Page 7 of Tangled at the Root
And, fuck. The beast is fuckingstarving.
Impossibly, like the hunger has inadvertently ignited something, Rosemary’s heady scent intensifies, thickening around me like a cloud of perfume. I spin around, panting, half-afraid I’d find her standing right there.
My relief is short-lived when I hear a tenuously calm exhale. My spine stiffens.
“All right,” she’s whispering, seemingly to herself, and I’m stalking out of the kitchen, hunger rapidly morphing into anger.
She’s in the foyer, her back to the staircase, staring up at the blank wall like she doesn’t know how it got there. Her old trunk and duffel bag are both inside, too.
“What are you doing?”
She spins around, brown eyes wide behind her glasses. Fuck, theglasses. They’re new. Thin, round, fancy golden frames that complement her cool, dark brown skin, and make those doe eyes look even bigger, even more guileless. The beast wants to fuckingruinher.
“I thought I told you to leave.”
“I’m sorry,” she says immediately. “I tried, I promise I did—I just—I … can’t.” She clenches her eyes shut and visibly,rightfully, braces herself against my disbelief.
“Youcan’t?” I snarl derisively, then—
What the fuck?
“What the fuck,” I say out loud.
The front door is gone. I glance wildly down the length of the foyer, down the stretch of the entire wall.
It’s simply gone, as though it never existed.
“What thefuck.”
I’m going to have a panic attack.
I storm to the kitchen, chest heaving faster when I find that the back door is fucking gone, too. The windows, like most Nigerian houses, have iron bars built into the concrete on the inner sills to prevent burglary. But for every room, the bars of at least one window are required to be able to open in case of emergency.
I check every window. There are no openings, even though I could’ve sworn I’d noticed the padlock on the window above the sink—on the one in the sitting room, behind the two-seater sofa.
I grip the metal bars. They’re hot to the touch.
“Genevieve …”
Fuck. Jesus. Hervoice. I can’t.
I grip tighter, then yank. Hard. Harder, trying to pull the bars straight from the walls, even though, to Rosemary, I must seem like I’ve lost it.
I pointedly ignore the almost mocking silence around me, my helplessness and frustration mounting with every failedattempt. This is only my second time ever at my grandmother’s, so its alarming how much I hate this fucking house. And I hate my grandmother for leaving it to me, for feeding my mind with the shit that had brought me here in the first place, even though I’d honestly had no choice.
My arms threaten to dislocate from my shoulders, my elbows threatening to lock. Only then do I stop.
I can feel my ex-best friend hovering feebly behind me. The walls seem to be closing in.
I think of how breakable she is, how painfully, patheticallyhuman. Her scent is already permeating into the rest of the house, slowly sneaking its way from where she’s standing and into every crevice, clinging soft and misty like morning dew.
“I can’t do this.” It comes out sounding more desperate and pathetic than I intended.
I don’t look at her when I brush past, daring anything to stop me as I make my way up the stairs.
3: THE HINT OF OLD AND POWERFUL ESHÉ
Somewhere upstairs, a door slams. Earlier, my brief reunion with my ex-best friend had felt almost dreamlike. In here, though, as she’d stormed her way through the house, trying to find a way out, she’d felt more tangible. Real in a way that had made me desperate to reach out and touch. Except, I remember, she doesn’twantme here.
