Chapter Fourteen - Good Boys Don't Bite

Rowdy can’t remember the last time she dreamed, but as her mind settles and then opens wide again, she finds herself in a basement with cool morning light filtering in through the high, narrow windows set into the wall in front of her.

The first things she notices are the shadows. Five of them linger around the space in front of her, some moving and others not. All of them are definitely people, though none of them have any discernible features beyond having heads, shoulders, and legs. There’s no indication that they realize she’s appeared, but to be safe, Rowdy inches until her back hits something solid. A doorknob presses hard into her flank.

Undulating, the shadows break away from one another and move to various parts of the room away from her. She swears she hears one or two of them whisper, “unlike us” on breaths that sound like heavy steps across thick carpet.

Once they’ve moved far enough away, Rowdy peeks more curiously around the room.

There’s a long entertainment center just underneath the windows, neatly organized with DVDs, gaming consoles, and a television that looks like a modern recreation of a vintage model. She starts to go to it, to see what kind of games are hidden beside the movies, but hesitates just outside a bar of light.

“It won’t hurt you here.”

Leena’s voice makes her jump hard enough to bite her tongue on accident. Everything on the entertainment center fades away as she whips around to find where her voice came from.

Leena’s sitting on a bed wearing a yellow dress and entirely surrounded by big, squishy stuffed animals. Everything within her reach looks soft and comforting, either texturally or by the design. Rowdy tilts her head; she never would have pictured her room this way.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hi, Rowdy.”

“Are you okay?”

Leena gestures around vaguely with a sad sort of smile on her face. “A dream isn’t the worst place, you know. You’re here.”

Rowdy forces her feet to take her across the room, but when her shins hit the edge of the mattress, she sinks down to her knees instead.

“I have so much to tell you.”

Leena shakes her head. “I saw it all. You don’t have to go to the trouble of recounting it all for me.”

“What?”

“I watched the whole thing from inside you. I don’t know how I feel about it, though, to be honest.”

Fear rattles itself alive in Rowdy’s chest. “What do you mean? We killed him. We . . . we made it safe.”

Leena’s smile turns gentle, and she reaches out to cup Rowdy’s cheek in her palm. There’s no scrape of callouses or roughness as her hand meets her face. “I know that’s what you think and how you feel. The gesture, I love, you know that. But he could have faced real consequences. I only wanted you to find the bag.”

Tears, hot and terribly real-feeling burn in her eyes as Rowdy’s lower lip starts to tremble.

“I blew it then.”

“Nah. You tried pretty hard to blow it, but not hard enough.”

Leena lets Rowdy cry for a few seconds before she pants her shoulder and wipes her cheeks clean. When Rowdy’s mostly put together, Leena straightens the top of her dress and settles back amongst her toys.

“You did what you thought was right. I’m not mad at you for that or anything.”

“But I—”

Leena shushes her. “You did your best. Sometimes your best just also isn’t right.”

Rowdy looks her over, her vision tinged pink as she tries to clear her eyes, and actually see Leena in the state she’s in.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt at all?”

Leena looks fine. Her eyes are wide and crinkled around the corners, and her skin is freshly freckled in a way that Rowdy has never seen it before. A sick, worried part of her wants to reach up and touch her, to make sure that she feels okay after so much obvious sun exposure.

“I’m all right, Rowdy. Really. Pinky promise.”

The lump in her throat eases as her shame and guilt ease off. “I’m sorry that I didn’t do the right thing this time.”

Leena grins wide, her fangs smaller and less sharp than they ever were when she was alive. “That’s all right. You’re more than forgiven in my heart.”

“Will it change anything? All this, I mean.”

Leena squints off into the distance, her brow delicately wrinkled. “I think so. It’s brighter in here than it was before, and that seems like a good sign to me. You know I missed the sun a lot.”

“Yeah, so much you went and walked into it on us.”

They stare at each other for a second, and then Leena starts busting up laughing. Rowdy can’t help but join her, even if she goes into hysterics barely a second later. Her crying wracks through her again, hard enough to make all the bones in her torso ache.

Leena doesn’t tell her to calm down. The bed creaks as she reaches for the upper part of Rowdy’s back and rubs the twitching muscles there as dark peach-colored splotches bleed all over the pink fabric.

“Too soon?” Rowdy chokes.

“Maybe just a little. I’m sorry, by the way. If that helps at all.”

“It doesn’t help. I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do with all of these— all these feelings.”

Leena nods, but her lips don’t even quirk to begin to form words.

“What?” Rowdy asks.

“It’s just, I don’t know. I had all these feelings too, and I kept thinking that I would never die unless I did it myself, so I’d have this eternity of having to deal with what was done to me, never being able to escape it unless I made the decision to escape. There are worse things than death that we can go through, and I made the decision I thought was best for me.”

“That’s so fucked up,” Rowdy whispers. “I— I should have protected you better.” Her words flip over themselves and skip and repeat but Leena lets her get them out, an understanding softness in her eyes.

“Rowdy, you did everything you could have done. This was always going to be too much for me regardless.”

Cold sinks through her stomach ,and Rowdy shakes her head. “We could have—”

“I know you think that, but look at them.”

Rowdy looks.

“Some of them are in their late forties, and they still ended up here after all that time. He hurt so many of us and I—” Her voice breaks, and Rowdy’s already moving to catch the tears before they can fall anywhere but on her fingertips. Gently, Leena pushes her hands away. Between her ribs, an ache blossoms at the rejection, but Rowdy sets her jaw and waits.

The breaths Leena drags in rattle, but she pulls herself together after only a few of them. “There would be no real escape for me outside of this. It would keep happening to me as long as I let the dog keep the toy.”

The ache widens to a chasm that tears and rips and shreds until the pain flips to rage.

“If you had stayed, we could have taken care of this together.”

“Maybe.”

“You didn’t have to go and do this to yourself.”

Leena’s voice drops. She nods, solemn and understanding. “It’s okay to be angry with me.”

Rowdy realizes as her hands start to lift again that she wants to grab Leena and shake her. Frozen half-way between the bedspread and her shoulders, Rowdy flexes her hands into fists and then relaxes them again. Her anger cools to agitation, and she sits with it. Leena’s permission is a salve.

“What am I supposed to do now?” she finally asks.

“Hang out with me for a little while longer, and then wake up and go back to where you should be.”

“This is the last time, then?” Her jaw sets and the tears burn but she doesn’t stop them from falling or try to hide her face.

Leena should see how hurt I am, she thinks.

“Have you ever actually seen me, Rowdy? Since . . . since I . . .” She straightens back up and takes a breath. “It doesn’t matter. You’re here now.”

Rowdy’s shoulders creep up toward her ears. “All right.”

Leena brightens into a grin again, dimple and all. “What should we talk about while you’re sleeping?”

Rowdy can only lift an eyebrow as if it’s obvious. One muscle at a time, Leena’s smile falls to a tense frown.

“You really were with me that whole time, weren’t you?”

Leena gives her an apprehensive nod. “Right.”

“Leena.”

“I’m with you how all dead people are with the people they leave behind.”

“What does that mean? I’ve seen you. I’ve felt you.”

Leena shrugs. “Maybe you just needed to see and feel me to get through whatever was going on.”

Rowdy starts to respond but freezes when she notices Leena’s finger. The tip of it reminds her of the burnt end of a cigarette. Little bits crumble away every few seconds in an invisible breeze.

“You’re—”

“Ashing out. I know. It started a couple minutes ago, but I didn’t want to say anything because I thought it would scare you and make you leave me.”

Stricken, Rowdy shakes her head. “I won’t leave you. Can I do anything to help?”

“It doesn’t hurt, Rowdy. Not this time, anyway.”

The rest of her fingers join in, and some of the ash starts collecting on the nose of the nearest stuffed animal, a yellow bear with a big brown pot in its arms.

Rowdy suppresses her panic and reminds herself that this is just a dream. She needs it to just be a dream. The only thing she can think to do is to distract them both from the inevitable, like Leena’d said.

“You, uhm, have a lot of stuffed things here.”

Leena looks around at her hoard, warm pride written all over her face. “I like them. When I’m here, they keep me safe.”

With a pang, Rowdy sits back on her heels and looks at Leena, really looks at her. At camp, she had the same energy that the Tenders and the others older campers gave off. Anytime a decision had to be made, Rowdy always looked to her first. She assumed Leena was turned later than she was herself, maybe when she was nineteen or even twenty.

Seeing her surrounded by the things that bring her the most comfort as she turns to ash makes Rowdy realize how wrong she was. Leena was younger than her by miles.

“How old were you when you turned? I don’t remember.”

Half her arm is gone now.

“That’s what you want to ask me?” Her eyes skip nervously over the top of Rowdy’s head.

“Yes.”

Leena waits until the middle of her upper arm is gone before she answers. “I was fifteen when Madame Broussard offered me the choice. Remember when I told you?”

Something sharp squeezes around the inside of her throat and tightens until she can barely breathe. Fifteen. Even more than that, she doesn’t remember at all.

“That’s—”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“I don’t. I’m— I’m so sorry I don’t know why I can’t remember.”

Leena’s smile is soft and tired. “It’s okay, Rowdy. I’m not angry with you.”

“But I should remember this.”

“It’s fine. I’ll just tell you again. Madame Broussard was . . . Well, there’s a reason I got sent to camp before October came the year I was turned. She . . .”

“Spit it out.” Rowdy’s fear and anxiety forces her tongue, and she knows somewhere deep in her chest that she’ll regret being harsh despite not being able to soften it now.

“They had me temporarily removed from the estate until she could give them proof that my human body was dying before she turned me. That’s the only reason they let her live after.”

Rowdy scrubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. So many words want to pour out of her and she holds them all back, unsure which will sting and which will soothe.

“Don’t worry. Nothing hurts anymore, and it won’t hurt ever again.”

“For you,” she rasps. “Everyone else took on the hurt you get to leave behind. Knowing that— Fuck, Leena, I don’t know how I’m supposed to carry this.”

The room around them starts to fade, the details going fuzzy before disappearing entirely. All that’s left is the bed, the stuffed animals, and most of Leena’s body.

As Leena’s shoulder and the side of her torso start to collapse, the air turns acrid. “I’m not leaving anyone behind. You’ll always carry me with you, right? We’ll share it.”

“This isn’t fair.”

When no reply comes, Rowdy jerks to wrap her arms around Leena, but there’s nothing to grab. As Leena goes, Rowdy isn’t fast enough to catch what’s left of her before it all drifts away to nothing.

A new rage builds and dies in waves too quickly for her to hold onto as she stares at the empty space amongst the stuffed animals. None of them are blurry or starting to disappear. They’re all exactly as they should be.

Rowdy’s hands shake as she looks behind her, the silent silhouettes also gone from what little of the room still has detail. The sun outside looks twenty minutes away from high noon. Rowdy’s breath hitches as whatever wound inside her begins to knit itself back together.

Emotional injuries always hurt worse, she laments, numb and empty.

She can’t bring herself to touch the pile of what remains of Leena. For a little while, it’s just her and the glittering ash. The eyes of every stuffed animal remain dull and benevolent as they look at her.

The space around her continues to brighten, but Rowdy can’t look away from the little plastic eyes.

Time passes in bursts. The warmth from the sunlight crawl over her bare heels to the backs of her calves before washing up over the tops of her shoulders. There is no burn, only the comfort of a memory of a forgotten feeling.

“What do I do?” she asks the little yellow bear when the sun kisses the back of her head.

It only looks at her.

“How do I do this without her?”

A couple pieces of Leena drift down off its nose.

“Killing him didn’t change anything.”

The realization leaves her only by way of her lips curling around the words while all of her breath stays locked in her lungs. Admitting it, even just to herself, carves the chasm deeper and pops open the wound that valiantly tried to seal itself shut.

Carefully, so she doesn’t rustle what’s left of Leena too much, Rowdy slides up onto her bed and stretches out beside her. The mattress gives to her weight and then slowly, one inch at a time, Rowdy sinks deeper.

She doesn’t fight it. The surrender comes easier than anything.

Within a couple of minutes, she’s looking up from what feels like the floor as the stuffed animals stretch farther and farther away from her. She’s taken so far down that eventually the bright, late morning light from Leena’s room is barely a pinprick star above her head.

The smell of a fresh bouquet of flowers wafts just under her nose where she can’t see. The deeper she breathes in, the heavier her eyelids grow.

Leena was right, she thinks. It’s safe here. Nothing can hurt her anymore.