Song of the Fireflies

Chapter Fifteen

Elias

The beach house was one of the most immaculate I had seen, overlooking the ocean. It had a massive boat dock just steps away from the backyard, which itself looked like something you’d see in a landscaping magazine. Every room in the house was like walk-in luxury, with expensive ceramic tile floors and intricate paintings and designer furniture that I was afraid to touch and leave fingerprints on. I thought that a place like this, so rich and clean, couldn’t possibly belong to any of Tate’s friends. The last few houses we had visited looked more like my apartment did back in Georgia: a bachelor pad.

Turned out, this was Jen’s parents’ house, and they were in the Bahamas on vacation. So, naturally, we turned it into a party spot.

The music bumped through the speakers in the living room ceiling. Bray and I were sitting together, kicked back on the couch with a mixed drink in our hands while Tate and Jen and a few others danced to “Pony” by Ginuwine in the center of the room. There were people sitting on every piece of furniture, and as I got up and went into the kitchen to trade my mixed drink for a beer, I saw that even the countertops were occupied.

Caleb was one of the occupants. He sat near the sink with a half pint of Jack Daniels between his legs. Johanna was on his left, leaning her head against his shoulder. She had a dazed look in her eyes, but with her that wasn’t unusual—she always appeared dazed even when she was sober.

“I have a question for you,” Caleb said.

I was surprised by his voice. He had never made much of an effort to have a conversation with me before. Now that he had, I was leery of it.

I shut the fridge and leaned against the counter beside it, twisting the top off my beer.

“Yeah, what’s that?” I asked before taking a swig.

Caleb moved the whiskey from between his legs to one side. He took his time. “Why didn’t you call the cops when your car was stolen?”

“What makes you think I didn’t?”

“I heard you talking about it with your girlfriend the other night.”

So Caleb was the quiet, observant type. I didn’t give him enough credit. Up until this point I didn’t take him for the type to give any kind of shit about what other people had to say.

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” I answered, and I knew my excuse was lacking but I couldn’t tell him the truth. I really just needed to avoid this conversation altogether.

Caleb smiled slimly. I didn’t think I’d ever actually seen that guy smile before. He was onto me.

“The only reasons someone wouldn’t call the cops if their ride got stolen would be either you stole the car first, you’re in some kind of trouble and can’t call the cops, or you’re lying about it.” He smirked subtly.

I wanted to punch him, but I couldn’t punch him for being intelligent.

“Hey man, no judgments here.” He put up his hands briefly. “I can’t talk. I’m not exactly Kirk Fucking Cameron. Whatever you two did, it’s none of my business. I just don’t want you getting us mixed up in your shit, all right? I’ve got enough of my own to last me the rest of my life.”

It takes a criminal to recognize the actions of a criminal, I thought.

I couldn’t really agree to his request in good conscience. As long as we were with them there was a chance they’d get mixed up with what we did. But to be fair, Caleb was right: he couldn’t talk. From what I knew about him, he was an asshole and a drug dealer. And from where I was standing, drug dealer trumped accidental death by a long shot.

“Nothing to worry about,” I said and pushed away from the counter.

“For your sake,” he said, “I hope you’re right.”

I left the kitchen without any further conversation.

Caleb would always be the mood killer for me as long as we were around them.

But Caleb did something more than kill the mood, he got me to thinking. Were the police looking for Bray and me yet? Had they found Jana’s body? Suddenly, I had to know. I left the kitchen and weaved my way through people standing in the hallway until I found Jen. I asked her if there was a computer in the house I could use, and she directed me to her father’s office.

I closed myself inside the office. Alone. Just me and the Internet. I sat down at the desk in the leather office chair with wheels and cupped my hand over the cordless mouse, bringing the flat-screen monitor to life in front of me. The light from the screen illuminated the dark room. I opened a web page and started to type in our names and “Georgia” and a few other random keywords, until I realized it wasn’t such a good idea to do it that way on someone else’s computer. I backspaced and typed in one of Georgia’s news station names instead.

And then I just stared at the list of results, my finger wanting to click the mouse button. But I couldn’t. As much as I needed to know, I was too afraid. Bray and I were having such a great time together, able to forget about the looming future that I knew would eventually come, but I wasn’t ready to bring it on sooner. I wasn’t ready to see that smile on Bray’s face I woke up to every morning disappear and become only a memory.

I wasn’t ready.

I erased my search from the browser’s history and then closed the page out, leaving the room the same way I found it. Dark and empty and with all of the answers.

I went back into the living room, and as my gaze fell on the couch where Bray had been sitting, I saw that she wasn’t there. I looked around for her, casually making my way from room to room and between Tate and Jen practically fucking each other while still dancing to “Pony,” which seemed to have been put on repeat. As I glided past the sliding glass door in the sunroom, I saw Bray sitting outside in a patio chair talking to Grace.

Feeling playful and deprived of screwing with Bray’s head the past four years, I quietly crept my way out the door and approached the two of them from behind. It was much quieter out here; I heard the sound of the breeze coming off the ocean and the calm waves brushing against the dock nearby. The bumping music inside the house was muffled by the walls.

I snuck up quietly, intent on scaring Bray enough to make her pee herself. But as I drew nearer and caught snippets of their conversation, my steps began to slow and my ears began to burn.

“God, I just can’t imagine…,” I heard Grace say with a gasp.

I saw the top of her head from over the back of the patio chair, and she leaned over as if to look down at something.

“Grace, just… please don’t say anything else about it,” Bray said, and I noticed her move her hand from between their chairs. “I don’t want Elias to know.”

Grace nodded slowly. “Yeah. Sure. Not a problem.” And then she added, “Is that why you wear so many?”

I stepped up as close as I could to better see, but not enough to be seen. Grace was looking down again. I cocked my head at an angle to get a better view between their chairs, and I saw Grace’s fingers probing the hemp bracelets around Bray’s right wrist.

And then Bray noticed me standing there.

She jerked her hand back from Grace again and scrambled to finger the bracelets back in place. I walked the rest of the short way over to them.

“Hi baby,” she said to me, looking over the back of the chair with a forced smile.

I leaned down and pecked her on the lips.

I glanced at Grace and then back at Bray, hoping Grace would get the hint and leave. But she didn’t. I looked down at Bray’s hands, my eyes scanning the bracelets.

Suddenly, I felt betrayed by them. Not by Bray, but by the bracelets.

I gave Bray a moment, a chance to just fess up, because she must’ve known that I’d heard parts of their conversation that she never wanted me to hear. But no one said anything. It was an awkward moment; Grace being there was what made it the most awkward.

“What did you not want me to know?” I came out with it.

Bray looked away.

I glanced over at Grace again, but now that she felt trapped, she wanted out of there. She looked back up at me squeamishly, stood up and said, “I need to find Caleb,” and then scurried across the brick walkway, which was laid out in a mosaic pattern.

A new song filtered into the night air for a moment until it was shut off by Grace closing the sliding glass door.

I pulled the empty chair around in front of Bray and sat down. Her knees were drawn up, and to the side, her bare feet on the seat. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look at me.

I reached out for her hands. “Are you going to tell me?” I turned her hands in mine, my thumbs caressing the delicate skin of her palms.

“No, Elias. I can’t.”

I pressed down on her hands with all of my fingers and she tried to pull them away. “No,” I said and held them tighter, forcing her gaze. “I want you to tell me.” I searched her face for emotion, her eyes for information, but found only pain. I already had an idea about what I was going to find, but I didn’t want to believe it.

She tried once more to pull her hands away, but I held them firm in mine and gently pushed my thumbs underneath the bracelets. My heart fell. I stopped cold. I couldn’t move or say anything to her. And she still couldn’t look at me for longer than two seconds at a time.

I took a deep breath into my lungs and then rubbed the pads of my thumbs over the scars on her wrists. I closed my eyes to compose myself, but my moment of calm was shattered when Bray snatched her hands away when I was at my weakest, leaped from the chair and ran past me.

“Bray!” I ran after her. “Stop! Please!”

She kept running, over the mosaic bricks and then through the landscaped grass and past the dock, heading toward the rocky beach.

“Stop! God damn it, stop!”

I grabbed her by the elbow and she swung around to face me, her long, dark hair whipping about her face. She tried desperately to push my hand away, but I refused to let go. The more she struggled, the firmer my grip became.

“Please, Elias! Just leave!” she roared. Tears streamed down her face.

I pulled her toward me, but she still fought, and with her free hand she tried to shove me backward.

“Talk to me, Bray!” I screamed. “Tell me why you did it!”

Having no other option, she let her weight drop and she fell against the sand. I let go before I went down with her. She wailed into the night and buried her face between her knees, rocking back and forth. I sat down in the sand with her. I tried to comfort her. I tried to touch her. Talk to her. Understand her. But she was inconsolable. I was lost. This wasn’t the Bray that I knew, the girl that I grew up with. This wasn’t the fun and crazy and life-loving beautiful girl I shared my entire life with. She was still the girl I loved, no matter her flaws or her weaknesses. That would never change. But this girl sitting in the sand in front of me with suicide scars across her wrists and such pain in her heart that it shook me to my core… this was another side to that girl I loved. A side that I never saw, never even knew existed.

“Please,” I said softly, in a last desperate attempt.

She raised her eyes and gazed out at the dark ocean. Tears clung to her long, dark eyelashes. But she wouldn’t speak.

I could only wonder what she was remembering…

Bray

The memory…

Blood dripped from my fingertips like little crimson beads, pooling on the floor beneath the chair. Each drop actually sounded more thunderous than the last, as if in death the body’s senses heighten. That little voice in my head, the one telling me I was tickling the threshold between sanity and despair, had finally won.

Elias was gone. I felt alone. So alone. I had grown so apart from my parents that we talked only on special occasions. They gave up on me a long time ago, and so I gave them the space they seemed to want from me. My only friend, Lissa, wouldn’t understand me if I sat her down and tried to make her understand. Although she had a big heart, she was much more comfortable watching another’s problems from the sidelines rather than wanting to be a part of the solution. I had no one. But worst of all, I didn’t have Elias. I had left him, moved away from my life with him in Georgia, because I knew I didn’t deserve him. I was too messed up; I had far too much baggage that I was too afraid and ashamed to set at his feet. I just wanted him to be happy.

Dark clouds littered the evening sky, but nothing would come from them. Choking incense burned heavily on the side table, and in intervals the coils of smoke were broken apart by the wind creeping through the opened window. Buried beneath the fragrance, a layer of metallic blood lingered. I could smell it like vinegar pressed against my nostrils, taste it in my mouth and in the back of my dehydrated throat.

But nothing was more potent than the memories. In my final hour, they had come back to haunt me, and all I had the strength to do was try to force them away. I gazed beyond the choking smoke, my eyes heavier with every troubled breath. The sound of Lissa’s voice out in the hall suddenly paralyzed me. The fear of her stumbling upon my gory predicament caused my heart to quicken. Soon though her footsteps faded as she shuffled down the hallway.

I closed my eyes. The painful memories still pressed against my skull, tearing holes through the backs of my eyes. The pictures were so clear, so lifelike and so cruel.

And I was powerless to stop them from tormenting me.

I could feel the early morning spring rain against my skin, the coolness of each drop on my cheeks and my girlish bare shoulders. I ran with thirteen-year-old Elias through the pasture near Mr. Parson’s pond—two gullible, free, young barely-teenagers with little worry in the world except getting caught and grounded, or forced to eat ramen noodles for dinner. We headed out in a mad dash and jumped into the water with a great splash. Elias fell beneath the surface and swam toward my legs, grabbing me at the knees. Just like he had always done when we came here. I kicked my legs wildly, trying to get away, laughing so hard that brief tears formed in the corners of my eyes.

Elias emerged from the water, pushing back the soaking mop of dark brown hair on his head.

“I wish we could stay here forever,” I said.

He splashed at me gently. “I do too,” he said. “Who says we can’t?”

I chuckled, covering my mouth with my hand.

“School. Our parents. They might have a problem with it.”

Elias lay back, floating atop the water with his arms stretched out beside him.

“You know that boy in Mrs. Rowe’s class, Brayden Harris?” I began. “I think he likes me.”

Elias lifted, eyeing me suspiciously.

“I want to learn how to kiss,” I added. “Like a real kiss with tongue, y’know? I don’t want to look stupid when I do it for the first time.”

“You don’t need to even have a boyfriend, much less be kissing.” There was a strange edge to his voice that I couldn’t place.

“Oh come on, teach me how, please,” I begged. “I’ll be embarrassed!”

“No.”

“Why not?” I splashed at him. “I know you kissed Mitchell’s sister before. Mitchell told me all about it.”

“I did not kiss her.”

“No?” I narrowed my gaze at him. “So then you’ve never French-kissed? Ever?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking somewhat unconfident. “Sure I have. Just not Mitchell’s sister.” He visibly shuddered and made an awful face.

“Then who?” I tried crossing my arms, but it made me bob precariously in the water.

“That’s none of your business,” he said, crinkling one side of his nose. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to kiss and tell?”

I rolled my eyes and splashed him again.

“You suck,” I said.

He looked faintly stunned, and the whites of his eyes became more noticeable. I laughed because I thought it was funny how he was so offended by such a generic put-down. But I always did like to push his buttons, so I added, “You suck big, hairy, disgusting—”

A tsunami took the breath right out of my lungs and replaced it with dirty pond water. I choked and coughed and tried to rub the burning water from my eyes, only making it worse since my hands were wet.

“Damn it, Elias! I hate you for that!”

“No, you don’t,” he said matter-of-factly.

I twisted my bottom lip between my teeth and snarled. “OK, so maybe I could never hate you”—I rolled my eyes for added effect—“but if you don’t help me practice and I get made fun of when I do it wrong the first time, it’s on your ass.” I rounded my chin arrogantly.

“You’re hopeless, Bray. You know that, right?”

I could tell by the surrendering tone of his voice that I was going to get my way.

“Please?” I whined.

“All right, I’ll try to show you,” Elias agreed with hesitant words that he almost swallowed. “I mean, it’ll be weird kissing you like that, being my best friend and all.”

My face lit up. “I don’t care! Just be glad I’m asking you and not Mitchell or Lissa!”

We exploded into laughter.

“Yeah, that would be pretty disgusting,” he said.

Elias drew near, placing his hands upon my wet cheeks. For a moment, my lips formed a pucker and I closed my eyes so tight that I felt lines crinkling around my nose.

“No, not like that,” Elias said. “Relax your face and don’t do that smoochy-thing with your lips.”

I followed his direction and when it felt natural, his lips gently covered mine. He slipped his tongue into my mouth, and my whole body tingled in a way I had never felt before. My belly swam like warm mush and fluttered and made me feel weird between my legs. I didn’t understand it, but I liked it, almost how I liked it whenever Elias would scratch my back or play with my hair. It was heavenly and warm.

The kiss broke and we looked into each other’s eyes. But before things got awkward, we started splashing each other relentlessly.

I screamed at the top of my lungs as Elias swam around and jumped on my back, pressing both hands on the top of my head and trying to dunk me. I went under twice and swallowed more pond water before I could get away.

“You jerk!” I shrieked.

His dark hair bobbed in the water as he began to swim back toward the dock.

“You still suck, Elias Kline!” I called out to him, my voice carrying across the water. “And that’s why you won’t admit to kissing Mitchell’s sister! Because you sucked at it and don’t want anybody to know!”

With his back to me, his arms came up and he fixed his hands against the edge of the dock. His body shot up out of the water and he sat down against the wooden planks.

“You’re wrong, Bray!” he shouted back.

“Is that so?” I sneered.

“Yeah,” he said. “I never French-kissed her because you were my first.”

I shook the memory out of my head and screamed at the top of my lungs, pounding my fists against the bloody arms of the chair. Tears shot from my eyes.

I looked over at the razor blade on the side table, forcing the memory of Elias out of my mind entirely. I struggled to lift my head, but it felt like it weighed fifty pounds.

The room began to spin. Long, flowing curtains blended with the beige paint on the walls. The sounds from the house were now more audible than ever before. The ticking of two clocks sounded more like six. The shuffling of Lissa’s feet stilled right outside the room. The clock ticking on the wall in the hallway clacked so loudly in my ears I wanted to press my hands over them to stifle the sound, but my arms were too heavy and limp to lift.

My mind was receding fast into blackness. I had always thought this was a slow way to die and that maybe the mind goes before the body.

But I never got the chance to find out.

Lissa burst into the room, saw me in the chair, my wrists covered in blood, and she started screaming.

“Brant! Brant!” I felt her hands cover my wrists. “Call nine-one-one! Brant! Fucking call nine-one-one!” I thought her voice should be unbearably loud in my ears like everything else had been just seconds ago, but this time all the sound around me had become dampened by death slowly stripping away my conscious mind.