Free A Night at the Asylum by Jade McCahon Page B

her,
laughing.
    “That sort of makes me glad it’s over with
us,” I joked, but there was nothing funny about the pain behind
those words. It was impossible to hide that I missed Raymond. Now
that my safe haven was gone – my tall, dark,
built-like-a-linebacker safe haven – I was being ran down by crazed
cops and chased by guys with knives.
    Well, technically just one guy with a knife,
and I still wasn’t sure how to process that.
    So much for putting away the mysteries for
the night.
    Emmett Sutter really was a mystery to
me. Despite struggling against it, my thoughts kept drifting back
to him. Ridiculous, Cole saying what he’d said about him and me.
Wasn’t it? Honestly, I was more bothered by the realization that I
wasn’t the only one afraid Emmett had suddenly stepped off the
edge. But why? Besides the earlier near-miss and the obvious danger
to the rest of society, what difference did it make to me?
    What was it about Emmett that made me cling
to that shred of hope that he wasn’t a latecomer to lunacy? So he
was gorgeous under those tangles of dark-reddish hair. He was also
practically anti-social. I wasn’t sure how he made it through high
school, drifting in and out of the hallways in silence. He was like
a ghost. He spent his days reading and painting and otherwise being
introverted while I spent mine being the center of my boyfriend’s
attention. The sunlight of Raymond’s personality barely kept me
from slipping into the dark after Tommy died.
    I recalled then things I had fought all night
to avoid remembering...Emmett’s round olive eyes, that rust-colored
hair always hanging down to his chin, how self-conscious I felt
under his gaze. He was shy, but those green eyes always found me,
at times even seemed to search me out from across the room. And my
skin prickled, my blood pounded in my veins, my breath caught in my
throat, just because he was looking at me. I would walk by his
table in the library and my train of thought would derail. These
memories I’d denied for the last four hours shook me. I thought of
how he always walked with his head lowered, sleeves pulled down
over his hands, dressed in the layered wardrobe of a person who was
perpetually cold. How the one time I’d seen him laugh, the moment
stuck in my mind because of the way my knees had gone weak; I'd
never forget such a heart-stopping smile, the deep dimples on
either side of his mouth, longing to know what had made a person
usually so reticent so momentarily happy.
    How even in school I shoved these feelings to
the back of my mind…I had a boyfriend, and he was funny and
friendly and charismatic and popular, and I had loved him and then
he’d dumped me. Such a sick, twisted life I lived…such a screwed up
night to bring it all to light. I swallowed hard to force the tears
back down past the massive lump in my throat.
    It was a strangely lengthy drive across town
to my house. As I lapsed into silence again, Jamie and Cole
laughing quietly up front, I gradually and regrettably lost the
battle with my consciousness.
    Almost immediately the dream began. This time
I knew it was just that – a dream – but that didn’t make it any
less frightening. The phone in the kitchen at home rang in the
middle of the night and I raced down the stairs to get it, sure the
noise would awaken my parents.
    I snatched up the receiver. “Hello?” There
was nothing but obscenely loud breathing on the other end. “Who's
playing phone perv again?” I asked with a sigh, glancing down at
the caller ID. The display read “Joey”. Where had I heard that name
before?
    “Who is this?” I shouted, forgetting about my
sleeping parents, gasping when the person at the other end finally
began to speak.
    “Sara, this is Roy Conroy,” came the answer,
and it was Roy, sounding more nervous than he ever had.
“There’s been an accident.”
    Fear seized me, overpowered only by the
strongest feeling of déjà vu. “Who?” I asked frantically.