Every Wicked Man by Steven James

Author:Steven James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

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.

Tessa read, and every word was a way for her to put more distance between her feelings and her awareness of her feelings, as if maybe, just maybe, by gorging herself on a story, by swallowing it whole, all the squibbles and frozen black letters would quiet the nameless ache inside of her.

The bell rang, and everyone shuffled out of the room toward the cafeteria.

“Watch out,” she said as a boy brushed past her.

“You okay?” Candice asked her.

“Yeah. It’s just that I suffer from triptostupophobia.”

“What’s that?”

“The fear of stupid people tripping and falling on me.”

“I don’t think that’s a real fear.”

“It should be. I’m scared of it.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Whatever.”

On her way to the caf, Tessa checked her messages and found a text from her mom asking her to give her a call.

She felt her chest tighten. Her mom knew all about the no-cell-phone policy at school, and she wouldn’t have left a message like that unless something was up.

When Tessa tried the number, no one answered. She couldn’t remember exactly when her mom’s flight was supposed to take off, but she figured that she was probably either in the car on her way

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