School ends in a few days and it’s getting close to the day when I should be heading home, back to the hellhole where nothing feels right and I feel like a God damn kid again. Kayden’s already got most of his stuff packed, his side of the room covered in taped-up boxes. He is over at Callie’s dorm helping her out right now and I haven’t even gotten started on my side, the bed still made, my clothes still in the dresser. I’m seriously contemplating lighting it on fire and living in my truck. I haven’t even bothered talking to my father since our last conversation. He’s called a few times, but hasn’t left any messages.

“Look I’m sorry I’m breaking your heart or whatever,” I pace the length of my small dorm room between the two beds with the phone pressed up to my ear, shaking my head at pretty much every word she utters, “But I’m seriously going to stay here.” I’m so full of shit. I officially have nowhere to stay. All the apartments for rent cost too much money. At this point I’ve been searching for a roommate, but I can’t seem to find one. It’s just the wrong time or something and I f**king hate it because I don’t want to go back to my hometown, Star Grove.

“Lukey,” she starts. I hate it when she calls me that and even now it makes me feel nauseous. “You need to come home and take care of me. I’ve started taking my medications again and I need your help.”

“Which ones?” I say disdainfully, kicking at the leg of my bed, the need to pound a hole into something rising in me like a flame burning toward a pool of gasoline. “Your heroin? Your crushed-up pain meds? Coke? Whiskey? Which one is it, Mother?”

“You act like I don’t need it,” she says, sounding hurt. “I do. I need it, Lukey. I need it more than anything otherwise I think too much and bad stuff happens when I think too much. You know that.”

“Bad stuff happens regardless of what you’re on.” I slam my boot into the leg of the bed over and over again, the bed slamming into the wall, and my foot starts to hurt. Fuck! “And you know I’m too old to believe that shit, Mother. I know you’re just doing drugs for the same reason that everyone else is in the world and that’s to escape whatever it is you’re running from. It’s not some doctor prescription like you convinced me it was when I was six.”

“But it is, sweetie.” Her voice is high-pitched as if she’s talking to a child. “The doctors just haven’t realized I need it yet.”

I hate her. I hate myself for hating her so much. I hate the hate inside me and how out of control it makes me feel. I hate that every time I get even remotely close to anyone, I think of all the horrible things she made me do—the hell she put me through. “You know what I think,” I say and storm over to the wall. “I think you’ve done too much of it and now you’ve lost it.” I pause, wondering how she’s going to respond. I’m usually not so blunt with her, instead avoiding her at all costs. But the moving back is getting to me.

“You think I’m crazy?” she asks in a subdued voice. I hear rustling in the background and I don’t even want to know what she’s doing. “Is that what you think? Does my little boy think his mother is insane?”

I press my fingertips to my temple, the muscles in my arms tightening with my frustration. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“You’re sounding like all the rest of them,” she says and something loud bangs in the background.

“All the rest of who?” I ask, rolling my eyes.

“The neighbors,” she whispers and then pauses. “I think they’ve been watching me… And there’s this car parked out front… I think it’s the police watching me again.”

“The police aren’t watching you again—they never were. They just questioned you once for God knows what, you never would tell me.”

“They are, too, Lukey. They’re after me again.”

I shake my head and the list of what “medication” she’s been taking becomes shorter because there are only a few of them that bring out her paranoia. “No one’s after you and you want to know why? Because no one cares.”

“You care about me, though.” Panic fills her tone. “Don’t you, Lukey?”

I sink down on the bed and lower my head into my hands. God, I wish I could just say no. Tell her I hate her. Rid my life of her. But I can’t seem to bring myself to say it aloud, always bound by that stupid little kid that lives inside me, the one that always helped her, felt like he had to because no one else would. “Yeah, sure.”

“That’s my good boy,” she tells me and I feel the burn of approaching vomit at the back of my throat. “Always taking care of me. I can’t wait for you to come home. We’re going to have so much fun.”

I know what her version of fun is—cleaning the house together, having me help her with whatever drugs she’s taking, sit with her, listen to her sing, be her best friend and enter her insane world of drug-induced ranting. I can’t go back and live with her. In that house. In my room. With the insanity. Her telling me she needs me. Needs. Needs. Needs. Just going back for Christmas was enough and I wasn’t even there that much. If I end up with her there I can probably get a job and party a lot just to avoid going home, but in the end I’ll have to go home. I never want to go back. I ran away from all that shit when I was sixteen and I can’t go back. I need to get out of going home no matter what it takes. “I have to go.” Before she can say anything I hang up.

I toss the phone aside on the bed and rock back and forth, breathing back the impulse to scream and hit something. I know if anyone walked in and saw me like this they’d think I’d lost my mind, but I can’t stop the wave of anger and panic once it surfaces like this. Only three things do it for me. Sex and alcohol and violence.

I keeping rocking and rocking but the rage inside me rises and mixes with the vile feeling of shame I always carry with me. I feel a wave of rage building and building as it makes it’s way through my body toward the outside of me. If I don’t do something soon I’m going to end up destroying the room. Finally, I can’t stand it any longer. I jump up from the bed and storm for the wall again. This time I don’t stop. I just bend my arm back and ram my fist against the wall over and over again, heat and rage blasting through my body. After the fifth slam of my fist, I’m trembling from head to toe and there’s a fist-size hole in the wall and each one of my knuckles are split open. Kayden was already worried about fixing the door and now the wall’s messed up. I’m really on a roll. I need to get out of here because it still feels like I need to hit something. Kick something. Beat the shit out of something. I need to get the anger building inside me out, before it takes control of me, and there’s only one way to do that and it requires a lot of physical pain and alcohol, but I want it. More than anything.

Violet

I’m in a super shitty mood today, the invisible razors and needles I haven’t felt in a long time are back, slicing at my skin as my irritation builds. At first it was a slow-building irritation, over life in general. I tried to tell myself over and over again that it was nothing—that I was just in a mood. But I think it might be something deeper, like the fact that I find myself missing a certain someone.

I never miss anyone. And all I want to do is turn it off, yet at the same time I don’t.

It’s confusing and slightly annoying

As I’m packing my boxes, telling myself to stop thinking about him, my phone rings and the song playing means it’s an unknown number. When I answer it the person breathes heavily and then hangs up.

“Seriously,” I say to the phone, before setting it down on my bed. I move over to the desk, searching through the papers stacked on it, wondering if any of them are mine. As I’m reaching the bottom stack, my phone rings again, same ringtone, unknown number.

I glare at the phone as I pick it up. I don’t even get to hello this time, before the caller hangs up. It happens again and again and finally, after the seventh or eighth I tell the person off.

“Look, if you don’t stop calling me,” I say, “I’m going to track you down and cut your balls off.”

“What if I’m a girl?” he asks with a hint of laughter in his tone.

I sit down on my bed and cross my legs. “Then you really need to stop taking so much testosterone since your voice is lower than a normal dude’s voice.”

He laughs, like I was amusing, but I’m being serious. “You’re funny.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

“Well, you are.”

I shake my head. “What the hell do you want? And who are you?”

“I’m looking for Violet Hayes,” he says.

I go rigid. I don’t recognize his voice—he shouldn’t know my last name.

“Who the hell is this?” I start to grow nervous as I glance around my empty room. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt uneasy with being alone, but the old feelings are emerging, the feeling that someone is watching me, waiting to hurt me like they should have done twelve years ago.

“The Violet Hayes who was part of the Hayes murder case,” he says.

I hang up on him and chuck the phone across the room. It dents the wall and I think I broke it until it rings again. I let it ring and ring, then it silences as it goes to voicemail. But then it starts ringing again, until finally I can’t take it anymore. I get up and track the sound of the ringtone to the corner of the room, where I find the phone wedged between the leg of the desk and the wall. I bend down and fumble around until I get a hold of it.

“What the hell do you want, asshole?” I practically shout in the phone as I stand back up.

“Is this Violet Hayes?”

“Oh my God, are you being serious? I don’t want to talk to you, whoever you are, so stop calling.”

He pauses. “This is Detective Stephner. I need to speak to Violet Hayes.”

I hesitate as I wander back to my bed. “Did you just call me?”

“No…” He sounds lost and gives an elongated pause. “I’m calling you to see if you can come meet with me. I’d like to talk to you about your parents’ murder.”

It takes me a second to answer. “Why?” I ask cautiously.

“Because I’m reopening the case,” he responds in a formal tone. “And I want to see what you can remember about that night.”

“Why are you reopening the case?” I ask, wondering if maybe they found something, feeling a spark of hope. “Did you find something?”

“No, but we’re hoping to,” he says and all of my hope simmers out.

“Well, I remember what I told the police thirteen years ago, which isn’t a hell of a lot, since I was six and emotionally f**ked up,” I say, telling myself not to get my hopes up but I can already feeling the emotions pressing up, the ache connected to the loss of my parents. “So I don’t really see the point of me coming down there and wasting my time, you asking me the same damn questions and shoving the same damn mug shots at me even though I told you I barely saw the killers since it was dark.”

“I understand your frustration, but answering some questions could help solve your parents’ murder,” he points out and I hear him shuffling through papers.

“No it won’t,” I say, flopping down on the bed on my back, holding the phone to my ear. My muscles are starting to tighten just from the suggestion of going down to the police station and chatting about something I’d laid to rest a long time ago. Case closed. They said so themselves and even though I didn’t like it, I accepted it. Moved on. Lived what life I had. “They couldn’t solve it thirteen years ago and you’re not going to solve it now.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d come down,” he tells me, sending me a silent message through his firm tone. You’re going to meet me—it’s not a choice.

“Fine, but I live in Laramie now, not Cheyenne,” I say in a tight voice. “And I’m in the middle of moving, so it’ll have to wait a few days.” I’m making up excuses on purpose.

“How about next Monday at seven? Downtown at the Laramie police station?” he asks without missing a beat. “Does that work for you?”

I frown. “I guess.”

He says good-bye and then I hang up, lying on the bed. I chew on my fingernails, not liking the emotions tormenting me in the quiet. I’d shut that door a long time ago and now I was just supposed to open it up so I could tell him the same things I already told the police thirteen years ago. I’m sure he has all that in his file, so why is he bothering me?

I check my voicemail seeing if creepy, deep-voice guy left a message. He didn’t and an unsettling fear stirs in my stomach. For the first few months after my parents died, I had this overwhelming fear that the people were going to come back to finish me off. It was like I constantly felt I needed to look over my shoulder; if I saw a shadow at night in my room, I thought it was them breaking in. But I managed to get myself out of that place and land where I am now. I worked hard not to be afraid of anything and I refuse to go back to that place.

I barely budge from the bed, drowning in my emotions, and I start to debate my options for a much-needed hit of adrenaline. I have these pills that I’ve taken a couple of times and at the right dose they can put me into darkness and I can still get out. They’re hidden in the computer desk drawer, beside the prescription bottle that holds the stash of weed Preston gave me to make quick sales, right within arm’s reach. Such an easy escape from everything going on around me. It’s not my favorite route to go, because it’s easier for someone to walk in and find me. I don’t want to be found. I want to remain lost because it’s the only thing that’s become serenely and painfully familiar.