CHAPTER 31

HUMAN

Chloe:

I remember running so fast and sometimes down the middle of the road and sometimes faster than even the goddamned cars, and yeah I did wonder if those drivers in those cars were shocked or something, seeing me run like the fucking bionic woman, and yeah I knew I was running way too fast than normal, at like fifty miles an hour or something fucked up like that, and you would think it would make me feel all cool and all, but all it made me feel was scared, cuz like, where the fuck was this coming from, I’m not cool or special because of this, all I know is that there’s something fucking wrong with my body and that I can do this really weird thing running faster than cars, but at the same time my fear didn’t make me slow down, I just kept running as fast as I could, which was fast enough to pass cars, and I heard a few horns, but after a few minutes I turned onto a different street where there were no cars, just trees flying by very, very fast, and I kept running like nothing would ever stop me ever never, and there was all this wind. I was definitely being drawn someplace running faster than falling, but that’s what it felt like, though I also felt like nothing could hurt me, but that I had already been hurt, something
had fucked me up real bad to make me like I was, I didn’t feel right at all, and still in my brain was all that shit that went down at school in the quad with James and the whole school watching, but you know I wasn’t running out of some guilt, though that would make perfect sense. I mean, I may as well have been naked in front of the whole school cuz that’s how it felt, I mean, how much more exposed can you be when you have a fucking orgasm, you know, when you fucking come in public in front of everyone. So running made sense, but that wasn’t why I was running. I was falling toward something else which I didn’t know at first, I just knew it was going to be something, and when you are running as fast as I was it didn’t take long. I must have burned through a bunch of miles, but I never got tired, I never broke a sweat, and I never slowed down. It never even occurred to me, but I knew all this was happening, and it made me even more scared, and I think I even ran a little bit faster then. Like I said I began to notice less cars and more trees and less houses and the road went off into the woods and became a path, and I guess I had a vague memory of being there before. But I knew I wasn’t there yet. I mean I wasn’t to where my body wanted me to be. I felt like if I closed my eyes and kept running, I could, and I wouldn’t run into anything. It was like my body took over and knew everything, and had somewhere to be, and nothing would get in its way. So I tried it, I closed my eyes but I didn’t slow down, I still felt the rush of the wind in my ears and hair and on my skin, and suddenly I felt the fear go away if only just for a moment, I guess the trust in my body kept me calm for a second, but then I opened my eyes and my body had stopped running, and I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t even on a path anymore, I was in the middle of the woods, and it was quiet with trees and birds and I stood in a clearing staring up at what I guess you would call a cliff or a wall of rocks about fifty feet high running pretty far in both directions to my right and to my left, and for the briefest of moments I wondered if I had stopped running because I had reached this wall and it blocked my way, but then something else came flooding back to me, like something you can’t help thinking even if you really don’t want to. I stared up at that wall, and clear as day or the nose on my face, I saw Anna stuck up there on some tiny ledge, and me just below climbing up to save her. I was telling her where to put her feet and she was too scared to move, but I kept telling her because she couldn’t stay up there for the rest of her fucking life. As clear as this sight was to me, and it was really fucking clear like I was watching real people I could reach out and touch, for some reason then I closed my eyes to it, but in my brain I didn’t see a darkness, what I saw was like everything was normal and you could see like you could on the day, and I was seeing what I could see up on those rocks, I was seeing exactly what I could see, me, Chloe, trying to save Anna, my stupid bitch of a twin sister stuck up there like the pathetic weirdo that she was, and me trying to do the right thing and save her sorry ass, probably because she’s my fucking sister and that’s the sort of shit sisters do, so I did it, I climbed up there real high, and there’s my sister all frozen and shit, not moving an inch, so I yell at her, like maybe if I get her angry enough she’ll move and we can get down from there and get back to being normal again, and I know I’m getting close to her now, I’m close enough to touch her foot though I don’t think I do, I just tell her to lower her foot onto another ledge so that she can climb down, but she doesn’t, and I yell at her, I call her a stupid cunt or some shit because that’s what she is, and then like what the fuck, I feel the air all change like I can when she gets all mad and is about to go into one of her fucking spaz attacks, and what does that fucking bitch cunt do but kick me so fucking hard in the face that I fall right off that wall, I mean, she kicked me hard, my head went back and my whole body followed, and she did that on purpose because she was pissed off and she fucking lost it like she always does, even when we were little kids, except now this was fucking serious cuz I was falling and I was way up there, but I remember now she was watching me fall, and I saw into those fucking bitch cunt eyes of hers, those fucking evil motherfucking eyes, and I saw she knew what she was doing, and she was glad, she was glad to see me fall and she knew I was up too high and she knew once I hit the ground I would be fucking dead, and I could see plain as day that she fucking knew all this in her eyes, and she knew I could see her, and she wanted me to know, she wanted me to see that she wanted me fucking dead, she was sick of being the fucking loser twin and she wanted me fucking dead and so that’s what happened, I hit the ground and I was fucking dead, except back now in present time with me standing there, like I really was, in that clearing alone, I opened my eyes when the me in my imagination hit the ground, and then I kept standing because I wasn’t dead, in fact I was the fucking opposite of being dead, I was standing there in that clearing all by myself, and I was alive, and I was human.