and no one wanted it. The dark history of the land was too much for anyone to want to rebuild it, no matter how much it was worth. The house belonged to the spirits now.

Clark McCallum and Sam Fields were not naive. They didn’t want their children anywhere near the Evers’ house. The four McCallum boys, Mason Fields and his little sister Caroline had disappeared over an hour ago, completely shirking their chores. When Sam and Clark heard voices from the east, they shared a grimace, tipped their hats, and stalked over toward the Evers’ property.

“What in the name of heaven are y’all doing over here?” Sam’s drawl surfaced through his anger.

None of the children had an excuse. Mason still held what they were using as a bat, and Caroline dropped what they assumed to be a small stone that had been used as a ball.

Clark took one look at Mason, and his stomach churned. “All you, get home right this instant, and we won’t tell your mothers.”

That struck fear in their hearts, and they ran as fast as they could, navigating through the overgrown grass and brambles that tore at their feet.

“Look here,” Clark said gravely once the children had gone. He held up the bat that Mason had been using.

“What is that?” Sam asked. “Is it—”

“Human?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a humerus bone.” Clark ran his finger along a line on the bone. “See here? That’s a bicipital groove, and that’s olecranon fossa.”

Sam looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

“It means this is a right humerus human bone.”

“And our kids were using it to play ball.” Sam shuddered. “How old do you think it is?” He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.

Clark shrugged. “Looks old. Could be from…you know. Why didn’t anybody clean these up? You’d think Delilah Evers would have wanted her family to rest in peace.”

“Maybe it wasn’t her family,” Sam suggested grimly.

Clark carefully set the bone down and buried it as he recited a Bible verse he remembered from the church service last week. “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

They stood in silence, looking in awe at the mysterious house, as Sam contemplated the verse.

“Whatever it is, I don’t like it. Let’s get out of here.”

As he turned to take another look around, he paused and started to blink. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

“What’s the matter?” Clark asked.

Sam shook his head. “Nothing. Just my eyes playing tricks on me.”

But as they walked away, Sam would have sworn on his life that he had seen a beautiful girl in a white dress, leaning against the stone doorway, her blonde locks spilling out from under her hat.

Caroline Fields begged her father to go back to the Evers Plantation. “Please, Daddy, please! I dropped Molly in the grass, and now, she’s lost. I can’t let her be lost forever. She’ll be so sad. She’s all by herself with no one to play with.”

He could barely say no to his youngest child, let alone when she was upset.

“Annaleigh,” he told his wife, “I’ll be back in time for dinner.”