Page 68 of Uncontrolled

“Damn,” I manage, shaking my head as LowLow’s chuckle trails off. Lucky for him, my brain’s fuzzy with lack of sleep, my reflexes dull. “You about got a smile across your stomach not worth sewing shut.” I roll my shoulders, trying to oust the kink in the muscle from his squeeze. “I thought pacifists aren’t supposed to cause pain?”

“Not on purpose.” He gives me a once over and then leans to the side as if the picture of me isn’t quite making sense. “Shouldn’t you be with your girl?”

Time’s distorted in my head. I feel like I ran into LowLow with Allie a lifetime and seconds ago. Too much has happened. “We got in a fight.”

“There’ll be others,” he says with a shrug. When he notices my wounded expression, he clarifies. “Other fights, not other girls. Allie is the one you end up with.”

“Yeah,” I say, because it’s easier than sorting out the strangeness that is LowLow. He’s going to ask about my missing pack. He’s going to rib me about my vacation from the camp shacking up with Allie, and how clean my clothes are, and how I reek of laundry detergent. I’ve got one shoe gray with the sick water of the puddle, the other too white to blend in this place I used to call home. That’s me, I think. Half in, half out, fitting nowhere.

He angles toward the boxcar I was clearly navigating to before he casts a wary glance at the crime scene tape. “You don’t want to bother with that one. Got an extra sheet you can borrow,” he says. “Piece of floor, too.”

I open my mouth to say thanks but what comes out is, “How bad is it?”

I remember the blood when I clicked my headlamp on, congealed and sticky, the taste of it in the air, in my lungs, in the back of my throat, and I remember later at Allie’s place where I’d gargled shower water that had done nothing to help.

A drop of rain splatters against my temple, slides. I brush at it as another hits the nape of my neck, another, another.

“Bad?” LowLow says. “Not bad. Occupied.”

For a moment, I don’t understand.

“You left half a month ago, Ploy.” He hooks an arm over my shoulder and circles us toward the boxcar he’s staying in. “Can’t expect you weren’t evicted.”

But Brandon died in there, I want to say. Brandon had his guts stolen and none of you knew Jamison did it. It could have been anyone here.

Brandon’s murder barely made the paper the next day. I looked. And now, there’s no proof he existed. Two weeks and every trace of me in this place, a year of living, is scraped clear.

I’m a ghost.

“Roomie!” LowLow calls into the gaping maw of the boxcar door, and my attention roams from the crime scene tape to the metal car LowLow stands beside. “Told you I had a feeling we got company coming!”

I’m trying to remember the handle of the guy he shares with. Something foresty. Oak maybe. Moss?

No one here has a real name. No one here has a real life.

The rusted metal creaks as LowLow vaults into the car. When he reaches to haul me up and in, his smile fades. I don’t know how, but somehow I get the feeling he knows exactly what I’m thinking.

“Get up in here,” he says quietly. “I’ll give you something to take the edge off, okay?”

Already, I feel the claws of this place digging into me. How easy would it be swallow what LowLow offers and let Allie fade into memory? A dark future spirals through my head like a portent, one where whatever LowLow gives me fades me into a stupor. One where I sink into sleep without ever waking up. One where Allie’s all alone in her apartment and I’m not there when the hunters I helped come for her.

My brain’s mush, pushed well past the boundaries of exhaustion. “I’m so tired.”

“What?” LowLow asks before he disappears. When he comes back, a bright pop of color is squeezed between his fingers. “You in?”

“No,” I say. “I just need sleep.”

The pill disappears in a complicated sleight of hand trick and then LowLow offers me his palm. This time, I take it.

All around me is the sharp tink, tink, tink of rain splattering against metal roofs. At first rhythmic before growing into a cacophony, the patter of falling droplets deafening as the sky opens. Inside the boxcar is the same scent of old blood branded into my memory. I brush the rain from my arms and accept the sheet LowLow offers.

“Thanks.” I shuffle to a corner crowded with old cans and bottles, clear a patch of floor and curl up, my head on my damp arm. Outside, the storm rages as I finally give in to fitful dreams.

I come out of sleep struggling. One second, I’m under, the next, I’m clawing for consciousness, arms outstretched. Pain thrums through every joint. In the distance, birds chirp. Sometime while I was out, it stopped raining. I’m awake enough to know where I am, the why. Thirty seconds and already my anxiety is spiking.

My pack is still at Allie’s. I’ve got to get that pack. Everything I own is inside it. For a minute, I consider texting her. She could leave it outside or I could go pick it up and we could talk.

Running my fingers through my hair, I give up on the idea. She’s pissed. She might have already tossed it. Huddled on the other side of the boxcar are the lumpy shapes of LowLow and his roommate. I ball up the sheet and drop it on top of LowLow’s backpack, and then I slip through the opening to the outside and head to Allie’s.

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