Page 46 of Grave Mistakes
After a few more grounding breaths, I get up and trade the scythe for the baseball bat in the umbrella stand. Maybe knocking a wall down with nothing but my rage and this Louisville Slugger will get me closer to the much-needed REM that I’m desperate for. And Jerif’s right. It will also double my kitchen space. Win-win.
13
Roughly six hours later, I’m sitting on top of my countertop, staring at the hole that used to be a wall. I’m wearing nothing but my old AC/DC sweatshirt and my underwear, and my hair’s thrown up on top of my head haphazardly. My kitchen is covered in enough powdery dust to set at least a thousand Instagram artist’s makeup.
“Now, you want to make sure that your wall is not load-bearing before you knock it down,” Bob Builds-A-Lot says from the YouTube video streaming on my phone.
“Way too late for that, Bob,” I tell him, eyeing the exposed studs I left on the ceiling. I’ll have to patch that. And fix the floor where the wall used to be, and fix the wall that used to connect to this one, and...a shit ton of other things that I mangled in the kitchen.
Bob Builds-A-Lot keeps droning on and on about the proper way to do things, and nowhere in his spiel does he condone someone blaring rock music at four in the morning and taking a baseball bat to their wall over and over again until paint and drywall exploded all over the place.
My house is a disaster, and I definitely shouldn’t have been so impulsive, but hey, it was a really good rage release. I just poured all of my anger and hurt and frustration and fear into every hit. At one point, I started kicking the wall too, which wasn’t too smart, considering I was barefoot and only had on leggings, but I was too caught up in the moment to stop myself.
I wish I had, because I accidentally sent my whole leg through the wall, got stuck, and then skinned my knee like a bitch trying to wrench it out. Once I got unstuck, I peeled off my leggings—and had to toss them since I put a hole in them—and then bandaged myself up. You’d think that with a bloody knee, the rage haze would’ve cleared, but no.
I blame my demon side.
I took down the whole wall, and that’s when I spotted the cracked tile on the floor. So I took the baseball to that too. And once I started with one tile, I had to do more, because it’s not like I could just replace one tile. I wanted hardwood anyway. So I smashed it. It was a realif you give a mouse a cookiekind of situation, but in this case,if you give an angry demon a baseball batwould be more accurate.
Once I smashed the floor tile up in the kitchen, I started staring at all the stained grout on my countertops, which is how I ended on top of my island, with a metal pick in hand and the remains of my frustration. The last of it is draining away, and now I’m just sitting here, soaking in the disaster that is my house. I’m also soaking in the drywall dust, because I think it’s embedded into my pores at this point.
Bob Builds-A-Lot keeps talking, but I’m not listening to his experienced advice anymore. I’m just staring off into space, noting how the morning sunlight is trying to filter in past the edges of my curtains. Not today, happy sunshine. Not today.
I feel bone-tired. Like all the way past my skin and through my muscles, right down to my marrow, tired. And not just because I’ve been hacking at my house for the past six hours like a crazy person, but because of my life. I couldn’t help but recap my entire twenty-eight years as I smashed and tore apart more of my existence.
An only child to two awesome parents who were too good for their rebellious, snarky daughter. I hated school, got in too many fights to count, and then when the few friends I had graduated from high school, they went off to college where we lost touch, while I stayed here in Sandpiper and got a meaningless job for meaningless pay, and then one day, as fast as a snap of my fingers, my parents were dead. Gone. Just like that.
The only two people I had in my entire life were buried in the ground, and I’ve been floating in space ever since with nothing to secure me. I hate to admit it to myself, but I’ve been stuck for nine years in a shitty life that I had no way to escape. And now this? Now I get tossed from a luke-warm frying pan into the acidic air of Hell? I just don’t understand how this can be real or how I’m supposed to play the hand that I was dealt.
Somewhere in my foggy brain, I hear a low whistle, and I turn around to see Iceman standing in the middle of my house. His presence is so unexpected that I just stare at him for a moment. He doesn’t fit in the catastrophe that is my house—not with his pristine gray suit that accentuates his perfect navy blue hair and cool skin. Even with his curling horns and the slightly sinister arch of his brows, he’s a gorgeous being, and just the sight of him makes my stomach tighten.
“How did you get in here?” I croak, my voice surprisingly sore. I guess it’s the physical manifestation of the rage-screaming I’ve been doing all morning.
“I have my ways,” he says simply, his icy blue eyes sweeping over the chipped concrete and broken tiles that litter the floor.
“Did you find a way to reapply the block?” I ask.
“No,” he replies as his eyes come back up to me.
I nod, picking at the bandage on my knee. I wasn’t really expecting anything else, but I’m surprised Iceman came here. I haven’t seen him since that night I left the graveyard.
“I’m afraid that type of demonic skill is beyond the people I can ask. If I were to dig deeper, it would only make things worse. Right now, the four of us have been able to keep your existence between us and the few Outer Ringers who’ve seen or sensed you. But if Inner Rings know about you, it will...complicate things.”
“Complicate things even more than they already are?” I ask.
“Yes. They could report you. Lobby to force you to live in Hell permanently. Some would argue it’s where you belong.”
“I belong here,” I snap, feeling the backs of my eyes burn. I pick up the metal pick and start working on the grout again, just to give myself something to do so that I can hide my face from Iceman’s perceptive gaze.
From the corner of my eye, I watch as he stuffs his hands into his pockets and leans against the wall. “You want to tell me what happened in here?”
“Jerif told me I should open up the wall because it would expand my kitchen’s feet,” I answer numbly, my aching hand screaming as I continue to hack away at the grout.
He nods slowly, and even though he’s quiet, I know he’s taking in everything about me and cataloguing it. I know what this must look like. My house in tatters, I’m half-dressed and filthy, sitting exhausted on top of the countertop as I chip away at old grout. It’s an entire kettle of crazy tea that nobody wants to drink.
“I’m surprised you listened to Jerif,” he finally says, a hint of amusement in his voice.
“He was right,” I say, throwing my back into the movement to get a particularly stubborn piece of grout to come out. I grind my teeth and scrape harder, ignoring all the aches and pains I feel not only on the outside, but on the inside as well.
