Synesthesia: Chapter Thirty-Two

serial fiction

Image: Mikey Frost, Unsplash

After freeing myself from the scratchy pink bedspread, I stood up and stretched. I rubbed my eyes and tried to push the echoing visions of being buried alive out of my head, replacing them with thoughts of how I could get out of Hoka guy’s house and back onto the road where I belonged.

I opened the bedroom door and stepped into the hallway to look for a bathroom, and the smell of frying bacon hit me square in the face. My empty stomach gurgled in response. How long had it been since I’d had good, crispy bacon?

I located the bathroom, relieved my bladder, and found my way to the kitchen. Escape could wait until after breakfast.

But what I saw when I walked into the room made my appetite dry up like a puddle under a desert sun.

Hokas was sitting on a bar stool, a plate piled high with bacon on the countertop beside him. And in his lap, giggling like an idiot, was Amber.

I stood there watching them, unwilling to believe what I was seeing, until Hokas finally noticed me lurking in the doorway.

“Well, good morning, sleepyhead!” he grinned, and Amber turned and faced me too, still giggling and—was she blushing?

My mouth opened mechanically, but no words came out.

“Want some bacon?” Hokas offered, reaching for the plate and moving as if to stand up. Amber dropped out of his lap and leaned against the granite countertop behind her. She was definitely blushing.

I looked at Hokas’s smiling, birdlike face, then at the plate of bacon in his hand, the pools of grease around the meat slowly congealing in the air conditioning.

“No,” I said, and my stomach rolled out a noise of protest.

His sparse eyebrows pushed together in confusion.

“I’m leaving,” I announced.

Hokas said nothing. Amber just stared at me. I couldn’t read her expression, but I thought I smelled fresh-cut grass over the lingering aroma of frying bacon.

“You can stay, you know,” she said. “Can’t he?” She turned to Hokas and batted her eyelashes like a cartoon character.

I felt like I was going to be sick.

“No,” I said simply. I felt ready to walk out the door, but then I remembered the logistical difficulties I still needed to sort out. “Amber, can I talk to you?” I asked.

She unpeeled herself from the countertop and followed me into the living room. I sat down in a leather armchair and immediately regretted it as my body sunk further and further into the chair. My hips finally stopped their descent somewhere below my knees.

“Why don’t you wanna stay, Zodiac?” she asked. She raised one thin eyebrow. “You jealous about me and Daniel?”

I suppressed an urge to vomit.

“This just isn’t what I came to Arizona for,” I said finally.

A whiff of gasoline curled past my nose.

“You came here to kidnap hookers, is that it?” Amber broke into a dry, cackling laugh, and the gasoline smell intensified.

I didn’t know what to say. She’d gotten it right on the nose.

Well, what was wrong with pursuing my dreams?

I started to say something in my defense, but I was stopped by a nagging feeling that something in the house felt off.

I looked around.

Someone was missing.

“Hey, where’s Jacob?” I asked, sensing that something was wrong.

Before Amber could respond, there was a loud knock at the door. No, not a knock; it sounded more like someone was punching the door.

“I’ll get it!” called Hokas, dancing into the room wearing a neon orange and turquoise pair of his favorite chunky, foam-soled shoes.

He stank of shit.

But over the shit-stink of his happiness, I smelled an intense anger, a soap smell stronger than any I’d ever experienced.

Everything that happened next felt like it happened in slow motion.

Hoka guy’s hand making contact with the polished brass doorknob. The hand and the knob turning. The door opening too fast, too hard, with a fury Hokas clearly hadn’t anticipated.

And filling the entire oversized door frame, chest heaving and belly shaking with rage: Gas Stove.

I was up and out of the leather armchair on the second try, grabbing Amber’s hand and pulling her out of the room.

“Where’s Jacob?” I repeated, this time in absolute terror.

“He’s in the bedroom!” Amber cried, mildewed orange blossoms filling the air around her.

I let her lead the way, our hands still clasped together. I had no idea what was going on between Hoka guy and Gas Stove in the living room, and I didn’t want to know.

In the dim, curtained light of the bedroom where Amber and Jacob had presumably spent the night, I could make out a small lump under a turquoise bedspread, dark curls spilling onto the pillow.

Amber threw back the bedspread, grabbed the lump, and pulled me through a back door out into the blinding sunlight.

From somewhere inside the house, I could hear what sounded like loud crashes, things splintering and shattering. I pictured the glass curio cases lying destroyed on the artisan tile floors, the He-Man and Spiderman figurines strewn helplessly across the house.

“Into the car!” Amber hissed, and I was suddenly aware of being in the front yard, then the driveway. I watched Amber toss Jacob into the back, then felt myself being pushed down into the front seat.

In another moment, the red Mustang was reversing out of the long, curved driveway. When the car met the road, Amber shoved the car into gear and drove away, tires squealing.

I stared at her, then turned and looked back at the reddish-orange mansion receding into the distance.

“What the hell was that?” I asked, dumbfounded. “What about Hokas?”

“What?” Amber spat like a curse, shifting into fourth gear.

“Daniel,” I corrected myself. “Weren’t you two gonna get married or something?”

A moment of wet-dog confusion, then Amber’s laugh broke out with a punch of gasoline.

“Married? You’re hilarious, Zodiac,” she said between cackles.

I blinked at her. We were merging onto the highway now, heading north.

“Then—but you—why were you—?” I couldn’t articulate what I wanted to know.

Amber moved into the left lane without signaling, then buckled her seat belt across her lap. “Jacob, put your seat belt on,” she barked at the boy in the back seat.

My hand moved obediently toward my own seat belt. I was still struggling to understand what had just transpired over the past five minutes.

“But you and—”

More gasoline. “Come on, Zodiac,” Amber said, rolling her eyes. “I wanted a safe place for me and Jacob. Daniel had that. That’s all.”

I stared at her, saying nothing.

Another question formed itself in my mind. “But how did Gas—”

Amber shushed me harshly, indicating with her eyes toward Jacob in the back seat.

“Turns out Daniel didn’t have a safe place for us after all,” she said matter-of-factly, her tone indicating that the conversation was now over.

We drove in silence for a few minutes.

“Is… is Daniel gonna be okay?” I asked.

Amber shrugged. “Dunno. Shoulda thought of that before he did those things to Yaraceli.”

The engine hummed down a few more miles of highway.

From the back seat came the scent of yeasty dough rising.

“Does this mean I don’t get my Spiderman room?”