A Place So Wicked by Patrick Reuman (life books to read txt) 📕

He knew it wasn’t their fault. He had no idea why he was feeling so crappy. The first theory was the pizza they had eaten, which was partially reinforced by Toby not feeling good, but why then was Toby pretty much fine now and everybody else was all right? Why just him? What did he do to deserve this pain?

He couldn’t even describe how it felt. It wasn’t the pangs of hunger or even that of being sick. It felt like something else, something unexplainable to him. But maybe that was only because his mind was cloudy. He felt disoriented. The room shifted like it was going to start spinning but then would stop and start shifting in the opposite direction like the world was on an axis, a spinning globe being played around with by some maniac.

A tear trickled down his cheek. He just wanted it to stop. He could still smell that crap from the basement like it was a living organism clinging to the inside of his nostrils. He even tried to pick it out once, only coming away with dry, crumbling boogers.

As he lay there, weeping softly and wishing his mother would come in and hold him, the room began to get darker. Or at least that’s what it looked like to Trevor. The light coming from the window dimmed and started closing like the end of a Looney Tunes episode.

He waited to hear, “That’s all folks!” Everything continued to get darker. He wanted to call out for help, but he knew what he was seeing, what he was experiencing, was just a side effect of him being sick. And so he did the only thing his little thirteen-year-old mind could come up with to make it stop, and that was to close his eyes, shutting out the light before the darkness could do it for him.

Paisley sat there in her bed, staring out into the night, at the streetlamps raining their light down into the silent street. It must have been the middle of the night by then. She wished now that she had eaten, if only to prove to herself that the growing, twisting pain in her gut was being caused by hunger and not something she caught from her twin brother.

But deep down, she didn’t think it was hunger. There was just something within her, a tingling feeling in the back of her head, that told her it was something worse. Her arms and legs felt weak as well, as if she had gone for a jog and lifted some weights just before heading to bed, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t done either of those things or anything else.

In fact, she had done very little since arriving at their new house. Even when they were moving things in, she strategically avoided the duty, disappearing right when she thought someone was going to need help moving something larger. Maybe it was girly of her, but she didn’t want to carry stuff around.

At least with all the chaos that had taken place throughout the day, with the yard, and that basement stuff, she had pretty much forgotten about Brent. That was, until she was alone in her room with nobody to distract her. Now, Brent was pretty much all she was thinking about, even over the day’s strange happenings and her stomach pains. She had not received even one single text from him all day.

She hadn’t checked much throughout the day. But now she was staring at his last message, one from the day before, and she felt herself nearing tears. Her nose was suddenly runny, but that may have been because of the sickness she was coming down with. With her forearm, she wiped away the glisten from her eyes.

She had to be stronger than this. It was nothing she hadn’t expected, him not talking to her much anymore. But obviously, that knowledge didn’t make much of a difference or she wouldn’t have been sitting there moping the way she was.

She straightened herself with a firmness that was fake but she hoped could become real. There was a pang of pain in her side, somewhere deep within her. She tried to remember what organs were there; maybe her kidney, or pancreas, or something, she couldn’t remember.

If she didn’t fall asleep soon, though, the lack of sleep would start to add up. She could already feel that annoying headache coming on, the one that preyed on fools who stayed up late too often. She lifted her blanket and crawled under. With her eyes closed, she tried to think about nothing, which was incredibly difficult to accomplish when trying to do it on purpose.

“I want to go home.”

Paisley jerked up from what was almost sleep. She scanned the room. It was silent, empty. Dark. She took in a deep breath, which seemed louder than it should have been, and laid back down. Was she seriously going to have nightmares now? She was more annoyed with herself than she was afraid. The little girl’s voice had sounded real, almost as if the words had been whispered into her ear, but she didn’t have the time to worry about that. She pushed the thought to the back of her mind and pressed her eyes tightly shut.

“It took my mommy.”

She lurched upward, one hundred percent certain she had not fallen back to sleep yet, that the voice was not a dream. Now she was afraid. She started feeling around under the blanket for her phone. She needed a second source of light aside from the streetlamps out front of the house, and there was no way she was getting up yet to hit the light switch. She felt the phone and snatched it, pulling out from underneath the blanket and opening the flashlight app on the home screen