Page 81 of Irreversible

“So, two out of three makes me around sixty-six percent passable?” Truthfully, I’m more of a cat person. Any animal that can tell you to fuck off just by blinking is right up my alley. Whatever. At least I’m safe on tacos.

Who doesn’t like tacos?

“I guess I can’t afford to be too picky.” Her laugh ends in a pained groan that makes me wonder if she really has been eviscerated.

“Are we playing the game of ‘torture ourselves by salivating over things we can’t have’now?”

“Yep. Let’s see, are you a steak and potatoes kind of guy?”

I scoff. “Doesn’t matter much. Food is food. Gotta eat, or you die. What I really want is a cigarette and a bottle of whisky.” I used to keep a bottle of my favorite whisky in my apartment just to prove I could resist it.

“So, if a gourmet chef offered to cook whatever you wanted right now, you’re telling me you’d ask for whisky and cigarettes.”

“Just cigarettes. I don’t drink anymore.”

“Okay.” She lets that little tidbit go without further questioning. “That settles it. You can bring the bubble tea, and I’ll bring the cigarettes.” It’s tinged with a thread of hopelessness that breaks my heart.

Getting us out of here will take a fucking miracle.

In the quiet space that follows, I can’t help but dwell a little too long on the thought of that whisky, until I blurt something just as dangerous. “Chicken pot pie.”

“What?”

“That’s what I miss.”Turn around, Porter, you don’t want to start this…“Sara’s chicken pot pie.”

And there it is.

I just pushed on a boulder that’s balanced at the edge of a mountain, and there’s no going back.

“Sara.” Everly swoops in on the subject, but she clearly doesn’t know what to do with it. “She…she was…”

“My younger sister. Half-sister, technically, but since she was the only member of my family who cared to claim me, it didn’t matter.”

And now I’m all in.

I can almost hear Everly trip over the thoughts. Sifting, discarding, needing to know more, but treading very carefully soI don’t shut down. She knows me too well by now. “Your sister… She liked to cook?”

“No, she was terrible.” I laugh. “But she figured out how to make chicken pot pie, and it was the only kind worth eating. It was the first thing she made for me after she grew up and got out of the house.”

It was also the last, but I’m not touching that one.

“So, she sang, played the guitar, and made chicken pot pie.”

“That about sums it up.”

I’m full of shit. It doesn’t even come close to summing it up.

“Will you tell me more? What else did she do?” The desperation in that question makes me remember just how lonely the girl next door is. Sometimes I forget that my sister was one of her companions for a few fleeting moments. One she didn’t have time to get to know well enough.

Under different circumstances, there’s no doubt they would have been friends.

That’s what she wants from me now—a lifeline, a connection to the girl who sang to her on the other side of the wall.

“She saved me.” That’s the raw truth of it, really. “She saved my life.”

“What did she do?” There’s a detectable undertone of awe there, and suddenly, I can’t remember why I hid her away for so long. Why I refused to talk about her. Maybe I didn’t want to bring her memory into this place of darkness and death. But the thing is, she was already here.

“For some reason, she believed I was worth something. God knows why—most of the time, I wasn’t very nice to her, but once she made a decision, you couldn’t do much to change her mind. One day when she was six, I beat up this bully on the playground, and she was convinced I was meant to be a superhero.”

---