08

“Mom, Mom, please calm down,” I cut her off, trying to keep my voice from cracking. “I’m with a friend. I’m okay. Everything’s fine.”

“It’s nearly eleven o’clock in the evening, Hadley! On a school night!” Mom babbled frantically over the line, obviously reaching near hysterics.

This honestly would have been insanely funny had I not been about to get grounded to within an inch of my life.

“I’m getting a cab home right now, Mom, I should back at the apartment in, like, fifteen minutes,” I quickly reassured her, not wanting her to keep on babbling.

I hung up before she could say anything else, tucking my phone back into my pocket.

“So we’re friends now, are we?”

I glared up at Archer, my eyes narrowed. “Clearly you don’t want to be friends, but I do.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that one. I don’t want to be your friend.”

“That’s hardly fair.”

“Life’s not fair, Hadley.”

I snorted out a laugh in agreement. He’d hit the nail on the head with that one.

Life sure as hell wasn’t fair. The sad thing was is that I was barely beginning to realize that.

Yesterday I had thought I was just an ordinary, average sixteen year old girl whose ambition in life was to get through high school unnoticed and unscathed. But now that was entirely thrown up into the air. Now I was suddenly an ordinary, average sixteen year old girl who also happened to have the task of saving another person’s life resting upon her shoulders.

Life was definitely fair, wasn’t it?

“Look, Archer,” I sighed heavily, shifting awkwardly on my feet. “This is stupid. We don’t even know each other and we’re fighting? It doesn’t even make sense. Can we start over?”

“Start over?” Archer repeated, his eyebrows pulling down in to a quizzical expression. “Do you want me to smack you awake this time?”

“Archer! Please! I’m trying to be serious here!”

“So am I.”

Bloody hell, he wasn’t making this easy at all.

So, taking a deep breath, I tried to start over on my start over.

“Hi,” I said brightly, holding out a hand for him to shake. “I’m Hadley.”

“I already know who you are. You don’t need to tell me.”

“I’m Hadley,” I repeated forcefully. “It’s nice to meet you. And you are?”

Archer was giving me a look like I was the weirdest thing he’d ever seen in his life, but he gave up half a second later, rolling his eyes.

“I’m Archer. Can you leave me alone now?” he said in a mockingly polite voice, vigorously shaking my hand.

“Pleasure, Archer,” I returned through stiff lips, trying super hard to keep smiling.

I made to drop my hand, wanting him to let go of me and trying hard not to focus on how it felt like I was being electrocuted or something with him touching me, but he grabbed my forearm and shoved up the sleeve of my jacket, a curious look coming over his face.

I followed his gaze with a horrified look, wondering what on Earth he was staring at.

Etched onto the smooth skin beneath my palm in an eerie style, smooth and pale like a perfectly constructed yet entirely grisly scar, was the number 27.

When the hell had that gotten there?

“And what, pray tell, is the significance of the number 27?” Archer asked, sounding as if he were trying to undermine his curiosity.

“L-Like I’d tell you,” I stammered pathetically, wrenching my wrist back. “I have to go now.”

He let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Finally.”

I shot him a nasty look, yanking my jacket sleeve back down. “Very funny, Morales.”

“I’m never funny.”

Clearly.

“So, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?” I asked awkwardly as I stepped backwards off the curb with the intent on catching a taxi.

“God, I hope not,” Archer muttered, although I had a feeling he hadn’t meant for me to hear that.

I stared at him in open-mouthed horror.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a sissy – you can’t really be a sissy when you live in a place like New York City – but all of his cracks and insults, even though I’d been around him for barely half an hour, were sort of starting to get to me.

“Oh, hell,” he blurted out, his eyes widening as he caught sight of the look on my face. “Don’t look like that, Jamison. If we’re going to be friends, then you’re going to have to get a thicker skin. Because if the opportunity to mock you presents itself, I’m going to take it, no holds barred.”

There was only one thing I really got out of that sentence.

“You mean we’re friends now?” I babbled excitedly, rocking back on my heels.

Archer resembled a deer caught in the headlights with that one.

“No,” he fired back immediately. “We’re not friends.”

“Ah, but you just said we were going to be friends,” I pointed out in a self-satisfied voice. “I’m wearing you down, aren’t I, Archer Morales?”

“Yeah, keep on dreaming,” he said, exasperated. “It’s going to take a lot before we’re ever friends, Hadley.”

“Like what?”

To be honest, I was sort of expecting Archer to go hands on hips and give me a nasty, girlish like look.

“Just go home,” Archer sighed, waving a hand towards one of the many taxis on the streets. “You’re annoying me.”

“And you’re frustrating the hell out of me,” I griped under my breath.

“Get used to it.”

Damn. With the luck that I seemed to be having, Archer probably had supersonic bat hearing or something.

“Goodnight, Archer Morales,” I sang in a cheery voice after I’d flagged down a cab. “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning.”

“If you sing like that to me tomorrow, I’m seriously going to hit you,” he groaned in response, a hand at his forehead.

I snickered, my hand grasping the cab door as I leaned against the car.

“Not a morning person, are we, Archer?” I asked sweetly.

The language that Archer used to respond with was entirely vulgar, which more than made his point clear. I went to high school and heard disgusting language every day, but even I wasn’t really comfortable with the language he used.

Honestly, he would’ve put even the toughest of sailors to shame.

I quickly waved goodbye to him and clambered into the cab, slamming the door shut after me.

I slunk down in my seat after giving the gruff looking cab driver my address and sighed heavily.

So far, this had been the most I’d ever done in a day before.

I actually wore a dress for once. I went to a funeral. I met Death. I made a deal with Death. I was thrown back into time in some unknown, rather disturbing manner that had somehow made me change clothing – yet not location, I realized – in the process. I discovered in this deal I made with Death, I only had 27 days to stop a guy I didn’t even know from killing himself.

And to top it all off, I was beginning to realize what Death had said was entirely true.

This hands down going to be one of the hardest things I was ever going to do.

Yay for Hadley.

I sighed heavily and slouched forward, resting my arms on my knees as I held my head in my hands.

I was trying to have a positive outlook on all of this. I really was. But Archer Morales had obviously made it known that he wasn’t in any mood to make any new friends. Why that was, I had no idea, but it was honestly beginning to bother me.

I was by no means a person that anybody could describe as verbose, but I had friends. Granted, my main friend and person that I hung out with the most was Taelor, and it had been this way since the second grade when we showed up to class wearing the same pair of Velcro sandals. But I still had other friends; like in some of my classes I didn’t have with Taelor – CP English 3 or Body Toning. I thought everyone at least had one acquaintance in their life.

Yet it seemed as if Archer didn’t.

Everything I thought I knew about life was being tossed in the air and scattered about, making no sense whatsoever. From what I’d heard, I’d always believed that a person committed suicide because they were lonely or depressed.

Well, Archer clearly preferred solitude than company, and he didn’t seem depressed at all so much as angry and bitter.

It was when the cab driver was coming to a screeching halt outside the apartment complex I lived in that I made a sudden decision.

Death had told me that I needed to help Archer and stop him from doing something completely awful and horrible.

Help was a vague term. It could mean a lot of things.

But as I sprinted my way to the elevators to take me up to the ninth floor, I made myself promise that I would do everything in my power to actually help Archer. Because even if I somehow managed to make it past this 27 day deadline, that didn’t mean Archer still wouldn’t commit suicide later on. Just because a problem was temporarily fixed didn’t mean that it was going to completely disappear and make everything better.

No, I was going to have to help him meet his demons – for lack of a better word – head on.

There was no doubt in my mind that I couldn’t do this alone. The only problem was that even if I told Taelor or my parents or somebody, they wouldn’t believe me. Who the hell was going to believe that I was thrown back in time and was on a first name basis with Death himself?

The only person I could use to help me help Archer was Archer himself.

And clearly that was going to be a rollercoaster in itself.

I glanced down at the weird mark on my arm that was curled around in the shape of the number 27.

27 days was all I had to do this.

I seriously hoped I was going to be able to do this. Because I didn’t want to think about what would happen if I failed.

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