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Vin balanced himself on his skateboard deck as it rolled through town. The rhythmic noise helped clear out his thoughts until he was back home. Once he was back at his apartment, he stopped to grab the mail on his way in. He rifled through it, picking out those addressed to him and leaving the letters addressed to his roommates on a counter. Only one letter stood out to him, the one that looked exactly like all the others he’d been getting, the ones with things written by Charlie Decker. He’d read part of one, months ago, but since then he’d only opened them to check and see what they were and tossed the journal entries without reading them. It was just one of those things that were easier to not think about, or at least as little as he could help it. He opened the letter, glanced at it, and seeing that it was more of the same went to throw it away when he noticed Allison’s name on the paper. 

He didn’t want to read it. Nope. But instead of tossing it in the trash, he set it down and paced around the apartment. Until he would inevitably end up right back at the table it was on, and he’d glance at it, then continue to pace around the small room. If anyone else had been home, he knew they’d think he looked like a crazy person. He couldn’t just not read it now, it was all he was going to think about until he read it. When he picked the letter back up again, his eyes didn’t even want to focus on it. He had to force them, as he slowly scanned over the text, and it took a few minutes for the words to settle in his brain. 

Was Charlie Decker at his sister’s funeral? Just sitting there taking notes and watching the pain he’d caused? That was too creepy to think about, not that he could really think right now. The sound of his own heartbeat pounded in his ears. Every time he reread the letter it felt like a heavy weight was being placed on his chest but kept doing so until it felt like he couldn’t breathe. And he kept rereading, far more times than he really should have. He stared at the letter until his eyes burned and he felt like he couldn’t breathe. 

Vin didn’t cry; not when they carried Allison’s body out of the house, not at the funeral, and not really anytime that he could remember since he was a little kid. Even his dad had cried at the funeral, and people said that it would hit him eventually and that it wasn’t something to worry about. And the grief did hit him. At random times, it snuck up on him when he wasn’t expecting it but he never did shed any tears. He kept his grief, cemented it into his core just beneath the surface so he wouldn’t lose it. That was all he had left, and sometimes it made it hard to feel anything else. 

He hadn’t even been angry at Charlie after it happened; he knew it wasn’t all Charlie’s fault, he’d only been a part of it. So many other factors had been a part of it, and Vin was one of them too. But he was angry now, angry that someone would send him this, send everyone in town these letters to keep reminding them of all the pain Charlie had caused. Shit, he really hoped neither of his parents were getting these letters, he’d never thought to ask before. 

Eventually, he stopped reading the letter, he practically had it memorized anyway, and did the reasonable thing, and took it over to the kitchen sink. He fished around in his pockets until he found a lighter and burned the letter. 

Then Vin found himself on the couch taking bong rips until he felt like the anti-drug commercial where the girl just melts into the couch and the small apartment was basically one big hot box. There was a cartoon on the television, but eventually, even that got too complex to follow, so he just stared at the screen and zoned out. He didn’t want to think about Charlie, or grief, or the shooting, or Allison right now. He didn’t want to think about how he said nothing about how she partied too hard because he was just happy to be at his first high school party that night. He just wanted to stare, half confused at a cartoon dog and maybe laugh a little. Then, if he woke up from a weed coma in time, he’d think about if he wanted to show up at the high school tonight. 

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Logan took a handful of the aspirin and swallowed them down with water. He then left the convenience store swishing the mouthwash about until he felt that his mouth was properly minty fresh before spitting it all out onto the sidewalk. Eventually, he made it back to his car, a lifted jeep with big offroading tires, he never actually went off-roading but it looked cool. There was a time when things like that made him happy, but now the car was really just more annoying to drive. His father hated the jeep, called it an eyesore and a waste of money, so selling it was out of the question. Logan wouldn’t give his old man the satisfaction of being right about the car even though it made his knee hurt every time he jumped out of it. 

He drove home, beer in the seat next to him, a fresh pack of cigarettes in his pocket, and nothing stronger to take the edge off the unsettling feeling Edenridge gave him. The whole town just bought a paranoid feeling that being here meant something bad was bound to happen. Was it even, technically, paranoia if it was based on experience? Logan was inclined to believe it wasn’t. Everything he drove past looked the same as it always had, so it stood to reason that the luck of this town was probably the same too. 

The house he’d grown up in looked more or less the same, and he was half surprised his key still worked. The response he’d gotten when he’d texted his father to let him know he’d be home for the summer was ‘good, clean your room.’ It wouldn’t have been out of character for him to change the locks just for the hell of it. Inside the house looked like a picture from a magazine; immaculately clean, organized, and cold. No one was home, which meant his timing was at least spot on and he wasn’t going to be forced to make conversation. Logan didn’t bother roaming through the rest of the house, he just took his bags and beer straight up to this room and tossed them on the bed. 

Logan’s room was left in the state of complete disarray he’d left it in. Clothes covering the floor, drawers pulled entirely out of the dresser and left sitting on top of it, and never finished homework assignments from high school scattered about. A box of hockey trophies, some broken, were collected in a box half shoved into a closet along with his skates and equipment which were half falling out of the closet. There were various posters hung intentionally croaked and even upside down on the walls, or more accurately rehung that way about a year ago. His bed was unmade, hell some of the piles of clothes were year-old laundry and the only part of the room that was organized was a single spot on a desk where his father stacked mail that had come for him while he was at college. It almost made him chuckle to think about his father having to walk into the absolute tornado of chaos every so often to put his mail here, and then carry about his day knowing that one room in the house was an absolute disaster. 

Logan had, very purposefully, left his room in such a state before he’d left last year. Knowing that it would irritate his father but that the man would never clean up after another adult. So, Logan had ignored several angry voicemails about it and had an excellent excuse for why he was never available to come home during the school year to clean it. There was really no escaping having to clean the room now, but this petty act of revenge, and knowing that it had gone on for a full year, brought him some joy. He sat down in the desk chair, placed his feet on the desk, and casually flipped through the mail, and tossed most of it into the overflowing trash can. Then all that was left was a small stack of letters with no return address on them. He wasn’t sure what he was excepting those letters to be, but copies of Charlie fucking Decker’s journal entries was about the last thing he would’ve guessed.

[color=59B9C1]“Well, it’s way too fucking early for this shit.”[/color] He muttered and got up and grabbed one of the beers from the recently purchased sixpack. If he was going to spend the afternoon reading the musings of a psychopath it only seemed right that he should do so with a drink. 

They all read more or less the same to him, started with some pretentious quote, and then went on and on with Decker’s whining. Even though just thinking about Decker made his stomach turn in a way a hangover never could, he read all those letters. He even remembered the time he’d grabbed one of the guy’s journals and read some of it aloud in the middle of study hall. Sure he’d pushed Decker but he’d had no idea what an absolute time bomb the guy really was. In Logan’s mind, it was less of a question of ‘if’ and only of ‘when’ Decker would’ve done something truly horrible. Maybe if he’d just left Decker alone that ticking time bomb of destruction wouldn’t have exploded in school, and his violent tendencies could’ve stayed contained with the rest of the Southside shitheads. 

The knowledge that psycho-boy had a fan in town was not only bizarre but genuinely disturbing. Like those women who marry serial killers on death row disturbing. Logan especially hated that they were being sent to him. It felt like an accusation; like a year’s worth of buried guilt being ripped to the surface. Some of that was deserved, Logan was sure he was part of the reason Decker had targeted the school, but he was also sure Decker was a bad guy from the start. What else do you call someone who shoots up a school besides a monster? Hell, monster is a nice word for someone like that. 

He wasn’t exactly sure why he didn’t throw the letters out, but he stashed them in a drawer in the desk. 

The very last place in town he wanted to visit was the old high school, but he was going to be there tonight at 8 pm. He had to know; who was sending those letters, why, what they thought they were getting out of it.