Perigee [bxb] | Bad Moon Book II

46; {Matt}: the unfortunate death of Matthew Richards

A month after she'd disappeared, they found Clara's body in a creek down by a grocery store. The manager had stepped out back for a cigarette break and saw the edge of her pink dress entombed in the mud. That was all Matt knew, because it was all his mother would ever tell him before her face went hard and the look in her eyes died out to the unfocused distance. It was like something clicked in her brain. The snap of two magnets poppin' together. Whatever it was made her an empty, shriveled husk of a woman.

His dad shared that look too. Every time his missing swing would lose him the softball game. Every test he failed, every rule he broke, every time he tried with everything he had and never made the cut, his dad would get that look in his eyes. To Matt, that look always meant this was a mistake.

He was a mistake.

Clara probably woulda grown up to be a lawyer or a scientist or a doctor. She probably woulda had kids now. A family and a white picket fence house. In Matt's mind, Clara made straight A's and wore promise rings and braided flowers into her hair. Clara kept her parents together. Clara was everything anyone ever wanted to be.

Even when he was young, that was the way Matt envisioned her.

His dad never hit him, but there was a time where he came real close. The Sunday morning that Matt had shattered one of the dozens of portraits of Clara that hung on the living room wall. It was on accident and it wasn't. He shouldn't have been throwing his old baseball around in the house, but a part of him aimed for Clara's photo on purpose. He still remembered the feeling of his dad's rough hands, scratching the bones of his neck as he ripped him up by the collar of his shirt.

Matt wasn't made to do good. His clumsy hands couldn't write poems or paint portraits, or even throw a decent pitch. He wasn't smart enough to be a scholar or strong enough to be an athlete. He didn't know jack shit about cars or politics or woodworkin' gun-racks out of cedar trees.

Matthew Richards was never going to make his father proud. But for Jaylin and the others, he refused to be a disappointment.

Sadie had him locked around the arm. He moved quickly but carefully. One sloppy step and his shoes scuffed against the tiles beneath him. He didn't know how many wolves would be around the next corner, so he moved like he was walking between razer wires. Every bit of him was itching to turn back. Leaving Tisper felt like an abandonment. Even though she told them to go. Even though she was more useful with leverage-it still felt like they'd tossed her to the wolves.

He was so much weaker without her. Weak and small and afraid.

"It's gotta be left," Sadie whispered to him, and he turned down a hallway where the walls had been paved with deep purple paint. They were looking for a staircase or an elevator-any way to reach the floor below. But the place was so much bigger than it looked from the outside. Matt's legs burned from all the running. He'd planned by now to be curling weights like they were made of feathers, sporting a six pack and running 5K's without breaking a sweat. The police academy's physical exam was a cruel, ruthless test and if he wanted to pass, he'd needed to start his endurance training early. When I get back home, he kept telling himself. Now he regretted putting it off, the muscles in his thighs gone tense, cold sweat crawling down his back.

They neared the end of the hall, and around the bend, the red of Ziya's throne room cast a gradient fuchsia on the plum textile walls. Matt slowed his pace. Sadie had locked on tight to his hand, her warm fingers threading through his own. Her breath rattled and her hands gripped tighter.

"What happens if we don't make it out of here, Matt?"

He turned to look back at her-the space between her brows glistened with sweat. The shortest of her curls had fallen from her messy bun, her round eyes wide, glittering tinsel in the slow strobe of candle lights. It was wrong, seein' Sadie so afraid. Wrong like cold ice on soft teeth.