She Lies Twisted by C.M. Stunich Read Free Book Online Page A

I hissed as I slipped through a break in the hedge and a hole in the neighboring chain link fence. “I told you to fuck off, leave me alone.” He kept following.
    “ You don't know anything do you?” He asked, this time with a touch of amusement in his voice. I proceeded down a cobblestone pathway that lead to a duck pond and a series of trails that would ultimately end up with me in my own backyard. When I reached the cover of the trees, I turned around and shoved 'James' or whoever the hell he was in the chest.
    “ I said fuck off!” And then I was turning around and running until my breath caught in my chest and I was standing at the edge of our fence debating the merits of actually going in. I didn't have anywhere else to go. I didn't have any money on me. What were my options? Boyd's. Go to Boyd's. My unconscious mind had yet to accept what my conscious one had already drowned in. Boyd was dead and gone.
    Boyd killed himself and he's never coming back.
    The wind whispered these words in my ears but still, I went. I walked that familiar route and climbed in the trailer through a back window. The house smelt like bleach and new carpet but still, under all that, there was just a little of Boyd. I curled up in the corner of the kitchen and hoped the Orangutan hadn't moved back in yet. I wasn't in there for more than five minutes when I heard noises from Boyd's bedroom.
    They're cleaning his stuff out, throwing it all away.
    I rose to my feet without thinking. All I knew was that it had to stop. I had to stop them from touching it because if they touched it, if they took his flannel night shirts away, if they took the manga, if they took the ships in bottles, then Boyd would really be gone.
    I flew around the corner, my hands grasping the edges of the door frame and prepared myself for a fight with the Orangutan. Instead, I found something else. Something I had been trying to prepare myself never to see again.
    It was Boyd.
    My insides burst open like a pinata. There it was, all of me to see, my emotions strewn across the floor like candy.
    “ Boyd?” The word was wet with tears. It dripped from my lips and splashed into the silence that loomed between us. Boyd glanced back at me and rubbed a hand over his beard.
    “ Which do you like better,” he began, holding up two CDs. “Moonlight Sonata or Für Elise?” I stared at him a moment and watched him shimmer like a reflection in a glass, wobbly and unstable. He wasn't real but now I knew I'd finally plunged over the deep end. I'd left the dock of sanity at the trailer door. But at least if I was crazy, I could have Boyd back in a way. Maybe I could even summon up my mother or Jessica or my brother, Abe? I lunged towards him.
    Arms wrapped around my chest, pulled me back, and threw me to the floor in the hallway.
    “ Don't touch him!” James screamed, his chest heaving as he struggled to hold me back. “He isn't finished yet. If he was finished, they would call for you!” I stared at him for a long while, wondering which us was crazier. I decided I didn't care and threw him off of me. Boyd's room wasn't very big and I was at his side in three short strides.
    “ Boyd?” My fingers brushed his sweater, my hand reached for his face. His lips twisted, curled, became black and brittle like charcoal and began to flake across my skin. He wrapped his hand around my waist while talons, dark and gleaming pierced into my side. I started to scream but then he was tossing me like a doll across the room. I burst through the cheap prefab walls and into the living room. In the very spot I'd seen Boyd dead, I was now lying in danger of bleeding to death.
    I lifted my sweater and stared in horror at the red liquid leaking across my hands. Boyd- or whatever it was that he'd become- crawled through the hole I'd made and came tearing after me. His back was twisted, his vertebrae exaggerated and sharp, and his eyes, like two pieces of broken glass, reflected my pale face back at me.