I wanted to scream; I wanted to come out of that box just to slap his stupid, stupid face. But I was too tired to raise my voice above a croak. The disco lights that danced on my eyelids were fading and I was sleepy. My head was as cottony as my mouth, but one thing was clear—I was in here for all the wrong reasons.
Kyle wasn't even mad at me.
“When you figure this out, you're…well, I don't know how you'll feel about it,” I said.
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you've got it all wrong. You don't want me in this box. I'm not the problem. If you want to feel better, feel like you've avenged your brother, then torture the person who tortured your brother—go get your mother and put her in this box. That woman shit on your brother every day of his life. She wouldn't even feed her kid. Her own child. Did you really understand that note? If David blamed me, he would have pinned my note to his body too. Right?”
Nothing.
I had to keep talking. The buzz in my head was piercing. A band saw chewing up my skull. I had to get this out now because I knew I didn't have any time left.
“David's note was aimed straight for your mother. Her words are teeth. He wants her to feed on his corpse. He hung himself in your front yard. He wanted people to know, to know what she did to him.”
Still nothing.
“If I die and she lives—how does that make you feel better? She wins even bigger that way.”
More nothing.
And then the radio clicked off. I heard a long, anguished howl. Loud enough to vibrate through the earth.
And then he was gone.
I knew he was gone. I could feel it.
This was all—backward or sideways or…I couldn't think, my head hurt and this fading in and out kept me from focusing. What did I do wrong? I had it all figured out…I knew what I…
Oh shit.
I'd done part of it right. I'd convinced him that burying me was covering up the problem. And covering up the problem, never letting it come to light, was how his mother got away with wounding David with her words until she bled him dry.
But I was supposed to make Kyle see that his mother always made sure someone else paid the price for her shortcomings, for her mistakes. Kyle was supposed to dig me up so I wouldn't die for what his mother had done to David.
I was supposed to convince him that his mother murdered David.
And she couldn't make Kyle responsible for murdering me.
He was supposed to get me out first.
Now he was gone.
I wasn't supposed to…I didn't think he'd self-destruct…I…didn't…
I signed my own death certificate.
My eyes are closed. I own the dark now. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears and it's got a flutter or maybe I mean a stutter. I'm too weak to bang my heels, my breath kind of rattles, and my tongue has gotten thick again. The things that should hurt, my shredded fingers and toes and heels, don't. The places where I've bitten through my lips and where they've cracked and bled, none of that hurts. But I'm cold and I shiver and jerk and that makes my joints feel like they are grinding. And my head. Pounding, buzzing, the whirling lights.