23. Reversal

TWENTY-THREE

Reversal

The door opened in an obnoxious way—as though the person behind it had every right to barge into the room I was sleeping in. I sat up suddenly, brandishing something in my hands. Familiar indigo eyes collided with mine, the colour sharpening with shock, before clouding over in disbelief. Nicholai froze, and we stared at each other, before his eyes finally moved to the object in my hand.

I was disoriented and dizzy, my hands shaking with the sudden rush of adrenaline. I also looked at my hands. I was holding a large, ceramic candlestick. It was heavy, and the way I had been apparently sleeping with it clutched in my hand left no room for misconception: I had been intending to use it as a weapon.

I quickly set it down, my eyes flicking around the room in confusion before everything came flooding back to me. I remembered Spencer, and the drunk guy in the rain. I remembered the party. I remembered the bathroom. I remembered the video. I picked the candlestick up again, scrambling out of bed and holding it before me, my knuckles turning white.

"What are you doing here—" I paused, and he paused.

We had both spoken the same thing, at the same time.

"This is my dad's house." He folded his arms over his chest, quickly recovering from his confusion.

He seemed to grow bigger then, pulling his posture around himself in defence. His eyes flicked to the shirt I was wearing.

Holy fuck.

His shirt.

I was shaking too much—the candlestick was wobbling in front of me. I tightened my grip on it, the whiteness of my knuckles spreading down to my fingertips.

"I ... I was invited in," I managed. "Spencer. I was in the rain. I ... like this house ..." I trailed off.

There had always been something about this house, but was it possible that I already knew it to be Nicholai's? The vines had reminded me of his father's restaurant, and the day that Jen had called him to meet us at the café, he had appeared only five or ten minutes later, meaning that he probably lived only five or ten minutes away.

No … it was all a coincidence. There was no way I could have known this was Nicholai's house. It had drawn me to it.

It was just a coincidence. A fucked-up, creepy coincidence.

"The video—" he rushed out, causing me to flinch. "That's what you meant, in your message? She sent it to you and deleted it, didn't she?"

The shake in my hands grew suddenly steady. "She?"

"Jen. She was at the door to the bathroom, recording us. I've been over this so many times in my head. I couldn't sleep. I just kept going over and over what you could have meant by that text …" He moved forward. I moved back. He paused. "She must have sent the video to my phone right before I confronted her. She blackmailed me into handing over my phone before I noticed she'd sent me the video, and then when I handed it over, she forwarded it to you. She must have deleted both messages before she gave my phone back. Tell me that's what happened." He stepped forward again, and I stepped back again, but this time, the small of my back bumped into the be dside table. "Tell me you weren't talking about what happened between us."

"I wasn't talking about us—" The words were barely out of my mouth before he was closing the distance between us, shocking me into sudden quiet. He stopped, hovering an inch away. There was a barrier between us. Uncertainty. He had said that we wouldn't happen, and somehow, he had still made something happen, while still barely touching me. Surely, that counted. We hadn't had any time to figure out what it meant before everything had gone wrong.

He took a deep breath, and I watched as his shoulders straightened out. He had been leaning into me, watching the thoughts pass over my face. Whatever he had seen had made him draw away.

"How did you get here, Mika? What happened?"

I opened my mouth to answer, but the clock on the wall behind his shoulder caught my attention. It was five minutes past six. I was late for breakfast. I switched my attention back to Nicholai, examining him a little more closely this time. He was wearing a soft grey sweatshirt with dark jeans, his hair mussed. He looked younger than he had ever appeared to me. More comfortable. Of course he did—he was at his father's house on a Sunday morning, ready for a stupidly early breakfast.

"Shit, I'm going to be late," I spluttered out, pushing past him and running to the bathroom. I closed the door and quickly swapped his shirt for my dress. It was still damp, so I pulled his shirt back on over the top.

"What the fuck?" I heard him mutter from the other side of the door.

I emerged from the bathroom and hurried past him, my head down. I had no idea what to say to him, or how to explain that me being at his house actually had nothing to do with him. He followed me out of the room, up the staircase, and into the kitchen.

Spencer glanced up as I opened the door, his eyes immediately widening at the sight of Nicholai. He froze, his hand reaching into the fridge.

"Nic." He cleared his throat and seemed to be at a momentary loss for words before he quickly forced out, "I didn't know you were coming today."

"Morning to you too, Dad. I didn't know you'd gone into the business of kidnapping eighteen-year-olds."

Spencer pulled his hand out of the fridge, placing a container of butter on the counter before moving to the stove and lighting it. Nicholai and I both waited for a response. It didn't come.

"I was outside," I finally said.

"It was raining," Spencer grumbled.

"There was a guy," I added, watching as Spencer turned from the stove, folding his arms over his chest.

I also folded my arms over my chest. Nicholai looked from his father, to me, and back again.

"A guy?" he prompted his father.

"The unsavoury sort." Spencer nodded.

"An unsavoury sort of guy," Nicholai repeated tonelessly.

"What are you making for breakfast?" I asked, sitting at the stool on the other side of the counter.

Spencer turned back to the stove. He was fully dressed already, his dark blond hair neatly combed, his broad face freshly shaved.

"Pancakes," he answered. "Did you sleep okay?"

"Who was the unsavoury guy?" Nicholai interrupted, seeming to recover from his shock. There was a tone of anger underlying his words now.

We both turned to look at him.

"Do you know each other?" Spencer asked, before refocussing on his task of pouring mixture into the heated pan.

"Yes," I answered. "I'm a student at the school he was working at. And I slept well. Thank you again. Can I help with breakfast?"

"There's some fruit in the fridge to cut up. Was he a good counsellor? He never talks about his work."

I slid off the stool, moving to the fridge. Spencer pointed out the fruit to me with his spatula before returning to his pan. Nicholai was still standing in the same place.

"All the girls thought he was the best thing that ever happened." I moved back to the counter, accepting the cutting board and the bowl Spencer handed me.

"I'll bet," Spencer scoffed.

" What unsavoury guy?" Nicholai had stepped further into the kitchen, his frame vibrating with some kind of emotion. Frustration, possibly—or anger.

We paused again, looking at him.

"I'm going to give you two a moment," Spencer muttered. "Don't let my pancakes burn."

He stepped back from the stove, passed Nicholai the spatula, and walked to the staircase beyond the dining room, climbing up to the attic.

"You ran out of the party." Nicholai paused, set down the spatula, took a deep breath, and continued. "Ran all the way here. In a storm. Correct?"

I nodded, cutting a strawberry in half.

"So you haven't been staying with your aunt," he surmised.

I shook my head, quartering the strawberry.

"And you haven't been staying with the Morenos, either." It wasn't a question .

"I've been staying here," I told him, reaching for the next strawberry.

"Stop." He was beside me again, taking the knife out of my hand, turning me by the shoulders to face him.

I leaned into his touch immediately, though I wasn't sure I wanted to. I still had no idea what the night before meant for us.

"You only stayed here last night," he corrected me. "I spent most of Thanksgiving morning here, and the night before. You weren't here. He didn't mention you."

"I didn't mean here ." I glanced toward the window. "I meant out there."

He groaned, his eyes closing, his fingers digging in a little. "Fucking hell, Mika."

His phone rang then, as Spencer appeared at the bottom of the staircase again. Nicholai dropped my arms, pulling his phone from his pocket as Spencer returned to the kitchen. His pancake was a little blackened. He frowned at it, picking up the spatula again.

"Hello?" Nicholai walked to the other side of the counter, holding the phone to his ear. "Yes, speaking. Yes, I do. She's … an acquaintance. Yes, I did. Yes— what ?"

He was silent for a moment, the sharp tone of his voice forcing tension into the already rigid cast of Spencer's posture.

Nicholai was silent for a long time, listening to whatever was being told to him on the phone. I took up the task of slicing fruit again, until it was finished, and then I re-claimed my stool.

"I didn't realise you were still in school." Spencer finally spoke as Nicholai left the room, his phone still pressed to his ear.

"I got kept back a year," I replied.

Spencer turned his back on the pancakes, his expression searching. "You obviously spent a lot of time with my son. Why did they keep you back a year? What happened?"

I swallowed, the lump in my throat suddenly too big to swallow around. This felt like a pivotal moment of some kind. A pin on the board of my human existence. Alicia had been another pin, Jean another, Duke another. Nicholai was all over it—pins scattered to the very edges. I had reached the ‘Spencer' pin. The upright, grumbling man in the raincoat who somehow meant something.

Maybe it was because he was Nicholai's father, or because the house I felt drawn to was his, or even just because he had helped me out of the storm and away from a bad situation, gaining nothing at all from the action .

"My parents died," I forced myself to say.

I sounded casual, but my hands were clammy. The thought of him kicking me out before I had even had a chance to properly thank him for letting me sleep there was relentlessly pounding at my head. I could picture it clearly, how he would tell me that his house had seen enough trauma already, how he would ask me to hand back the little antique key before the gate slammed in my face and the cold clifftop welcomed me back into exile.

"Where were you?" he asked, his eyes narrowed on my face. He didn't look suspicious, only … worried. Fearful, somehow, of what I might say.

It would come, though. The suspicion. We were in a small town, and small towns loved to gossip. He would figure it out, eventually.

"I was there, with them," I told him, forcing myself to say more. To say all of it. To say the words that I hadn't yet had the strength to speak to anyone. "That's where they found me. At the house, the gun in my hands. I wouldn't speak. Didn't even cry as they checked the bodies. When they tried to take the gun off me, I flipped out. Almost shot one of them?—"

"It sounds like you were scared?—"

"I was covered in my parents' blood, holding onto that gun like it was my sole purpose in life." I cut across his sympathy mercilessly, and then hunched over on the stool, trying to fight back the horrible feeling that was creeping up the back of my neck, the hint of mania and memory that had shadowed my every step for the past year.

Spencer turned back to the stove. He flipped the pancake, and then waited. Finally, after a minute, he spoke again.

"You're her. The girl from a while back—over a year ago now, I think."

There it was.

He had paused, possibly waiting for me to say something more. I didn't. "It was in the papers," he sighed out. "I still remember it—thought it wasn't right, the things they wrote. Accusing every person, left and right. Including you. It was the worst thing to happen to this town in … years." He shot me a look, his blue eyes sharp. "I don't remember all the details. They took you out of school—the police?"

"It was mandatory, that's what the courts said. I needed to be locked up. Supervised. Medicated." My jaw was so tight that forming the words to voice my reply had become almost impossible.

Spencer nodded, flipping the last pancake onto the stack and transferring it to the counter.

"Did you do it?" he asked, placing a plate in front of me. "Did you kill your parents?"

"In a way. "

"How so?"

"I should have fired the gun, but I didn't. I could have saved him. But I didn't. I couldn't kill her."

"It was your mother." He moved to the dining table, placing his plate onto the surface a little too heavily. I realised that his hand was shaking. He sat, clasping his hands in his lap, his knee jiggling slightly. "That's …"

"I know." I ran my finger along the edge of the plate in front of me. "Nobody knew about her. Nobody could have guessed."

"Was she … crazy?" He seemed hesitant to ask the question, his eyes flicking to the door Nicholai had disappeared behind.

"I guess." I shrugged. "She would do crazy things. Say crazy things. She would hurt Dad, threaten him."

"Did she ever hurt you?"

"No. Just him. She was really angry at him. All the time. She spent most of her time working, always out of the house. When she came home, she mostly just did coke. She'd walk in the door, hang up her coat, pull out her tray, and set up in the living room to get high. Said she had a really stressful job, that she needed the release." I was talking without thinking, memories popping into the dark space of my mind like bright fireworks, frying my nerve endings and making my voice tremble with aftershocks .

Spencer listened, his eyes on me, his posture bent a few inches forward.

"I woke up that night, and she was screaming," I told him. "Screaming my name."

"Jesus, kid. I'm sorry."

We sat in silence for a few moments. I had no idea what Spencer was thinking, but I was reeling. I felt sick, unable to believe that I'd just told him all of that.

I could see it all clearly, suddenly.

"Get the gun, Mika."

My father's voice was calm, but loud, trying to speak over my mother's screaming. She was slumped on the couch, her tray had been thrown against the wall. Maybe she was angry about that—she was very particular about her tray.

"My dad must have known that something bad would happen, eventually," I muttered, standing and walking to the window, the glass blurring with my memory of the incident.

I walked back to my bedroom, bidden by my own fear. I should have known better, but my dad always knew what to do. He always had a plan. There had to be a reason.

"I should have known better." I was choked up now, trying to fight back tears. I refused to cry, though. I had cried enough, just as I had been silent enough. Now, it was time to finally tell someone my story. "He trained me how to shoot a gun. Told me how important it was. As I got older, we practised scenarios. He said that mom knew some bad people—that they might come to the house looking for her."

I walked back down the hallway with the gun in my hand, past the rows of photographs lining the wall. I imagined that they were all turning away, pretending not to notice. My mom was still on the couch when I returned, but I realised something different when I got back. There was a knife in her hand from the kitchen. She had been holding it down against the couch the first time I walked into the room, but now she picked it up, resting the handle against her bouncing knee. Her lids were half closed, but she wasn't acting sleepy.

"I told you to come here," she ground out, her green eyes holding mine.

I loved my mother, but I hated seeing her when she was coked up.

"Why do I need the gun?" I asked them both. "Who's here? Why were you screaming my name."

"We need to do this as a family," she said calmly, the screaming already forgotten.

"Do what?" I asked.

"Mika." my father pulled my attention over to him. "Tell her to drop the knife."

I turned back to my mom, still slouched against the couch, still jiggling the knife on her knee .

"He said we were broke," she told me. "Do you remember, baby?"

My mouth was dry, my hands clammy. "Yes," I croaked.

"Well, we aren't. He's been saving it all up, hiding it away from me. From us . That's not right, is it, baby?"

"It was about money," I told the window, no longer even talking to Spencer. I was numbly recounting now, shielded from any further reaction to the story, as a dull, thudding pain started up in the front of my head. "My dad was pretending that we were broke so that mom would stop spending all the money on coke. There was a huge fight that night, I stayed in my room the whole time, but the next day, Dad's whole forearm was burnt. Covered in bandages. He told me he didn't realise the stove was on when he leaned on it. A month later, she realised that he was lying about the money. He had a second bank account. She demanded access to it, but he refused. She started threatening him with a knife. When that didn't work, she screamed for me to wake up."

"Mika." My dad was pleading with me now. "Make her put the knife down. Make her."

I didn't have to wonder how I was supposed to do that. It was obvious. Dad had been training me to use a gun all this time to protect me from my own mother … not her bad friends .

My hand twitched. She stood up.

"I'm your mother," she told me. "You're not going to shoot me. You need to be on my side now, baby. Your father needs to give us that money. We're his family. He needs to take care of us."

She was walking toward him as she spoke. He stood his ground, watching me with pleading eyes. My tongue was lead, too heavy to form words. I wasn't sure what to do—he didn't seem sure what to do, either. He looked like he might run, but she was before him already, brandishing the knife in front of her.

"You need to give me those account details, Henry ? —"

He surged forward, knocking the knife out of her hands, and they both crashed to the ground. I couldn't breathe through the panic gripping me, but I managed to stumble forward a few steps, completely forgetting about the gun as I held my hands out—pleading for them to stop fighting.

Mom saw me and lunged at me, but Dad caught her by the legs, dragging her back. He sat on her, grabbing one of the couch cushions that had been knocked to the ground, pressing it over her face to smother her outraged screams.

"Stop," I cried, stumbling forward another step. "Dad, stop; you're going to hurt her. Please."

He was crying, the sobs heaving through his entire body. His arms were shaking violently .

"Shoot her," he begged me. "You have to shoot her, Mika. You have to end this before she kills us both."

The body beneath him began to spasm, and he rolled off, curling into a ball against the side of the couch. "I can't do it, Mika. You have to do it." His words were almost incomprehensible, choked out by the sorrow that shattered him.

Mom was gasping in air, tears streaking her face. She lunged at me again, her eyes on the gun, and I reacted without thinking. I threw it. It landed on the floor, and she turned away from me, making a grab for it.

It was too late.

Dad had picked it up, the deafening sound of a gunshot echoing through the suddenly silent house. He wasn't even crying anymore. He was staring at the gun in complete shock, his eyes finally turning to her. His wife. My mother. She collapsed against the ground, and he moved forward, drawing her into his arms. The silence broke then, and I turned away from the sound of one man's heartbreaking and another woman's life ending.

I wasn't sure who fired the second shot, because I wasn't watching. As soon as it happened, I ran to them, pulling them apart, trying to find the gun. It had fallen to the floor between them. I picked it up, staring at the two forms before me as they bled out around my feet .

"It wasn't just her." When I finally spoke the words, my voice was hoarse. "I think they killed each other. They must have thought it was me—we were all too covered in blood to get a proper swab on the gun—I remember someone saying that. It didn't help that I wouldn't say anything. They obviously figured it out at some point, but by then it was already too late. I was already in the institution."

I closed my eyes, resting my head against the glass. Spencer didn't get up from the table or try to comfort me. After several minutes, I finally pushed away from the window and turned around to make sure that he was still there. He was. In the exact same position, though his eyes were now filled with more pain than I had ever seen on another person's face.

He finally opened his mouth, on the verge of saying something, but the door that Nicholai had disappeared through slammed open, shocking us both. He reappeared, his hair sticking up all over the place, the lines around his mouth hard.

"What happened?" Spencer asked immediately, shooting me a concerned look before standing from his chair.

I walked over to the table, the already-sick feeling in my stomach intensifying. Something was very very wrong. It was written all over Nicholai's face.

"She finally killed herself," he announced. There was no expression on his face as he walked to the stairs. No tone to his voice. He paused, his hand against the door at the top of the stairwell. "I'm sorry …" he murmured, before he disappeared down the stairs.

A moment later, I heard the sound of the front door slamming, and I took two shaky steps toward the stairs, my hand twitching at my side as though I could still reach out and stop him.

I'm sorry .

He had sounded so … final.

"Who …" I started, my voice still weak, my head clouded over in confusion. I was finding it difficult to pull myself out of my memories and back into the present.

"Jennifer." Spencer sank back down into his chair, his head falling into his hands. " Goddammit ."

"Where …" I took another step toward the stairs, and Spencer looked up, sympathy flashing in his eyes.

"He's gone, Mika."

"Where did he go?"

"Somewhere you or I won't be able to find him."

"How do you know that?" I spun around, frightened anger riding my tone.

He made a scoffing sound. "I'm his father. He did this when his sister died, and when his mother died. The last time he did this he enrolled in Stanford without telling me and barely spoke to me for years— sent me a damn email inviting me to his graduation."

Years .

"But …" I moved to the table as he pushed out a seat, waving me into it. I sank down, my legs unsteady, my heart racing with indecisive panic.

"Listen." Spencer laid his hand on the table between us. "I know you want to help, but I'm not going to chase that boy down. I've tried it. It doesn't work. I don't know what kind of relationship you two have, but trust that if it means anything to him at all, he won't stay gone for long."

I nodded, trying to get a hold of my sudden urge to run out of the house and track down Nicholai. He obviously didn't want my help, and there was some part of me that didn't blame him for running out. After all, if he blamed himself for Jennifer's suicide, then maybe he also blamed me . Maybe seeing what Nicholai and I had done together was what finally pushed her over the edge.

"Help me clean up." Spencer broke into my thoughts. It seemed almost deliberate, the very sudden change of subject. "If you're still here tomorrow, we'll have a breakfast where we actually eat. Might even turn on the radio."

I stood and helped him clean without responding, but he didn't seem to need a response. It should have occurred to me as strange that we could exist beside one another in perfect silence, each going about our cleaning tasks as though we had known each other for more than the time it took to make a ham and cheese sandwich. Then again … didn't he now know me better than most ? Didn't I now know him better than most ?

It wasn't until the kitchen was clean and I was heading back to the stairwell with the intention of packing up my backpack that his last words finally registered.

"If I'm still here tomorrow?" I asked, pausing at the top of the stairs and turning around.

He had placed the kettle on the stove and was in the process of removing a mug from the cupboard. He set it down on the counter that I had just cleaned.

"Yes, well …" He shrugged a little awkwardly. "You have school, right? I can drop you there tomorrow morning. Maybe pick you up after."

"Why." I demanded the word.

"Why not?" he shot back, matching my tone. "If you had somewhere to stay, you'd be staying there instead of sleeping outside, so obviously, you have nowhere else to be."

"That's not your problem, though, is it?"

"It's pretty simple, kid. Do you want to stay here for a few days, or not? "

It wasn't that simple at all. I knew that it wasn't, and yet, when he said it like that …

"Okay," I answered.

"Then it is my problem. Do you have any clothes we can pick up? You won't have anything to wear to school tomorrow."

"I don't. The place I was living in burnt down."

He had been pouring boiling water from the kettle into his mug. I watched as it spilled over onto the counter. He cursed, placing the kettle back onto the stove.

"I should have asked if you were going to burn my house down. Are you going to burn my house down?"

"Not unless it's full of spiders."

"The kid has jokes. Go grab one of Nic's old sweaters. We're going shopping."