Page 30 of Skalterra By Nightmare
She nodded.
“Absolutely. I’ve got things handled here.” She waved me out from behind the register. “Wren, go with them. They’ll appreciate the help.”
I faltered, hunkering down in my safe haven behind the counter.
“But what about the shop?”
Gams laughed and side-stepped around me to take up my post at the register. Jonquil jumped onto the counter to greet her with a chirp.
“What do you think I do the rest of the year when neither of you are here to help? I’m perfectly adept at running my own store. Besides, you’ve been staring at the far wall all day without blinking. You need a break. Get a move on. The highway is going to get crowded soon.”
The air outside was uncomfortably warm, but I pretended it didn’t bother me. If Liam worried about my tendency to take sudden and aggressive naps, he’d panic if he saw the bruises on my arms.
Sabrina introduced herself properly as we walked to her mom’s tavern. Like Liam, she’d grown up in the town. Unlike Liam, she attended the community college in the next town over.
“Von Leer is the most popular school in the area,” she admitted with a shrug, “but I’m not nearly pretentious enough to go there. Even if they did admit me, I’d die living on a campus full of people just like Liam.”
Liam rolled his eyes at her ribbing, but smiled.
“That’s great news for Wren,” he said. “She uses words like ‘amalgamation’ in casual conversation. She’s perfectly pretentious enough for us.”
He took the stack of posters as we approached a black sedan, and Sabrina climbed into the driver’s seat. Liam paused with his hand on the passenger door.
“Are you okay?” he asked under his breath.
“I’m fine. Why?”
“Yesterday you would’ve thrown me in the harbor for calling you pretentious. Today you seem… I don’t know. Off.”
“Maybe because you don’t know me?” I raised an eyebrow at him.
His cheeks tinged pink, and he opened the passenger door.
“Would you like the front seat?” Liam asked. I stopped myself from scowling at him, remembering that we were only climbing into a car together in search of his missing cousin.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, taking the backseat, and then forced out, “Thanks.”
The inside of the car was sweltering. I risked pushing my sleeves up, trusting that Liam wouldn’t look back and see my bruises. They’d faded slightly since morning, but were still dark and mottled enough that I was sure he would worry.
The coastline blurred past outside as we headed north on the two lane highway that wound through trees and along the lips of cliffs. I relaxed against the window while Sabrina and Liam talked in the front seat about small things that didn’t matter. I figured she was trying to distract him. However, the way Keel Watch Harbor was, she was probably close with Riley too.
I tried to focus on what they were saying. I wanted to think about anything that wasn’t Galahad and Grimguards, but the trees that passed outside the car reminded me too much of the forest from my dreams.
My fingers inched to the back of my head, but my undercut served as a reminder to not pull hair there. Heat rose in my face, thinking about how Liam had thought my classmates had shaved my hair in retribution for narcing about the physics test.
Instead, I leaned my head against my hand and gave in to the urge to pull at my eyelashes. I’d stop after just a couple. I would force myself to stop. In the meantime, it helped. When my thoughts raced faster than I could keep up with, the act of plucking hair from folliclealwayshelped.
I’d pulled my first eyelash back when I was only nine-years-old, but it didn’t get bad enough for Mom to notice until I was fourteen. That was when I’d raised my hand to play with my eyelashes and found none left on my right eye. So, I moved to the back of my head.
The first doctor Mom took me to said I was depressed, that the hair pulling was a form of self-harm. She’d been so smug in her assessment, so self-assured, that I didn’t know how to speak up and say otherwise. I wasn’t depressed. I knew I wasn’t. I was an anxious mess, and had been since a small age, but I was an otherwise happy kid.
Luckily, Mom didn’t think much of the first doctor’s assessment either. The second doctor wasn’t much better in my opinion, but Mom liked what he had to say a lot more.
“It’s because she’s gifted,” he had explained through a neatly-trimmed white beard. He probably should’ve retired a long time ago. “I see this all the time in smart kids.”
Mom liked that.Gifted.Her kid wasn’t defective after all. No, it was the opposite. Her kid was smarter, better, more advanced than the other children! And somehow that translated to a compulsion to remove the hair from my face and head one strand at a time.
That doctor’s solutions weren’t great—fidget toys to busy my hands, gloves to render my fingers useless at pulling out hair.
