Faithless Read online

  Faithless

  Julie Johnson

  JOHNSON INK, Inc.

  Copyright © 2017 Julie Johnson

  All Rights Reserved.

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  S E C O N D / E D I T I O N

  978-0-9986574-4-8

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  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, product names, or named features are only used for reference, and are assumed to be property of their respective owners.

  The first edition of this novel was previously published in December of 2014 under the title ERASING FAITH.

  This one’s for

  the moon

  for proving even things with

  scars & a dark side

  can be beautiful beyond measure.

  “Just gonna stand there and watch me burn…

  Well, that's all right because I like the way it hurts.

  Just gonna stand there and hear me cry…

  Well, that's all right because I love the way you lie.”

  Skylar Grey

  Contents

  I. Budapest

  1. Weston

  2. Faith

  3. Weston

  4. Faith

  5. Faith

  6. Weston

  7. Faith

  8. Weston

  9. Faith

  10. Weston

  11. Faith

  12. Weston

  13. Faith

  14. Weston

  15. Faith

  16. Weston

  17. Faith

  18. Weston

  19. Faith

  20. Weston

  21. Faith

  22. Weston

  23. Faith

  24. Weston

  25. Faith

  26. Faith

  27. Weston

  28. Faith

  29. Weston

  30. Faith

  31. Weston

  32. Faith

  33. Weston

  34. Faith

  35. Weston

  36. Faith

  II. Three Years Later

  37. Weston

  38. Faith

  39. Weston

  40. Faith

  41. Faith

  42. Faith

  43. Weston

  44. Faith

  45. Faith

  46. Weston

  47. Faith

  48. Weston

  49. Faith

  50. Weston

  51. Faith

  52. Faith

  53. Faith

  54. Weston

  55. Faith

  56. Weston

  57. Faith

  58. Weston

  59. Faith

  60. Faith

  Acknowledgments

  Playlist

  About the Author

  Also by Julie Johnson

  Next up…

  SAY THE WORD: Excerpt

  Part One

  Budapest

  Chapter One

  Weston

  IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING

  * * *

  Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

  There’s a monster in the dark, darling. Hiding under your bed, lurking in your closet.

  Are you scared yet, little girl? You should be.

  Monsters aren’t all tentacles and teeth. Sometimes, they’re far less obvious — wrapped up in charm and charisma, cloaked behind secrets and seduction. They don’t blunder through blackness, or slither soundlessly through shadows. They are the dark — it’s what they’re made of, it’s in their very essence.

  Still not frightened, little one?

  Open your eyes, then. See the monster you’ve invited into your bed. You can hide under your covers all you like — I’ll hide under there with you. I’m your childhood nightmare, come out to play.

  I won’t leave footprints to follow or fingerprints to trace. I’m no Sasquatch you can track through the wilderness, no monster you can spy swimming at the bottom of a deep loch. My calling cards are far more subtle.

  A crooked smile. A smoldering look. A broken heart.

  I don’t play fair — I don’t believe in it. Life isn’t fair. Why should I be?

  What big eyes you have, the little girl says to the wolf.

  All the better to see you — your every soft spot, your every weakness. I’m going to exploit them all.

  What big ears you have.

  All the better to hear you — your closest-guarded secrets, your innermost thoughts.

  What big teeth you have.

  Yes, baby. And I’m about to eat your heart out.

  Chapter Two

  Faith

  LIKE A DREAM

  * * *

  Good things come to those who wait.

  Everything happens for a reason.

  It’s not about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.

  Everyone knew these phrases.

  They were everywhere you looked — doodled in the diaries of hopeful young girls. Emblazoned on taped-up college dorm posters. Framed on the walls of doctor’s office waiting rooms. Re-blogged infinite times on social media sites.

  They weren’t called clichés for nothing.

  In a society where “cool” and “cynical” seemed to go hand in hand, these platitudes often induced heavy eye-rolling from the majority of my jaded generation. To most, they were nothing more than pretty, empty words.

  But that wasn’t me — never had been.

  I wasn’t cool. Not unduly sophisticated, or plagued by a self-inflated sense of worth.

  See, I was the loser who actually thought that happy endings existed for everyone in this life. The girl who believed in random acts of kindness and the power of love. The idiot who trusted that reaching for the moon was worth it because, even if you missed, you’d still land among the stars — or so I’d been assured by my Pinterest and Tumblr feeds.

  Maybe I was naive. Maybe I was an innocent with wide eyes and a foolish heart. Maybe I really did live up to my name, putting blind faith in things I shouldn’t. But I loved those stupid, vacuous, absurd clichés. They were oddly comforting in this life of mine, where the only constant was change and the only thing consistent was utter inconsistency.

  I grew up in a crazy family.

  I loved them to pieces, don’t get me wrong. But the Morrissey clan was nuts. Totally, completely, certifiably insane.

  First, there were my parents — two 1960s throwbacks who’d never quite stopped being hippies.

  Products of their generation, they didn’t believe in corporal punishment, discipline, or any kind of rule-system. Rebellion was welcomed — encouraged, even. For my eighth birthday, I received a pair of platform white go-go boots; for my twelfth, they bought me a hookah; for my eighteenth, they supplied my party with three kegs. Despite their graying hair, they both had a penchant for stocking their wardrobes with far too much tie-dye, they listened almost exclusively to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, and Jimmy Hendrix, and they were often caught making out in the kitchen like handsy teenagers — much to the mortification of their six children.

  Yes, you heard that right. Six children.

  And, as the baby of the family, you can bet your ass that I wasn’t the only one who wound up with a flower-power-generation name. From oldest to youngest, my three sisters were called Saffron, Meadow, and Rain. My two older brothers were partly spared this humiliation, given that male hippie names were a little harder to get away with if you wanted your son to survive g
rade school unscathed. My brother Dylan was the namesake of a particular favorite, famous folk hero my parents adored in their youth. And let’s just say, Lennon’s childhood bedroom was top-to-bottom Beatles lyrics for a reason.

  I got lucky, I suppose. Maybe by the time they popped me out, my parents had given up on the truly Looney-Tunes names at the top of their list and decided to pick something a bit more reasonable. I felt justified in making that assumption, given the fact that my license didn’t read “Starshine Love Morrissey” but instead, “Faith Moon Morrissey.”

  Still a hippie name, but at least passably normal.

  On the contrary, there was nothing even remotely normal about being the youngest of six siblings in a house with very little parental guidance. My entire childhood was spent playing one everlasting game of catch-up.

  My three sisters were eleven, nine, and seven years older than me, which meant that by the time I was formulating basic two-word sentences, even the youngest of them was filling out her training bra and gossiping about potential boyfriends. My interests — which mainly included teething and tinker toys — didn’t exactly leave us with a lot of common ground. I suffered through a decade of hand-me-down clothing and absent parenting, waiting for years to get older, to grow bigger. Praying for the day that things would finally change. And they did, eventually — just not in the way I’d been expecting.

  I wasn’t welcomed into the Ya-Ya Sisterhood with open arms. My sisters didn’t become my friends; they became three more mother-figures whose “sage” advice I may’ve needed but rarely heeded.

  Dylan and Lennon were closer to me in age — just five and three years older — but, as every little sister in history knows, there comes a point in every boy’s life when letting your baby sis tag along on your adventures is no longer acceptable. Plus, they were boys. I could play LEGOs and army tank with the best of them, but after ten years of scraped knees and tomboyish-tendencies, I was ready for a change.

  My teen years were lonely.

  All three of my sisters had moved out of the house, by that point — off at college or settling down with their own families halfway across the country, in places so far from our sprawling California farm house, years would pass between their oft-promised holiday visits.

  They left and the house was suddenly quiet — or, if not quiet, then at least quieter — and I could hear myself think for a change. There was no more of Saffron’s screeching into her cellphone at all hours of the night, no girly pop music blasting from Meadow’s speakers, no rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack of Rainey’s field hockey stick in the back yard. Dylan and Lennon, typical teenage boys, were out partying with their friends half the time and passed out in a dead sleep the other half.

  There was silence at last in the Morrissey manor.

  And in that unforeseen quietude, I — for the first time ever — could finally stop playing that game of catch-up. I stopped rushing full-speed toward my siblings. I let them fade out of sight, around a distant corner, and I was abruptly alone on the empty, dust-swept road of childhood. I glanced around for a while, apprehensive at my sudden solitary state, before I realized there was nothing left to do but ask, now that they’re all gone…

  Who the hell are you, Faith Morrissey?

  The saddest moment of my life was when I realized I didn’t have a fucking clue.

  By the time I turned eighteen, I was overdue for an adventure.

  I’d graduated from high school and broken up with Conor, my high-school sweetheart, who’d done the great service of divesting me of my virginity and walking me through all the typical teenage milestones: homecoming, prom, graduation. No one — not even me — fully understood why I’d ended things with him. He was the perfect, All-American guy — two years older, attending community college, and first in line to inherit his father’s car wash business, even if he secretly harbored greater ambitions. Being with Conor promised security: a safe little life with a big house and a bunch of kids, which never forced me to step foot outside the county I’d been raised in.

  But I didn’t want safe. Not anymore.

  So, I left a bewildered ex-boyfriend behind with no regrets, and found myself alone at California State University in Bakersfield — just another freshman with an “undecided” major and a case of severe skepticism about what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I’d figured that sensation of mystified self-consciousness would fade as I adjusted to life at school.

  It didn’t.

  CSUB was only a few hours from my parents’ house and, frankly, after putting five other kids through college and paying for two lavish weddings, it was the only option my parents could afford. I lived in a dorm with a part goth, part punk, full crazy girl named Cindy. She wouldn’t let me call her Cindy, though, insisting that I instead refer to her by her “paranormal” name — Crimson.

  ‘Cause, you know. Vampires. Blood. Red. Crimson.

  Yeah.

  She wasn’t exactly what I’d call an original thinker, let alone a friend.

  So, when I heard about the study abroad opportunity my favorite history professor was coordinating, I didn’t give a damn about the destination. Timbuktu, Athens, Tijuana, Amsterdam… name the city, and I’d be there. As long as it was anywhere but here, cloistered in a 10x10 foot cinderblock room with a girl who spent every weekend watching reruns of Buffy alone in the dark.

  Though my parents were fully supportive of my travel plans, they couldn’t contribute financially. I scrimped and saved for two years until, finally, I had enough money for the down-payment. And only when the check had cleared and I held the flight itinerary in my hands, did I allow myself to be excited.

  Senior year in Budapest.

  I still remember the giddy feeling I carried inside for weeks leading up to the trip, and the shit-eating grin I couldn’t quite keep off my face as I boarded my first ever plane, which would whisk me away from the only state I’d ever set foot in. I felt as though I was starring in a Hollywood movie version of my life — some glamorous jet-setter, heading off on a year-long European vacation with stars in my eyes.

  And the best part? The trip was mine.

  Just mine. It wasn’t a repurposed, out-of-fashion prom dress or a second-hand pair of shoes one of my older sisters was no longer interested in. It wasn’t the inherited, old bicycle Dylan had no use for anymore, or the beat-up, twenty-year-old SUV I finally got to drive after Lennon left for college.

  Budapest belonged solely to Faith Moon Morrissey, and no one else.

  I’d wonder later, after it all fell apart… if I’d known how it would turn out, would I have ripped that plane ticket into pieces? Would I have stayed in my quiet little life, married Conor, and chosen never to meet the man who’d splinter my world — and my heart — into fragments?

  I still didn’t know the answer to those questions.

  And, at the time, I had no idea that Budapest, that the fantasy I was living, wasn’t real.

  It was nothing more than a dream — the kind so perfect, so detailed, it feels more authentic than any reality. The kind you never want to wake up from.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  Because while Wes Adams may’ve seemed like a dream come true…

  He was actually my own worst nightmare.

  Chapter Three

  Weston

  THE LITTLE PRINCESS

  * * *

  Her smile was so white it could blind you, but that didn’t stop her from grinning at every stranger she passed on the street. She had a tiny crescent-shaped scar on her left temple, but you could only see it if the light hit her face just right. She walked with a near-giddy bounce in her step, like there was a fountain of energy and excitement welling within her, always threatening to spill over. She couldn’t wait to explore this faraway city she’d come to – greeting the world with enthusiasm, seeing promise in everything and everyone she met. Her existence was a series of blissful moments, with each day better than the one before.

&nb
sp; If she were anyone else, that exuberance for life would’ve driven me up a wall.

  As a general rule, I avoided happy people. They had a way of making everything in my world seem even bleaker. People were always spouting shit affirmations about the power of positivity and the influence of others. They’d smile and stitch throw-pillows with quotes by goddamn Oprah on them, and carry on with their carefree lives.

  Surround yourself only with people who are going to lift you higher.

  What a load of shit.

  First of all, Oprah Winfrey has more money than King Fucking Solomon, so perhaps her life lessons would be more accurate if they said, Surround yourself with giant piles of money until you forget how shitty life can be. Secondly, as any truly miserable human being knew, surrounding yourself with people who walk around with their heads in their asses, holding onto bullshit beliefs that life is unconditionally beautiful and that people are inherently good to one another — no matter how many shitty things have repeatedly proven otherwise — didn’t make you any happier. In fact, it usually served the opposite purpose: highlighting and increasing your own misery by comparison. Because you’d never be as happy as those delusional dumbasses — it was a waste of time to even try.