Beware & Behold

Role the Dice

It's the feeling you get when the world around you goes out with the tide. The horrible feeling of loss that sits in your chest for a while, then one day decides to fly out, taking your heart with it. Like a bird that you know will never find its way home and will never sit on your shoulder again. A bird of guilt, a bird of sorrow, a bird of remorse.

I was patched up by the doctors, of course. Three broken ribs and a fuchsia-colored cast that wrapped around my leg for a good three months. I wished not to remember that night: my grandma's eyes on the verge of breakdown, Dad's paused wedding plans with Alice and Nick's untimely return to New York. And the reason to all was one tiny human—me. The girl that almost died.

I have sealed away the depression, slipped in a joke or two at times and I drew pink hearts on my cast, for God's sake: anything I could do to make them happy. But deep inside, combined with the physical pain, I drowned. I drowned in the missing of Derek Cromwell.

When the Gate closed, two soulless demon eyes were staring at my face. I instantly knew that Derek had vanished into the Portal. Beetlez turned back into himself and released a growl before running off with the other demons. And I suddenly felt broken, too broken to comprehend what was happening. Someone pulled me out of the water where I ended up, thrown by the wave of power that trembled the earth. I felt their hands rushing me to the surface, which ignited in tiny spiderwebs of yellow color. Then I remembered hearing the rebel yell resonating in between the trees, the echo of the crash that went with the ambulance, running from the demons with frothing mouths who chased me and that moment when I saw him last, before the neon turned to black. My chest hurt from compressions, and my legs were bloody and covered with dirt. I had scratches on my face that looked like cuts from a mountain lion. None of it compared to the deep empty hole which replaced my heart.

It was Monday afternoon, a day that, for the first time in a long twelve months, didn't start with breakfast and my hovering grandmother. A day that Dad was called back to D.C. He collected toiletries from my bedroom sink, gathered his red ties and gray suits from my wardrobe and fitted them all in a charcoal luggage carry-on. I just sat on the bed watching him run around the room, dreaming that I was a brush, a razor stand, an accessory he could have forgotten. Wishing for another reason to run away from Harpers Ferry.

After staring blankly at the cleared-out wardrobe shelving and empty dress hangers, I shuffled into the bath- room. The medicine cabinet had one last prescription bottle confined in it. A white pill chimed at its bottom. I wobbled the lid off and flushed the pill down the toilet. It made a plopping sound and swirled away with the water. My body had endured enough. I wasn't about to keep poisoning it. It was my soul that was really broken, I thought.

I was washing off the soap from my hands when I caught a glimpse of a stone glowing on the marble vanity, just below the medicine cabinet. It had round edges and a heart at its core. I found it on the old bridge railing when I first got out of the hospital. That same bridge Nick and I used to run off to after school when we were growing up.

It was an elegant rock formation that floated above a beautiful flower valley and a silver-veiled lake. Some of the rocks smelt of moss, age and the faded footsteps of people who have crossed it. I have always believed it to be a bridge to Neverland, or some other magical kingdom, because that's what Nick and I had imagined it to be when we were little.

After I watched Dad's taxi disappear from our driveway, and the house with lavender curtains felt almost empty again, my heart ached to be lured back into the magic of the old bridge and its mystical waters. I climbed out of my bedroom window with a duffel bag over my shoulder and slid along a bedsheet rope into the yard. I ran in the shadows of the trees, hoping to get to the Harpers Ferry train station in time. But I shouldn't have worried—the train carried me away so swiftly that the houses and trees reflected in the train windows were hardly visible in the distance.