Chapter 7: Devin's Never Ending

Her fingers and hand were strange. They didn’t look like her fingers or hand. They looked alien, pale white and cold as a corpse. They should have been hot and flushed from walking in the sun. They should have been a lot of other things. Nothing was the way it should have been. But she took her alien hand and knocked on the door.

“Devin, you can’t be here-.” He saw her, with a queer vacant look in her eyes, and he saw the gun, “Devin, Devin, what are you doing?”

“Don’t say my name, everybody says my name so much. I don’t like it anymore.”

“Oh ... okay.”

“I’m not coming in, don’t worry. I-” she heaved a breath. “I know you don’t love me.”

“De-, honey, of course I do but-”

Her eyes shut tightly fighting back tears and pain. She both wished she could run into his arms and be loved and wished she had the gun in her hand to kill him or herself. But she had neither, “Stop! Just stop. Don’t talk.”

Her eyes remained shut, the world was dark, even with the sounds of birds off in the distance, she was more aware of the sound of her heart thumping in her chest and the breathing she was fighting to keep regular. “You know, I was thinking about killing myself a lot lately. When I figured out the truth about everything. I just wanted to die. I wanted for you to save me, to make everything okay. But it’s not okay.”

“I kept telling myself I was okay, when I knew I wasn’t,” she stopped. She wanted to tell him about the drugs, and the man in the limo and everything. But all at once, she didn’t. This was her story. This was her life. Her eyes opened and she looked up to him, “Now I realize something else. I am okay. I am normal. But you, you’re not okay. You are broken. You rape -”

She took a deep breath, “You raped me. But it’s okay. I’m not mad. God, five minutes ago I would have married you. But now I know better. I know better. I wanted to tell you it’s over. It’s over. You should move far far away. Okay?”

He nodded, a bead of sweat trickling down his face.

“Okay, good. Goodbye Phil.”

Nerveless, she walked back to Conner and alien hands at her sides. “I am done. I wanna go home.”

“Who was that guy?”

She took in a deep breath and finally exhaled. Her face crinkled up like a paper in a fire and tears began streaming down her cheeks. She flung her arms around Conner and just sobbed.

Perplexed but feeling full of both empathy and hatred, he just held her until at last, she was ready to go home. He never asked her about that guy again.

Months passed. Piper and Sarah get their friend back. Jake and Conner became mainstays in the group along with Orlando Perez, Sarah’s boyfriend. After a few weeks, Devin was smiling again, even joking.

Piper never saw the black limo driving near the school again. Devin never told her who it was and Conner never said either. Piper had to quit track, but they would still get together on the weekends to go running sometimes. Sarah sometimes wondered why Conner and Piper never got together, but both insisted that they were just friends. She never knew anything about why they became such close friends, but she was glad she was at least talking to a boy.