Текст книги "Bad Girls Don't Die"

Автор книги: Katie Alender

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Come play.

It must be Kasey, I decided. But it was too late to play.

Thanks to Kasey’s daylong series of screeching temper tantrums, the whole family was drained. Our parents were Exhausted with a capital “E” and any little girl caught sneaking out of her bedroom would be in Trouble with a capital “T.”

Come play, the whispers begged.

I folded the pillow over the sides of my head to block out the sound, but it didn’t work.

I was determined not to go to my sister’s room, but I felt myself drawn to the window and figured that wasn’t breaking any rules. I gave in to the urge and went to the cushioned window seat, pressing my hands flat against the panes of glass. Then I reached down and unlatched the window, pushing it up and letting in the cold night air.

Come play.

Something rose up inside me, a burst of bravery, and for some reason I decided that I must climb out the window. I must climb the giant tree. I had to do it to prove to myself that I wasn’t afraid of the new house.

As I knelt and began to stick one foot out the window, the whispers grew louder and more excited, and I grew more confident that what I was doing was absolutely the right thing. Think how proud Mom and Dad would be the next day. Think how impressed Kasey would be.

I set one foot lightly on the roof and shifted a bit of my weight to it, but my foot slipped a little on the loose shingles, and I thrust a hand toward the wall behind the curtain to steady myself.

I got my balance back, but as my hand pressed against the wall, panic surged up inside of me. The whispers became slower, angrier, as I stared down at the twenty-foot drop off the edge of the roof.

Suddenly I didn’t want to come play.

It was wrong. It was dangerous. My parents wouldn’t be proud—they’d be horrified.

My hand felt along the wall for something to grab on to, to get the strength to pull myself back inside. I was distracted by the swirling roar of whispers in my head, scolding me and beseeching me to Come play, Come play, Come play….

What my hand found was a small piece of metal, tied with a loop of ribbon, hanging off a tiny nail in the wall.

I grabbed the metal, and the whispers went silent.

With a burst of strength I hauled myself back inside and shut the window, locking it, and climbed back into bed. In the moonlight I stared at the object in my hand– a flat silver heart, cut in half with a smoothed-over zigzag edge. There were letters on it, S, H, and half an A, and below them, M, E, and the round back of what could have been a Q or an 0. ..

Or a G .

When I woke up the next morning I would have thought the whole thing was a dream, except for the presence of the charm and ribbon, which I’d wrapped around and around my little hand and held on to like a talisman.

For years I slept with that heart under my pillow. I never really stopped to wonder where it came from or who it had belonged to. I liked it, on some deep level, and I thought, on the same deep level, that it liked me back. It was my lucky charm.

The whispers never bothered me again.

After eighth grade, when Beth and her mom moved away, I gave up on the concept of luck. If there was any such thing, I figured, I was getting the bad end of it. Better to reject the whole idea outright than to keep inviting bad luck to kick me around.

So I packed the charm in my treasure box of knick-knacks and forgot it existed.

To put it simply, our attic is an abomination.

Box after box of old clothes, worn-out bed linens, and faded, ripped towels. My childhood toys, passed on to Kasey and then hidden away and forgotten. A few pieces of furniture covered in white sheets that glowed in the moonlight like phantoms.

It’s like a graveyard for household goods. It’s intimidating even in daylight.

As I stepped off the ladder onto the creaking floorboards, I took a deep breath, flicked on the dim overhead light, and looked around.

Just had to find my treasure box.

Which was in the attic…somewhere.

It was clearly hopeless. In the two years since I’d stored it, approximately eight million more pieces of junk had been shoved in front of it.

I plowed all the way to the back wall and found nothing. I moved Kasey’s old pink clock radio out of the way and reached for a box behind it.

The radio turned on all by itself. I nearly jumped out of my skin until I realized where the music was coming from. Then I saw that the clock was on—red numbers and everything—and the radio was playing, and all the while I could see the cord neatly coiled up around it. Not plugged in.

I spun around to see if someone was in the room with me, but I was alone.

The tinny twang of a pop-country singer poured out of the speakers, occasionally fading out under a wave of static, and without thinking, I kept my hands held out in front of me, as if the clock was going to fly at me and I was going to block it.

“And though we may be apart, you’re always in my heart, so baby please come home….”

I stared down at the radio, afraid to touch it. What if I got a shock?

“Because home is where the heart is….”

The radio switched off.

I stepped back. Home is where the heart is.

All week that phrase kept popping up. Carter had said it to me in the car. It was in my fortune cookie. It was the title of the school librarian’s book. It was almost like someone was trying to tell me something.

Well…I was looking for a heart.

Home is where the heart is.

Home.

I looked around.

My eyes stopped on the old dollhouse, wedged between a bed frame and a stack of old boxes.

It was just a guess, a dumb hunch. I was embarrassed and a little irritated at myself for even considering it. But I walked over to the dollhouse anyway, and peered in the window.

My treasure box.

Home is where the heart is.

I knelt on the floor, the box lit up by a shaft of moonlight, and carefully lifted out each item until I came to a little velveteen coin purse. I loosened the smooth braided rope and held it upside down over my hand. The heart charm and its ribbon tumbled out and landed in my palm.

I went back down to my room and spent the next hour and a half staring at what had once been my most prized possession, trying to figure out how something I’d trusted so much as a little girl could be connected to someone who turned out to be so evil.

Mom’s car pulled into the garage at 11:50 p.m. When I heard her come up the stairs, I followed her into her room and closed the door.

I had a plan.

“Oh, Alexis,” she said, yawning, “what are you still doing up?”

“Can I sleep in here tonight?”

“Well…of course you can. Is everything all right?” “Yep,” I lied. “I just need to turn off my bedroom light.”

I closed the door behind me and went back to my room. The heart charm was right where I’d left it, on the dresser. I debated for a few seconds, then tucked it into my pocket, switched off the lamp, and went back into the hall.

I almost ran smack into my sister. She stood in the middle of the hall, her body angled toward Mom and Dad’s bedroom, eyes fixed on the doorknob.

I froze.

Slowly, slowly, she turned to face me.

“Hey, sis,” she said, her voice soft and casual.

“Kase…is it you?”

Her face looked angelic in the soft gold of the hall light. “Of course it’s me, Lexi.”

“What are you doing?”

She looked around, then shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Well…maybe you should go back to bed,” I said.

Her lips pressed together in a pout. “See?” she hissed. “This is why I had to find a better friend than you. My other friend never bosses me around.”

We stared into each other’s eyes.

“I just don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” I said at last.

“Then you should be more careful whose bedroom you snoop around in,” she said, turning on her heel and stalking back into her room.

The door closed behind her, all by itself.

23

A SUDDEN SHOCK OF BRIGHT LIGHT hit my eyelids, jerking me out of my sleep. For a moment I wondered where I was, and then I saw the pale blue floral of the bedspread and remembered.

Mom stood at the window, dressed and made up, her dirty-blond bob neatly turned under.

“Sorry,” she said. “That was brighter than I thought it would be.”

I looked at the clock—7:12.

“I’m going in early today,” she said. “You’ll be all right getting to school?”

“I’ll manage,” I said, sitting up and swinging my feet to the floor.

She kissed me on the top of my head and hurried out. I heard her knock on Kasey’s door and then call a goodbye from the hallway.

I waited until I felt the rumble of the garage door closing after her and went back to my own room. I grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt (careful not to wear school colors again), then took the world’s fastest shower and ran down to the kitchen and swigged a cup of orange juice.

“Where’s the fire?” Kasey said darkly from the kitchen doorway.

I didn’t answer. For now she just seemed to be regular grumpy morning Kasey. I stuck my hand in my pocket and felt the smooth edge of the heart charm, suddenly wondering if it had been wise to bring it downstairs with me. If Kasey got too close to it, would she– would Shara —gain some evil power from it? Would she recognize it and demand it back?

What if it reminded her of Megan?

I let go and brought my hand out of my pocket.

“I have to run,” I said, rinsing out my cup and setting it on the counter. I grabbed my backpack from the bottom of the stairs and left.

I walked toward the school as far as the stop sign on the corner, then went all the way around the block and came back to my house from the other direction. I crept across the side yard and stood behind the overgrown bushes while I waited for Kasey to make her appearance. Surrey Middle started at 8:30, so she should have been out of the house at 8:15, but she came sauntering out at 7:54 and started down the street in the opposite direction from the middle school.

She held a stack of notebooks in her arms as she strode down the sidewalk, oblivious to anything around her.

Including me, as I followed a half block behind. I tried to stay out of her eye line, but I didn’t have to worry. She was hell-bound for her destination and didn’t even look behind her once.

I followed her the five blocks to the quaint little downtown shopping district, where moms with strollers and men and women in suits seemed to dominate the sidewalks. No one noticed my sister as she trudged up the stairs of town hall. I went in after her and just caught a glimpse of the back of her sweatshirt as it disappeared down a hallway.

“Pardon me, miss,” said a man sitting next to a metal detector. “Can I help you?”

“That’s my sister,” I said. “I have to ask her something.”

“She was here all day yesterday too,” he said. He waved me through the metal detector, and I darted through the crowds to see where Kasey had gone.

I found the long hallway and went all the way to the end, where there was a single door. The metal sign on it read HALL OF RECORDS.

By the time I got to school, first period was half over. I figured I might as well go to the office and get my late slip before Mrs. Anderson sent me. But when I told the secretary I’d been over seeing my dad at St. Margaret’s Hospital (for lack of a better story), she wrote me a pass without marking it in the book.

“You take care, now, dear,” she said, handing it over with a sad smile.

Between classes I stopped by my locker and felt a dozen pair of eyes on me. The cheerleaders were all staring warily from their row of lockers. They were clustered so tightly that I couldn’t see Megan.

But really, it didn’t matter. What could I possibly say to her?

I arrived at fourth period and sat in my usual desk at the back of the room. I was flipping through my textbook when I caught a flash of red and white out the corner of my eye.

“Hey,” someone said.

I glanced up to see Megan standing next to me. “Oh, hi,” I said.

“Um…will you sit next to me?” she asked, playing with the hem of her satin cheerleading uniform.

I hesitated for a millisecond, wondering if the people around us were paying attention. It was long enough that Megan’s eyes flickered away self-consciously.

“Yeah, of course,” I said, picking up my bag off the floor.

I followed her across the room; she gestured to an empty desk.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Chloe sits there. She’ll move.”

I set my stuff down and got settled. Another girl in a cheerleading uniform, Chloe, came wandering over and exchanged whispers with Megan. Then she went across the room to my usual seat.

I looked expectantly at Megan, thinking she had a question or something.

She wrinkled her nose and gave a sad little tip of her head. “No real reason,” she said. “I just wanted to be around someone who understands.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out how to stop thinking about—”

“What? This sucks!” I looked up to see Lydia standing a few aisles over, glaring down at Chloe.

“It’s cool, Lyd,” I said. I tried to wave her over so I could explain, but she didn’t budge.

“No, not cool,” she said. “They took your chair.”

Everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, seemed to be enjoying the conversation.

“No,” I said. “They didn’t. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried,” she said. She drew up to her full five-foot-nothing. “I’m pissed. On your behalf.”

“Lydia,” I said loudly, because loudness is the only thing that gets her attention. “I’m fine. Go sit down. Leave it alone.”

“But I—”

“I want to sit here,” I said, and the whole class fell silent and stared at me. I figured, what the hell, and added, “Next to Megan.”

Lydia sputtered and sniffed and plunked down in her own seat.

I turned to Megan and rolled my eyes.

“Sit with me at lunch?” she asked.

This time I nodded right away, not stopping to look around and worry about who was watching or what they were thinking.

And as class progressed, I found myself actually looking forward to lunch. Not just because it was something new, but because I felt a connection with Megan. More than all the haunted house stuff. More than my crushing sadness over the circumstances of her mother’s death, and the circumstances of her discovering those circumstances.

No, it was something like the old Beth feeling. A kindred spirit kind of thing.

As the bell rang, Megan stood up with her bag slung over her shoulder and waited for me to gather my things.

We made our way down the hall side by side, and I felt like some old rusty door was opening up inside of me, releasing something that had been bottled up for years.

She chewed silently, looking blankly ahead. I swallowed the last bite of my rice pilaf and reached down to my pocket for the heart charm.

“So…I realized,” I said, hesitating. “Yesterday? At your house? When I said I had the same kind of necklace as you…”

I set it gently on the table.

“It’s the other half of yours, isn’t it?”

She reached into her collar and pulled the chain out. Hers had the letters RA and GAN.

SHARA. MEGAN.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Do you…want this one too?”

She stared at it for a long minute, then shook her head. “Nah. You keep it.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” she said, swirling her bottled water. “How’s your sister?” “Weird.”

“Did she hurt you again?”

“No, she’s really busy…making these lists of names. It’s kind of obsessive.”

Megan frowned.

“I’m sort of hoping she’ll get bored of it and, like, stop. I mean, bossing people around is fun, but clerical work isn’t that cool.”

“That’d be good,” Megan said.

We ate in comfortable silence.

When the bell rang, signaling the end of lunch, Megan reached into her bag and pulled out a paperback book with a purple cover. The title was Things That Go Bump in the Night.

“Take this. It might help,” she said.

I took the book and made a move to lift the necklace off the table.

“Look,” Megan said, pointing at it with a carrot stick. “It says SHAME.” SHA, ME. Shame.

“I never thought of it that way,” I said, scooping it back into my pocket.

“Funny,” Megan said, not smiling. “That’s what the whole damn thing is. A shame.”

After the final bell rang, I went to my locker.

Carter was waiting for me. “I’ll drive you home?” he asked.

I nodded and followed him out to his car. I made a conscious effort not to notice the curious stares in our direction, but that made me notice them that much more.

“You all right?” Carter asked as we pulled out of the lot.

I nodded again, looking out the window at the throngs of kids happy to be done with their school day.

“If you need to talk about anything, I’m here,” he said, his voice gentle. “I felt so bad yesterday. I can tell there’s something going on.”

No. He was just too nice. I could not let my horrible life leak inky black misery all over what he’d managed to rebuild for himself.

I never thought I would say this, but Pepper was so right.

“Carter,” I said, before I could stop myself, “I can’t go to the dance with you.”

“What? Why?” There was a hint of nervous laughter in his voice, and he shot me a bewildered half-smile as he reached forward to turn off the radio.

“I just…can’t,” I said, taken aback by the sudden shock of disappointment I felt.

“You mean you don’t have a reason?” His smile seemed plastered on, like this was just one more amusing example of Alexis’s bad-girl antics.

“I do have a reason,” I said. “I just…you wouldn’t understand.”

He laughed. “Try me. Listen, I don’t care. We can skip the dance. We can do whatever.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not about the dance. We can’t do anything.”

“Alexis…?” His voice trailed off, and the smile faded from his lips.

“You should take Pepper,” I said.

He gave a confused snort. “Why would I take Pepper?”

“She really likes you.”

“Alexis…I don’t want to go to the dance with Pepper Laird—I want to go with you.”

Oh, this sucked. This was so hard. Every fiber of my being wanted to change my mind, apologize, say whatever needed to be said to get Carter to forgive me.

“Well…“I tried to force myself to sound nonchalant. “You can’t.”

He pulled into my driveway and braked a little too abruptly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not you.”

I unhooked my seat belt, and he reached over and put his fingers on my forearm. His touch sent shivers through my body, but I shrugged his hand away. “I have to go.” I got out of the car and closed the door.

He rolled down the window. “There’s something you aren’t telling me.”

“I’m sorry, Carter,” I said. “Please just go.”

Reluctantly, he rolled up the window and drove off.

I trudged up the walk, feeling as if there were a dark veil hanging over me that would never go away. I was trying to sort out the storm of thoughts about what had just happened—I’m a horrible person; I’ve hurt him; he didn’t deserve that….

But better now than later…

It wasn’t until I looked up and realized I was halfway up the stairs that I paused to wonder if Kasey was home.

But the house was empty, and wherever she’d gone, she’d taken all of her research materials with her, so I had nothing to snoop into. Instead, I sat on my bed with Megan’s book and the one I’d stolen from the library in front of me.

Megan’s book looked like it was written for middle school kids, maybe even younger than that. The cover art was a cartoony picture of a ghost. I looked inside the front cover and saw, in Megan’s precise handwriting: Megan Wiley, 1026 Primrose Ave., July 2004.

I skimmed over the first few chapters, which just gave definitions of different types of paranormal activity—ghosts versus demons versus poltergeists.

Frankly, I didn’t care what we had. I just wanted to make it go away.

Chapter four, “Haunted Houses,” explained that spirits often take on the emotions they felt as they died. So a person who died under stress or in pain would be more active and violent than one who died in his or her sleep. And the spirit could lie dormant for years before choosing to wake up and raise havoc, often on or near a significant date.

The day Shara died: October 15.

The day Kasey was supposed to make her decision: October 15.

Perfect.

I looked around the room again and felt the horror of what had happened in the house sink down like a weight on my shoulders. A woman had died. Died horribly.

And she was still here.

Something had awakened her. I remembered the story—my casual mention of Megan. Was that all it took? Did I remind the sleeping ghost of her murderous past? Did I wake her up and somehow instill a need to finish what she started?

The end of chapter four said that in most cases, avenging or solving a mystery or murder would cause the ghosts to move on. But there was no crime to solve– Megan escaped. Shara died. Not the kind of case that takes a lot of detective work.

I set that book down and picked up Walter Sawamura’s, the one from the library. This one was definitely intended for adults. I glanced over the chapter names: “Identifying a Spirit”; “Symptoms of Hostility”; “Seeking Professional Help”; “Practical Concerns of Living with Spirits”; “Anchor Objects: The Ties that Bind.” I stopped at that one. I’d never heard of an anchor object. I turned to that chapter and began to read.

According to Mr. Sawamura, some ghosts and spirits find themselves attached to a physical object. The object is kind of like an anchor holding a boat in place—the boat can drift, but it can’t go too far from the anchor. Often, all their power is tied to this object, making it a “power center.” The power center is a strong supernatural force in and of itself, but by destroying it, you could free the spirit and force it to pass along to another plane, wherever it would have gone if it hadn’t been trapped.

Was the necklace Shara’s power center? Was it evil?

Of all the possibilities I’d considered, I hadn’t even thought of that.

I mean, from the very beginning, the first night in the house, I believed it was on my side. Protecting me. Comforting me.

How could something that made a person feel so safe be so bad?

And Megan—she wore hers all day, every day, and nothing had happened to her. It didn’t make sense.

My T-shirt and sweater were no match for the wind. Cool air sliced right through them and covered my skin in goose bumps.

I rang the doorbell again, and took a step backward off the stoop.

Mary wasn’t home.

I went back home and stood in the kitchen like a watchdog, looking out the front window. A half hour later, Mary pulled into her driveway. I ran to catch her as she went inside.

“Hello, Alexis,” she said, shooting me a weary glance.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to ask any more about my house.”

“Oh good,” she sighed. “Well, come in, come in; you’ll freeze out here.”

The living room was about four, hundred degrees. I took off my sweater and draped it over a chair as Mary tightened a knitted shawl over her shoulders.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“I just need your help for a school project,” I said. “You’ve lived in Surrey your whole life, haven’t you?”

She smiled and nodded. “Born and raised.”

“Good,” I said, unfolding the print of Kasey’s lists. I chose one at random. “So do you know the…Pittman family?”

“Oh, the Pittmans,” she said, nodding slowly. “That was old Mr. Pittman with the butcher shop. Of course, he was long dead even when I was a girl, but the shop was around until the 1960s.”

“Um,” I said, studying the names, “and who was Cora Pittman…Billings?”

“Mrs. Billings. That’s right, she was a Pittman, wasn’t she? She was a bit of a tragic figure. Her husband was killed in an automobile accident when I was very young. And it was quite sad, because she’d had a daughter who died of cancer. But there was another daughter, Jessie Billings, who married Phillip Martin, the lawyer. Their daughter Rosemary was in my class at school.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked, a little in awe. She was like an encyclopedia.

“Well,” Mary said. “Think about your friends; you know all about their families, don’t you?”

Um, not quite. I shook my head.

“Oh,” Mary said. She shifted self-consciously. “I mean, goodness, Alexis, we didn’t have television back then. We just went around and visited. It was what we did for fun.” She laughed. “I can’t tell you what I ate for dinner last night, but I know the names of all the men who were in the chamber of commerce with my father.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Who are your people?”

“Let’s see,” she said, scratching her forehead and rocking absently in her chair. “My mother was a Schmidt. My father was a Ridge—”

“Ridge?” I interrupted. That was familiar. I searched the list of names. “John Ridge?”

“Why no, he was Benedict Ridge. John Ridge was his brother.”

“And Ivy Coleman was his mother?”

She looked surprised. “Yes—how do you know that?”

“Are you related to the librarian?”

“Delores Oliver?” She rocked a little faster. “Good heavens, Alexis, what do you have there? Yes, we’re cousins, but we never spoke. Her father didn’t like the family. He was very religious and she didn’t approve of my grandfather’s fondness for whiskey….I suppose it’s silly that I don’t just go say hello to her.”

My head was spinning.

“I have a picture of my grandmother,” Mary said. “Would you like to see it?”

“Sure,” I said absently, thinking I’d gotten all I was going to get out of Mary.

She shuffled away and shuffled back a minute later with an ancient black-and-white photo in her hands. It was so old the white parts had a silvery cast to them. She handed it gently to me.

“See? Second from the left,” she said.

The photo was a group of young girls lined up in their Sunday best and staring at the camera with solemn faces.

I flipped the photo over and saw a list of names:

Mildred Shore

Ivy Coleman

Patience O’Neil

Molly Saint

Cora Pittman

Mercy Bambridge

Ann Patrick

Lucy Schimidt

“Patience O’Neil,” Mary said, lowering herself back into her chair. “She became a Michaelson. That’s your mother’s family.”

“Wow,” I said. “This is amazing.”

“Why don’t you keep it?” she offered.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

“What use do I have for it?” Mary asked, waving dismissively. “It’s a piece of your family history. You should know where you come from.”

I looked at her face, creased and lined with age. Her eye shadow had been applied with too heavy a hand; the color on her lips was two shades too bright. She looked lonely and worn out and old.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks a lot. It’s really cool.”

She smiled, pleased.

“I’d better get going,” I said. “But you’ve been really helpful.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “Now, you don’t have to be a stranger. I know you have your MTV and your e-mail Web sites, but if you ever have a little time, come by and say hello.”

“I will,” I said. “I promise.”

She made a move to stand.

“No, stay,” I said. “I can let myself out.”

I closed the door carefully behind me and started down the sidewalk, then stopped short.

Kasey was coming across the street, carrying a tray with a little pitcher and a box of cookies.

When she saw me, she raised her eyebrows but kept walking.

“What are you doing?” I asked, grabbing her by the elbow.

She jerked away. “Being neighborly.” “Listen to me, Kasey,” I said. “I need to talk to you about your friend.”

“Why?” she asked, her lip twisting into a sneer. “Does Megan want to ask her some questions?”

“Stop it,” I said. “Leave Megan out of this.”

She stared at me intently for a long few seconds.

“Megan is on my list,” she said, looking me up and down. “And so are you.”

“What is your list?” I asked. “I don’t understand what you’re doing.”

“You are not meant to understand,” she replied.

Her gaze fell on me like a heavy coat weighing me down. I felt as if my feet were rooted to the ground. She turned and walked up to Mary’s door, ringing the doorbell in quick bursts.

I couldn’t even move.

But as she disappeared inside, the leaden feeling dissolved, and I dashed home and into the kitchen. I looked in the trash and found an empty packet of lemonade mix.

My heart stopped pounding quite so hard. Maybe Kasey was just going to do what I’d done—ask Mary about the names.

I went to the sink to get a glass of water, and that’s when I noticed the grains on the counter. For a second I thought they were sugar crystals, but then I flipped the light on to see that they had the faintest cloudy green tint.

I opened the cabinet under the sink.

The first thing I saw was a box of ant poison sitting slightly askew.

I poured a little into the sink.

Tiny green grains, no bigger than sand.

I didn’t bother to close the front door behind me. I tore back to Mary’s house, pounded on the door, and pulled it open without being invited. I heard Mary exclaim from the living room and found my sister pouring the second of two glasses of lemonade.

“Kasey,” I said. “Stop.”

“She’s not causing any trouble,” Mary said. “It’s really all right.”

Kasey looked at me. “You heard Mary,” she said. “I’m not causing any trouble.”

She stared straight into my eyes, but her glare didn’t seem to lock on to me the way it had outside. I didn’t get the same heavy, captive feeling.

“Go home,” I said.

Neither of us spoke. After a long few seconds, Mary cleared her throat and stood up. “Alexis, dear, I’m so glad you came back…You forgot your sweater.”

She hung it over my arm and then retreated, sensing that her gesture hadn’t eased the tension.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” I said. “My sister has to go home.”

Kasey cocked her head.

I took a step forward.

And Kasey took a step back.

…Huh.

“Go,” I said. “Now.”

Kasey took another step backward, then turned to Mary and glowered as intensely as a lion watching its prey.

I began to move closer, and Kasey took off at a full run, down the hall and out into the night.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Mary, trying to sound casual, dumping the lemonade back into the pitcher and setting everything on the tray. “She’s just way behind in her schoolwork and our parents will get really mad if she doesn’t…”

Mary was watching me, wide-eyed.

“Mary,” I said, turning to face her. “Do me a favor? Promise me you won’t let Kasey back in tonight. Or tomorrow. Not until I tell you it’s safe. No matter what she says.”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She pulled her shawl a little snugger over her shoulders and shuffled toward a window. She checked the lock, and then shuffled to the next window and checked that lock.

“Um…are you okay?” I asked.

She faced me, and I noticed a shudder in her hands and a faint quiver in her voice. “Alexis,” she said, “the last time someone looked at me like that was…” My whole body went stiff with fear. “Nineteen ninety-six,” she whispered.