I Am Grey

  I Am Grey

  Jane Washington

  Contents

  SPIRALLING: A PROLOGUE

  1. Maybe And Might

  2. Alone

  3. Reverberation

  4. Appearances

  5. Grey Girl

  6. Stalker

  7. Packages

  8. Burn

  9. Dark Hearts

  10. Sick

  11. Animal

  12. Consequences

  13. Abduction

  14. Phantom Menace

  15. Arrows

  16. Demented

  17. Gunpowder

  18. Spyglass

  19. Twinkle

  20. Wet

  21. Psycopath

  22. Rainfall

  23. Reversal

  24. Karma

  25. Lighthouse

  26. Changing Colours

  STEADFAST: AN EPILOGUE

  Also By Jane Washington

  Connect With Jane Washington

  Copyright © 2018 Jane Washington

  THESE CHAPTERS HAVE BEEN PROVIDED TO A SELECT NUMBER OF PEOPLE, FOR ADVANCED-READING PURPOSES ONLY.

  The author has provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The events described are fictitious; any similarities to actual events and persons are coincidental. Any products or copyrighted works featured herein are used only for reference and are assumed to be the property of their respective owners.

  www.janewashington.com

  Copyright 2018 © Jane Washington

  The author has provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The events described are fictitious; any similarities to actual events and persons are coincidental. Any products or copyrighted works featured herein are used only for reference and are assumed to be the property of their respective owners.

  Washington, Jane

  I Am Grey

  www.janewashington.com

  Edited by David Thomas and Josephine Banks

  www.josephinebanksofficial.com/editing

  ISBN: 978-0-6483784-0-2

  For Kendrick Lamar:

  For keeping me humble, and for making me sit down.

  SPIRALLING: A PROLOGUE

  One year ago …

  Red was a disgusting colour. It transformed perfectly bleak things into outrageous horrors, scarred beyond recognition even after the red had been scrubbed away. I stared at the freshly-painted, white-washed walls before me and all I could see was red. It dripped to the skirting and pooled along the sanded floorboards, congealing in the spaces in-between until the faint drip of it could be heard, escaping the cracks to conquer the packed dirt beneath the house.

  I shuddered, pressing my eyelids together until the images faded away, but the feeling of horror only increased. It spread out to my shoulders and down my arms, dislodging my hold on the cardboard box. The shattering of glass scraped against my ears as the box hit the ground, forcing my eyes open just as a person walked through the too-bright opening of the front door. I squinted as the silhouette formed into a tall but slender man, standard-issue belt adorned with pepper spray and missing a firearm.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer him. He wouldn’t appreciate what I had to say.

  None of us were okay. We were all temporary inhabitants of a world that wanted to kill us at every turn, sharing space with people who hated our happiness and stomped on our small successes.

  The red is haunting me. I’m never going to be okay again.

  He started gathering the fallen items from my box, even going so far as to walk me away from the space in case I stepped on any glass. I had shoes on, so I wasn’t sure why he bothered.

  “What should I do with the box?” he questioned.

  “I don’t care.” My voice sounded as numb as my heart felt, my words ringing with a hollow sound. I wasn’t trying to be rude, only honest.

  He looked inside the box, and I could imagine that most of the contents were now sprinkled with shattered glass, so I wasn’t surprised when he walked outside and I heard the sound of the garbage bin being opened and closed. I should have told him that those were my only remaining belongings—everything that hadn’t been confiscated by the authorities—but it seemed fitting. They belonged in the garbage.

  I belonged in there with them.

  “That’s everything, Miss Grey.” This was another person. A woman. I didn’t even bother looking at her. “We need to lock up the house now,” she added.

  I nodded to the voice. I hadn’t been noticing details for days now; details like names and faces. The red didn’t let me. It took up all remaining space in my eyes.

  I found myself on the lawn, the condensation from the long grass dampening my calves. The outside of the house no longer reflected the inside, the way it used to. The inside hadn’t always looked so sterile and white-washed. It had been unkempt only last week. There had been mould on the curtains and ants in the cupboards.

  Someone was speaking to me again, but I was fixating. Fixating on the memory of the mould and the ants and the sound of blood drip dripping to the floor. I was fixating and spiralling and I could no longer even see my own hands as I held them over my face.

  One week ago …

  “You don’t have to be here, Mika.”

  I stared at my lap, my nails biting into my knees. The guidance councillor’s office was nicer than any other place in the school. There was something obsessive about … what was his name again? I couldn’t remember; but there was something obsessive about him. He needed to have everything in its place, and that had a soothing effect on my chaotic thoughts. There were exactly four little plants lined up on his windowsill overlooking the courtyard behind the cafeteria. They were spaced evenly apart, without a single dying leaf between them. His desk was completely bare, except for a closed laptop. Behind him, there were several rows of shelving stuck to the wall, filled with ordered rows of handbooks and pamphlets, arranged by problem. Teen pregnancy, depression, divorce, sexual assault, suicide …

  “You don't have a phone in here,” I noted, turning my eyes back to the desk.

  “If someone needs to reach me, they can reach me on my cell phone,” he replied.

  He sounded surprised, or curious, or maybe he had just assumed that I didn’t speak. I suppose I had been sitting there silently for a while.

  I finally turned my attention to him. “Isn’t that kind of unprofessional?”

  He was younger than I had expected. Much younger. Uncomfortably young. I didn’t think I could talk to him about my problems. How could he possibly understand? He had smooth, tanned skin—the kind of genetic tan that was impossible to get from the sun or from a bottle. It was earthy and perfect. His stubble was inching beyond stubble into a very controlled, dark shadow of beard—the colour several shades deeper than the burnt blonde of his hair, which had been cut short to contain a barely-perceptible curl. Maybe the facial hair was an attempt to look older. To look qualified. He might have been a brighter blonde, in other lights, but there was a building beside his office, blocking out the angle of the sun, and the shade was slanting directly over his face, darkening his colouring. He had intense eyes—unendingly deep and knowing. Blue, like the ocean. Those eyes would haunt me—I knew it already.

  He was unmarked, unbruised, unaffected … totally fucking unqualified. He was too young to know about all the ways that blood could haunt a person.

&
nbsp; “The opposite, actually.” He had taken a moment to reply, and I suspected that he had been busy measuring my reaction to him. “It allows me to do my job properly. I want this room to feel safe. Disconnected from the outside world.”

  I looked back to my lap.

  “Mika, you don’t have to be here,” he repeated.

  He had said my name in a voice that carried some kind of underlying command, and it was enough to force my eyes up again. The smallest spark of satisfaction in his expression told me that his words hadn't been so important; he was more concerned with my attention. He couldn’t read me if I was staring at my lap.

  Fuck you, I thought, looking directly at him, before defiantly directing my attention back down again. “Here as in your office, or here as in—”

  “School, Mika. You don’t have to be at school. You’ve been through a lot, it’s been a very difficult year. If you aren’t ready to come back yet, you just have to say so.”

  You have no idea what I’ve been through.

  I wished that he would stop saying my name. He had an arresting voice, and it made me look up every time. It was the sort of voice that begged you to talk, to hand yourself over on a platter just to hear him deliver an approval of your actions. It was the sort of voice that you wanted to hear in an office like this—a boxy place where people came to talk about finding their plot again, or to lay the ends of their tethers on the desk for inspection. It was the sort of voice you wanted to hear because it made the world feel fuller. There were some people who could do that: all they needed to do was speak, and the masses would follow. It made me feel like I didn’t have control over myself—and what pissed me off most about that was the fact that I shouldn’t have cared so much. What did it matter? What did anything matter anymore?

  He was young, but his persuasive voice and haunting eyes had clearly gotten him this far. He had that air about him: the air of a person who could influence people; who could affect people with a word, or a look; who could bend the world around them with their intention alone.

  “You haven’t been back for very long,” he continued. “You were released to your aunt and uncle’s care only yesterday. The school would understand if you needed time to adjust to your new home. To prepare to return to classes.”

  I laughed.

  I couldn’t help myself.

  Home?

  I laughed until I cried, and then I cried until my throat was raw. After that, he offered to call my aunt to come and pick me up. I snapped at him. Maybe. It was unclear, because I was spiralling again, disappearing into a world of red. I didn’t remember the walk home, but I obviously walked, because when I woke up the next morning, there were blisters on my feet and blood in my shoes.

  The red was back.

  It was chasing me …

  Three days ago …

  “You know you can’t stay here with us, Mika.” My aunt was reasoning with me as she twisted her platinum hair into a knot, securing it with a clip. “That’s why we gave you the RV. So that you could have independence. You’re too old to be coddled. This is what’s best for you. You’ve been on your own for the last year—coming into a family now would just be too big of an adjustment.”

  I felt pulled between rage and despair, and the result was silence. I simply didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want independence. I wanted … to not be left alone. To not be forgotten. To not be stored away so that I wouldn’t remind people of how much they were hurt by the same hurt that ate away at me.

  I wanted to be a person, not a problem; a person, not a reminder.

  “I won’t make trouble,” I pleaded quietly. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

  “But we will,” she returned, sounding pained and exasperated. She moved to the kitchen table, extracting Evie from her highchair so that I would know who we were. “We are all still healing. It wasn’t just what happened a year ago. It was the trial, the constant questioning. We had to represent you in court while you were off—well, you know.” She patted my arm, but then moved away to the other side of the kitchen. She couldn’t stand to be near me. “All of us still have healing to do. You do, too. That’s why this will be good for you. Being here, with us … it’ll only remind you of what you’ve lost, sweetheart.”

  She was confusing me again. Twisting me between rage and despair. Sweetheart, she had called me, while telling me that I wasn’t allowed to be a part of her family.

  What could I say?

  “Here are the keys.” My aunt—no, Shel. Her name was Shel. She didn’t want to be my aunt. Shel handed me the keys, closing my fingers around them in a sort of handshake-clasp, before inevitably drawing away again.

  She sought refuge on the other side of the kitchen once more, scribbling something onto the top page of a notepad. She tore off the page, tucked it into a manila envelope, and then I was being herded to the door.

  “I’ve set up a bank account for you—you won’t be able to access your full inheritance yet, but your mother’s accountant managed to put aside some funds for you. They should last you the year.”

  She must have already called a cab, because there was one waiting by the curb. She was juggling Evie, so she couldn't hug me goodbye. She said that uncle—no, Fred. Fred would miss me. They would check up on me. They would call.

  She was lying.

  I didn’t care.

  I was spiralling again.

  Two days ago …

  The RV was parked in Summer Estate Trailer Park, and the rental for its allocated space had been covered for the year ahead. There wasn’t anything particularly summery or stately about the park. There were trees, and that was nice. There was a pathway through the trees, but night-time had it choking in darkness, so I hadn’t yet explored where it led to. The RV was sparse. It seemed to have been recently stripped. Perhaps Shel had thought that it would be best for me. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted me to remember her, or them, or the family that wouldn’t have me.

  There was a small kitchen and living area in the centre, with a u-shaped couch built into the right side, set beneath a u-shaped trio of windows. A curtain separated the kitchen from the bedroom, which was just a double bed between two bedside tables, a wardrobe built into one side and a small window set into the other. There was an empty shelf above the bed, and it reminded me of the guidance councillor’s display shelves. If I filled it up with pamphlets and handbooks, it would look the same.

  There was a tiny en-suite at the back, but no shower. Summer Estate Trailer Park had an amenities block, where I supposed I would be taking my showers from now on. It wasn’t summery or stately either.

  I fell asleep on the u-shaped couch and woke up with my head pounding and my stomach cramping. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any money, or that Shel hadn’t put some essentials in the RV’s fridge, because she had. It was because I sometimes forgot to live. I forgot that I needed simple human comforts. I forgot that they were available to me. It seemed a surreal concept; the fact that I had to expel effort to keep myself alive. It was like losing sleep over a bad relationship; wasting time on fighting for something that I wasn’t even sure I wanted anymore.

  The fridge revealed milk, eggs, bread, and butter. The receipt was still stuck to the carton of milk, having been plastered there from the moisture. I peeled it off and saw that Shel had bought the items only the day before yesterday. She had also bought diapers for Evie, a six-pack of Coors for Fred, and a toy for the dog, Houston. I was immediately consumed by a horrible, niggling thought: a suspicion that she hadn’t been able to complete her shopping trip to fill up my new fridge without also buying those extra items. She had needed to remind herself that she couldn’t be sad for me, because she had her own family to worry about. A family who needing things just like I needed things … except that they were her responsibility, and I was nobody’s responsibility.

  I thought that I was angry at her for it, but I wasn’t sure.

  I hunted through the cabin
ets above the kitchenette, pulling down a glass and pouring myself some milk. I couldn’t bear to smell the cooked eggs, or to have the roughness of toast clogging up my throat, so I poured another glass of milk. Maybe if I drank enough of it, I wouldn’t have to eat anything.

  I pulled out my phone, navigating to the notepad app.

  Buy more milk.

  There. I was taking care of myself already. I didn’t need Shel. I didn’t need a family. I exited the app and found myself staring at my phone’s background. A picture. I was smiling, my chin notched atop my mother’s head. She had hair like mine: a heavy blonde that shone with strawberry streaks whenever the sun hit it. The picture was cut off right below her eyes. Even her eyes were like mine: green, almond-shaped, tilted slightly at the sides, framed by thick lashes. The similarities ended there. I had my father’s cheeks, the too-full hint of youth that never seemed to fade away. My ears were all my own, too pointed and small to have come from them. My lips were my own, too; they weren’t wide and smiling like my mother’s, or thin and smirking like my father’s. Mine didn’t seem to know how to smile at all. Not anymore.

  I was partly a product of genetics, partly a product of torment.