A Dark Road Read online

  A Dark Road

  By Amanda Lance

  A Dark Road

  Copyright © 2013 by Amanda Lance. All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: August 2013

  Limitless Publishing, LLC

  Kailua, HI 96734

  www.limitlesspublishing.com

  Formatting: Limitless Publishing

  ISBN-13: 978-1492156390

  ISBN-10: 1492156396

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  For everyone else just trying to make it through.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 1

  Hadley

  I unwrapped the silver picture frame and put it on the dusty shelf next to one of my trophies. Mom and Dad could make me pack up my life during senior year, force me to leave my friends, the fencing team; they could even make me participate in the unpacking of the knick-knacks. But they could not make me dust the shelf before I loaded it with the clutter of our family life.

  As I looked at the picture within the frame, I almost felt bad for not giving it a proper home. The picture demonstrated one of those rare times that Simon and I were both having a good hair day and I had actually been willing to participate with Mom and her camera.

  I took the frame from the shelf and used a dishrag to dust the area that would be the frame’s new home.

  Simon walked into the large living room of our new farm house whistling the James Bond theme song. His demeanor was so carefree, so lighthearted; if I didn’t love him so much, I would have hated him.

  “Isn’t this place awesome?” He wiggled one of the loose shelves on the wall. “It’s uber creepy. I keep waiting for a zombie to pop out and eat my brain.”

  I smacked his hand away before I glanced at the low ceiling then down to the scratched floorboards. The realtor had thought to paint this room a marigold yellow. And though I did think it was nice with the enormous amount of sunlight the windows let in, it was easier to notice the ceaseless imperfections in the oak trim, the broken doorknobs, and the ugly radiators that stuck out from the walls.

  “It would be disappointed…and hungry.”

  “I swear sometimes it’s hard to believe we ever shared the same uterus.” He wrote his name in the dust. “Let alone at the same time! If you weren’t so diabolically evil, I’d deny you as my twin any day.”

  I disagreed. With our brown hair and eyes it would be easy enough to guess that Simon and I were related. At least we had both been blessed with high cheekbones and clear skin, giving us each a complementary look for our respective genders. Yet, as grateful as I was to be considered attractive, I didn’t want it to be my only feature and hated when people acknowledged it, as though my physicality was the best thing about me.

  I shoved a cardboard box at him and made my way to another. I didn’t want to go up the stairs yet to the room that was supposed to be ‘mine’ (as though rooms can belong to people). To unpack my stuff would make this move official. I would be an occupant in Ravel, Pennsylvania the moment my socks found a drawer or my books a shelf, and the semi-denial phase was just fine with me.

  “You’re being too optimistic about this.” For a second I imagined the tape I ripped through was Mom’s new job, the thin sheers of the bubble wrap I popped every used automobile she had ever sold.

  “Just use your imagination a little, Hadley. With some flowers, curtains, a few décor specials from the local hillbilly-mart, this place might actually be livable. Home was too cookie-cutter, anyway,” he scoffed. “Everything in Connecticut is.”

  I sighed. “See, there’s the thing. You’re still calling Connecticut home just like I am. This place isn’t home. It’s just a house.”

  “Look, you think I like leaving my friends? No. It sucks. But we’d have to do it anyway in a few months to go to college, so what difference does it make? And anyway, Mom is really excited to be the manager for this dealership. We should throw the old gal a bone…you know, before menopause comes along and breaks them.”

  The only thing worse than having a brother who is unbiasedly popular, is having a brother who is almost perpetually and intolerably right about everything.

  “Really thought out that argument didn’t you? I bet you practiced it all the way here. Looking to be on the debate team?”

  “Hads, if this piss-ant school doesn’t have a fencing team, something tells me they don’t have a debate team. Even if they did, why would I want to join? It could seriously interfere with my time with the ladies and the band.”

  Simon always referred to ‘the band’ like he was part of some cool punk-rock group instead of the school band. He was, though, dead to rights serious about time with the ladies. His unrelenting charm actually got him into a hint of trouble every now and then with crazy girlfriends, pregnancy scares, and angry fathers. I had a secret suspicion he was happy about moving just so he could try out new material on the female student body, but I didn’t say anything yet. I’d save the ‘I told you so’s’ for later.

  We were sorting through the DVDs, trying to decide if they should be in alphabetical order or arranged by descending order of suck-etude. I absolutely had to put my foot down about arranging them according to lead actress’ cup sizes, but at least I won that battle. That’s when Dad made his way downstairs.

  “Hey guys, Have you worked up an appetite over here yet?”

  “Does Prince Harry like to party?”

  Dad looked at me and straightened his wire rim glasses.

  “He does,” I confirmed.

  “So is that a ‘yes’ to being hungry?”

  “We’re starving, Dad.”

  He withdrew some money from his wallet and placed the bills on top of Simon’s perfectly styled hair, pretending to balance it out before Simon swiped at it. “Mom ordered pizza from some place down the street. It’ll be good for you kids to get a lay of the land before you start school.”

  “Dad,” Simon handed me the money and immediately went to repair any potential damage on his hair. “What have we said about using that word?”
/>   Again Dad looked at me for translation.

  “‘Lay or any tense thereof,” I said. “You and Mom agreed to not use this word as per title one, subsection three, division six—”

  “—in clause 4.7, relating to any matter of similar words. Including, but not limited to: boner, nasty-”

  “Naughty, sexy—”

  Mom chimed in from the hallway above, “Just go get the food!”

  Though I wasn’t excited to explore the small town, I was willing to take any excuse I could to get out of that house. Back home when I wasn’t at school or out with friends, I was at the gym practicing for tournaments. Here, I didn’t know if I would have any of that. I hated the uncertainty of starting new. It was like the first day of tryouts when I was a freshman, I just wanted to know if I’d make the team or not and get it over with. Some people liked suspense. I didn’t.

  I put the name of the pizza place into the GPS and grabbed a light jacket. It was only mid-September, but already cold enough that the nights made everything frosty.. At home, most people still had their pools open and I could swim laps at Jordan’s house. Funny how a couple hundred miles can change things.

  “Will you drive?” I threw the keys of our shared car to Simon. “I want to scour Main Street for Help Wanted signs.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Simon said. “You need something to keep you from getting bored.”

  “Sorry. Some of us can’t just have shiny things dangled in front of them and be so perfectly content.”

  “They don’t have to be shiny, Hads.” His head shook in disbelief. “They just have to have large breasts. Large, symmetrical breasts. Large, symmetrical, perky—”

  “Okay, enough already!”

  We elbowed each other out the door. I swore as Simon pinched me, but got him back by tripping him up as he ran to the car. He stumbled and threw a handful of dead leaves at me.

  “If you weren’t a girl, sister dear—”

  “Then I would still kick your ass. And if I wasn’t a girl, I wouldn’t be your sister at all.”

  He flipped me the bird. “Tweet, tweet, Hads.”

  We laughed but it didn’t help my mood much. I tried programming radio stations as we drove along, too much pop, not nearly enough rock. Just another reason to hate this place.

  “If this town doesn’t at least have decent pizza, then I’m running away and joining the circus.”

  “At least be original about it, Hads. Run away to Habitat for Humanity, or join a nudist colony, or something.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “Just watch where you’re going, huh? I’d like to get there alive and with all of my limbs intact.”

  Though it was almost dark, we found the highway that would lead to the town square. As usual, Simon drove at a speed reminiscent of a wheelman in a bank robbery. I braced myself and held onto the door handle of our Ford Taurus.

  “Hey, did you pay those tickets before we left the state?”

  “Dad did,” he admitted. “I owe him like three-hundred bucks.”

  I sighed. “I have to get my own car before you crash this one.”

  “Oh, come on. You know I always take good care of the ol’ Bull here.”

  As we stopped at a light, I sighed and leaned into the crook of my fist. I looked over at the side of the road and saw a most delightful male specimen. He was about my age and leaning over the open hood of his truck with a flashlight in his mouth. His wild blond hair was streaked with oil from his hands, making him look like a mad scientist or one those villains from old cartoons. I sighed to myself and craned my neck to watch him as Simon pulled away, gunning down the street like a maniac.

  Perhaps there would be something to this town after all.

  Chapter 2

  McKay

  All I had wanted was something to eat. Now, I’m on the side of the road like a jackass trying to decide if I should just set my pickup on fire or if I should bother fixing it at all (if I had a coin, I’d flip it). I wanted to blame the overheating on the summer, but now it’s almost jacket weather. And even after I replaced the battery, the wheel bearings, and cleaned the engine (I like to think of it as a pickup enema), the damn thing is giving me problems. But it’s almost dark now and I can’t really see anything, which is making this even harder than it probably has to be, so if it is another problem on top of the original problem, I might be screwed.

  I have a flashlight, but oil is flooding everywhere, so I can’t even see a spark from a wire. Maybe I should put it out to pasture. It might be more merciful, but then I’d have to walk more than I’d like, and there is nothing that sticks out more than a geeky kid walking along the side of the road. All I needed was one more winter. One more—

  “Goddamn it.”

  People are stopping at the light and looking at me. Their stares dig into me like tiny little rivets. just being self-conscious, and logically people see broken down cars on the highway all the time, and that this isn’t a big deal, but I still can’t make the thoughts go away. And because I can’t make it go away, I want to rip their fucking eyeballs out, one pair at a time.

  It could be worse, though. Somebody could pull over and try to help, and that would be so much more fucking worse, just the idea of it makes me want to hurl. If I was alone, I think I might laugh. If I’m this paranoid about producing and selling, can you imagine what a basket case I’d be if I actually used my own stuff?

  I have a macabre vision of trying to fit myself in a basket.

  I practicing the awkward explanation in my head so that it comes out the way I want it to. If I do end up having to have a conversation with a do-gooder, I figure its best to be prepared.

  Inside of the truck, Dog is dying to get my sandwich, or at least get out of the pickup and see what the hell I’m doing out here. Obviously, I can’t let him do that with all of the traffic, so I try to ignore his whining. I see his head darting back and forth from window to window. He’s trying to cram his entire massive body out of the passenger side just to get to me. He must think I’m in distress or something. I can practically read his teeny little mind.

  Hey, McKay? Are you in trouble? I love you! I smell cheese! Can I have this sandwich? I love you! Can I go play with the cars?

  Yet because I can’t take all the imaginary eyes off of me and it’s getting darker by the second, I feel drained by every little effort. All I want to do is get back to the house, my lab, and feed Dog. But my sandwich and fries are getting colder and I’m getting more and more self-conscious, which led to me getting pissed. I start thinking of cold meatballs and food poisoning and lettuce with brown edges and I hate it.

  I hate it. Hate this town. Hate this pickup. Hate this life. Hate. Hate. Hate.

  Its times like these that I wish I kept a regular phone so I could hold it up to my ear and pretend like I’m talking to someone or pretend to type and smile. That way people would think a friend sent me a funny message. They would think that help was already on the way.

  Chapter 3

  Hadley

  Mom drove us to school while Dad went to get our car serviced. It worked out well since Dad didn’t trust ol’ Bull with the additional two hundred and four miles on its speedometer. And since Mom had been so busy getting the new dealership together, she hadn’t had much time to research our new school. Dropping us off would give her a ‘lay of the land’ as well.

  “You have money for lunch, right?”

  Simon handed me some mints. I shook my head and offered him gum.

  “Simon? Hadley? Do you two have enough money for lunch?”

  “Brought our own.”

  Simon completed my sentence. “Precautionary measure.”

  Ravel Regional High School looked as standard as any other academic establishment I had ever seen: several brick buildings were loosely fitted together behind a baseball field and spruce parking lot. The entire structure was surrounded by sidewalks with broken pavement. I sighed and tightened the straps of my backpack.

  Simon pushed me
forward at the curb. “This won’t be so bad.”

  “Un-huh.”

  “Come on.” He pulled me along. “Let’s go.”

  I turned away and watched some crumbled leaves make their way into the foyer of the school. By now Jordan, Aimee, and Ian would be meeting in the weight room for a morning workout. I should be at home with them. If I tried picturing it hard enough, maybe I could make this place feel like home. Then again, I never had much of an imagination. I tried to stitch the images out as best I could, the greenhouse beside the school, the freshmen trying to sneak in cigarettes before homeroom, but the pattern wasn’t coming together the way I wanted and my daydream of remembered things quickly fell away.

  A large token security guard interrupted any chance I had at rescuing the images as we walked into the lobby.

  “Walk on straight through,” he said. “Office is the second door to your left.”