How to Love a Psychopath

Chapter Seven

It was two a.m. and Sadie could not move. Her eyes were wide open and her hands were shaking. Even though she was staring straight at the ceiling she could not see it at all. All that was going through her head was that she needed to get away.

It had been three days since Ryder's funeral and she hadn't let out a breathe since then. Things at school went on as if nothing happened. She quickly realized that if she died, the same thing would happen. Everyone's life would go on.

She shot out of bed, threw a sweatshirt on and grabbed the bag containing her phone and credit card. This isn't okay, she thought.

She walked outside in a haze, not knowing whether or not she had woken up Audrey or not and not really caring as long as she didn't follow me. Her legs took her down a few blocks and her mouth spit out her location to the taxi dispatcher that she'd called.

The taxi ride was dizzying and she paid the driver too much he didn't mind.

The step into the building was the hardest, leaving the dark quiet of the cool night air and entering the brightly lit airport. Airport.

Buying a ticket home was instinct for her, often Sadie and Audrey decided to take the short flight home and surprise her parents. She ignored to looks of the startled woman behind the counter.

Walking through the security line and making her way to the gate was a haze. The next flight wasn't until tomorrow, so she would have to wait there. Finding a seat in the corner, she put on some music and tried to blast some feeling into herself, but that was no use.

She remembered the times Xander used to drag her out of bed before dawn when they were teenagers and lead her outside to the forest. It was always beautiful. Sometimes fog was layered over the ground and dew covered all the surfaces. The air was crisp and sometimes hard to breathe in. Everything was untouchable. It was a lot like Xander in a way.

But she was going on her own adventures without him now.

She remembered her first anxiety attack. Xander had climbed onto the roof of an abandoned house. When the shingles began sliding and she saw the moment of fear in his eyes she fell apart. She stopped breathing, thinking that she was about to lose the only person that had made her feel anything since her parents death. Lose her only family.

"Xander!" She screamed. He didn't look at her. He was looking for an escape.

She collapsed onto the ground hoping he would not do the same. Maybe she was just a melodramatic child but she was terrified. She couldn't hear the wood of the roof collapsing into the body of the house. She didn't see Xander climb into a tree that had grown close to the old house. She did not feel him pick her up and bring her away from the scene of destruction.

She didn't realize that he was the real scene of destruction until many years later.

Xander told her that she shook for an hour. He told her she would stop breathing for minutes at a time. He told her her eyes looked like they did when they watched her house burn down. He told her it scared him half to death. She told him he needed to be more careful, she couldn't lose him too.

The next day he danced on a cliff's edge with his friends after having two stolen beers. The cops found them screaming into the sky, cursing the city.

Another attack happened alone in her room after she got a phone call from Xander's father that he had been gone for 76 hours. A new record. He always left. He was never meant for society. But he always came back. She was sixteen. She clawed at her arms and ripped the pictures off the walls but nothing brought him back.

She didn't remember her breathing patterns. She didn't remember crying so loudly that Audrey took her to the hospital because if she kept up she would hurt herself.

She remembered Xander was not at the hospital bed when she woke up. She remembered they put her in the phsyc ward for three days. She remembered when she came home Xander was sitting on her bed and laughing. She remembered hitting him across the face and screaming.

She remembered how he never screamed back.

***

Weeds grew around their graves. It wasn't surprising. As their child, Saide was supposed to maintain their burial sight. But she found the weeds soothing and beautiful.

She didn't know how she got there. Maybe she was possessed. She blamed Xander.

She sat in front of their grave, picking at the grass like she would do as a child absentmindedly at the park.

She was calm. She was breathing.

"Mom. Dad." She couldn't bring herself to say anything else. It's not that she was overwhelmed. In fact, she was a bit underwhelmed. It did not resonate with me that she was sitting above their coffins. Their rotten bodies.

"I miss you. I'm all alone." She lay down and ran her hands over their names carved into the cool stone.

Her phone vibrated in my pocket. She had been gone all night and most of the day. It was evening now. Audrey had probably noticed by now.

She answered her phone expecting it to be her.

"I'm sorry, I just..." She started.

"Sadie, where the hell are you?" The fury in his voice took her back.

She was not expecting him. She hadn't thought that he would notice her absence.

"Xander." His name barely escaped her lips before she broke down sobbing. "Xander please, it hurts." She couldn't breathe.

"Sadie are you hurt? Tell me where you are?" She could sense the fear in his voice and it just made her sob more. He'd never worried about her before.

"No. No. I'm with them. My parents." Her ears were ringing and her eyes weren't seeing anything.

"Sadie, listen to me. Are you listening?" His voice was rough and low. It had a sense of urgency to it.

"Yeah." She tried to take a deep breathe but just ended up coughing. As soon as she was quiet he spoke.

"This is real, okay? They're gone and you're okay. They're gone." She tried to focus on his breathing. Something she'd always done when she was upset.

"They're gone. I'm here. This is real."