History repeated and read out loud (Joss, Carly)
There was a boy in one of Joss’s classes who called himself a witch, not pagan, he said, none of that god stuff, just a good honest witch. They’d smoked a bit of weed together, in the wild back lawn of the Vatican, Joss lying on one of the stolen park benches, Cooper in the empty bathtub, witch-boy high as a kite searching the edges of the garden for – Joss couldn’t remember now, something from Harry Potter – monkshood or some shit. He’d called the spell a recipe for living and that’s the bit that had stuck. A recipe for living. Put the raw ingredients in and life came out. Joss liked the simplicity of that.
Joss wished he was high right now, but he only had enough weed left for maybe one joint and it felt like a dick move not sharing it with Carly.
He’d done all the recipe-for-living crap. He’d put food in his mouth, he’d had half a bottle of orange juice, he’d briefly gone out in the Spring sunshine, he’d taken a sleeping pill last night and managed unconsciousness for a few hours. Raw ingredients in. He’d got that part down. Couldn’t seem to work out the magic of the next bit. Dinner sat heavy in his stomach, undigested. The orange juice inside him still felt cold. His head didn’t feel like he’d slept at all.
Every time he closed his eyes he was back in the theatre. The girl – her name was out now, Indigo-Hope Dumire, another cursed London College student – she’d looked right at him and Joss had felt how much she wanted to kill him. Did you know her? Carly had asked. No. No, but it had felt like she’d known him, like she’d seen something in him that marked him out as next. Joss couldn’t get that look out of his head, his memory rolling it over and over till he couldn’t tell if he’d seen it at all.
There was no fine line between imagination and memory, none Joss could ever find. Both poured together, mingled. Sometimes he drifted into a thought that was a stronger concentration of memory and othertimes imagination and the longer Joss thought about any one thing the more the waters combined. Had she really looked at him like she wanted to kill him, or was that only in his head?
At the moment, Joss was alone in his bedroom, although his door was open, his window was open to the night and a mild wind was blowing through. Carly was not right in front of him, so he struggled to believe she was really alive. He believed he’d seen her die, he’d felt her die, watched her die, but her eyes had reopened and her mouth had gasped in air, and then there were things like vomit and tears and those were very alive, yes. Joss closed his eyes and in his mind, Carly opened hers, and without her here in front of him how could he believe that was real, that was memory, and not just wild hope or denial.
When he’d been dragged away from Kenzie’s body, he’d been convinced she’d opened her eyes. Memory, or traumatised imagination? When he’d been twelve and pulled his cold sister from the bath and she’d opened hers – same question? When he’d lain on his side beside Carly on the floor of the theatre, covered in her blood, and she’d opened hers – same question a third time.
Joss tried to pull his mind away from the constant interrogation by scrolling through his phone, but it was like pulling himself out of one trench and rolling into another; there were stagnant memories in this one too. The missed calls from Leon, trying to find him to tell him – hah – that their mother had tried to kill herself. How was that even part of the same world he was living in now? Joss chucked his phone into the tangled sheets of his bed, out of sight, and sat down heavily on his bedroom floor, back against his bed. He tilted his head back and stared up at the dark collage on his wall, remembered Merry’s voice going your wall creeps me out. Maybe he should call Merry.
Do you remember exactly when Patrick Ravensdale hunted you through those woods? Or have you gone over it so many times in your head it’s a horror story you tell yourself? When does something turn from a memory into a story and is it bad that it does?
He probably shouldn’t ask her that.
If she’d died up in those woods when Joss wasn’t there, would he have created a memory that he was? Leaned over her body in the leaf litter, blood soaking through his knees. Would he have told himself she’d opened her eyes too?
No, he should not call Merry. He should get up off his bedroom floor and go and find Leon.
Leon.
Joss didn’t get up.
Leon.
He’d seen the terror on Leon’s face, all mixed up with dread and worry as he looked at his little brother, as he looked at Carly.
Joss wondered just how absolutely, painfully powerless he made his older brother feel. As he slithered down to his back on the floor, his hand found the note he’d left Leon, scribbled on the torn out inside of his cereal box. I’m not dead. Joss held it over his face, staring at his handwriting, trying to imagine what Leon had thought.
Trying to imagine what Leon would have done with this note if Joss had died, if Indigo-Hope Dumire had got her way. Panic surged up inside Joss and jolted him up off the floor. It would have destroyed him. Joss could see it – his imagination strong enough to project a memory of the future just as vivid and traumatising as any memories of the past – Leon would have come in here, grieved in here, been destroyed in here. Leon would have sat on his floor and stared up at the void and would have come apart with his grief.
And eventually, Leon would have started to pack up Joss’s room. Leon wasn’t the type to leave it as a shrine. Leon was too connected to his life and his future to get stuck like that. Leon would have gone through all his things and he would have found something that would have destroyed him, shattered him, all over again.
“No,” breathed Joss, out loud, crawling across his floor. It was a wounded crawl – his right arm was in a sling, not because it needed to be but because it was the only way to remind Joss not to use his hand and bust the stitches on the delicate skin of his palm right open – but it was only a few feet across the carpet to his low, cinderblock bookshelf beneath the window. Frantic, he pulled out two handfuls of books – using just his one hand, twice – till he found the bag that sat behind it. It didn’t need to be a very concealed hiding place, none of his housemates would come in here to search his room, not unless he was dead.
It was just a ziplock bag, not a lot of ceremony to it. Joss slumped back till he was lying on his floor, his wounded arm over his forehead so the sling entirely covered his face. He groaned, entirely without meaning to, the wretchedness urging out of him anyway it could. Yeah he had to do something about it, but for a miserable moment, he just needed to lie on his floor and wallow.