You have the hole. You can bring her down here anytime. If it’ll make her stop talking to you, then take her upstairs. When she quiets down, you can bring her back down. You can bury her then.

“But what if someone finds her upstairs? What if someone comes looking?”

Just take this one step at a time. Make sure nothing else points to you. Be careful. Just like Lonnie would be.

It was getting harder and harder to sift through the real from the imaginary.

At last, Timothy eased the sheet off her, tipping the dirt that was on top of it aside.

Even though he was careful, some of the soil spilled onto Julianne’s face. He brushed it away, then gently blew the remaining granules of dirt off her cheeks and her eyelashes and her lips.

Finally, he lifted her, and she thanked him thanked him thanked him as he carried her up the stairs to his bedroom.

43

During her classes, Tessa kept the Timothy Sabian novel that Patrick had bought for her open on her desk but hidden under other papers or inside the textbook she was supposed to be reading. She wanted to get through as much of it as she could before tonight, so she spent each class venturing further and further into Timothy Sabian’s imagination.

At times it was illuminating.

At times devastating.

The lyrical call of darkness was his friend, the shackled dreams of the world his canvas.

There are so many ways to feel pain as a teenager, so many ways to be lured into loneliness, so many places to look and find only darkness. She was lonely for her foster sister, missing her mom, and wondering what to make of Patrick, and so she read. Some people sneer and call reading an “escape”—as if that’s a bad thing. But since when is it a bad thing to try to escape pain?

She didn’t delve much into fantasy, but she’d looked over some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s essays. In “On Fairy Stories,” he explained why he wrote what he did. Whatever else might have been true about him, the man had no patience with people who derisively labeled some genres of literature “escapist.” As he wrote, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?”

Yeah.

That was a good question.

This world is full of prisons that bear all sorts of names, and the most sensible response is to try to escape them—why should that be mocked, ridiculed, or looked down on?

Seeking escape is the most rational pursuit of all.

Like that guy last week. The senator’s son. The final escape, the final choice. And he filmed it for all the world to see.

Sabian seemed to understand that. The necessity of escape, the stifling nature of life’s many prisons.