Page 9 of Poison Vows

I stare at him with a faux-complicated look. “You want me to breach her privacy?”

Of course I’ve done that many, many times before, but Spider doesn’t need to know that.

“I want to show you something. Besides, if she suspects anything, she’ll only blame me. She hasn’t truly forgiven me for what I did back then.”

I don’t ask, but I remember that stormy day in the park when Angel and I made an unbreakable vow in the park, under a large tree by mixing our blood.

I reach for the box, open it, and then fish out the first diary I see on top. It’s locked, so I pass it to Spider.

I can easily open it, but if I’m going to sell the premise of ignorance about Angel’s deep thoughts scribbled within those pages, I have to keep acting the part of not knowing.

Spider scoffs, reaches for the diary, and picks the lock.

I watch as he flips through some pages, then he hands it to me.

“Read that!”

At first, Angel’s childish thoughts from years ago are still evident in the old pages that show obvious signs of wear and tear, being read over and over again.

She writes about wanting to be normal like other kids that have parents.

About missing her mother.

Her immense guilt over her grandfather’s death is written every five lines.

She describes her grandmother’s sadness, and her brother’s coldness and the silence that prevailed after they lost her grandfather.

And then,‘the cold green eyes.’

The thing in my chest starts pounding with vicious, hard knocks that break my breathing streak.

Just four words, but I already know she’s writing about me.

I’ve read all this before, after I found out she started writing a journal.

That’s when I started breaking into her room years ago, to see if she remembers my mother and what happened that night.

Back then, she’d just repeat the same crappy, heartache shit, but she wrote these four words only once.

As if scared to write any further.

She never wrote about how we met.

Or about our conversation that night.

Nor about me egging her on to jump and just end it.

She also never wrote about the bodies that dropped dead in the snow.

And she also didn’t divulge about us jumping over the cliff into the raging, cold sea to escape the men that had come to unalive her.

She never once wrote about that for some reason, as if she wanted to keep that deep in her bones like I do, so I flip through to the last page I read and then move to the new stuff, only to pause as if I’ve been electrocuted by a million megavolts.

The thing in my chest chills immediately as I stare in shock at the words no longer written with some kind of glittery purple ink as before.

These new words are now in bloody-red ink.

There’s a sense of urgency in the writing.

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