Gorgeous Misery (Creeping Beautiful)

Wondering if I missed something.

Wondering if I’m being played.

“Nothing to say to that?” Indie asks.

My breathing slows and so does my heart rate. The building panic recedes and I pull myself totally together.

No. I’m not being played. Indie isn’t acting. She’s just being herself.

Everything is fine.

“OK.”

“You agree?”

“I’ll find Merc for you. But here’s the catch. If he does have Wendy, and she’s hurt, I will blow up this entire fucking world to make you pay for that, Indie. And I will do that by making sure Donovan dies.”

She lets out a breath. Perhaps alarmed by my threat, perhaps not. “Call me back at this number when you’re on your way. And Nick? Don’t take too long. Because I have many more ways to hurt you than you do me.”

I don’t care who you are, or how old you are, or how kicked-back you are—when someone you love shuns you for years at a time over something you can’t really change, it hurts. And that time, as it passes, it feels like forever. It’s an eternity of self-doubt and constant wondering… is this really how it ends?

That’s how it starts. And if you’re not totally in control of your world, this is the kind of shit that tears you up from the inside out.

I might not be totally sane, and for damn sure I’m nothing even close to normal, but I know how to lock out the doubt. I know how to plow ahead with blinders on.

This is kind of my thing.

So when Wendy walked out on me three Christmases ago, I plowed ahead. I put on those blinders. But I also showed up. I showed up for her birthday that year. She turned twenty-two. But Wendy wasn’t there. Never showed up at all, and I stayed for a couple of weeks just to make sure.

At the time I was thinking, Did she come? See my truck? Turn around and go the other way?

But no. Because unless she was sneaking up on me through the woods or something weird like that, I would’ve heard her tires on the gravel driveway. Also, she didn’t pick up the mail that first year. I know this because I broke into that fucking box of hers and there were birthday cards.

That distracted me for a day. It was nice, too. Reminded me of all those times—well, it really wasn’t a lot of times. We’re so hot and cold. So on and off. But the point is, opening the cards was nice. I even started matching them up with previous years. Wendy never threw any of the cards away. She had them all stuffed in garbage bags under her bed.

This cross-referencing didn’t have a purpose, but it kept me busy. Kept my mind off of all the ways I was driving her away.

Anyway. That birthday she turned twenty-two.

I came by again for Christmas that year. Came early. Got a little tree. Bought some cookies from the nearby grocery-store bakery, I even found a Christmas carol playlist on my music stream.

No Wendy.

Fine, right? You wanna play hard to get? I can play hard to get.

So that next summer I did not show up for birthday twenty-three.

Well. I didn’t show up early, anyway. But I was there on the day.

Did I stay two weeks, like last time, though?

No. I was strong. I was in control. I left the next morning and drove all the way back to my stupid farm in Nebraska.

Then I started calling her.

Well, first I posted on the board online. That’s where we make plans. The board is an anonymous place. You don’t get a name when you post. Well, I guess you could have a name—there’s a place for one on the form when you make a reply. But if you use a name you are relentlessly ridiculed by every other anonymous person online. ‘Oh, you’re too good to be anonymous like the rest of us, you fucking loser?’ Shit like that.

So I posted our code—this is something we’ve had in place since before we were even friends. It’s how Chek and I used to communicate when Wendy was a teenager. We go to the board, we post a new message, and we wait. That message is only visible for about… oh, maybe… twelve hours. Then it falls off the front page, becomes archived and it’s pretty much impossible to find after that. So you gotta post another one if you don’t hear back.

I know it sounds like there isn’t a chance in hell of communicating with people like this, but it actually works—if you’re following the board. And Wendy and I have been chatty on that board for years. We’re into it. Probably because we’re losers. Trolling an image board on the chans is kind of a good time in our sad, pathetic world. So this method has worked well with us. If we’re both on at the same time, we chat sometimes. Anonymously, of course. We have a little meme war, we shitpost about other anonymous losers, we sometimes even say things like ‘good night’ and ‘see ya around.’