Sketch
I was numb.
Numb to the bone and drowning in anger and regret.
My brother was still dead.
But Romi didn’t do it.
She didn’t kill Chris.
Of all the things I had learned in the past twenty-four hours, and there had been a hell of a lot, that was the statement that was sticking out in the fore point of my brain.
I tortured her for months. Punished and taunted her, bullied and pushed her to the edge of her sanity, was more than likely responsible for her lying in a hospital bed right now, and it had all been for nothing.
Because she was as innocent as I was.
What the hell was I thinking?
How could I think she was capable of killing Chris?
Was my grief that blinding?
Romi Dillon was 5'1 and 100lbs soaking wet. The girl couldn't fight her way out of a paper bag, never mind cause the kind of physical damage listed on Chris's autopsy report, evident on his mangled body when I went with Sheriff Steiner to identify him that night.
Jesus Christ, I couldn’t handle this.
I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t fucking breathe, and all I wanted to do was march back to the hospital and demand things from a girl I didn’t think would look at me again. She would never forgive me for the way I behaved towards her. When the dust settled, and she had a chance to think things over, think clearly again, she was going to be furious with me, and I wouldn’t blame her one bit.
"Don’t talk to anyone, Sketch. You can't trust them..."
True to my word, I had kept my mouth shut, never voicing the conversation we'd had to a single living soul, while I waited for her to be discharged from the hospital.
While I waited for the answers to the questions building up in my mind.
Trying to get information out of Romi would be virtually impossible now, not just because I'd been such a dick to her, but because she was scared out of her mind.
But I had to try.
For Chris.
Because I was right.
Months of being labelled crazy by my father and the police department and I had finally been given the one thing I'd been desperately seeking.
The truth.
"He found something, Sketch. He asked the wrong questions to the wrong people and it got him killed. So don’t go digging around in this. Don't go looking for trouble. Not when it's right on our doorstep."
And the truth spelled out the fact that I had been dead on the money all along.
My brother didn’t die from the impact of the car wreck.
He was dead beforehand.
He was murdered.
"You don’t get it. If I tell you anything and you react badly, then we both die. I've already told you too much. This is serious. It's not a game. And I don’t care what happens to me anymore, but I made a promise to your brother that I would protect you."
Furious, I lay on the flat of my back on Chris's bed, mulling over both my thoughts and theories, as I stared up at the ceiling in his bedroom.
I halfheartedly tossed a football into the air, catching it and throwing it again for the millionth time, needing to do something and nothing all at once.
I was struggling to register everything, to deal, and weirdly enough, the familiar feel of pig-skin between my fingertips was grounding me.
Every once and a while, I flicked my gaze to the framed photo on my brother's nightstand but that only made me feel worse.
Seeing Chris with his arms draped around Romi at the winter formal in junior year, just days before his death, made me want to gauge my eyeballs out.
There would never be a picture like that with me in it because I'd never been good enough for Cal Dillion's only daughter. Because something about me, something inside of me, caused my own damn parents to hate me.
A slick layer of cold sweat settled on my brow every time I thought about Chris and Romi being intimate; their bodies touching, his hands on her, her lips on his, clothes shedding, skin on skin…fuck!
Seeing them together in the flesh had been torture enough. I didn’t need the reminder of a fucking photograph. I couldn't bear it, if truth be told.
In a lifetime that consisted of adoring and looking up to my brother, I could count on one finger the number of times he let me down.
One time.
With one girl.
My girl.
Chris had everything growing up and I never complained. He got all the love from our parents, received all the preferential treatment everywhere we went, and still, I never said a word. He had everything I never had and I didn’t begrudge him any of it because I got to have Romi.
She was mine.
And then he swooped in when my hands were tied and took her away.
Dated her.
Kissed her.
Touched her.
Slept in her bed.
Loved my damn girl like he had the right to.
My nostrils flared as my breathing accelerated, body trembling with barely restrained fury, because it still hurt.
Tossing my ball away, I swiped the half-empty bottle of whiskey balancing between my thighs and guzzled it down.
Two years on, and it was the feeling of betrayal that I still couldn’t seem to shake.
Feeling guilty for the resentment rising up inside of me, all directed at Chris, I reached over and placed the frame face down, taking care not to smash my fist through it like I desperately wanted to do, before resuming my post of staring at the ceiling.
Why the hell hadn't she been released from the hospital yet?
It had been over twenty-four hours. What the hell was taking so long? She wasn't in critical fucking care, dammit. She had a banged-up knee and some stitches – hardly a medical emergency by any stretch.
I wasn’t a patient person as a rule, and waiting for Romi to get her ass back to the house next door was making me antsy.
I hadn't left Chris's room since I came home from the hospital yesterday. With the exception of raiding the fridge for snacks and my father's liquor cabinet for a few bottles of his prized whiskey, I kept myself locked away from the outside world. I knew I couldn’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut if I was faced with the opportunity to interrogate someone – or worse, throw the truth in my father's face.
I also knew that if I fucked this up, if I blew her trust, Romi wouldn't talk again.
And that couldn't happen.
"What the fuck did you do, man?" I asked the empty room, envisioning Chris sitting at his desk where he always sat, cramming for some test or other, while I drove him batshit crazy with my inability to sit still and do nothing.
"I swear to God that I'll avenge you," I whispered then, feeling my chest tighten and constrict. "It might take me some time, but I'll find the people who did this to you, Chris, and I'll make every last one of them pay."
I knew I should be losing my shit a lot more than I was, considering the significance of the bombshell that had been dropped on my lap, but I'd come to terms with the truth many months ago.
Long before Romi spilled her guts, I had accepted the fact that Chris was murdered.
Even when nobody else believed me, I knew I was right, and I made peace with it. I accepted the fact that I would never stop hunting and searching for the truth – not until my brother's killer was brought to justice.
For ten months, I'd believed that person to be the girl next door.
Now, I didn’t dare think too much about her.
If I did, the guilt would break me.
I couldn’t think of the million different ways I had wronged and wounded Romi Dillon. Made her suffer for something she clearly had no part of.
Yeah, it was safe to say that I had thrown a lifetime of friendship out the window based on a very valid hunch that I had directed at the wrong person.
Chris passed away ten months ago, December 23rd to be exact, and I'd been consistently tormenting Romi every chance I got since.
For the two months she was on house arrest, awaiting her trail, and for the two months since she had been home from juvie, I'd taken both comfort and pleasure in seeking Romi out with the sole aim of inflicting as much turmoil and pain on her as I was capable of.
Hell, even when she was in juvie, I never missed a week to send her a strongly worded letter, letting her know exactly what I thought of her – word for cruel and threatening word.
The sick part of it all was that I was still mad at her. I had no reason to be, but that didn’t change how I felt. It made zero sense, but my feelings never usually did. I was still pissed and hurt, still angry and vengeful. I was still wounded. I still had a Romi-shaped hole in my chest.
Maybe it was the fact that I'd spent the bones of a year actively despising the girl and feelings were hard to turn off. Or maybe it was the fact that I was still hurting over her and Chris.
Either way, I hadn't taken any comfort from her revelation, nor did I have a 'oh thank God' moment because the bomb she dropped wasn't one filled with rainbows and good news.
Chris was still dead, his death was still a result of murder, and Romi was still a little liar.
An innocent liar, but still…I'd been through hell this past year and at any point in time she could have stopped it, or at the very least given me the comfort of knowing that I wasn't, in fact, losing my mind as so many had accused – and a small part of me had believed.
Romi knew all along and she did nothing.
But I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt because I could see the terror in her eyes yesterday. I knew when Romi was telling the truth and I knew when she wasn’t, and that fear she displayed in her hospital room was one hundred percent genuine.
She truly believed that she needed to protect me from something, and it had cost her a great deal of inner peace and mental wellness to speak the words that had finally freed me from the crippling shackles of the unknown.
I knew I should take heed of her warning, but without the whole story, it was hard to come to terms with the mind-fucking tidbits she'd fed me between panic attacks.
I believed her, though. I didn’t need the whole story to know that much. No one was that good of an actor, and she was the worse version of a liar I'd ever met. Her inability to spin a decent story was the reason I had hounded her so relentlessly for the truth until she cracked.
I had wanted answers and I got them. Now, I wanted more, but I was willing to be patient and wait, instead of forcing them out with threats and taunting. She had suffered enough – six months in juvie for a crime I could only assume that she was coerced into.
"Yes, I was behind the wheel that night," she sobbed, shoulders jerking violently. "Yes, I ran us off the road. And yes, I'm responsible for the wreck, but I did what I had to. I did exactly what he told me to…"
It all made sense now.
Romi had been speaking to me in riddles the whole time.
She might not understand or be able to remember everything that happened the night Chris died, but she knew enough to help me piece the puzzle together.
And I would figure it out.
I would avenge my brother.
If it was the last thing I did.