List’ning to sad songs from Edge and Bono

Wynonna cried

Sang along, who’d blame her

You’re grown

So grown

Now I must say more than ever

Too ra loo ra too ra loo rye aye

We can sing this tune forever

Come on, Holden, oh I swear, gentleman

At this moment, you mean everythin’

You in that shirt

My thoughts are pure dirt

Oh, so dirty

Ah, come on, Holden

I liked to think of myself as a genuinely sympathetic human being. However, evil may have prevailed for a moment as a sinister smile crept across my face and I thought to myself:

I have the ultimate blackmail on Wynonna.

Then it happened—a flash.

Suddenly, hot water was pouring down on me, and my surroundings had altered entirely and so had the position of my body. I was standing, hands against the wall, head hanging down, letting the water hit the back of my neck and run down the planes of my body.

I was in the shower.

I was naked.

I was me.

That’s when I heard the scream—Wynonna’s scream—from the floor of her bedroom where I left her.

All of her secrets laid out in the open. Her own vulnerable words wailing in her ears.

I had expected a reenactment of the scene from Psycho. Silhouette appears outside the shower curtain, knife is raised overhead, slash, slash, slash. Ezra Slevin topples over the edge of the bathtub, ripping the shower curtain down with him. Camera fixes on his open, lifeless eye, slowly panning out to reveal his terrified face pressed against the tile of the bathroom floor.

Okay, so maybe my paranoia was a tad dramatic. Still, I expected something. I waited in the shower a long moment for that something, but it never came. I held my breath when I finally heard footsteps in the hall. They grew louder.

And then they grew quieter.

Then I heard the front door open and close.

“Wynonna?” I said.

I turned the shower off. Listened breathlessly for a sound. Wynonna was just faking me out, right? I would walk out of the shower with a towel around my waist, and then she would jump out of nowhere, cosplaying as her quite-possibly-dead mother, and stab me to death.

I dried myself with a towel, wrapped it around my waist, and stepped out of the bathroom.

“Wynonna?” I said again.

I peeked inside her bedroom. No Wynonna.

I did, however, notice that the baby-blue puffer coat—and the rest of the clothes Wynonna had been wearing—were unceremoniously shed into a pile on the floor.

Maybe she was hiding?

I wandered into the kitchen. Into the living area. I even dared to look inside Carol’s bedroom—a dim, foreboding, sophisticated-looking chamber with a massive, wooden, antique canopy bed carved and polished like a throne, some sort of Persian-ass rug, and a hefty copy of Anna Karenina on the nightstand.

No Wynonna.