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Alex can't quite hear what Nona's saying.
Her voice is distant and foggy, and suddenly, Nona’s a lifetime away, and Alex can't seem to find her way back. Her tether is loose, long and winded, twisting in static and darkness and she's gazing into nothing.
She blinks, color returning, and she's back on Edward's Island. Harden Tower –Jonas is yelling, Ren's defensive behind her. She's torn between them and suddenly she's torn again, and she's on the beach playing truth-or-slap and bearing witness to Clarissa's venom. She can't hear it, but she feels it, seeping into her like a snake bite, running through her veins, swelling, swelling, swelling, like she's about to burst.
Her ears fill with static. It screams at her, screaming at nothing, screaming at everything.
"Alex?"
Pause. Nona's tone pulls her back, like a gentle guiding beacon cutting through thick fog. Mostly worried, a little scared, and Alex thinks she hears her voice blip before she's back in the present.
"Shit…"
Okay, breathe . Alex's vision is wobbly, blinding, and she takes short breaths that aren't doing much of anything to help her. Panic bubbles in her gut–Why, why?
Nona's hand is on hers, and she's rubbing her thumb across dry, rough skin. "Hey–breathe with me, Alex, you're alright."
Alex hiccups, breath hitching, but Nona counts to four and Alex listens because it’s all she can do. By the sixth cycle, she’s not hyperventilating anymore.
Things are still blurry, but Alex is used to that–she’ll roll with it, or whatever she usually does. Something something lemons, lemonade.
They’re sitting together on the old bench that overlooks the ocean, and there’s a nip in the air, and Alex can smell salt and petrichor from the brief stint of rain ten minutes ago. At least, she thinks it was ten minutes ago. How long had they been out here for?
Nona’s hand is still on hers, and in any other scenario there’d be a warmth blossoming across Alex’s cheeks, but she’s kind of distracted by other, more pressing matters. “Are you… Are you, um, okay now?”
Alex isn’t really sure if she is, because there’s a residual static still buzzing in her ears and her freakish time-traveling, mind-bending escapade threw her entirely off-center. She’s grateful they’re sitting down, though–she would really rather she not pass out and give herself another minor concussion.
“Uhm, maybe?” Alex says, and her voice is a bit crackly. “I just need… Like five… Five minutes, yeah.”
“Sure.”
Nona’s hand is still on hers, and the coastal drizzle picks up again. She watches it drip from the wooden pergola that’s keeping the two of them dry, and Nona’s cigarette lit, following the drops from the wood to the wet concrete. A succinct, orderly existence, from one place to another. Alex envies the rain, the simplicity of its essence.
They’re skipping school, Alex remembers. She should be in English, with Ren on her left and Clarissa behind her, in the classroom in A-Wing that has that old, musty library smell, but instead she’s out here with Nona. She was shaky during lunch, stomach toiling so much she could hardly keep her PB&J down. Seventh period had passed agonizingly slowly, nausea kicking her into high alert, and the tick tick tick of the old dusty clock on the wall above her was the catalyst for her residual ghosts to come and haunt her.
Nona had noticed, of course she had, bless her, and she had pulled Alex out of class ten minutes before the bell rang with an excuse of taking her to the nurse.
But they hadn’t gone to the nurse–they never do. Nona had held her hand with both of their bags over her shoulder and led Alex up the hill to the edge of campus, to the tiny bench where they always sit when they play hooky. Sometimes they’re here together, alone, sometimes with Clarissa. Sometimes Alex comes up here by herself when she can’t stand to listen to another lecture about the bullshit history of Edward’s Island, but it feels wrong without Nona’s presence.
Nona shifts next to her, scooting closer to Alex. She’s here, they’re here together. Alex takes a shaky breath, resting her head on Nona’s shoulder.
“Hey there,” Nona says softly. Her thumb runs over Alex’s knuckles. “Feeling better?”
“Something like that,” Alex says. She’s not dizzy anymore and the static has mostly vanished, leaving her only with a racing heart and sweaty hands. “Just… facing the repercussions of, you know, whatever the fuck those freak-show circus flashes are. I feel like I just got off a tilt-a-whirl…” Alex pauses. “But like, after riding it a hundred times.”
Nona nods, resting her head on Alex’s in turn. “Yeesh. That sounds pretty…Gnarly.”
Her sincerity echoes in Alex’s head. “It was definitely up there on the list of Alex’s-top-ten-worst-experiences,” She chokes. “I think you being here is helping, though.”
“Okay. Okay, cool. We can just…chill.” There’s a hint of a smile in Nona’s voice, and Alex can’t exactly see Nona’s face on account of her resting against her shoulder, so maybe she’s just imagining it. “Do you wanna… Um, talk about it?”
Alex shrugs. They’ve talked about it before, oh so many times, and she’s afraid she’ll sound like a broken record. Almost always, it’s the same moments from Horror Island, where her nerves were stretched thin time and time again, so loose and wobbly that she hardly had anything to fall back on to keep her grit in-tact. The tension in those moments was always strung endlessly high, waiting, preying, like lightning festering in thunder clouds, itching to strike and burn everything to the ground.
“It was just the typical stuff,” Alex says, sighing, resigning to keeping her sanity intact instead of reliving the fight with Jonas and Ren over again. “Clarissa, Jonas, Ren… Times I’ve told you about over and over again.” Alex laughs, wondering how Nona wasn’t sick of her and her incessant ramblings.
Nona takes a draw of her cigarette, and the smell of it is oddly comforting, which is something she never thought she’d say. “You can still tell me, if you want. I really don’t mind hearing it again.”
Alex draws her eyebrows together, wanting but also not wanting, hesitating to speak. Nona knows but she doesn’t , not really. She remembers the fight at Harden Tower, because she was there, once , caught up in the middle of the storm, but she doesn’t know what it was like to repeat that for five–God, five fucking years. Nona might not mind hearing the story she’s only experienced a handful of times again, but the thought of retelling it, reliving it, as if it wasn’t already seared into every fiber of her being, made Alex want to throw up.
She hates it, hates the fact that Nona will never know. No one will ever know, not Jonas, not Ren, not Clarissa– god, not even Riley will ever understand the agony of her existence, doomed by the narrative, fucked over by a world that had no remorse for her. The ache in her body from those years ran hundreds of miles deep, festering in every part of her, becoming her, becoming one with her , rotting her skin and her blood and her nerves.
She’s tried to explain it before, explain what happened to her, but everytime her words fail her, and her story falls short. At sleepovers with Clarissa and Nona, during drives with Jonas, when she’s helping Ren write a new Red-Headed Bedwetters song, and she stammers her way through a measly explanation of what she thinks is the truth, but she’s not even really sure herself because it all feels so, so foggy in her harrowed brain, and they don’t get it and they try and soothe her with words that feel empty.
Alex hates herself for it, for not being able to be sympathetic, and she’s glad that they don’t understand, really, she is. She doesn’t want them to understand, no one should. The only other beings who really know what it feels like are locked away, buried in a desolate grave that will keep them awake for as long as eternity exists.
Trying to explain all of that to Nona while they play hooky is something Alex would rather not do, she decides. Maybe one day she’ll be able to tell her, tell everyone, but it’s only December, and she’s got a whole school year left and then some to really unpack her deep-seated trauma.
“No, it’s okay…” Alex says. “I won’t bore you with it again. It’s passed, anyway.”
“You sure?”
Alex sighs, deep, for once. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
They rest against each other until the rain eases up and school’s been out for half an hour, and Clarissa is texting both of them asking where they are because Alex promised her they’d go thrifting after school and she forgot about it entirely.
They run back to Alex’s truck, the same one Michael used to drive, Nona keeping their fingers intertwined the entire way across campus. Alex allows herself to leave her ghosts on that hilltop, trying to push them all away, just for once, even though she knows they'll come back.
They can wait until the next time she plays hooky.