ᯓ★ Read Chapter 3 Here
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Finney’s first night home after breaking out of the basement and spending half the following day in the hospital wasn’t great as he thought it’d be.
Part of him expected to go back to complete normalcy. He’d be home and safe; everything would be better. He’d feel better. But the sinking feeling in his stomach never went away.
That night, when he got into bed for the first time after sleeping on that dirty mattress, he felt unnerved. Even though he was safe in his house, he was afraid. And these feelings led him to dream about the Grabber, have a nightmare about the Grabber.
And when Finney awoke, he’d peed the bed.
Shamefully, Finney crawled out of bed and threw his soiled pajama pants and underwear in the hamper, exchanging them for clean ones. He bundled up his sheets and comforter into a giant ball and carried them to the laundry room. He’d just stuffed the ball of fabric into the washer when Gwen appeared in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” Gwen asked, rubbing at her eyes. Then her hair was still long, and she had French braids for bed.
Finney’s face went red; he felt like he’d been caught in the act. He shut the washer door and began to fiddle with the settings so he wouldn’t have to look at her.
“I peed the bed…” he confessed quietly.
Gwen stood silent for a moment and then asked, “Want me to help you put on new sheets?”
Finney nodded slowly, and the siblings went to his room to redress his bed. That was that.
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Finney Blake was in what his school counselor would call a “destructive cycle”.
Of course, when she’d first used the term, she was referencing the many fights Finney got involved in. She suggested taking deep breaths, avoiding conflict, and notifying a teacher before things got out of control.
Finney told her to go fuck herself and stormed out the room.
He knew that the staff at Galesburg High School’s patience was wearing thin with him. They’d been plenty lenient with his behavior. Nobody wanted to punish the kid who had suffered a traumatic kidnapping— So rather than suspend him, they simply ushered him into short bouts of counseling. They wanted to “help him heal” as they put it, they felt it would “improve his learning experience”. In reality, nobody at Galesburg High knew the half of it.
Finney lived his life going through lows and then seeking highs that only made his lows lower.
ᯓ★ Read Chapter 13 Here
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Robin had never felt so weak in his entire life.
He’d had his fair share of ailments like any other kid. He’d sprained his wrist falling out of a tree and had a bad case of the flu a few years back. But this—whatever this was— was worse. He lay on his side on that old mattress, shivering, his body sore with bruises. The inside of his mouth felt like cotton, and every so often, he was hit with a bout of hunger pangs that felt like someone was repeatedly stabbing the inside of his stomach.
Robin had long since given up trying to plan an escape; he’d exhausted all his best ideas on his first day there. He checked for any weak spots on the wall and found none. He’d tried to jump up to the window and call for help and only managed to get hold of the ledge a few times, slipping off shortly after. Robin had worked on trying to pull the phone out of the wall. He discovered quickly that the body of the phone wasn’t budging and shifted his attention to pulling the receiver out alongside the cord. He thought maybe it could serve him as some kind of numbchuck. He worked in intervals— as to not get caught by The Grabber— pulling the cord taut and planting his feet on the dirty tile like he was in the middle of a tug of war match. For a while, he was hopeful that little by little he was wearing on the wire, and that soon it would snap. Maybe it would've, maybe it wouldn’t have, he didn’t get to find out. The longer he stayed in the basement, the harder it became to utilize his full strength. Eventually, the act became too dizzying, and Robin had to surrender to the mattress.
It wouldn’t have worked anyway, he told himself. The phone wasn’t heavy enough to do what Robin wanted it to do. Maybe, if he’d had something like sand to pack it with, then he could’ve used it to do some real damage. But as it stood, even if he’d been able to tear the phone from the wall, the best it could do was bruise his abductor. A bruise wouldn’t be enough to let Robin escape.
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“Okay… See you soon, Dad. Love you, bye.”
Gwen hung up the phone in the ER waiting room and walked over to sit back down next to Ernesto. Once Finney had dropped to the floor, everything happened so fast. She and Ernesto had carried him into the car. Ernie drove fast enough to get a hefty speeding ticket while Gwen sat with Finney’s unconscious body in the back, pressing a washcloth to his forehead and praying he didn’t lose too much blood.
All of that for the doctor to determine that the wound wasn’t that serious and could be closed with a couple of stitches. Finney had simply lost too much blood and passed out. Gwen didn’t even tell the nurse about everything that had occurred before.
Gwen sighed and buried her head in her hands. She and Ernesto were the only two people in the waiting room, which smelled like hand sanitizer and rubber.
“Are you okay?” Ernesto whispered.
Gwen rubbed her face before turning to face him, “My dad is coming to pick Finney up. We can leave now.”
“Do you wanna leave?” Ernesto asked.
“Not really…” Finney hadn’t woken yet; she couldn’t leave him here alone before he did.
“Then we don’t have to.” Ernesto shrugged like it was no big deal to be waiting around in an emergency room lobby at one in the morning, and Gwen felt a pang of guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she groaned.
“For what?” Ernesto asked, and that only made her feel worse because he was being too polite to even acknowledge the night's events.
Gwen rubbed quick circles in her eyes, “For everything. I’m so embarrassed. I can’t believe Finney— I’m sorry about—” She was at a near loss for words.
“It’s okay,” Ernesto insisted, and when he saw the doubt in Gwen’s face, he added, “really.”
“No, it’s not!” Gwen hopped up from her seat. She needed to move; she needed to pace. “My brother threatened to kill you and bled all over your backseat, and I want you to know it’s okay to be totally mad right now because I am too—”
“Gwen, stop seriously.” Ernesto got up off the cushy waiting room chair and joined her in the middle of the room, taking her hand into his. “I’m not mad at you or Finn. I understand, really I do…” he paused and bit his lip like he’d just caught himself saying the wrong thing, “Well actually, no. I don’t really understand… But I can empathize.”
He stared down at the floor for a moment, seemingly deep in thought as he debated something. He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked back up at Gwen with a kind of determination, his hand still around hers.
“You forget I know what Finn was like before… before all of that.”
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Gwen was surprised that Finney agreed to go to the mall with her and Ernesto after school. Not completely surprised, she knew Finney wouldn’t pass up on a ride to the record store. Neither of the Blake siblings could drive, so accessible transportation was scarce for Finney. Gwen wanted to learn to drive more than anything. She was just waiting around for Terrence to teach her, but he was always so busy with work, and his hours were strange. It was hard to find a weekend when he was free and awake.
Finney was simply uninterested— as he was with most things. Initially, Terence had been excited to teach his boy to drive. He even tried taking Finney out on his sixteenth birthday, only to realize Finney was terribly unreceptive and quite possibly not stable enough to be behind the wheel. Eventually, Terence decided Finney was a lost cause when it came to driving and gave up on trying. So until Gwen could manage to get her license and a car. The Blake siblings either had to walk where they wanted to go or wait for their father to be off from work so he could drive them.
Things changed when Gwen began to date Ernesto; he became her main mode of transportation. She stopped taking the school bus every morning and evening, opting to hop into his blue 1964 Chevrolet Impala. Ernesto had no problem driving Gwen around either; they were nearly inseparable anyway. And the Blakes lived closer to the school than the Arellanos. So it all worked out.
The car had been Ernesto’s father’s. He had taken good care of it up until he enlisted, and then it sat untouched in the Arellano garage for years. Ernesto claimed that sometimes he and Robin would climb inside and pretend to drive it, but their mom would always shoo them away. It wasn’t until Ernesto’s 16th birthday that he stepped out of the DMV with his brand new license to see his uncle had pulled up in the Impala, squeaky clean from a car wash. Ernesto drove it home with glee, and it was his ever since.
ᯓ★ Read Chapter 5 Here
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Ernesto was finding it hard to concentrate in class. Normally, he was a star student, perfectly attentive. But today, his mind just kept drifting off— He was thinking about Robin.
He thought about Robin often. It was hard not to. Robin had been a permanent staple in his life since he was born. They shared a room, they played, they fought. Then one day that all just ceased. Robin was no longer there, he’d quite literally vanished. Ernesto used to hate having to share a room. Yet when he went to bed that night, he was overcome with an intense feeling of loneliness. The worst was hearing his mother’s muffled cries as she tearfully spread the news to their relatives in Mexico through the phone.
He remembered going to bed that night with tears in his eyes; praying that when he woke up it would’ve all just been a nightmare. Robin would be sleeping in the twin bed on the other side of the room. When Ernesto would tell him about the dream Robin would say something about being able to take any kidnapper in a fight and call Ernesto an idiot for even thinking otherwise. In a strange way, it would make Ernesto feel better.
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Finney was off when they went back home after the mall. Gwen supposed he was mad at her for critiquing his interaction with the cashier at Sam Goody. She expected Finney to hide out in his room for the rest of the night, but to her surprise, Finney hung around with her and Ernesto. He wasn’t socializing exactly, but he stayed in their company. He rewatched the moon landing on TV while Gwen and Ernesto made blueberry pancakes for dinner, laughing as they tossed the berries at each other in the kitchen. It was a Friday night, so Terrence wouldn’t be home until late.
Gwen balanced a plate with a fat stack of pancakes as she carried it into the TV room. Ernesto followed behind her, holding utensils, paper plates, and a bottle of syrup. He’d gotten his lens replaced at the mall and could now see clearly again. Gwen placed the pancakes down on the coffee table and peered at Finney out of the corner of her eye.
”You want some pancakes, Finn?” Gwen asked him. Finney nodded, his eyes glued to the screen where Neil Armstrong was bounding across the moon’s rocky surface with the American flag in hand.
Gwen began to plate the food, dividing the stack into three equal portions. She passed Finney his plate first, and then she and Ernesto sat on the floor in front of the coffee table to eat. They ate in near silence, other than the quiet background noise of the moon landing tape. Gwen kept thinking about the Ouija Board, which was still sitting on their kitchen table. Ernesto had seen it, but he said nothing, purposefully ignoring its looming presence. She didn’t want to push him into doing something he didn’t want to— She already kinda had forced him to play in the first place. But at the same time, she couldn’t fathom why he wouldn’t want to take the opportunity to speak to Robin after all this time. She thought about what would’ve happened if Finney hadn’t made it; she would’ve tried everything she could to talk to him again. Then again, that was what she would do. Everybody grieves differently; she shouldn’t force Ernesto into acting how she believes he should.
Okay but Racetrack having a irrational fear of dogs. Even if there's just a stray on the street he's climbed up a tree just to avoid it. Most of the newsies find it funny. Jack tries to get him to come around by finding stray puppies for Race to pet. But it never goes as planned.
