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They say you’re paranoid. Fine. Maybe you’re not exactly sound of mind, but you have good reasons.
Can you be called paranoid when there are so many graves in your aunt’s backyard? Can you be called paranoid when your aunt looks at you with that crooked smile of hers, like she can’t wait to use you? And what if being paranoid was what has kept you safe so far?
Ohhhh no. Oh, no, no, no.
You need to get out of here.
You need to get out of here fast.
You know you’ve got issues. You don’t trust easily. That’s what happens when your entire life is taken away from you in the blink of an eye. Your parents drowned. You lost your house. You lost everything. The only reason you’re still here is because you were out having the time of your life that day, and you try not to blame Johnny, whom you were with, because it’s not your fault, but now you’re the last Nigmos, and sometimes you do blame him but you don’t want to but... Had you been home, would anything have played out differently? Would you have heard them drown? Would you have saved them? Or would you just have been another victim?
You don’t trust your aunt. She’s the one you got placed with, which is funny since social services took your cousin from her ages ago. You suppose it’s because there was no one else, and you’ll be of age soon.
If you make it to eighteen.
Your aunt chills you to the bone. She shuffles around the house like she’s more of a ghost than those in the garden. She goes from one room to the other, always circling back to her garden. Or graveyard. The terminology isn’t clear. There, she sits on a throne like she’s the Queen of Death, and her eyes linger on every tombstone like they’re happy, nostalgic memories.
You’re afraid. Man, you’re terrified. She doesn’t only have a screw loose, she’s free wheeling!
Johnny doesn’t believe you. Or more, he believes you’re concerned, and that losing your parents did a real number on you. But he hardly believes your aunt has killed everyone in her backyard. He still listens to you, he ponders every word you say— he is sweet, so sweet. But Johnny doesn’t understand the way you do. He doesn’t get that creeping feeling. He doesn’t hear the ghosts scream at you every night to get out of here.
Where would we go? Johnny asks. You don’t know.
Anywhere else.
We’re in the middle of the desert, Philly…
So you talk to Ripp about it, suggest you make a run, get out of Strangetown and start somewhere else. He wants to go too— not because his father’s a prick, not because he can’t be who he is in this desert, but because he has nothing better to do and he knows there’s no future in Strangetown and even less fun.
You will leave one day.
It’ll feel like driving your car off a cliff.