What Follows
4.3: Lost Things and Broken Legs

`do you think anger is a sincere emotion...or the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain?`

I should probably freak out about how Sierra seems to stare right through my soul (more of at a snake that Tobias is staring at with immense fascination), but I’m disarmed by how nervous she seems.

She’s wearing black leather pants, a black, plain top, and white converse. Her dark hair is pulled up in a messy bun with a pair of sunglasses pushed up against it. She looks like her typical self. No smudged eyes or red cheeks.

When Tobias is done with the snake-staring, he straightens up and we both watch Sierra hastily open her small, black Prada handbag.

“Your best friend?”

“Yes,” I say as she pulls out a mirror and tries resting it on some kind of a pit in the tree bark. She then pulls out her blush and a brush.

“She’s applying makeup? Now?” Tobias asks and I frown.

Sierra is heavily applying blush on her cheeks and nose before flipping the container close and throwing it back in her bag. She looks at herself in the mirror and pouts. She then grimaces before smiling sadly.

“She’s -er- making faces?" Tobias comments.

I don’t reply because I’m too busy watching Sierra violently rub her eyes. I narrow my eyes at her before she drops her hands with a satisfied sigh, exposing her now smudged, wide eyes.

She then quickly peers into her mirror before triumphantly smiling and making more faces.

“She’s making sad faces-” I choke out, feeling quite breathless.

Tobias just heavily sighs as Sierra reaches for her mirror that falls on the yellow-leaves-laden ground. Sierra grunts to herself before bending over and dropping her bag in the process too, spilling its insides on the ground.

I told you. She’s too nervous. It’s confusing.

Sierra crouches and angrily picks her bag with shaky hands. She then quickly piles the dropped things inside before picking her now broken mirror. She violently throws it away and gets up, reaching for her phone.

She calls someone and that someone picks up.

“Mason?” She sniffs and I wonder if she wants to make him think that she’s drowning in her tears of immense sorrow for her lost friend.

“She’s faking her sadness,” Tobias whispers and I inhale deeply.

“Where are you, babe?” She says softly despite the frown on her face.

“I can’t believe it-” I say in terrible shock. “I can’t believe she’s not mourning my death. I can’t-”

Sierra is listening to the other side of the phone with her lower lip caught between her teeth and her feet tapping the ground. And it’s impossible how the hatred emerging from my pit seems to leave a trail of non-extinguishable fire in my nonexistent guts. It’s almost impossible how I’m overcome with an intense desire to smack her in the face.

It’s almost impossible how this makes me wish I was alive to show her how much of a traitor she is. I want to take things in my hands like a big girl this one time but can’t do anything as I watch her insult me in the worst possible way.

Because as I stand there, a few feet away from her, she’s easily breaking my heart with her little, red nose tip and her fakely flushed cheeks that were meant to ‘honour’ my death.

I can’t even glance at Tobias because I know I must look like a nightmare. I might’ve bared a fang or two (I just sincerely hope that this spiritual body of mine ejects fangs for ghost bullets. I also hope to be able to freak the hell out of her like ghosts do in horror movies).

By the time I’m done hating her to the point of being too hurt to look at her, she had already hung up on Mason. Tobias seems, however, relaxed, with a twig in his hand that he points at Sierra.

My eyes widen at the fact that Sierra, who’s currently scrolling through her phone, might see a twig floating around.

“What are you doing?!” I ask and Tobias snaps his head in my direction.

“I’m aiming it at her heart.” He simply says, pushing the twig forward.

“She can see it!” I rant out. “You’ll freak her out!”

“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart?” He says, making a sour face. “I’ll only be at rest when this petite twig pierces her petite, stone-hard heart.”

“But she can see it!”

“She obviously cannot-” Tobias states. “As long as anything is in my hand or on me or whatever, it’s not visible. It’s like, it gets transported to our realm. However-” He smiles wickedly. “-if I do drop it, I might as well give her a well-deserved cardiac arrest. Which do you think is a better way to dispose of her?”

I blink at Tobias in surprise. “Where did the poet go? The sunsets and all?”

“We all have our bad sides-” Tobias shrugs. ”She triggered me.”

“I just don’t understand-” I say calmly and composedly, impressed at how I’m capable of talking without sniffing and crying like the loser I am. “Why does she hate me? What have I done?”

Tobias gives me an overall glance with his hazel eyes, runs a hand through his hair, and then says nothing. I sigh and look at Sierra who’s busy watching people from behind the tree.

I look at the ground, thinking of why I’m still standing here when God has given me the little freedom to get away from her and her foul-smelling betrayal? Why am I still drawn to her and her fake blush and tears? Why am I okay with getting heartbroken?

I guess we’re all just somehow drawn to our problems. Or perhaps they’re drawn to us. What I’m saying is, there’s a definite attraction and there’s no way out. No running from what we’re drawn to. Because our problems are little pieces of us, wanting to come back home.

“Maybe we should just go,” I say despondently, feeling light-headed.

“Wait," Tobias announces, staring at the foot of the tree Sierra is leaning against. “Can’t you see it? The blinking?”

I look at where he’s pointing and notice a red light blinking under a heap of dead leaves.

“This wasn’t there before. It fell out of her bag,” Tobias says.

I stare at the leaves heap in immense curiosity before glancing at Tobias who silently cocks his head toward the ground, urging me to check it out.

“I mustn’t-”

Tobias looks puzzled at my response. “What’s wrong with you? Has she something against you? You’ve been acting nice ever since you saw her and it’s sincerely worrying me.”

“I don’t want to take something hers and then get her to freak out,” I say easily.

“She doesn’t care about you.”

Infuriated by his insensitivity about it, I snap. ”I do!”

Tobias shakes his head. “Don’t you wanna know why she hates you? Why she’s like this?”

I glance at Sierra who’s back at scrolling through her phone. “I do.” I sigh.

Tobias then lifts his hands and brows triumphantly before approaching the tree’s base and kneeling in front of it. Sierra is just an inch away from him- in fact, Sierra’s shoe tip is going right through Tobias’ shin.

Tobias uses both his hands to carefully uncover what, apparently, is another phone. He picks it up and turns his head to me with a grin. I roll my eyes and think of how Sierra will never replace this phone unless we, somehow, leave it for her in this dimension. And I wonder if that’s why, sometimes, when I was alive, things just got lost. They just disappeared and reappeared on their own accord.

Maybe, really, it isn’t their own accord. Maybe, it’s spirits (or whatever) like us who take our things to other dimensions, then drop them off when they’re bored with them.

It’s haunting to think that I’ve once touched something another dead soul has touched.

Tobias gets up and gives me the phone. “Now-” He smirks. “-we can investigate."

“There’s probably nothing on that phone.”

“One way to replace out,” He says.

I give Sierra, who’s still staring into her phone, a final glance before Tobias holds my forearm and drags me away from her and back onto the walking aisle that leads to the church.

Being back to where I can hear people’s chatter and children’s laughter over the sound of my nonexistent heart and the crunch of dead leaves under Sierra’s shoes, seems much more pleasant. It feels like I’ve reconnected with reality and that I’m not stuck in a dimension where an only hateful Sierra exists.

“Check the phone!” Tobias urges when we’re finally standing by the church’s wide-open doors. People I know and people I don’t are entering. And what will be to Sierra’s thrill, I’ve seen Mason slip through while blowing his nose.

I look at the BlackBerry in my hands and press it open with a lot of anticipation and fear of what could be hidden behind it’s many, many buttons. I blink at the black screen and wince when it flashes about how it’s low on battery and immediately shuts down.

"Brilliant," I whisper unpleasantly under my breath as Tobias tsks.

“We’ll need to replace a charger.” He comments.

“Well, I don’t know when I’ll be back at Sierra’s place,” I say bitterly.

"Well...there’s another way," Tobias says with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

I stare at him and arch a brow.

“We can steal one.”

I almost laugh at how ridiculous this sounds. “You really want God to be mad at us.”

“Well, if God led us to this-” He points at the phone in my hand. “There must be a reason. And to replace this reason, we must charge the phone.”

I shake my head. ”No.”

“Look, we have this whole city to explore and we haven’t been sucked back to the Darkoom yet, so what’s your excuse, huh?” He studies me with his bright irises and I suck in a breath.

“Yeah, fine, okay-” I say, throwing cautions in the air. “Let’s go shoplifting.”

Tobias grins widely at me, his eyes locking mine. It’s almost a magical moment, a moment of freedom and wide smiles.

“You’re growing on me.” He tells me breathlessly. “Let’s go break a leg!”