Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 117363 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 469(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117363 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 469(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Jean looked at the TV, then slowly reached out and picked up the remote. His finger hovered over the power button as he warred between the sense that something was very wrong, and the surety Renee wouldn’t lie to him about Kevin or Nathaniel. At length he pressed down to turn the TV off and said, “I won’t watch.”
“Thank you,” she said, and was gone immediately.
It made for a wretchedly slow morning, but Jean had survived weeks of boring days trapped in Abby’s house. He went from the living room to the bathroom to the kitchen as needed. That gnawing sensation in his chest never eased, but he attempted to distract himself as best he could by watching Trojan games. Partway through the second match he considered going back to bed, if only to help kill some time, and then his phone chimed on an incoming message.
It was a group text from Jeremy to Jean and Kevin: “Jesus, I’m so sorry. Are you guys okay?”
Jean’s heart tripped in his chest. He looked from his phone to the remote to the darkened TV, then over at the laptop sitting on the coffee table. Whatever Renee didn’t want him to know yet was starting to make the morning rounds. Renee had told him not to get his answers from the news, but she hadn’t said he couldn’t get it from someone else. He looked down at Jeremy’s text, thumb hovering over the OK button to open a response. At the last moment he went one button over and dialed out.
Jeremy picked up immediately, and the soft care in his, “Hey, are you good?” had every hair standing on end. For a moment Jean felt the misstep and thought he really ought to wait for Renee, but he swallowed against his dread and demanded,
“What happened?”
The silence that followed was endless. Jean’s mind filled it with a thousand miserable possibilities, and then Jeremy finally said: “I’m sorry. I thought you heard. I don’t know if I should be the one to…” Jeremy trailed off, and Jean thought perhaps he was going to hang up rather than explain. Then he took a deep breath and said, “It’s Riko, Jean. He’s gone.”
-
It would take weeks for Jean to patch the day back together again; for weeks it existed as fractured bursts of moments all out of alignment. He remembered Jeremy’s call. He remembered the bite of wood and pop of glass as he destroyed anything he could get his hands on. Mostly he remembered the unyielding hands of campus security as they broke into the room some indeterminate time later. By the time they reached him, the shower had been cold for ages. Jean was hunched up at the far end of the tub, as far as the spray as he could get, but his legs were soaked through where he had them hugged to his chest.
He tried to fight back, but he couldn’t feel any part of his body. The towels they wrapped around him felt like knives against his chilled skin, and he was half-pulled, half-carried out of the room. This time of day on a weekend Fox Tower was a bustling place, and as soon as word got out that security was breaking into the Exy dorm rooms a significant crowd had formed in the hallways.
Jean saw their faces as blurs of color as he was hauled to the elevators. His name was an echo filling in the gaps between his heartbeat as they saw the tattoo on his face. There was a car, and the sickening blur of green out the window. Unfamiliar nurses pulling at sopping wet clothes, teaming up when he tried fighting them. Drugs that made his thoughts go hazy. Heat, slow then fast and far too much. White, white sheets.
A rainbow.
“Oh, Jean,” Renee said at his side. “I asked you not to look.”
He blinked the room into sluggish focus. She was thigh to thigh with him, perched on the edge of the bed beside him. One of his hands was clasped in two of hers. There were fresh bandages on his hands, mottled with dried blood in too many places. He closed his eyes, opened them, tried again. His head felt cottony. There’d been a bit of clarity earlier, he remembered, or thought he remembered. He’d fought back so violently they’d had to sedate him again.
“Jeremy,” Jean said.
“We saw his text too late on Kevin’s phone,” Renee said quietly, which at least explained why someone sicced security on him. “We tried to call you, but you didn’t answer.”
“Where is Kevin?”
Nathaniel’s voice came from somewhere across the room: “We left him and Coach Wymack in West Virginia.”
He didn’t say for the funeral. He didn’t say to mourn. He didn’t have to when Jean could put the pieces together. He couldn’t say it when there was no way this was true. Jean lifted his free hand to his face and dug unsteady fingers into the tattoo on his cheekbone. Kevin had been with Riko for far longer, navigating the precarious line between beloved brother and punching bag. It didn’t matter how much Riko hurt him; they’d spent too many years completely wrapped up in each other. Kevin had to say goodbye.