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Teagan’s parents car rumbled down the highway, smooth enough as highways went, but to Teagan it was unbearable. The constant movement of the car made her feel sick, every slight bump threw the bile in her belly up her throat and she had to choke it back down. Her head ached; she thought she could ignore it to begin with, when they first started driving. Within the city limits of Liverpool the traffic was relatively slow, and the motion sickness wasn’t as bad. But out on the highway it was a nightmare. Sickness crawled up her body, clogged her brain, made her feel utterly miserable.
Being in her head without Kenzie was almost worse, though. As if every good aspect of Kenzie that Teagan shared had been torn out of her as well. All that power, that feeling she was something special, was gone, and had been replaced with grief, and hatred, and anger. She’d loved Kenzie, Kenzie was family, Kenzie was closer than her own sister, Kenzie was all the brightest bits of her, and Kenzie was gone. Not just dead, but gone.
Teagan had killed her.
She’d more than expected to die as well. When she remembered that night (which she did in broken painful chunks and whispy clingy nightmares) she remembered her strength giving out, she remembered believing that she was dying.
Then the next day she’d woken up in hospital and everything got worse from there.
When her parents finally arrived at the hospital she’d looked at them blankly. They’d hugged her and cried and told her they loved her and were angry at her but that love came out on top. The only thing Teagan felt was the urge to tell her father to shut up, and the urge to punch her mother in the mouth. She looked at her little sister Shiloh who was freaked out at the sight of her – Teagan was a battered, injured mess that Shiloh must have thought she could break – and she didn’t feel a thing for the kid.
Like she’d loved Kenzie and Kenzie had been torn from her and taken Teagan’s ability to love with her.
Of course the doctors saw it differently. Now that Teagan’s body was reacting as it was medically supposed to, every doctor that talked to her was a lot more confident. Her escape from the hospital, her freak strength, all that could be put down to adrenaline and chances are one or more of them would be writing her case up as part of a study. Brain damaged teen ignores pain, escapes hospital, returns to hospital emotionless husk.
She did have brain damage. There were scans that proved it. That and her reactions to things.
She couldn’t smell any more. They told her that wasn’t unusual and it might come back but it might take a long time. But she didn’t tell them that sometimes she did smell – huge wafts of scent would come down on her at weird times, in weird places. The scent of her old high school hallways while she was in the hospital garden, the scent of rotting meat while she was taking a shower. Out of place, freak smells that were so strong they made her dizzy, sometimes they made her vomit.
Sometimes the smell clouds would coincide with the light turning to knives in her eyes. The sharp, sudden pain as something clicked in her brain and her sensitivity to light just exploded, so intense she couldn’t see. Sometimes so intense it made her vomit, too.
The motion sickness was all part of the fun new reality that was her brain. But she had to get home to London somehow. Teagan didn’t care if she ever went back to London or not, but her parents were making her decisions now.
Their first attempt to get out of Liverpool was two weeks after what everyone was calling ‘the accident’ instead of ‘the night Teagan murdered two people.’
They couldn’t put the security guard on her, even though he’d died around the same time she escaped. The coroner was baffled as to how he died, bruised intensely all the way through his chest, burst blood vessels everywhere, but so very localised. She’d never seen anything like it before, but it certainly wasn’t consistent with blunt force trauma. They’d asked Teagan if she’d seen anything unusual, but no one seriously suspected that a ghost had put her hands inside his chest and fucked him up.
Teagan knew, though.
Teagan remembered.
In the back of her parents car her throat contracted and her body heaved but instead of throwing up, as she was sure she’d been about to- she wanted to throw up, she wanted to get the sickness out of her – she sobbed instead, her body leading the way and her mind catching up a moment later. The grief was almost as bad at the sickness – she desperately needed to cry it all out of her too.
“Teagan,” her mother said gently, and her father looked at her in the rear view mirror. She knew she sounded like an animal, the sobs and the screams coming out of her body were more like an urban fox than a human, and her sister was freaking out again. “Pull over, Aaron,” her mother insisted.
“I can’t just pull over, we’re on a highway,” Aaron said tersely, and for the next few dozen kilometres they snapped at each other while trying to get Teagan and Shiloh to both calm down.
Eventually they pulled over at a rest stop crowded with other cars doing the same thing and Teagan piled out of the car and stumbled to the treeline where she fell to her knees, and threw up.
Not a single day had passed since Kenzie left that Teagan hadn’t thrown up.
Aaron bought her a drink of soda water and sat with her as she sipped it. She didn’t talk to him and for a while he let her have her silence. For a while, but not a long while. “Jeez I’m worried about you, sausage,” he said, using the pet name he’d given her when she was smaller than Shiloh, that he hadn’t used in years.
Teagan shrugged; worrying wouldn’t help anyone and certainly wouldn’t change anything.
He said a few more things but Teagan didn’t take any of them in. They were all along the same lines anyway. Instead she concentrated on standing up, refusing his help and using the tree instead. Across the carpark her mother was talking to Shiloh, sitting in the open boot of the car, her face wet with tears. As Teagan came closer Shiloh climbed out of the boot and held out her arms to hug Teagan, apologising for crying and telling her she loved her.
Teagan looked down at her little sister and thought it was freaky to hear her mothers words coming out of her tiny five year old mouth. She reached around her sister and pulled out her bag. “What are you doing?” her mother asked, sharply.
“I need to go for a walk,” Teagan said. “Alone. To clear my head.”
There was a ten minute round track starting at one end of the rest stop, looping down to a river and back up again.
“That’s a bad idea,” her mother said.
“Vicki, let her,” said her father. “Here’s an idea, why don’t you walk one way and we’ll walk the other, and we’ll meet you by the river in five minutes? Shi, want to throw some sticks into the river?”
Shiloh nodded enthusiastically, Teagan said “Sure,” and that settled the plan. She aimed for the cinder block of public toilets first, though, to clean herself up. The mirror was black speckled and a little warped around the edges but even through that her reflection shone back, red eyes, red face, her skin looked ill even after all her bruises from the accident had faded. All the cold water in the world couldn’t make her look any better.
“Killer,” she hissed at her reflection.
When she emerged from the toilets, her family had already left. The car was locked up and the picnic basket was gone from the boot. She shouldered her bag and looked around the carpark, weighing her options.
She could lie to the kind looking older couple and say she needed help and could get a ride out of here with them.
Or there was a family who looked to be moving their university student from one city to another.
Or she could walk out onto the highway and see what happened.
If there was a way to just lie down and decide to die she would have done that. It was preferable to getting in another car.
The threat of the sick sick sick sick pounded in her head and she knew she’d rather die than get back in her family’s car.
In the end she did not get the chance to make a decision as her father was closing the distance between them. She didn’t know how much time had passed. “Don’t,” she said, backing away from him. “Don’t make me get back in there, don’t,” she was close enough to the family with the university student that they were watching as she backed away from her father whimpering don’t.
He was saying something comforting but every one of his words fell on deaf ears. Teagan had fixated on the knowledge that getting back into the car would make her sick and she didn’t want to be sick, she wanted to be dead. When he reached out for her hand she screamed and bolted and locked herself in the toilets, screaming and fighting against anyone who came close.
The police were called (by at least two different onlookers) and, a couple of minutes later, Aaron called 999 as well, explained the situation to coms and asked for an ambulance, too.
They took her back to Liverpool hospital, heavily sedated which was as close as she could get to being dead.
~
Aaron thought; she was okay. She was okay after that so long as no one tried to make her get into a car. She was his little girl and she had to be okay. (Aaron had never thought of either of his daughters as ‘little girls’ before, but the words slipped into his mind now. When Teagan withdrew inside herself and pulled her sleeves down over her hands she looked more nine than nineteen.)
The rest of her family drove up to see her, Grandmother Grace talked with her for a long time about ghosts, May looked freaked out and barely said a word, April looked grim and scared of her. Micah looked solemn and wry and was the only one who Teagan didn’t want to punch in the face. But she still didn’t smile at any of them. Then two days later Teagan did punch her little sister in the face and knocked out two of her teeth.
She’d been sitting in the dark of the hotel near the hospital (not the motel where she’d murdered Kenzie). Just sitting in the dark because the light hurt and the world hurt. It was early evening and all the curtains were drawn and her parents were making dinner and talking in hushed voices in the kitchen. They had a lot of conversations like that.
Shiloh came in with a packet of chocolate biscuits, and pulled the curtain near Teagan to let the evening sun in. Teagan shrieked and lashed out, catching Shiloh in the mouth and sending her sprawling. She screamed as she hit the ground and continued wailing as Victoria bundled her into her arms and left Aaron to deal with their eldest. Teagan had picked up a lamp and was brandishing it like a weapon, and looked at him like she wanted to kill him.
He called an ambulance again. He didn’t know what else to do. There was no talking her down.
Maybe she wasn’t okay after all.
~
Victoria took Shiloh back to London the day after Teagan attacked her, and left Aaron and Teagan to talk with a specialist about how they were going to deal with this. Teagan said nothing, just slumped in the armchair in the office, and nodded at whatever they suggested. The only suggestion she made, because both doctor and father insisted on Teagan having some input, was “how about euthanasia?”
~
Aaron had a long, serious conversation with the doctor and in the end she was prescribed some heavy sedatives and traveled back to London in the front seat of the car, head so cloudy and heavy that she didn’t remember a thing. She woke up in a room in her grandparents house, in London, May’s bed empty on the other side of the room.
She was in April’s bed, which made sense. April had moved into the university halls and it wasn’t like they were going to force Shiloh to share a room with her monstrous older sister now. If she tried to punch May in the mouth, May would swing her solid arm right back at her.
Teagan stared at the ceiling for a very long time before Grandfather Bill knocked gently and bought in tea she didn’t drink and food she didn’t eat.
Her sense of taste was confused, too. Lost in the rest of the cacophony that was her head.
Surely somewhere in all her confusion, in her thousand screaming senses, surely some part of Kenzie remained.
Surely Kenzie would be back for her, to save her, to lead her away from this mess.
Well maybe she would have been.
If Teagan hadn’t murdered her.
Being in her head without Kenzie was almost worse, though. As if every good aspect of Kenzie that Teagan shared had been torn out of her as well. All that power, that feeling she was something special, was gone, and had been replaced with grief, and hatred, and anger. She’d loved Kenzie, Kenzie was family, Kenzie was closer than her own sister, Kenzie was all the brightest bits of her, and Kenzie was gone. Not just dead, but gone.
Teagan had killed her.
She’d more than expected to die as well. When she remembered that night (which she did in broken painful chunks and whispy clingy nightmares) she remembered her strength giving out, she remembered believing that she was dying.
Then the next day she’d woken up in hospital and everything got worse from there.
When her parents finally arrived at the hospital she’d looked at them blankly. They’d hugged her and cried and told her they loved her and were angry at her but that love came out on top. The only thing Teagan felt was the urge to tell her father to shut up, and the urge to punch her mother in the mouth. She looked at her little sister Shiloh who was freaked out at the sight of her – Teagan was a battered, injured mess that Shiloh must have thought she could break – and she didn’t feel a thing for the kid.
Like she’d loved Kenzie and Kenzie had been torn from her and taken Teagan’s ability to love with her.
Of course the doctors saw it differently. Now that Teagan’s body was reacting as it was medically supposed to, every doctor that talked to her was a lot more confident. Her escape from the hospital, her freak strength, all that could be put down to adrenaline and chances are one or more of them would be writing her case up as part of a study. Brain damaged teen ignores pain, escapes hospital, returns to hospital emotionless husk.
She did have brain damage. There were scans that proved it. That and her reactions to things.
She couldn’t smell any more. They told her that wasn’t unusual and it might come back but it might take a long time. But she didn’t tell them that sometimes she did smell – huge wafts of scent would come down on her at weird times, in weird places. The scent of her old high school hallways while she was in the hospital garden, the scent of rotting meat while she was taking a shower. Out of place, freak smells that were so strong they made her dizzy, sometimes they made her vomit.
Sometimes the smell clouds would coincide with the light turning to knives in her eyes. The sharp, sudden pain as something clicked in her brain and her sensitivity to light just exploded, so intense she couldn’t see. Sometimes so intense it made her vomit, too.
The motion sickness was all part of the fun new reality that was her brain. But she had to get home to London somehow. Teagan didn’t care if she ever went back to London or not, but her parents were making her decisions now.
Their first attempt to get out of Liverpool was two weeks after what everyone was calling ‘the accident’ instead of ‘the night Teagan murdered two people.’
They couldn’t put the security guard on her, even though he’d died around the same time she escaped. The coroner was baffled as to how he died, bruised intensely all the way through his chest, burst blood vessels everywhere, but so very localised. She’d never seen anything like it before, but it certainly wasn’t consistent with blunt force trauma. They’d asked Teagan if she’d seen anything unusual, but no one seriously suspected that a ghost had put her hands inside his chest and fucked him up.
Teagan knew, though.
Teagan remembered.
In the back of her parents car her throat contracted and her body heaved but instead of throwing up, as she was sure she’d been about to- she wanted to throw up, she wanted to get the sickness out of her – she sobbed instead, her body leading the way and her mind catching up a moment later. The grief was almost as bad at the sickness – she desperately needed to cry it all out of her too.
“Teagan,” her mother said gently, and her father looked at her in the rear view mirror. She knew she sounded like an animal, the sobs and the screams coming out of her body were more like an urban fox than a human, and her sister was freaking out again. “Pull over, Aaron,” her mother insisted.
“I can’t just pull over, we’re on a highway,” Aaron said tersely, and for the next few dozen kilometres they snapped at each other while trying to get Teagan and Shiloh to both calm down.
Eventually they pulled over at a rest stop crowded with other cars doing the same thing and Teagan piled out of the car and stumbled to the treeline where she fell to her knees, and threw up.
Not a single day had passed since Kenzie left that Teagan hadn’t thrown up.
Aaron bought her a drink of soda water and sat with her as she sipped it. She didn’t talk to him and for a while he let her have her silence. For a while, but not a long while. “Jeez I’m worried about you, sausage,” he said, using the pet name he’d given her when she was smaller than Shiloh, that he hadn’t used in years.
Teagan shrugged; worrying wouldn’t help anyone and certainly wouldn’t change anything.
He said a few more things but Teagan didn’t take any of them in. They were all along the same lines anyway. Instead she concentrated on standing up, refusing his help and using the tree instead. Across the carpark her mother was talking to Shiloh, sitting in the open boot of the car, her face wet with tears. As Teagan came closer Shiloh climbed out of the boot and held out her arms to hug Teagan, apologising for crying and telling her she loved her.
Teagan looked down at her little sister and thought it was freaky to hear her mothers words coming out of her tiny five year old mouth. She reached around her sister and pulled out her bag. “What are you doing?” her mother asked, sharply.
“I need to go for a walk,” Teagan said. “Alone. To clear my head.”
There was a ten minute round track starting at one end of the rest stop, looping down to a river and back up again.
“That’s a bad idea,” her mother said.
“Vicki, let her,” said her father. “Here’s an idea, why don’t you walk one way and we’ll walk the other, and we’ll meet you by the river in five minutes? Shi, want to throw some sticks into the river?”
Shiloh nodded enthusiastically, Teagan said “Sure,” and that settled the plan. She aimed for the cinder block of public toilets first, though, to clean herself up. The mirror was black speckled and a little warped around the edges but even through that her reflection shone back, red eyes, red face, her skin looked ill even after all her bruises from the accident had faded. All the cold water in the world couldn’t make her look any better.
“Killer,” she hissed at her reflection.
When she emerged from the toilets, her family had already left. The car was locked up and the picnic basket was gone from the boot. She shouldered her bag and looked around the carpark, weighing her options.
She could lie to the kind looking older couple and say she needed help and could get a ride out of here with them.
Or there was a family who looked to be moving their university student from one city to another.
Or she could walk out onto the highway and see what happened.
If there was a way to just lie down and decide to die she would have done that. It was preferable to getting in another car.
The threat of the sick sick sick sick pounded in her head and she knew she’d rather die than get back in her family’s car.
In the end she did not get the chance to make a decision as her father was closing the distance between them. She didn’t know how much time had passed. “Don’t,” she said, backing away from him. “Don’t make me get back in there, don’t,” she was close enough to the family with the university student that they were watching as she backed away from her father whimpering don’t.
He was saying something comforting but every one of his words fell on deaf ears. Teagan had fixated on the knowledge that getting back into the car would make her sick and she didn’t want to be sick, she wanted to be dead. When he reached out for her hand she screamed and bolted and locked herself in the toilets, screaming and fighting against anyone who came close.
The police were called (by at least two different onlookers) and, a couple of minutes later, Aaron called 999 as well, explained the situation to coms and asked for an ambulance, too.
They took her back to Liverpool hospital, heavily sedated which was as close as she could get to being dead.
~
Aaron thought; she was okay. She was okay after that so long as no one tried to make her get into a car. She was his little girl and she had to be okay. (Aaron had never thought of either of his daughters as ‘little girls’ before, but the words slipped into his mind now. When Teagan withdrew inside herself and pulled her sleeves down over her hands she looked more nine than nineteen.)
The rest of her family drove up to see her, Grandmother Grace talked with her for a long time about ghosts, May looked freaked out and barely said a word, April looked grim and scared of her. Micah looked solemn and wry and was the only one who Teagan didn’t want to punch in the face. But she still didn’t smile at any of them. Then two days later Teagan did punch her little sister in the face and knocked out two of her teeth.
She’d been sitting in the dark of the hotel near the hospital (not the motel where she’d murdered Kenzie). Just sitting in the dark because the light hurt and the world hurt. It was early evening and all the curtains were drawn and her parents were making dinner and talking in hushed voices in the kitchen. They had a lot of conversations like that.
Shiloh came in with a packet of chocolate biscuits, and pulled the curtain near Teagan to let the evening sun in. Teagan shrieked and lashed out, catching Shiloh in the mouth and sending her sprawling. She screamed as she hit the ground and continued wailing as Victoria bundled her into her arms and left Aaron to deal with their eldest. Teagan had picked up a lamp and was brandishing it like a weapon, and looked at him like she wanted to kill him.
He called an ambulance again. He didn’t know what else to do. There was no talking her down.
Maybe she wasn’t okay after all.
~
Victoria took Shiloh back to London the day after Teagan attacked her, and left Aaron and Teagan to talk with a specialist about how they were going to deal with this. Teagan said nothing, just slumped in the armchair in the office, and nodded at whatever they suggested. The only suggestion she made, because both doctor and father insisted on Teagan having some input, was “how about euthanasia?”
~
Aaron had a long, serious conversation with the doctor and in the end she was prescribed some heavy sedatives and traveled back to London in the front seat of the car, head so cloudy and heavy that she didn’t remember a thing. She woke up in a room in her grandparents house, in London, May’s bed empty on the other side of the room.
She was in April’s bed, which made sense. April had moved into the university halls and it wasn’t like they were going to force Shiloh to share a room with her monstrous older sister now. If she tried to punch May in the mouth, May would swing her solid arm right back at her.
Teagan stared at the ceiling for a very long time before Grandfather Bill knocked gently and bought in tea she didn’t drink and food she didn’t eat.
Her sense of taste was confused, too. Lost in the rest of the cacophony that was her head.
Surely somewhere in all her confusion, in her thousand screaming senses, surely some part of Kenzie remained.
Surely Kenzie would be back for her, to save her, to lead her away from this mess.
Well maybe she would have been.
If Teagan hadn’t murdered her.
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