Текст книги "Bad Girls Don't Die"

Автор книги: Katie Alender

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

7

I went into my room and sat down on the bed, facing the door. I was restless. Part of me wanted to let my sister cry it out. I can’t be Mother Teresa all the time, you know? She didn’t want my help. Fine. Let her work through her issues on her own.

Right. So I wouldn’t look for her.

I sat in silence for a minute.

Okay. I grabbed my camera. Here was the plan—I would go out and take a few pictures, and if I happened to find Kasey, I might talk to her, depending on how I felt at the time.

I slipped the camera strap around my neck and headed out into the hallway, making a lot of noise so she would know where I was.

The dining room was empty.

“Kasey?” I called quietly, stepping into the dark living room. No answer.

I went back to check the kitchen—maybe she was sitting on the floor in the corner, eating ice cream out of the carton (it’s been known to happen).

Nope. I opened the garage door. “Kase?”

I heard a thump below my feet.

The basement.

I’m no fraidy cat, mind you. I’m very open-minded about snakes, clowns, airplanes, and many other things that scare the bejeezus out of most people.

But I don’t like the basement.

In fact, Mom doesn’t like it either. It’s the one thing we agree on. Going down there is highly discouraged on the basis of Mom’s having found a nest of black widows two years earlier. The spiders were long gone, and the exterminators, who dutifully show up the third Thursday of every month, claim that they’ve never been back, but it’s still off limits. I can’t say I blame Mom. Knowing my luck, I’d find the one black widow strong enough to resist the chemicals. And I’d find it with my bare foot.

The basement door is right down the hall from the kitchen. I stood outside it for a long minute, staring at the doorknob. I really—and I mean really —had no desire to open it and go down those stairs.

But if that’s where Kasey was…

I turned the knob and pushed the door open, waiting for an enormous, hairy arachnid to swing down and jump onto my face. Didn’t happen. Maybe they’d all jumped onto Kasey, and the path was clear for me.

I took a step down, flipping the light on and closing the door behind me. There was a single lightbulb glowing pathetically over the stairs, and everything beyond that melted into a smudgy blackness, punctuated by shapes caught in the faint moonlight streaming through one tiny window.

The air was stale and stuffy. It made my head ache the same way a really humid day does. But I didn’t see any spiderwebs in my path, so I kept going.

“Kasey?” I whispered. My voice sounded hoarse.

No answer.

The room was shaped like a U, with a center wall dividing the two sides.

I thought I heard something on the other side of the wall.

“Kasey, are you down here?”

Still no answer, but this time I heard a definite sound. I went around the U—as far as I could go and still be standing in a patch of light.

I’m not afraid of the dark, but I wouldn’t say I love it. I was tempted to turn back. Even if my sister was down here, she clearly wasn’t interested in company.

Besides, who’s to say the noise was Kasey at all? It was probably gophers. Or huge rabid sewer rats.

I was a nanosecond away from making tracks back upstairs when I heard a muffled sniffle.

Even huge rabid sewer rats don’t sniffle to attract their prey.

“Kasey,” I said, trying to sound no-nonsense. “Where are you?”

“Down here,” she said. “Down where?” “Under the card table.” Naturally.

“I have a flashlight,” she said, and a weak yellow spot of light illuminated the cement floor ahead of me. I followed its path to the corner. Then Kasey shined the beam on her own face, which was puffy and wet with tears.

“Come on, Kase,” I said. “Come back upstairs.”

She shook her head furiously. “No,” she said. “I’m never going back up there.”

“Never?”

Her head bobbed in the darkness.

“Where are you going to go to the bathroom?”

She sighed. “I mean it, Lexi.”

“So do I!”

“I’ll use the guest bathroom.”

“That’s upstairs.” I reached over and took the flashlight from her, shining it around the room. “Maybe there’s a bucket around somewhere.”

She sighed a sigh that was way too big for someone who hasn’t even started high school yet.

I decided to give her a second to be alone with her thoughts, so I shined the flashlight around, looking for spiders. Just because we’d made it that far without being bitten didn’t mean they weren’t planning their attack strategy. I kept my eyes out for the shiny, blueberry-like body of a black widow.

I didn’t find one. I didn’t see any bugs at all.

I did find shelf after shelf of everyday items that should have been thrown away long ago. Mom will save anything. She’d even saved the boxes of other people’s rubbish that were in the house when we moved here. Dad and I are much neater, but we know better than to try to toss any of Mom’s precious garbage—excuse me, stuff.

“Lexi,” Kasey whispered, “will you tell me a story?”

A story.

My thirteen-year-old sister wanted to hear a story. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. I didn’t know what to say.

She sensed my hesitation. “My brain is stuck. I need to change the channel.”

Her hand grabbed my arm. “Please,” she whispered.

“A story,” I repeated, hoping she would pick up from my tone of voice that it was a kind of a strange request. “Stories are for…little kids.”

“I don’t care. A short one. About anything.”

“Um…there’s a girl who lives on a farm in black-and-white, and then one day her house gets caught in a tornado and she wakes up surrounded by midgets and everything is in color.”

“I’ve heard that one,” she said. Her voice sounded tired and strained. “And you’re not supposed to say midget. It’s mean.”

“Oh, Kasey…”

She started to cry again. “Please, Lexi, please.”

Kasey had been normal once, had done normal kid things. She’d been bold and funny and stood up for herself. And now she was just…coming apart at the seams. Sitting under a card table in the basement. Talking to her dolls. Making a request a six-year-old would make.

Maybe I was an enabler. Instead of coddling her, I should tell her to make more friends at school, to do her own homework or take a failing grade. Not stand up for her anymore.

And definitely, one hundred percent, not tell her a story.

“Once upon a time,” I began, surprising both of us, “there was a man and a woman who lived in a little shack in the country next to a river.”

My voice was hard and shaky. I took a deep breath.

Kasey was silent. Afraid to say anything, probably, in case it would make me stop.

But I didn’t want to stop. I felt more of the story welling up inside of me, like a breath that needed to be exhaled. “They were young and poor—so poor that, like, some nights they didn’t have enough food to eat, but they loved each other so much that they didn’t even notice.”

Kasey drew in a quivering breath. I shined the flashlight around, making squares of light as I spoke. I moved the beam so fast that sharp glowing lines seemed to burn themselves into my brain.

“But the man worked really hard, and before long, they were doing well enough to build themselves a house.” I stared at the basement ceiling—wood rafters, some that looked a hundred years old and some newer ones, and crisscrossing rows of metal pipes. “So he built the biggest house in the whole county, big enough to show their neighbors how rich they were. They had a huge oak tree in the front yard and they built a swing on it, and on nice nights they would sit outside and swing together, and when it was cold they lit a fire and stayed inside.”

I could see it so clearly in my head; it was our house and our oak tree. And I could see the man and the woman, in their old-fashioned clothes, walking around, coming in through the front door, sitting in the back room with a fire in the fireplace.

“How did they meet?” Kasey asked.

“They met…” My eyes trailed the line of a thin pipe snaking around the edge of the room. “They met in college.”

“How long ago is this supposed to be?” Kasey said. “Ladies in fairy tales don’t go to college.”

“This one did,” I said. “They met in class and they fell in love.”

He was sitting at the desk closest to the door when she walked into the classroom. She was all alone. After class he waited and spoke to her. He asked if she knew where the Remington Building was, and she did, because her father—

“Ummm…Lexi?”

I blinked. How long had I been lost in thought? And…more important, where was this coming from? I’d never so much as daydreamed any of this before, but as the words formed themselves, it felt like I was telling Kasey the plot of a movie I’d watched earlier that day. The details…everything was right there. I just knew all of it.

“They got married…?” she prompted.

The words pushed out of my mouth before I had a chance to think. “So after they’d been married a while and built their house, they had a baby girl. And the mom stayed home to raise her, and the dad worked but spent all his free time playing with her and teaching her about animals and music. And the other kids in the neighborhood were always around—”

“You said they were way out in the country,” Kasey said, almost reluctantly.

“But the kids in town liked the daughter so much they walked miles just to be with her. And she made tons of friends and was everybody’s favorite person to hang out with. She was like a little angel. She wore fancy dresses with bows and lace, and she had blond hair and a round face with cheeks that turned pink when she went out in the cold.”

I could see the girl in my head as clearly as if I were looking at a photo of her. She ran down the upstairs hallway and into what was now Kasey’s room, three little friends running after her. She loved to sit at the window and look out at the lane that led to town, waiting for her father to come home.

“What were their names?”

“Who?” Her question jolted the image out of my mind. The basement seemed to be getting warmer, and what had been the faint beginning of a headache was starting to pound.

“The man and woman.”

“Well, her name was…” I gazed around the room, then it came to me. “Her name was Victoria. And the man’s name was…Robert.”

“And they all had beautiful exotic green eyes,” Kasey said.

“Why does that matter?” I asked.

“Because I like green eyes, and they’re running out. Soon all that will be left is brown eyes and blue ones.”

“There’s nothing wrong with brown eyes,” I said. “Or blue ones like…ours.” But the eyes that popped into my head were Carter’s.

“I know,” Kasey sighed. “But still.”

In my head I saw the little girl dancing down the upstairs hallway. She stopped and turned to look at me.

She did have green eyes.

I didn’t want to admit that Kasey was right. “So…where was I?”

“All the girls from town came out to play with me.”

That word– me —swooped in at me, made me catch my breath.

I looked at her. “I never said the girl was you.” “Who else could it be?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking up at the pipes again. Every time I looked, there seemed to be a new one winding around the room. “It wasn’t you, though.”

But as the picture of the girl faded back into my head, I could see a slight resemblance: the girl had the same soft caramel-color hair as Kasey, and the same sweet, soft eyes—although the girl’s were green, and Kasey’s were blue.

“It’s my story,” she said.

“Yeah, but it isn’t you,” I said.

“How do you know?”

Because I can see her when I close my eyes, that’s how I know. “I just know, okay?”

“I want it to be me,” Kasey said. She clenched her teeth, making her jawbone jut out near her ears. “You don’t have to be a jerk about it.”

I started to stand up.

“Forget it,” she said. “Forget it. It’s not me, okay?”

“All right.” I took a deep breath. “So anyway, when she turned ten years old, the little girl got a beautiful doll for her birthday.”

Kasey fell silent.

One pipe above our heads was covered in small red painted marks, a sloppy job. I couldn’t even tell what the marks were supposed to be.

“And when she took it to school, all the other kids got jealous because they didn’t have anything nice like that. But she loved her doll so much that she talked about it all the time. And eventually she started taking it everywhere, and acting like the doll was talking back to her. And the other kids were so freaked out that they stopped coming to see her. Gradually it got worse and worse.

They were mean to her at school and called her names and stuff.”

The red-painted pipe was so old the surface was flaky, and the end I could see was open, not connected to anything. The other end…I followed the pipe with my eyes. It led deeper into the room, back toward the darkest corner.

She came home from school one day, gray and pale, and said she didn’t want to go back. Her mother asked why, but the girl refused to tell. She was ashamed to say that the children in town were making fun of the whole family now—saying the mother was unfeminine for going to college, saying that they were vulgar show-offs for building such a big house for just three people.

“And the kids just got more and more suspicious,” I said. “Pretty soon they started telling everyone in town that the little girl was crazy. That she thought her doll was alive.”

The doll was her only friend. She sat in her bedroom staring at it, wishing it would wake up and speak to her.

“So one day when she wandered too near the school, all the town kids started teasing her. She ran away, but they chased her and grabbed her doll, and one of the girls took a pair of scissors and cut her hair off.”

“The girl?”

“No, the doll.”

Kasey breathed in sharply. A vicious doll-haircutting was probably the worst fate she could imagine.

“So she tried to stay away from them, and she never took her doll with her anywhere. But the next time they saw her, they chased her home, and she was so scared that she climbed up the oak tree to get away from them.”

“Wasn’t her mom home?”

“No,” I said.

“What happened?”

“The kids saw her in the tree—”

It was like the words were being planted in my brain all by themselves.

I could see it unfolding in my head—the girl climbing the tree, a pack of dusty, rowdy children shouting up at her, making fun of her, telling her she was going to tear her fancy dress.

“And they started…yelling…”

I forced myself to stop.

These were words Kasey didn’t need to hear. It would just increase the crazy quotient in our house, which, frankly, didn’t need any boosting.

I tore my eyes away from the pipes and spread my fingers flat on the ground. “Then the girl’s mother came home, saw all the rude kids, and scared them away. But first she scared one of them so badly that she peed her pants and none of the other kids ever talked to her again.”

It was a lie. Saying it made my throat hurt.

“Nice,” Kasey said.

The knotted feeling in my chest grew looser.

“Yeah, well, that was…was the evil Megan Wiley,” I said. The air in the basement was getting easier to breathe. As I went further from the story in my head, the words came out more smoothly. “And the girl came down, and she and her mom had tea, and it was cool. She went back to school and she was the most popular kid in her grade, because her mom made the evil Megan Wiley pee in her pants in front of everybody.”

“And?”

“And what?” I stared into the corner, where all the pipes seemed to end. “And then…?”

I was done. My whole body was sore and tired, and I rook that as a really good reason to get up and get ready for bed.

“And then nothing. She had all the bad town kids thrown in jail.” I sighed. “Happily ever after. The end.” “Wait, Lexi…” “What?”

“What about the doll?”

“Forget about the doll,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs, okay?”

Kasey’s bright eyes still drilled into me. In the darkness they looked strangely blank.

I stared at her for a second, and the doll from my dream came out of my memory: Your sister is crazy.

She took a deep breath. “What?” she asked, even though I hadn’t said anything.

“Forget it,” I said. “Come on. I’ll go first, make sure the coast is clear.”

No point in both of us getting in trouble.

Kasey waited at the bottom of the stairs. I opened the basement door and crept out into the hall.

All clear.

I opened the door slightly. “It’s fine, come up.”

Then I went to the kitchen, so if Mom came downstairs, we’d look innocent.

I got myself a glass of water, sat at the table, and slowly sipped it.

Five minutes later I noticed with a start that the glass was empty and Kasey still hadn’t appeared.

I went back to the basement door and opened it.

“Kase?” I asked.

No answer, just a rustling sound from the corner.

I took a slow step down, the blood in my veins suddenly electrified.

I went around the U with little chills running up my spine. A Kasey-size shadow was way back in the darkest corner of the room, near the long-abandoned tool bench, making clanking noises as it dug through piles of discarded junk. Werewolf, my brain said. Zombie! I snatched the flashlight off the card table and switched it on.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

My sister looked up at me, squinting into the beam of light. “Oh, hi.”

“Answer me,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I heard something,” she said, wiping her hands on her pants. “And then I…I thought I would see if I could find your ancestor report.”

“Why would it be down here?”

She shook her head. “I thought you moved your old file cabinet down here when you got the new one.”

“No. They’re both in my closet,” I said. “Now come upstairs.”

She started slowly through the sea of junk, using her left hand to steady herself.

“Are you holding something?” I asked. “What?” she said. “In your right hand.” “No.”

“Are you…” I sighed. “Forget it. I’m going upstairs.”

The headachy, sleepy feeling was coming back. I wondered if maybe we had a toxic mold problem. As an afterthought I pointed the light at the pipes on the ceiling. Now that I was standing up, I was close enough to see the red marks for what they really were—

Skulls and crossbones. Dozens of them, stamped on sloppily.

Nice. So glad to know we’d been breathing poison air all night.

I climbed the stairs and went back to my spot at the kitchen table, drawing deep breaths to clear out my lungs.

Kasey followed me as far as the kitchen doorway. “Can you go get your ancestor report?” she asked.

“Why don’t you go get it?” I asked. “Look in the cabinet on the left, top drawer—eighth-grade history, Miss Cardillo.”

Kasey nodded, then looked sheepish. “Will you make me mac and cheese?” she asked sweetly, crinkling her nose. “Pleeeease? I’ll do the dishes.”

I shrugged. I was feeling a little better. “Sure.”

She took a second, concentrating on something down to her right side, something hidden by the wall so I couldn’t see it.

“What is that?” I demanded.

She froze and looked up. Caught.

“What’s what?”

“Whatever’s in your hand.”

“I don’t have anything in my hand, Lexi,” she said.

I stared at her, and she gazed serenely back at me. Just to be a little mean, I clicked the flashlight on and shined it at her face.

And maybe I was just tired or something, but– Her eyes…They were green. Vivid green.

“I…” I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Never mind.”

“See you in a sec,” she said, disappearing up the stairs.

8

A FEW MINUTES LATER Kasey came hippity-hopping into the kitchen with the report in hand, singing to herself. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and sat down.

She twirled a piece of her hair around a finger and flipped through the pages while I collected the dirty dinner dishes and put them in the dishwasher.

Somebody had to clean up. Mom would be content leaving them until the weekend. Dad might have done it when he got home, but it gave me something to do while Kasey read over my stuff and decided how much she could risk copying without getting caught.

“Mom’s grandma was born in Surrey?” Kasey asked.

“Is that what it says?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Then…yes.”

“Ooh,” she said, unfolding a big sheet of newsprint. “Your family tree is pretty.”

I glanced at it and remembered how the teacher was so impressed that she hung it on the wall. That was back when teachers still liked me.

“I’d better make a new one,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table and skipping toward the stairs.

Content with the clean kitchen, I took out a saucepan and filled it with water for the noodles. I set it on the stove and remembered that I hadn’t wiped off the table.

I went back to the dining room with a dishrag, and when I looked out into the hallway I saw that the basement door was open, just a crack.

Kasey must not have latched it all the way.

I started toward it.

As I approached, the door slowly opened a few more inches.

“Kasey?” I asked. Maybe she was messing with me. I’d heard her thump up the stairs, but she could have sneaked back down.

In theory.

I could hardly force myself to take another halting half step.

A cool puff of air seemed to move across my legs, and a faint, bitter smell drifted into my nose.

“Kasey,” I said in my best jokey voice, “present yourself.”

“I’m right here.”

I spun around to see Kasey looking at me from the kitchen doorway.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I turned back to look at the basement door—

It was closed.

“…Nothing,” I said. “I guess.” “Come help me,” she said.

I went back to the kitchen table and sat down. She’d brought a shoe box full of pens and markers and a giant piece of poster board. One nice thing about a mom who works in the office supply industry, you always have plenty of art supplies on hand.

“You do the trunk,” she commanded, passing me a brown marker. I obeyed and found that drawing eased the fluttery, nervous feeling in my stomach.

“Sorry about what happened with Mom,” I said.

Kasey shrugged.

“That’s why I’m not ever having kids,” I said. “It sucks to have to pick between your job and your family. Besides, I can live without drooling rug rats hanging off me.”

She didn’t even crack a smile.

“Mimi’s mom stays home, right?” I asked. “And look how horrible Pepper turned out. So it’s just as well.”

Kasey sighed. “I don’t care.”

“So if you don’t hang out with Mimi, who do you eat lunch with now? What about Devon?” I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Devon was best known as the kid who could name every Star Trek episode ever made—including all the spin-offs.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kasey said, looking away.

A thought nagged at me. “Kase,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “That day…did Mimi try to…do something to one of your dolls?”

My sister’s eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Yeah, well, I did. And I’m the big sister. Kasey’s eyes lit up.

“Look, time to put the noodles in,” she said, pointing to the pot on the stove.

The water bubbled enthusiastically in a roiling boil. My hands immediately turned clammy and cold. “Kasey,” I said, “I didn’t turn the burner on yet.” Her face went white. “What’s going on?” I asked.

Kasey stared at the stove, then leaped off the stool and grabbed the pot by its handle. I staggered backward, thinking for a moment that she was going to throw the hot water on me. Instead she poured it in the sink and dropped the pot in too.

She turned and stared at me, but it was as if she wasn’t really looking at me. Like I was a stranger who looked vaguely familiar.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Kasey’s wide eyes got wider.

“Something really weird is happening,” I said.

I thought about the story, the way it poured out of my mouth without permission. About the basement door swinging open. The cloud of cold air in the dining room.

With a start I remembered the lights we’d seen outside the night before.

“What could it be?” I whispered.

Kasey wrinkled her forehead. “Lexi, don’t be mad, but…I think…maybe you’re just tired,” she said.

“No!” The burner! “The water was boiling and I—”

“Lexi,” she said, putting her skinny arm around my shoulder, ” I turned the burner on.”

“But…when? Why didn’t you say something?”

She swallowed. “When you were in the dining room a minute ago.”

“Yeah, but…”

“You need to relax,” she said. “You’re getting yourself all worked up.”

I glanced around the kitchen, which was lit warmly and smelled pleasantly of the spicy beef I’d just thrown away.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

“I know I am,” she said. “Now, sit. Finish the tree.”

I obeyed, feeling too bewildered to protest.

I don’t think I’m a great artist, but Kasey seemed enthralled by the lines I drew. She leaned forward, her chin on her hands, and watched me.

“You’re making me nervous,” I told her.

“Sorry,” she said, slumping back.

I concentrated on the silhouette of the tree trunk, plump and shapely, with gentle curves and little hollows. I drew a stub of a branch that had broken off, and another spot where a fresh layer of bark almost covered a gash in the side of the trunk.

I was vaguely aware of Kasey fidgeting across the table, making a click-click noise, and I could tell she was interested but trying not to show it.

Finally I sat up and looked at my drawing.

Wow.

Click-click.

It was totally different from anything I’d ever drawn. Usually I did well enough to get by in Pictionary– casual but effective line drawings.

There was nothing casual about this tree. It was covered in details. Even the drawing style was somehow different. The lines looked like they’d been drawn by someone else….

Just like the story had been told by someone else. Click-click.

And suddenly I felt sick. Click-click.

I pushed my chair away from the table and looked up at Kasey.

“STOP!” I shouted, scaring both of us.

She paused midclick, and her eyes widened in distress when she realized what she’d been doing—

Opening and shutting the back cover of my camera.

Letting light spill in and expose the negatives.

“I’m sorry!” she squealed as I yanked the camera from her hands and snapped the cover shut. “Lexi, I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t talk to me, Kasey!” I said. “Or I will be forced to murder you!”

I rushed out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

Kasey followed me into the foyer but kept a safe distance away, staring up at me, her mouth an O, her eyes red and streaming tears.

“I can’t believe you!” I called down to her, and then I went into my bedroom and slammed the door.

Mom’s voice came faintly from behind her closed door.

“Girls, stop yelling. I’m trying to work!”

I let out an angry grunt and smacked my pillow.

A few minutes later I heard Kasey trudge by and close her door. I felt kind of bad, but not bad enough to go comfort her.

Let her think about what she’d done.

Alone.