“I don’t know,” I say again. “I don’t remember.”
It’s all I’ve been saying, the entire time, because I think if I say it long enough they’ll start to believe me. I sure try my best to sound believable, or at least I try to sound like I’m not lying. I don’t want to explain that a demon called Cain healed my body and is now inside me making lewd comments about the nurse’s ass.
The nurse rips opens the velcro of the blood pressure cuff and types some numbers into the computer. I’m asked again now I feel, to which I say, “Okay,” because that’s all I keep saying. Just simple things, that I’m okay or that I don’t know. I’ll be cooperative because I don’t want to know what happens to crazy teenagers who don’t listen to police and EMTs and doctors who all want to know just what exactly happened to make Aidan scream at the 911-operator that he killed his best friend, to please hurry, send an ambulance, he’s so sorry but please hurry.
I’m certainly not dead or dying now. I want to tell the nurse to put the blood pressure cuff back on me just so we both can feel the hard beat of my blood, the steady in-and-out puff of my breath. I’m alive, I’m a living thing with all my limbs under control, my voice speaking only what I want to say.
I’m trying not to say anything crazy. I know this is a crazy situation, because Aidan and his sisters must have explained about how I came flying around the turn on my bike, how I collided with the car head-on and then all that limp-limbed flopping and rolling into the pavement. All that blood on my clothes, except I’ve been stuck into a hospital gown now. They let me wash my hands, scrub my arms clean of crimson smears. I want a shower but I’ll settle for getting my hands clean at least.
I’m taken for tests, loaded into a CAT scan, they take blood, Cain bitches about everything, I try to ignore him even though that’s just about impossible. I tell them I don’t know why there was blood, why I showed up bloody without a scratch on me. I say I don’t know what I did, why I ran away from Aidan — I say I don’t remember, and that I’m okay.
The police found me first, or rather I found the police first, when Cain gave me back my body. I wandered up to the police cars and found one of the officers waiting. He radioed to the others, I stood there quietly and told him I was okay. I cooperated, I’m too nice of a kid not to cooperate with the police. I heard Aidan but didn’t see him, didn’t really get a look at him, just heard him rushing up as they were packing me away in the ambulance.
Worst part is when my mom shows up. I tell her just the same, that I’m okay, I don’t know what happened, she starts to cry — she’s been crying. I wonder if Aidan called her or the police. I sit there with my hands pressed between my knees, being quiet and cooperative because I don’t want to be the kind of crazy they need to keep longer for observation. I just want to go home, but I’m too scared to say anything more than what nothing I’ve already said.
My mom rubs her hand between my shoulders as she stands next to the exam table and listens to the doctor try to explain this. They can’t explain it, of course they can’t, because you just need one look at Aidan to know he wouldn’t be capable of pulling a prank like this, nor would he want to, and I’m certainly not known for my practical jokes. I’m known for being crazy, so I’m not sure why everyone seems so surprised that I’ve turned into something impossible to understand or explain.
It’s just my mom in the room with me now. I pick at my cuticle so I don’t have to look at her, but I can still hear her delicate sniffling as she tries not to cry about her crazy son being so crazy they can’t even diagnose him.
I get a hug from her, rather than a lecture. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she says. “Ethan, honey, I’m glad you’re okay.”
I nod into her shoulder and put my arms around her.
Your mom’s kind of hot for an older broad.
I try to ignore Cain’s voice. I don’t want anyone to know I’m hearing voices — hearing a voice, Cain, he’s still inside me even if I’m the one controlling my body again. All these impossible things that have to be real, because nothing’s wrong with me according to all these tests. Cain doesn’t show in the CAT scan, he’s not a dark spot in my brain, not some tumor they can cut away.
Since nothing’s wrong except everything, I get to leave. My mom has a fresh change of clothes for me. I get dressed in the bathroom and try not to look at the dried blood in my hair. I slip out of the hospital gown and get wrangled into socks, underwear —
Nice dick.
“Cain, please. Don’t,” I whisper. I glance at the door, because my mom’s just on the other side of it waiting for me. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
Tough shit. I’m talking to you anyway. What else do I have to do?
I close my eyes and finish getting ready without letting Cain see anymore of my body, even though I guess he’s already seen everything. I guess he sees everything, like how I saw everything when he was the one in control of my body. I don’t want to think about that, because it’s just so crazy, but it happened or my hallucinations are becoming impossibly real.
I finish getting dressed and go with my mom out to the car. I turn around in my seat some to watch the hospital disappear, and then I stay turned around over the console to look out the back windshield. I’m looking for dead things. Surely I’m going to see a lot of dead things around a hospital.
“Ethan?” she asks. “Everything okay, sweetie?”
“Yeah.” I turn back around. I sink down into my seat some. It’s only once I reach into my pocket that I remember. I turn around again and pluck the hospital bag with my stuff in it from the backseat. I find my pants and dig the rectangular lump out of the pocket.
“Mom? Mom, I broke my phone.” I wait until she’s at a red light and show her the shattered LCD screen. “Can we get me a new one?”
She glances at me with a careful expression. “Now?”
“Um, yeah. I guess. Yeah, now,” I say. “Can we stop at the store on the way home?”
“No,” she says. “Honey, no, you need to go home and rest, okay?”
It’s her patronizing, my-son-is-crazy tone that lets me know that things are not okay. Nothing is okay about what’s just happened, but since I wasn’t hurt and seemed calm they’re letting me go home.
“Okay,” I say anyway. I try to sound appropriately meek, proportionally disappointed, not too eager and not too defiant. I try to sound normal, whatever normal should sound like for someone who just got hit by a car and was covered in blood but doesn’t have a cut or broken bone or bruise to show for it.
My mother glances over again. She doesn’t say anything more for the drive home and neither do I. There’s no police this time at the bottom of the drive, no Aidan screaming for me, not even a dead cat, just my mom pulling her car into the garage and then leading me into the house.
I still want a shower to rinse the dried blood from my hair, except now I know that Cain’s watching everything I do so it’s too weird. I take the shower anyway and get griped at by Cain for how much I close my eyes, how I just scrub shampoo into my hair, stare at the tile rather than look at myself, and hurry out of the shower and into clothes without looking at too much in particular, especially not my naked body.
Your parents must be loaded. What’s your dad, a lawyer? Wealthy banker? This house is top-shit swanky.
I hate Cain’s running commentary on my life. I try to ignore it as best I can as I get changed into pajamas. I get settled into bed, and it’s just like being sick as a very young child. My mom brings over my laptop, the television remote, a glass of water, some slices of toast. She fusses to bring me extra pillows and even digs my grandmother’s ceramic bell from the china cabinet to set on my nightstand. I don’t know why she bothers, since I can’t ring the bell hard enough to summon her if she leaves the room. I guess her mom did this for her when she was sick, so she does it for me when I’m sick, and I’m too nice of a kid to tell her it doesn’t make me feel any better.
“Thanks, mom,” I say instead. I open my laptop and try to look painfully normal.
My mom runs her hand over my damp hair with a frown on her face, worried and disappointed all in one stress-inducing expression. I try not to look at it. I click on random emails I’ve already read before starting to compose one to Aidan.
She moves to the doorway to watch me, so I type and do my best to look okay. Sure I was just hit by a car, but I’ve crashed my bike before coming down that hill. There’s a scar on my knee to prove it. The doctors said I was fine, nothing broken, nothing bruised. Not a scratch on me.
I write an email to Aidan to explain my phone’s broke. I even say I dropped it down the stairs before the wreck. That’s how I refer to it, just the wreck and then swiftly say I’m okay. What else am I going to say?
Sorry I hit your car, I write that. Delete it. Bring it back up with a quick control-plus-zee flick.
What’s this? How are you doing this?
I glance up at my mother, still standing in the doorway. Slowly I finish typing the rest of the email without really pulling my eyes off her long. I don’t want to look at the screen, can’t say anything to Cain while she’s watching me. It’s probably suspicious I’m watching her, but in all fairness she’s the one standing vigil over her crazy son.
This is a computer, isn’t it? I’ve heard of these. Do you have the internet?
I’m not going to think about how crazy that is. Everything in my life right now is literally the worst thing to ever happen to me. Right now I am sitting here writing an email to my best friend apologizing for fatally colliding with his car, and the reason I’m alive to do so is because a demon calling himself Cain has taken up residence inside my body.
But everything’s fine, I tell Aidan. I went to the hospital, and now I’m home. I send the email and then just click and drag rectangles around on my desktop wallpaper. Periodically I type a few random words into the search bar before deleting them.
“Ethan,” my mom says.
Tell her to fuck off.
“Is there anything you want to tell me, sweetie?”
Tell her you’re —
“I’m fine, mom. Really. It’s okay.” I smile. “I feel totally fine.”
Her expression isn’t one that believes me, but I’m sitting there clean, unbroken, completely alive and totally fine. Doctor-verified that there’s not a scratch on me, so that no one can explain it and now Aidan must be going crazy.
I check my email and there are three, all from Aidan, various ways of him asking if I’m okay, telling me he’s sorry, and first asking and then just declaring that he’s coming over. By the time I’m reading them, though, the doorbell rings. My mother turns from the doorway and disappears into the hall.
So about getting me a different body. It needs to be —
“No,” I whisper.
You want me inside you forever? I’m not going back into a cat, Abel. No fucking way.
“Please, no. I’m not killing anyone.”
I sink low into the bed and just know that Aidan’s about to burst into my room. I keep my eyes on the door and make sure to hush to Cain just as quiet as I can. I’ve tried thinking the words, but he can’t hear me unless I can hear me — which makes just as much sense as the rest of this.
Got any enemies? Rival … blonde kid, or something. Shit, your world is getting too complicated. I miss the days of relentless slaughter.
“I’m not killing anyone.”
I’m curled down into the extra pillows my mom brought when Aidan does in fact explode into my room. He’s loud enough to drown out whatever Cain might say in return.
“Oh my God, Ethan! I’m so fucking sorry –” He’s already sobbing, maybe he hasn’t stopped crying since the moment he saw me swerve straight into his car. He rushes at the bed to hug me, and there’s a weird pause before I pat at his back in return.
“I’m fine. Aidan, I’m okay. See?” I try to get him off me so I can spread my arms out, push the blankets down to show that I’m unbroken, unbruised, nothing wrong with me except Cain’s voice inside me.
The voice telling me to kill people, but at least Aidan doesn’t have to try living with the fact he killed his best friend, and my mom doesn’t have to bury her son. So, it really is okay. I’m okay with this.
I get my arms around Aidan, squeeze him close like when we were young. Before I started to realize I didn’t like girls, that I liked hugging Aidan a bit too much. I couldn’t make him live with having killed me — I’d be okay with dying otherwise, except for making my mom cry. Making her wear black — she hates wearing black. I remember her telling me the day of Poppa’s funeral, during those last few hours when everything was truly normal.
Aidan backs off enough to look at me. He scrubs his face with his sleeve and then shucks out of his coat. He slings his coat over my desk chair. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, my mom — your mom — everyone said you were okay, but –”
He saw me, he must have seen me bleeding and broken. He was right there when Cain clawed my battered body up from the crimson-soaked pavement. I stare at him. He saw the dead cat. He saw me dying. He saw the cat get up, he saw me get up.
I don’t want to sound crazy. I don’t want to ask. I’m scared to say anything too strange now that there’s a voice inside me telling me to kill people. Something incredibly suspicious, wrong, and unnatural just happened because no one can explain this except maybe me and Cain — more Cain than me — but I’m definitely not going to say anything crazy to doctors or my mom or even Aidan.
How about this dude? Get me his body. I bet even you can take him in a fight.
“No,” I say. Almost shout it, really, because I am not going to kill Aidan or let Cain take over Aidan’s body. I’ll keep Cain inside me, if that’s the alternative. I’ll – I can’t, I’m not going to kill anyone. I’m not going to kill Aidan especially.
“No?” Aidan echoes.
I shouldn’t have said that, so I have to think quickly. “Um, no, I’m okay. At the hospital they checked for anything, but I’m totally fine. Not even a bruise.”
Why not? Sure, he’s not much to look at, but I’ll take what I can get.
Aidan shakes his head. He looks to the door to check for my mother before coming up to sit cross-legged on the bed with me. “Ethan, I know what I saw,” he says. It’s difficult and thick for him to say. “I saw your femur sticking out of your leg. I saw so much blood — your chest, your head, I saw — I heard you gurgling — God, Ethan.” He shakes his head again and can’t say anything further.
It’ll be easy. Do you have a belt or anything else to choke him with? Nothing messy. I can’t piece together anything right now. You won’t even need to hide the body. I’ll put it to use right away.
I’m not going to listen to Cain, and I’m not going to kill Aidan.
Aidan rubs at his cheeks and curls then his fingers under his chin. He’s quiet as he looks at me expectantly, because he wants me to confess so he doesn’t have to ask.
I bet you’re hot for him. Is that why?
“Yeah,” I say at last. It’s an answer that suits Aidan and Cain both. I don’t dare keep quiet any longer, because that’s just as suspicious as saying something crazy.
“How?” Aidan looks to the door and then shifts closer. He whispers, because I was whispering. “Ethan, what happened?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m okay now.”
I figured you for a flamer. Well go for it, kid. Tap that ass.
I look anywhere but at Aidan. I wish I could tell Cain to shut up.
He’s cute, if you’re into fucking teddy bears. I knew a man once who fought a bear. I don’t think he fucked it, but he was a crazy cossack so anything’s possible.
I’ve been staring at anything other than Aidan and trying to ignore Cain for too long, because I hear Aidan whisper as if repeating himself, “Ethan? Ethan, you can tell me. If something happened, you know you can tell me.”
I’m not going to tell Aidan about the demon inside me who wants his body. I told him about the letter and everything I was seeing, but I can’t get him involved in this. I shake my head and then push my hands over my ears, because I am so frightened to hear Cain tell me anything else. I told him my name, he took over my body, I don’t want to kill Aidan.
“I won’t kill you,” I tell him. “Aidan, I won’t –”
Abel, you dumb piece of —
“What?” asks Aidan.
It’s all these things at once before everything pushes and pulls in a sideways shiver where I go away without moving at all. I don’t have breath to cry out for the agony of being ripped aside, because my voice belongs to Cain again, My body belongs to Cain, he thrusts into everything I was so that I am nothing and he says, “Nothing,” for me.
“For hitting me with your car,” Cain says. “I won’t kill you for it. No hard feelings.” He shrugs with lazily self-assurance that says he could manage carry through his threats, even using my wimpy body.
“What?” asks Aidan again.
Cain is doing a horrible job at being me.
“You heard me. There’s nothing much else to talk about, hm?” My hand goes against Aidan’s thigh. I lean in closer. I look at his lips.
No. No, Cain, don’t. Don’t.
It’s his low rumbling chuckle, a purring-growl sound that puts wide circles into Aidan’s eyes. He just stares with a slow-growing expression of horror as I rub my hand over his leg and move closer. I press my lips into his and hum brisk, thrumming approval. My body is hard and wanting, my heart is heavy and throbbing.
Cain, no, not Aidan — please, don’t do this.
I gasp, Aidan gasps, he pushes but I pull. “Ethan?” he squeaks. His face is bright-red, I pull him against me even though the door is still open, my mother is somewhere in the house, I can’t do this to Aidan, I can’t do this thing that I’m doing.
I kiss him like I’ve always wanted to kiss someone, like I’ve always wanted to kiss any pretty boy on TV or on the street. All the times I jerked one out thinking of just some generic man or maybe some specific one — all those imagined desires, none of them match the reality of kissing Aidan.
My fingers push through his hair as I bend him to me and he flutters, sighs and clutches back so that I’m shocked and Cain laughs ominously.
Don’t do this to Aidan, he’s my best friend. And my mom’s home, you’re going to get caught — Cain, please, don’t do this.
Distracting me is just how much my body is responding, how eager Cain is for this — that Aidan seems eager for this. I’m horrified, this is a nightmare, I can’t believe this is happening.
Cain pushes him into the bed. “Fuck, I haven’t gotten laid in so long,” he groans.
“What?” Aidan scrambles back, but my hand reaches out and snatches his arm. Fear flashes over his expression, and I feel Cain shift as I do. We both react, and my hand snaps away, I let him go, I am not going to do this to my best friend.
“No!” I shriek. It’s a husky-dry spit of a sound. “No! Won’t! I won’t!”
I stagger off the bed. I fall to my knees and dry-heave, clawing at the carpet as I writhe and moan. Chaos burns the echo of Cain and I overlapping each other with vicious, destructive discord. I hug my hands over my head and hunch into my knees with a hard shudder.
I don’t want my mom to hear, I need to stop screaming — but I wasn’t screaming, I was quiet, I am being quiet. Aidan heard just because he’s right here. He also saw me bent and broken in the street, he did all that seance stuff with me before my mom made him stop, and he knew about the letter. Still I’m not going to let Cain get him involved in this, even though Aidan’s already thick in this mess.
I feel Aidan’s hands against my back. It’ just one more rough-tumble shatter of sensation that makes me shiver and choke on my own saliva, on each panted breath, because Cain and I are fighting for control. Something snaps so that I flinch, Aidan flinches, and I clench my fists against the shock of fitting back into my own body.
Fuck, okay! Chill the fuck out, sweetheart.
“You leave him alone,” I say to Cain.
“Ethan?” Aidan whispers. He hasn’t started screaming for my mom yet, he’s just knelt here next to me with his hands on my shoulders, our thighs pressed close, he’s pressed close and trying to comfort me with the slow rub of his hand.
I kissed him. He’s my best friend, and I kissed him. Cain kissed him. Cain, as me, so Aidan thinks it was me — he thought it was me and kissed me back.
I jump to my feet. This can’t be happening. “I can’t believe you did that. Why did you do that?” I’m demanding this of Cain, I need him to answer me. I grip my hands into my hair, like I could possibly grab Cain. “Where’s the cat?” I ask suddenly. “Aidan, where’s the cat?”
“I – I guess I hit it, too, I don’t –” He’s too bewildered for words. I just kissed him. We were kissing, I kissed Aidan.
I’m not going back in the cat.
“Well I’m not killing Aidan! Or fucking him!”
From the floor, my best friend watches as I go completely crazy on him in ways that are probably terrifying. I don’t blame him for looking scared when I’m standing here talking to myself about killing him and/or raping him. He’s still kneeling on the floor but now he’s leaned back from me. His eyes are wide, round and staring.
Abel, calm down.
He doesn’t sound calm, this demon doesn’t sound calm even though he’s trying to tell me what to do. I stagger and think I might gag again, think I might really vomit, it’s an all-over sensation of clammy where I’m hot and freezing. I grip into the bedpost and vibrate like I’ll rip in two, which is exactly what it feels like in that moment.
Abel! Calm the fuck down.
“No! I’m not! You shut up! Just shut up!” I put my hands to my ears, but he’s inside me now. This demon is inside me and wants me to kill Aidan, or wants me to fuck him, and I don’t want to do either. “I won’t do it! I won’t! I won’t!”
Aidan runs to the door, disappears through it. He’s probably in the hall checking from the overlook for my mom, so I expect to hear him start screaming for her. Instead Aidan rushes back inside and gets the door closed. He has no survival skills, he would absolutely be the first to die in a horror movie, my best friend is a total idiot to get himself alone in this room with a crazy person like me.
“Okay,” he tells me. He takes hold of my wrists to pull my hands off my ears. “Ethan, it’s okay, you don’t have to. We’re not going to. I really don’t want to either,” Aidan says. He smiles with a short, nervous laugh.
I brace for Cain to say something, but he’s silent. I let Aidan tug my hands off my head. I stare at him, shoulders heaving as I catch my breath, as I fight against sobs. Aidan gently pushes me back into the bed.
“It’s okay, Ethan. You don’t have to,” he says. He watches as I crawl back into the bed, and he doesn’t sit on it with me this time. He fiddles with the ceramic bell instead and doesn’t look at me.
Finally Aidan sets the bell down and picks up the television remote. He finds literally the first channel that isn’t a commercial and makes us both suffer through a procedural drama neither one of us knows anything about. It’s awkward. He sits in the desk chair, I stay on the bed, Cain doesn’t say anything. It’s painfully awkward.
I hear the soft sigh that indicates Aidan’s about to say something. He’s waited for the show to end, even though neither one of us possibly could have been following it. Aidan gets up from the desk and comes to set the remote on the bed next to me.
“I’m not gay,” he says.
“I am.”
Knew it.
To his credit, the surprised, “Oh,” is completely appropriate for the moment. Of all the millions of ways I thought I might ever come out to anyone, especially Aidan, this has got to be somewhere firmly along the spectrum of the worst.
Aidan bites at his lip for a moment before asking, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Um, okay.” He shrugs. “Well, um –”
“There’s a demon called Cain inside me who made me kiss you. I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t, um, I don’t like you that way. Not that you’re unattractive, or anything, just –”
You are the dumbest fucking necromancer I have ever met.
“No, no, I – I get it,” Aidan rushes to say. “Ethan, I – I get it. It’s okay.”
Which means he doesn’t believe me, but I’ve scared him so badly that he just wants me to shut up and not say anything else crazy about demons and killing him. He stares at me, I stare at him, we both have to look somewhere else, and it’s so fucking awkward I want to cry. I can’t believe I kissed him. I can’t believe any of this is happening, except it is. It’s all happening.
I bring my knees up to my chest. “I hate you,” I whisper to Cain. “Get out.”
“What?” asks Aidan. He sounds confused and devastated, so it’s obvious he heard me. I wasn’t quiet enough, or I’d forgotten he was there, that my voice actually made noise enough for him to hear me.
I shake my head and press my forehead into my knees. “Not you.”
Surely you don’t mean me, sweetheart? I thought we were going to be friends.
I grip my knees tight, just this ball on the bed for Aidan to stare at, I’m sure he’s staring at me again even though I just see the red-black press of my closed eyes.
“You should go, though. Aidan? Just, leave. Tell my mom I’m asleep.” I unfold from my knees and shift down into the bedding. I don’t look at Aidan as I roll over and pull the blankets high over my head.
“Oh. Um, okay. Sure. Hey, Ethan? I won’t tell anyone. Um, what you said. About –”
“Okay,” I say. I interrupt him quick, because I don’t want to know which crazy thing I said or did that he plans to keep secret. I don’t want to know what bothered him the most, the kiss, that I’m gay, that I talked about killing him, that I tried to explain about Cain but Aidan doesn’t believe me. I’m too crazy to be believed, even after everything I know he saw.
“Sure, Aidan, thanks. See you later,” I say. I tuck deeper into the bedding.
I hear Aidan get his coat and then go to the door. “Bye, Ethan,” he says quietly.
I don’t say anything back, I’m going to pretend to be asleep. I ignore Cain, ignore my mother when she comes in to check on me, I’m not going to leave this bed to kill anyone or get laid or do anything else Cain wants. Maybe I really will sleep, just to bring to a faster end what has been the worst day of my life, and that’s when I first start to think maybe I’m the one who needs to be killed.