Page 16 of Beautiful Victim

Chapter eight:

I want to run after the cab, but I know I won’t catch up to it.

I want to hail my own cab, but I don’t have enough money. Damn me for always bringing the correct change for the fucking bus.

Each moment that passes, she moves further and further away from me, a bigger divide splitting us up once more.

She didn’t see me—of course she didn’t.

I’m invisible. I am a ghost.

Always.

I’mherghost, and she is mine.

I’m forgotten and discarded, and she is very much alive.

I feel sick. My skin is slimy and wet from the rain, my clothes sticking to me like a second skin that I want to peel off.

My head hurts. I can’t think. It’s too much.

Carrie.

MyCarrie.

Golden hair and pretty lips. Smiles she doesn’t think I see, but I do, I did, I always will. Her smiles are burned on my eyelids, burned into my head.

Carrie.

Carrie.

Carrie.

My bus pulls up and I stand, gasping breath burning in my lungs. I let out my air at the same time the bus’s doors open. They make a whooshing sound, and I panic for a split second, thinking I made that sound.

“You getting on, kid?” the driver says. “I gotta get goin’ if not.”

I look up into the light of the bus, from my place in the dark, and I nod.

The cab has gone and it’s taken Carrie with it.

But she was here!

MyCarrie was here!

But she’s gone now.

Again.

She’s always going when I need her to stay.

When I need her the most.

I climb the steps, my hesitation betraying me, but there’s no point standing around in the rain all night because she isn’t here now.

My skin feels alive, my mind in a frenzy. Everything is fucked up inside me. I climb the bus’s steps, noting their slipperiness due to the wet weather, and I fumble in my pocket for my money to pay the driver.

My body feels strange, like I’m in a dream, like I’m in a daze. My limbs aren’t attached, they move on their own. I’m not controlling them. I’m floating above everything, looking down. And the whole time my mind screams forher.