Page 152 of 72 Hours of You

Peter sits there, rubbing the back of his neck and stealing looks at me, before deciding to keep his mouth shut and open the Kindle app on his phone instead. The Scent Keeper. I peek over his shoulder. “Maybe that’s how it always is, I thought—we all just go along, catching glimpses of one another, thinking we know everything.”

That’s not it, I think, leaning my head against the rattling train window as we lurch away from the city. We go along, catching snippets that other people feed us, clinging to the lie of who they say they are. We don’t know shit.

Nineteen

THE CHAIN DANGLES, BROKEN, from the hotel door.

Charles is here. He’s here. He found me. Of course he found me. He always knows where I am.

“You think you can just ignore my texts!” he screams, pushing his way into the hotel room. His hair is wet, sticking to his forehead, his button-down soaked with rain. “You think you can just ignore ME?” He stalks toward me. “How could you?”

My heart slams against my chest. “Please, Charles. Just wait a minute.”

“Stop it!” he screams again. “Just fucking stop it!” He yanks at his wet hair in a fit of rage, a low growl rolling through his body. And then he pulls back and punches a hole in the drywall.

I cover my head and a scream dies in my throat. White dust floats in the air like snow. My body is shaking, shaking, shaking. But I stay silent.

He walks toward me, stumbling a little, his eyes wild and unfocused. Oh god, I think he’s drunk. I haven’t seen him drunk since last Fourth of July, and then he was all smiles and sparklers. “Sydney.”

I squeeze my eyes shut.

“You have to see what you’ve done.” I squeeze my eyes tighter. “Look at me!” he yells.

I back up against the wall, tripping over my duffel bag. “Charles,” I say again. As if that will stop him. As if anything could. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re ‘sorry’? Tell that to Caroline!” His eyes burn like he’s on fire from the inside. And maybe he is. He grabs my arms with his thick hands. I can feel each individual finger pressing into my forearms, squeezing until my skin is pressed against bone. His right knuckles are already bleeding. The gold watch on his left wrist glints under the hotel light.

“If you’re sorry, then fix it,” he snarls into my face, his breath hot and sharp. “FIX IT!” He screams again, and this time he digs into my arms so tight he lifts my entire body off the ground and slams my head back into the wall.

My head is swimming, the hotel light blurring into blues and yellows. “Please,” I whisper. “Please, Mr. Campbell.”

Twenty

I JOLT AWAKE, my heart going a million miles a minute and my eyes darting back and forth. The train is still rolling, graffitied buildings and browning trees scraping by the window faster, faster, faster.

“Sydney.” Peter puts his hand on my arm. “Are you okay? I think you fell asleep and were having some sort of nightmare.”

Oh shit.

I jerk my arm back. “I just … had one of those things where you think you’re falling. I’m fine.”

I’m fine? What a fucking joke.

“Are you sure? You—”

“I said I’m fine,” I hiss.

“Okay,” Peter says. “My bad.”

He turns his eyes back to his book, and I pull out my phone and pretend to scroll Insta, but none of the images quite make it into my brain. My thumb keeps moving up, up, up, until the pictures blur into an overexposed mess of other people’s teeth and limbs.

What gives Peter the right to jump in like that? He thinks he can just go around talking to people? Handing them hot dogs? Helping them do shit before they die? Giving them fucking hugs like he’s the guest star on a feelings episode of Sesame Street?

That’s not how this works. How this works is that you leave well enough alone and let death do whatever it’s going to do. You stay away from hospitals and nursing homes and you keep your eyes on your own fucking paper. And if you do see a clock, you try not to think about it. You put them in your notebook, and you turn the page and never look at them or think about them again. And you hope that you get a few months before you have to reopen the book and etch another name in your red college-ruled cemetery.

Except now I have two more to add. Just from today. Because of Peter.

Because he dragged me out there, into that snarled-up tangle of city lives, and city deaths.