Adam was right, the message was completely targeting me.
“Who would want to apologize to you?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I have no idea. But if they’re trying to apologize, this is a really messed-up and twisted way to do it, by destroying and harming things that I love.”
“Yeah, good point,” Adam agreed.
Michael stood slowly to his feet. “Wait, what if someone thinks that you owe them an apology? Maybe they’re sending you this message to try to get you to apologize to them.”
I started feeling tears well in my eyes. “But I don’t even know what I’m supposed to apologize for,” I said as I held them back. “I don’t even know what I’ve done wrong.”
“Shh,” Adam said as he reached his arms around me and pulled my head up against his chest. “You haven’t done anything wrong. We’ll figure this out, don’t worry.”
But I was worried. I was so worried that I stayed awake all night sitting on the couch by Adam as he slept. Someone had hit him over the head, drugged him, and taken him to carve marks in his body for three days, and none of us had the first clue why. I watched Michael pace back and forth in front of the apartment window. I couldn’t tell if he was watching the perimeter outside or simply trying to think and pace; maybe both. He didn’t sleep at all that night either.
“Maybe the four of us should just leave and go back to Asheville right now,” I whispered to Michael so that I didn’t wake Adam up. “Just like we did before, just get the hell out.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work this time,” he said.
I paused. “Why not?”
“Because a note followed you there, too,” he reminded me. “I think the only way to stop this is to figure out what it means and confront whoever is doing it. I just wish I knew where to start.”
And that made two of us.
The next morning we decided that we would all stay close, all four of us. Rob would move into the apartment with us now too, it was just too dangerous for us to all be separated and we stood a better chance at figuring this out together.
Adam’s cuts, although still quite painful, were shallow so they healed quickly. We were nowhere close to figuring out what was going on, and we had exhausted every resource at Lineage and every resource that Rob had at the precinct. Michael thought of going to Goldshire to see if there had been any strange occurrences on their campus as well. It was a long shot, especially since we all thought that it was pretty clear the attacks were being directed as a message to me. But then again, I was once a Goldshire student and it wasn’t that long ago that our rival colleges did quite a bit of intermingling of both friends and enemies.
We walked the pathway along the edge of the campus, the one that would head over toward that big tree that Julian and I used to sit in. The one where Michael and I had fought each other and given each other both black eyes.
And also, the one that the stone room had once been near along the edge of the path.
Layla had the stone room removed while she had been Headmistress here for that short amount of time. I don’t even think she knew what it was, or what sorts of things had happened in that room. I think she just realized that it was old and decrepit and didn’t serve a purpose anymore, so she had it taken off the campus. I wondered as we walked along this path toward where it had once stood, what had happened to it and if it had simply been destroyed or repurposed for something else entirely.
But, when we came around a bend in the path and saw the structure standing there once more, I nearly screamed.
“What the fuck…” Adam said as we slowed our walk along the path.
We had all seen that the stone room had been removed. We had all walked this path several times since we had come back to Lineage after Layla had presided over the campus. And we had all seen that it was gone.
How in the world was it back here now?
“Okay guys,” Rob said, looking visibly shaken for the first time in a while. “I walk this path on the grounds almost every day. This thing was not here yesterday. It’s not as if it was a small birdhouse, either. It’s a stone building for fuck’s sake. How did this get back here?”
We kept walking until we reached the structure and Michael stepped up to the door to open it. The daylight shined into the room and illuminated what was inside. What previously had been four bare, solid stone walls, were now four walls completely covered with notes taped up in every available inch of space. Every single little piece of paper had the word “sorry” scribbled onto it.
I felt like I was losing my mind.
I ran into the stone room and started to rip the notes from the wall, screaming and breaking my nails against the stone as I pulled every tiny piece of paper off and threw it into the middle of the floor. Michael came in behind me and tried to grab my arms to try to stop me and calm me down, but this time it wouldn’t work.
“I want them off!” I screamed. “I want them all off!”
So instead of trying to calm me, the three of them came into the room with me and helped to pull all the notes off until the walls of the stone room were bare once more. After we were done, we closed the room back up and left the pile of tattered notes inside on the floor.
We decided to wait until another day to go to Goldshire because I looked as if I had just had an emotional breakdown.
“I think that we should maybe try a different strategy,” Michael said as we walked back to the apartment. “This is obviously wearing all of our nerves really thin. Maybe that’s the point of what they’re trying to do. Maybe the whole goal of whoever is doing this, is to try to wear us down and make us ultra-paranoid. Maybe this isn’t even the end goal?”
“Well that sure is refreshing to hear,” Adam said sarcastically.
“You might be right,” Rob said. “So, what’s your idea then?”
“Pretend like none of it matters,” Michael answered.
Everyone kind of stared at him in disbelief.
“Seriously?” Adam asked.
“Yes, think about it. That stunt back at the stone room; there was no way that wasn’t just a mind game. What other purpose could that have served except to get Lisette really upset and worked up? If someone is doing this in order to get a reaction out of us, then the best way to get them to stop is to stop reacting.”
“What if that just makes them do bigger, worse things?” I asked.
“Possible,” Michael answered. “But at some point, they’ll grow tired of not getting what they want, of not getting a reaction.”
“It might work,” Rob said.
