Keep From Falling (Markson Grove Series Book 1) (7 page)

As I continue to watch him tell his story to his friends, he glances over and his eye momentarily catches mine. I stick up my middle finger and he promptly moves his eyes back to his loyal followers. “I hate him,” I hiss venomously.

“Yeah,” Skylar barely whispers.

I take her hand into mine. It’s time for us to do this. She needs me right now.

Skylar

I can’t stop my heart from wanting to beat out of my chest the moment that Bree takes my hand into hers. “Are you sure?” I ask.

She nods.

I notice Parker looking at us. He’s curious about what he’s seeing and it makes me nervous. The way he is constantly watching me makes me sick to my stomach now. There is a part of me that wants to scream at him, saying everything I’ve ever wanted to say to him since what happened. But there is an even greater part of me that is petrified of him, of what he’s capable of. Seeing him now freezes me in place and sends the deepest chill down my spine. Since that night, he’s only ever tried to approach me four times but I catch him watching me always. I can’t stand it. I wish he’d just fuck off. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell Bree. I didn’t even really tell Spencer. Isn’t that enough for him? He got off easy with me, so he should just take that as a blessing and keep the hell out of my life!

My body begins to tremble, but I can’t be sure if it’s out of fear or out of anger. I grasp Bree’s hand even more tightly as we make our way through the doors of the school.

As soon as we enter the doors, however, Bree lets go of my hand. The abruptness of this throws me off for a second, and I actually look at her hand in confusion before I lift my face to see what pulled her away from me.

I’m startled when I see a guy from my calculus class named Evan approach Bree and greet her with way too bright a smile. At first I’m curious, wondering if he has a thing for my girl. But as their awkward greeting continues, and I see how profusely Bree’s face is blushing, and how Evan’s eyes are wandering all over her, I begin to feel uncomfortable.

Evan seems to notice me noticing them before Bree does because he breaks their connection to speak to me. “Hey Skylar.”

I look over to Bree who finally seems to remember that she has a girlfriend. She looks at me with guilt in her eyes and that’s when it occurs to me that she actually likes this guy. She’s attracted to him! This realization hits me like a slap in the face and I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. I take a step back while looking directly at him. His confusion annoys me and makes me want to hit him. Didn’t he see us walk into the school holding hands? What kind of asshole tries to pick up someone’s girl right in front of her?

“Hey,” I force myself to reply through gritted teeth.

Finally, Bree seems to snap out of her trance. “Um Sky, this is Evan Daniels. We…we work together.”

I turn to face her, making sure she sees in my eyes why I’m about to walk away from her. I storm down the hallway and I hear her calling after me questioningly, but I don’t want to talk about this here. I don’t want to talk about it ever. I want to pretend like it never happened and for everything to go back to the way it was five minutes earlier.

I spot an empty classroom to my left and turn into it abruptly, shutting the door behind me. Then with my back to the door, I slide down to the floor in a state of helplessness.

Bree likes Evan Daniels. She
likes
him. She’s attracted to him. My stomach begins to ache and I can feel the knots forming. My eyes start to tear up, but I can’t let them trickle out or it will make my eyeliner run down everywhere. I lift my face to the ceiling, willing the tears to go away. This can’t be happening. How do I stop this?

“I can’t stop this,” I say out loud, and I know as I’m saying it that it’s the truth. If Bree likes him and he likes her, there is no amount of bellyaching that will ever be able to make that go away.

I feel myself begin to fall into the darkness. My breathing speeds up rapidly and I know that it’s happening again. I rummage through my bag trying to find something sharp, anything that can penetrate my skin. I need a release. I need to break my skin open and remove this toxic pain from my body.

I find my geometry kit and shakily take out the compass. Tears are dripping down my cheeks now, but the pain inside is too much for me to care. The only way to stop this scorching ache in my veins is to release it. I pull my right sleeve up passed my elbow, and with my left hand I dig the pointy end of the compass deep into the flesh of my forearm. I drag the metal across my skin forcefully, watching as the flesh parts and my blood begins to seep out of it. I take in a gasp of breath and then the calmness finally takes me over. My breathing slows, the tightness in my chest begins to fade, and I feel some semblance of control once again.

I hurriedly pull my sleeve down and shove the compass back into my bag. The adrenaline that is now coursing through my body makes my arms shake as I push myself up off the ground. I take in a few more deep and calming breaths before opening the door of the classroom and re-entering into the hallway full of people; back into the calm of everyday life.

I’m not going to class today, not after that. I can’t, I’m a mess. Everything about me is a mess. My entire life has been nothing but one big, gigantic mess that I’ve hidden away from nearly everyone I’ve ever cared about. Even Bree doesn’t really know me, I don’t know if she could handle it if she did.

Not too many people really knew where I was emotionally in the years following my brother’s overdose. I was in pain, of course, but the death didn’t truly break me till five years later on the day I was officially ‘older’ than my older brother; three weeks after I turned fourteen. Suddenly, I was one whole day older than he would ever be, and I couldn’t handle the idea of it.

Bree and her parents tried so hard to be there for me, and they were. They were truly my strength through all of it, but after five years had passed, they didn’t know they should have been looking out for something like this. No one saw it coming. Not even me.

It was five months in to the ninth grade. Bree and I had always wanted to go to high school parties, and that was the year it was going to happen. But her parents were strict, and she could rarely find a way to sneak out without getting caught. This is the main reason why she’s never known me to do drugs. She wasn’t around when I was doing them. She was at home, with her loving parents, in her cozy house, living a life I craved but would never have.

I did my first hit of ecstasy at The Misfit Mansion the day after my birthday. The experience was one that I will never forget because it was the first time I saw beauty and wonder in a world that had always been so dark to me. I loved everyone I saw, and I felt happiness from everything I looked at. Strangers surrounded me and all I felt was love; it was beautiful.

The experience was so amazing that I hooked up with a guy that night and had sex with him. Then the next night I did the same thing with another guy. Then a girl and a guy the weekend after that. I soon became addicted to all forms of MDMA and having sex while being on it. This went on for a whole year without Bree really knowing much about it. She knew about the sex, but I couldn’t tell her I was doing drugs or was now a Misfit. We had made a promise to one another when Keegan died and I broke that promise… So I couldn’t tell her.

I met Parker Michelson a year later, in January of the tenth grade. He was relatively new to The Misfit Mansion, having joined only a few months earlier. He was a mystery to me right from the start and I was undeniably drawn to him.

The Misfit Mansion is a secret establishment run by an unknown person who throws exclusive parties every weekend. The establishment was designed for anyone who wanted to hide away from their traditional group of friends, family life, or public stature in order to be whoever they wanted to be during their visit. It is an honor to become a member and one hundred percent confidential. What happens under the roof of The Misfit Mansion stays there. We weren’t even allowed to keep our phones on us, they had to be checked at the door, and only a certain few were exempted from that rule.

Spencer was a Misfit too. He was the one who had gotten me an invite when I started feeling like I couldn’t handle what life was throwing at me anymore. I was grateful for the invite, but I asked him if I could attend when he wouldn’t be there because I wanted to be ‘free’. Spencer said he completely understood and we worked out a schedule between ourselves so we could attend the parties on opposite nights of the weekend. This went on for the entire time I was a member. We were friends on the outside, but independent members on the inside, never experiencing one another within the Misfit walls. I liked it that way. I didn’t want Spencer or Bree to know my Misfit persona. That ‘me’ was personal.

Then I met Parker.

At first I just watched him, curious what his Misfit persona might be. Closet meth-head, homosexual, sex addict; there were all kinds among the Misfits. Or maybe he was what we called a ‘Mild Misfit’, a straight-arrow kid from a perfect home looking to slum it with the rejects. That’s what Bree would have been if she had become a member.

After a few nights of watching from afar, I decided to go over to Parker and, point blank, ask him what his Misfit persona was because I was driving myself crazy trying to guess.

“Where do you belong, blue eyes?” I asked, breaking into his thoughts.

He was sitting on a couch by himself smoking a cigarette and staring off into space. He looked up at me standing in front of him and a grin emerged on his face. My question amused him.

“You don’t think I’m a Misfit?”

“Are you hiding who you really are behind all of this?” I returned his question with another question, motioning my outdrawn arms around the room.

He took a long drag of his cigarette and smiled with a nod. “I guess you could say that,” he replied before exhaling.

I took a seat next to him and reached for the cigarette in his hand. “Do you normally smoke out in the real world?” I asked with a grin.

He nodded slowly, seeming to understand where I was going with my questions.

I butted out the cigarette in the ashtray in front of us. “Well then, maybe we should try something different. I’ve been watching you watching us for the last three hours now and I think it’s time, my friend, that you become one of us.”

His mouth curled up into a slight smile. “Oh, you do, do you?”

I nodded and pulled out a bag of marijuana and a bag of ecstasy tablets from my pocket. “What’s your new poison?” I asked with a wink.

“Not the pills.” He shook his head and I obliged, shoving the bag of E back into my pocket.

“Mary-J it is.”

As I rolled a joint for the both of us, I decided to break an important Misfit rule and talk about myself. I don’t really know why I did this except that there was something about him that made me feel like he would understand me. He had a sadness in his eyes that seemed to match mine.

And I was right. He did understand. He had lost his mom only a year earlier and was still dealing with the aftermath in his own way.

I decided that I liked him. “You, blue eyes, are my new Misfit friend,” I declared.

He laughed and took a long, drawn out toke of the joint before passing it back to me. He exhaled a moment later and reached his hand out to shake mine. “My name’s Parker.”

I smiled, taking his hand and giving it a deliberately slow shake as I kept my eyes locked onto his. “I’m Skylar.”