Song of the Fireflies

Chapter Twenty-Three

Elias

I rapped harshly on the bathroom door. “Bray?”

I could hear her sobbing, but she wouldn’t answer, so I knocked and called out her name again. Jen and Tate came up behind me, but I was too busy trying to get the door open to pay attention. I twisted the knob both ways, knowing it was locked but hoping by some chance it might still pop open. “Bray, open the door, baby, please.” My heart was thrumming in my throat.

“I heard her crying when I walked by,” Jen said from behind. “I stopped and asked if she was OK, but she didn’t answer. I dunno why, but it just kinda freaked me out.”

“Bray! Open the damn door!” I pounded on it harder with my fist.

“Move out of the way,” I heard Adam say in a calm manner, as if he had it under control.

I stepped to the side and Adam went up to the door and stuck a thin L-shaped piece of metal in the doorknob. The door clicked and popped right open. Adam stepped away and I wasted no time rushing in there. Bray was sitting on the bathroom floor next to the pedestal sink with her back against the wall, her knees drawn up and her head atop them. She rocked back and forth on her backside, her body a trembling mess, her arms pressed together against her chest. I checked her over from afar, at first afraid to approach her.

No blood. There was no blood, and a great sense of relief washed through me like a crashing wave. As relieved as I was, I felt guilty for thinking she would ever do something like that after she promised me that she wouldn’t. I wasn’t giving her enough credit.

I sat down beside her on the floor and glanced back at everyone standing in the doorway.

“Let’s give them a moment,” Tate said and reached out for the doorknob. Just before the door closed he added, “I hate to rush you, especially right now, but we have to head out in fifteen minutes so Jen can make her flight.”

I nodded and he closed the door the rest of the way.

Immediately, I turned back to Bray. Placing my hands on the sides of her face, I tried to lift her head. She fought me at first, but I managed to get her to raise her eyes to me. Her face was streaked with the black mascara she had borrowed from Jen. I tried to take her hands, wedging mine between her thighs and her chest to reach them, but she refused, jerking them away. Her dark hair fell over her shoulder and further concealed them.

“Why are you hiding them?”

That feeling in the pit of my stomach began to twist deeper.

“Elias…” Her voice was soft and pleading.

She didn’t want me to look.

I clenched my jaw so hard that pain shot through my teeth and I reached in and grabbed her by one wrist, feeling the coarse hemp rope material her bracelets were made from scratching against my fingers. I expected them to be moist with blood, but they were dry. She screamed at me and thrust her body backward, accidently hitting her head on the wall, but I wasn’t about to let go. Her eyes were feral and imploring.

“Stop, Elias, please!”

“No! What are you hiding?!” I wrenched her wrists into view and forced my fingers behind the bracelets, pulling them apart so I could see her skin. Still no blood. No cuts. I looked at the other one. It was the same, but as I moved a little to the left and the light in the ceiling filled in the shadow my body had been casting on her, I saw that her wrists were red and inflamed. Red streaks stretched from just below the balls of her thumbs downward to the center of her forearm.

Scratch marks.

I froze, my hands clamped down on her forearms so hard that she couldn’t move them. “What the hell is this?”

She shook her head. Tears streamed down her face, dripping off the end of her chin.

I shook her so hard that the back of her head hit the wall again. “What the hell is this, Bray?!” I roared in her face.

“It’s not that!” she screamed back in my face. “It’s not what you’re thinking!” Her face was contorted by pain.

“Then tell me what it is!” I remembered her telling me about this before, when her mom found her clawing at her wrists and sent her to a shrink afterward. But I needed to know more. I needed to know everything and she was going to tell me or we’d sit here like this forever.

She started to twist her body in a way that if I didn’t let go her arms would break, so I released her.

“Just go. Go home, Elias. Please just go home.” Her voice was strangely soft and distant, it felt like every part of her had given up.

She buried her head on her knees again, wrapping her arms around her legs.

“No, I’m not leaving this room until you tell me what that is.”

Her head shot back up. “If I tell you, will you go home?”

“No.”

“Then forget it. I’m leaving here, Elias. Not with Tate or with anyone else. I’m leaving here on my own.” Her voice was firm, resolute.

“What are you talking about?”

She was scaring me. Her wrists. This burst of despair and pain that came out of nowhere and blindsided me. This crazy shit she was saying about leaving without me. She shook her head back and forth over and over again, looking at anything but me. And it was infuriating. I rose from the floor and into a crouched position, pushing up with my knuckles pressing against the linoleum. She still wouldn’t look at me and I had given up expecting her to. Was she serious? Did she really want me to leave? What was she planning to do?

My heart sank. I knew I couldn’t leave her. I wouldn’t have, anyway, but I knew that even if I had wanted to I couldn’t.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she said in a soft voice. “I was… I just do that sometimes.”

“Do what?” I couldn’t for the life of me understand what the hell she was saying to me.

“I’ve done it since I was a teenager,” she said. “It’s no big deal. It’s just a release. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I told you I’m stronger than that.” She finally looked up at me and her face was full of darkness and finality. She was tired of who she was, tired of hiding, from me, from herself, tired of pretending to be someone she wasn’t, because she knew she wasn’t what society deemed normal. I felt it as I looked down into her eyes.

She was tired.

“I’d say that clawing at your wrists with your fingernails is a pretty big fucking deal, Bray.”

“To you, I guess it would be.” She was eerily calm and her tears had already begun to dry up. She sniffled back the few remaining.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

She hesitated and looked at the pedestal sink next to her. “You would never understand.”

“Try me.”

“They always say that.”

“I’m not ‘they,’ ” I said. “I’m the one person in this world you know loves you more than anything. Never throw me in the closet with them. I don’t belong there. I never will.”

Her throat moved as though she were swallowing more tears that were trying to rise to the surface.

Finally she said, “Sometimes the darkness feels like it’s right there beneath the skin. It’s right there. I hate it when I can feel it, because it’s like it’s taunting me. It knows I can’t get to it. I scratch and claw”—her voice began to shake, her eyes were brimming with tears again, tears of anger—“and I try to get it out but I can’t. I can’t because I know I’d hurt myself if I went that far! But I try so hard!”

I sat down in front of her again and took her gently by her forearms, my thumbs pressing in the center of the soft underskin. “Tell me. I want to know everything. How it feels. What makes it go away. How often it comes back. I need to know, baby.”

She choked the tears back and sniffled. “It doesn’t happen very often anymore, not like when I was a teenager,” she said. “And it eventually goes away after I’ve cried it out.” She laughed drily. “Well, I always try clawing it out, but it never works. It always comes back. And whenever it comes back, I always go for the wrists first.”

She looked me in the eyes. “Elias, I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. I just wanted it out.”

I believed her. I couldn’t understand exactly how she felt, but in a way I could. I couldn’t imagine living like that. I tried to picture myself in her place, going through the motions all her life, and it only made me squirm inside my skin. I thought she was much stronger than I could ever be for dealing with something so dark, so strange, practically all her life. I knew I could never have done it.

“Elias, I want you to go home.” Her tone was calm, but abandon lay evident in her eyes.

I was an idiot to think she had forgotten about that part. I shook my head. “You know I won’t do that.”

“Look, this isn’t some cry for attention,” she said as she speared all ten fingers through the top of her hair, pulling the hair away from her tear-streaked face. “This isn’t me telling you to go home because I need to hear you say that you won’t. I really mean it, Elias. You need to go home. This isn’t your problem and I’m tired of making it yours.”

“It is my problem,” I said. “Whatever you go through I go through with you. I always will.”

The palms of her hands slapped against the floor on each side of her. “Dammit, Elias! Stop doing this! You deserve better than what I could ever give you, and I’m never going to be able to change. Ever. Stop being my safety net and just go. I want you to.”

“I don’t care if that’s what you want,” I said. “I’m not leaving you. I’m with you to the end, whether you want me there or not.”

She gritted her teeth and inhaled a deep, infuriated breath. She was telling the truth about really wanting me to leave. It was exactly as she had said, that this wasn’t about needing to hear me say I that I wouldn’t. She was determined to make me leave her behind and angry that I refused. But I didn’t care.

“Three more days,” I said. “You agreed to give me that much. I expect you to hold to it.”

“So you’re just going to walk around going absolutely nowhere with me? Everybody here knows about us now. It’s only a matter of a very short time before one of them calls the cops and we’re hauled off to jail.” Her steely gaze shot through me when she said, “And I’m not going to jail. Do you understand? I won’t go to jail.”

The way she said it, the way her eyes held every ounce of resolve that I knew could never be shaken, tore a hole in my soul. Bray had revealed to me the darkness that lived within her, the darkness that made all the reckless decisions and that always controlled her when she was at her weakest, that which I feared would later send her right into the throes of death. My Bray was no longer the one sitting on that bathroom floor. That brave, strong, fearless girl who loved to laugh and play in the rain. The darkness that lived underneath her skin, that she fought so hard to be free of, was in control of her now, triggered by how close we were getting to the end of all this, triggered by the events that she knew would inevitably be set into motion. I won’t go to jail. Her words ran through my mind over and over again, and I knew that she’d die before she let that happen.

Bray would die before she let that happen.

“You promised me three days.”

She looked right at me. Her tears had completely dried up.

“Then three days it is,” she said, nodding. “We have three days left together. I want to make the most of them.”

Her words rendered me speechless. My heart, which only beat for her anymore, took my voice and my mind when it fell into the pit of my stomach.

We had only three days left together, and I knew that they would end either in separation or in death.

And I could never prepare myself for either.