I Wish

Chapter 58

Stealing away into the night, after my mum had made it perfectly clear that she’d been aware every time I’d left, was probably a d**k move. She was going to figure it out. I knew that. She was going to know that I knew she knew, and I still didn’t do it anywhere. I didn't care, guilt had reached paramount peaks of anxiety and I was just glad to escape the physical reminders of what I did. Or rather more particularly what I didn’t do. How I’d just let them stay spelled up to their eyeballs and unaware of just how much time we’d been there for. She could have moved in, they would have noticed anything was different, and I let it happen. For no other reason than it suited me. We hurried, Ivy wanted to go home, and I was letting my guilt chase me as fast as I dared to run. It wasn’t because we needed to, or because there was somewhere we had to be and we were late. We were literally fleeing like fugitives, and wasn’t that just telling. I was so tired of being forced to face up to what I’d done that I folded as soon as I could live with myself. 

“Am I the only person that feels like we’re running away here?” I muttered giving in to the compulsion to find out if this was normal or I was the only one. It wasn’t particularly smart of me, but as the trees blurred into each other around us I could help but do it. I wanted to know if I was the only one who thought that we took turns dragging each other further and further away from home. She laughed a little hysterically, and a tiny part of me felt like that meant that she agreed with me. It didn’t help, and short of bigger problems, I wasn’t sure anything was going to. It was a good thing that the one thing Ivy and I would never seem to run low on was bigger problems.

“I like your family, and I feel bad for doing what I did to them. I do, but guarantees are golden,” she shot back emotionally exhausted and with a grim grin barely holding on to her face, “If it makes you feel better, everything has a cost. I got to stay the easy way, but now I get to spend the rest of my life wondering if my mates family would have just let me stay… had we asked.” Oh… yeah, okay. So it wasn’t just me. That had to be hard, a different kind of hard than what I did, but it wouldn’t be a question that I would want to wrestle with nonetheless.

“Oh good, we’re sharing the guilt,” I say in return, almost breathless with relief, and then I stop and shiver. The grin on her face lost its grimness, fixing itself a little more firmly,  and her eyes started to sparkle with an unsettling kind of delight. It was good to know, we both had guilt and we both felt comforted because we’d both needed to feel guilty together. This would be toxically codependent, if we weren’t a matching set of crazy. It was nice to walk hand in hand together, without anyone watching us, it made me feel a lot less nervous about that. Somewhere around that though there’s a tripping feeling. I don’t know how to describe that other walking across a trip wire, but not stumbling or falling. I looked at her and tried to see if she’d noticed it. Going by the bright intensity of her smile I was going to say yeah, she knew what was up or maybe I was just imagining things.

“You felt that?” she asked excitedly and fluttering into my space, The thing was she made it look like it was a life or death question. Like she’d be devastated if I didn’t answer correctly, and it didn’t feel like a question. It also felt like she was asking a different question than the one I gave the answer for. I still answered her anyway.

“Yes,” I replied, attempting to keep the hesitancy out of my tone, as if I would forget the crap I’d pulled. The way she’d asked that? I was instantly on guard by her body language alone. If Ivy was this happy I was about to be very excited, or deeply disturbed.

“We crossed over. As soon as we left the human world, you felt it. It’s a good sign,” she encouraged clapping her hands together as if I was a dog that had learnt a particularly hard new trick. That didn’t sound like it was going to be a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, it sounded like it would be helpful if I knew when I was wandering from one to the other, but something deep in my gut told me that it wasn’t necessarily good. When I didn’t respond the way Ivy wanted me to, or at all really, she sighed because  I was too chicken to say anything in response, “Don’t you want to know why?” she goaded with delight, and I must say it was nice to regain some of my old decision making capabilities, because I knew immediately how to respond to that, and I did so with vehemence. 

“No,” I said, articulating every single syllable, “We’re going to play smart and assume that for one reason or another I’m going to lose my s**t about this, and just not go there.” She eyed me skeptically, doubt clear as day but not the reasoning for it. For a second she opened her mouth, and then realised that I was handing her an out. I thought she’d take it, and surprise-surprise I’d thought wrong.

“Yes, but how could you be sure? It could be something that you like, or that you get upset at me for not telling you later,” she said as if searching for a trap, chewing her bottom lip in a way that was very distracting. I guess I wasn’t the only one who got skittish when things seemed too good to be true. That bottom lip though. It took a minute to reboot my thought process enough to answer, and boy wasn’t she just smug about that. It left a little compulsion to be a smart ass, and I was never very good at resisting those. In fact, it was always what had gotten me into the most trouble.

“Would it have made you happy if it happened in reverse?” I asked snippily, and somewhat rhetorically. When she answered immediately I stumbled, her grip on my hand helping to steady me, because that was not the response I was expecting.

“Yes,” she answered without a pause, “It would have made me ecstatic.” Okay, so straight back to square one then? Didn’t you just love not making progress.

“Well now I really, really know I don’t want to know. Historically that’s how this works,” I said backtracking before things got really scary, and in my panic it was condescending. If she didn’t take this the right way, then I figure we were both about to be gearing up for one of those fights I’d sworn off. She’d risen to her full height, tilting her head with all the disdain of entitled rich people everywhere, and I started thinking that yeah. One of those fights was looking like it was more than likely about to start. Looking around at the incline we were standing on, and the large rolling drop into something that appeared to be more winter than spring, felt like it was going to be a particularly poor choice on both of our parts.

Fortunately we didn’t get a chance to test that theory, and unfortunately that’s because the earth started to move. Great crackling rumbles that had tree’s groaning and uprooting all over the place. I froze in shock, and the only thing it’s preventing me from doing right now was screaming in terror. A fear that was clearly matched, it was written all over Ivy’s face as tree branches became projectile weapons and leaves fell like confetti. My heart was beating so fast that I could feel it through my skin, and for just a little while I started genuinely thinking that I was going to die. That we were going to die. I gasped as the loud rumbling coincided with the ground moving underneath my feet. Wind whipped, and the ground cracked. Leaving deep crevices scarring the earth. I was vibrating. The tremors were so intense, that we were literally vibrating because we were shaking so hard, and it hurt my bones. 

“Rose,” she shouted, trying to take a step closer to me. Our legs go out from under us, and suddenly it doesn’t matter that I can’t find the words to respond. Tears welled up sharply in my eyes as I lost my balance, hand wrenching against my control out of Ivy’s grip, and toppling backwards. Which was when I realised that it hadn’t been my feet to go out from under us, it had been the ground. Forming a landslide and pulling me with it. 

Remember when you were a kid, rolling down a hill? How much fun it was, and how quickly you’d race to the top for another go around? This wasn’t like that. This was like being partially buried by debris, rolling at significantly increasing speeds and almost being swallowed completely and crushed to death until you hit yet another object that would prefer for you to move rather than them, and you break through the surface again. I think it was the cracking. That sound, the one that happened when I smacked into tree trunks and rocks. Bloody, bruised, and nigh unconscious I skidded across ice. 

“Ivy,” I croaked in a soft, barely there sob. One of my arms was bent at an unnatural angle, and darkness was quickly encroaching. I think that agonised second before it arrived, where I waited for Ivy to show up and cried as I realised that I wasn’t going to see her before I lost the fight to stay awake, was the worst part of it all. 

‘Are you sure about that?’ a thousand voices asked at once. We’re going to say it was an injury, and not anything else that had me fainting on the spot. That was my story and I was going to stick to it.