Chapter 4: Smiling Knives in a Moving Coffin
The taillights of the Mustang vanished around the corner, leaving Garret standing alone in the chemical yellow of the streetlight. The silence they left behind was a physical thing, a vacuum that rushed in to fill the space where engine noise and Martha’s defiant laughter had been.
Don’t wait up.
The words buzzed in his skull, a venomous insect trapped behind his eyes. He stared at his own front door, a rectangle of peeling white paint and warped wood that seemed a thousand miles away. His legs were rubber. The image was burned onto his retinas: Connor leaning across the seat, that terrible, friendly smile still plastered on his muzzle, his blue eyes holding Garret’s just long enough to convey the message. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an expulsion.
He forced himself to move. One foot in front of the other, up the cracked concrete walkway. The key felt alien in his trembling paw, scratching at the lock before finally sliding home. He pushed the door open into the dim, cloying warmth of the house.
It smelled of microwaved pasta and floral air freshener, a familiar scent that usually felt like sanctuary. Tonight, it felt like a tomb. The living room was a monument to quiet desperation: the flickering blue light of the unmuted TV playing a infomercial for kitchen gadgets, a half-finished crossword puzzle abandoned on the arm of the worn floral sofa, a single lamp casting long shadows from a stack of unopened bills on the coffee table.
His mom was asleep in her recliner, her reading glasses slipping down her nose, a romance novel splayed open on her chest. The sight of her, oblivious and peaceful, sent a hot spike of fury through Garret’s exhaustion. It was a childish, unfair anger, and he knew it. She hadn’t parked the Mustang under the broken streetlight. She hadn’t made those claw marks.
But she lived here, in this soft, worried world, and she never saw the cracks until someone was already falling through them.
He crept past her, avoiding the squeaky floorboard by the hall table. His room was at the end of the short hallway, a sanctuary cluttered with band posters and tangled cables. He shut the door softly, the click of the latch sounding absurdly loud. He leaned his forehead against the cool wood, eyes closed, and replayed it all.
The walk. Martha’s hand in his. Connor’s smile. The fresh, pale gouges in the vinyl dashboard, right where Connor’s fingertips had rested. A permanent record of the rage he hadn’t shown.
Where were they going?
The question was a drill bit in his brain. Connor wouldn’t hurt her. Not physically. That wasn’t the lesson. The lesson was in the humiliation, in the demonstration of power. The lesson was for him, delivered through her.
He shoved himself away from the door and stumbled to his bed, yanking his backpack onto his lap. He dug past textbooks and crumpled gum wrappers until his fingers closed around the cold, hard plastic of his phone. He’d turned it off after school, a pathetic act of rebellion he now regretted.
The screen lit up, blinding in the dark room. No missed calls. No texts. Of course not.
His thumb hovered over Martha’s name in his contacts. He’d put her in as ‘M.Jenkins - Chem’ last week, a bland entry that felt like a lie now. He hit the call button and pressed the phone to his ear.
It rang once. Twice.
A click.
“Hello?” Martha’s voice. A little breathless. Was that… was she laughing?
A wave of cold nausea washed over him. “Martha. It’s me. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“Garret? Hey!” Her voice was bright, loud. Too loud. There was music in the background, a thumping bassline he didn’t recognize. “Yeah, I’m fine! We’re just… getting a bite. Your brother’s cool.”
The words were so wrong, so perfectly scripted, they curdled in the air between them.
“Martha,” he said, his voice dropping to a desperate whisper. “What’s going on? Is he right there? Blink twice if you can’t talk or—” He stopped, hearing how insane he sounded.
“Talk? Yeah, of course I can talk. Connor’s just grabbing napkins. He says hi.” Her tone was bizarrely chipper, a bad actor reading lines. “Look, thanks for the ride, but it’s all good. Really. He’s actually being really nice.”
A new voice cut in, smooth as oil, close to the receiver. Connor’s. “Who’s that, Martha? Your dad checking in?” He sounded amused, congenial.
“No, it’s just Garret,” Martha said, her voice shifting, becoming slightly pinched. “Just seeing if I got home okay.”
“Aw, that’s sweet of him,” Connor said, the warmth in his voice utterly believable. “Tell him not to worry his pretty little head. I’ll have you back before curfew. Scout’s honor.”
There was a faint rustle, the sound of the phone being shifted.
“Garret,” Connor’s voice came through, clear and intimate now, speaking directly into the phone but for Martha’s benefit. “Everything’s fine. We’re just at that 24-hour diner off the highway, the one with the pie. I’m buying your friend some pie. You should get some sleep. You looked tired.” The last sentence lost all its pretended warmth, becoming a flat, icy command.
The line went dead.
Garret pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it. His reflection in the dark screen was wide-eyed, pale. He saw the fresh gouges in the dashboard again. He heard Martha’s performative laughter. He saw Connor’s knuckles, white on the steering wheel.
He threw the phone. It hit the wall above his bed with a dull plastic thunk and fell onto the pillows.
For a long time, he just sat there in the dark, listening to the hum of the refrigerator down the hall and the faint drone of the TV. He replayed the call. He’s actually being really nice. The words were a brand. Connor was showing her his public face, the charming, easy-going mask he could wear when he wanted to. He was making her complicit. He was making her lie for him. And Garret knew, with a cold certainty, that when Connor finally pulled the Mustang up to her house—curfew perfectly observed—and smiled that wide, toothy smile and said “See? I’m not the monster he says I am,” she would believe it. Or she would be too confused, too gaslit to argue.
The lesson wasn’t just for Garret anymore. It was for her, too. A primer on who held the power, on which version of Connor Hargrove was the real one. The friendly one buying pie, or the one who left marks in dashboards.
He got up, robotically changed into sweatpants and a threadbare t-shirt, and brushed his teeth. The mundane routine felt like moving through water. When he clicked off his bedside lamp, the darkness felt total.
He lay awake for hours, staring at the shifting shadows the streetlight cast on his ceiling. Every time a car passed, his heart leapt. None of them were the low, specific rumble of the Mustang.
Sometime after 2 AM, he heard it. The soft purr of an engine slowing, the almost inaudible crunch of tires on gravel not out front, but down the street. A door opened and closed with a careful, muted click. Then another. No voices. Footsteps, one set heavier than the other, receding.
Silence again.
He waited, ears straining. Five minutes. Ten.
His phone, retrieved from the bedsheets, remained dark and silent.
The final piece of the lesson clicked into place, cold and devastating. Connor hadn’t just driven her home. He’d walked her to her door. The perfect gentleman. Garret could see it perfectly: Connor saying goodnight with that same easy smile, maybe even making a self-deprecating joke about being a scary older brother. Martha, relieved, confused, perhaps even charmed, would wave and go inside. She’d think the whole thing was just a weird, overblown sibling drama. She’d think Garret was paranoid. She’d think Connor was… okay.
And Garret would be alone, locked out of the narrative, the only one carrying the true, ugly weight of what had happened. The claw marks, the cold fear, the calculated performance—it was all his to keep. His brother had not only enforced the boundary, he had rewritten the story around it, casting himself in a better light and leaving Garret to look like a fragile, exaggerating kid.
He finally understood.
Connor hadn’t just won. He had made winning look easy, and made Garret’s fear look foolish and childish.
The streetlight outside flickered once, twice, and went out, plunging the room into an absolute black. Garret closed his eyes, but the darkness behind his lids was no different. He was already in it.