by Rysa Walker
Game ON.
CHAPTER TWO
One
CHASE
Chase Rey sits on his bed with his tattered Transformers blanket pulled tight around him, staring uneasily at the bathroom door across the hall from the bedroom he shares with his older brother.
Something is not right. Something is off.
The bedroom is wrong, for starters. Everything in the room is pale, transparent, almost like it will shatter into dust if Chase moves even the tiniest bit from his spot on the bed. So he tries to remain perfectly still, pulling in shallow breaths to keep from disturbing the air around him.
Ben is wrong, too. Even over the sound of the shower, he can hear his brother’s muffled groans. Chase is certain he should know why Ben is in pain. But he can’t quite put his finger on it, and it feels like he’s missing something important.
The one thing Chase does know for certain is that he can’t just sit here. He has to get dressed. His brother will be out of the shower soon, and they’ll need to get going so Ben can drop him at school.
No. The bus. I take the bus.
That feels right.
It also feels wrong.
The room shimmers around Chase, like a mirage that could vanish at any moment, a bubble that could pop, stranding him in this strange and unforgiving landscape. For the past few days, this is how it’s been when he first wakes up. Nothing seems real. Each time, the uneasiness, the sense of wrongness, has gradually faded away. And so he sits on the edge of the bed, waiting for the world to turn right-side up again.
The shower cuts off, breaking Chase out of his trance. He moves frantically to the dresser and begins yanking clothes out, like he does every morning. That’s true, regardless of whether he’s in the world where Ben drops him off or in the one where he takes the bus. It’s the first thing that’s felt normal since he opened his eyes, and the routine calms him.
It’s Halloween, he thinks. There’s going to be a party at some farm. Ben says he’s taking me trick-or-treating first, although Marybeth probably won’t like that much. She doesn’t like me much. I’m in the way.
Chase is tempted to tell Ben that he’s too old for trick-or-treating. Or, at least, too old for someone to take him. At his age, he should be hitting up the houses with a posse of friends, laughing at the narrow-eyed looks from people who think you’re past the proper age for this activity, even though they don’t quite have the heart to deny you the candy.
But Chase doesn’t have a posse. He doesn’t want to go alone, and he doesn’t have anyone other than Ben. While he could live without the candy, he’s not willing to pass up a chance to get out of the house without a fight. Because his dad—
No. Ralph Rey is not his dad. That’s wrong, too. Not real.
Chase pulls his sweater the rest of the way down just as the door opens. A cloud of steam billows into the hallway and through the bedroom door. Chase watches, horrified, as the steam morphs into ghostly claws that slash through the cold air toward his brother. Then the illusion fades, and it’s just Ben standing there with a towel wrapped around his waist.
But what he sees when Ben turns to shut the door is worse than some imaginary phantom. Ugly red welts—welts that Chase knows from experience will soon turn purple—cover his brother’s back.
“What’s wrong?” Ben rummages through a plastic hamper of clean laundry shoved into the corner next to a busted tennis racket and an old Louisville Slugger.
You, Chase thinks. You’re wrong.
And it isn’t just the marks on Ben’s back. He seems different. Younger, maybe? But this is something else that seems true-but-not-true, like this room and the bus that Chase takes-but-also-doesn’t-take to school.
“Nothing,” Chase says. “What happened to your back?”
“You don’t remember?” Ben puts on his jeans slowly, wincing with the movement, then looks toward Chase, waiting for an answer.
Chase shakes his head. He doesn’t remember, but he feels like he should.
“Then I guess it’s not important.” But his brother’s gray eyes—eyes that look older than his seventeen and a half years—are worried.
When Ben lowers himself gingerly to the side of the bed, Chase starts to ask him if he fell down the trailer steps outside like Aileen—who he can’t quite think of as his mom—did the year before. And then he remembers that Aileen didn’t really fall down the steps. That’s just what she told people.
Your daddy’s a good man. He don’t mean nothin’ by it. It’s just the way he was brought up.
Chase’s stomach clenches, and his brother raises his eyebrows.
“Okay. Out with it. What’s wrong?”
Chase considers telling him nothing again, but he doesn’t like lying. “I don’t know. I just feel…weird.”
“Weird like sick or just weird like you are every day?” Ben grins, and Chase tries to respond in kind. But his face feels frozen, unable to form a smile.
My head feels weird. You look weird. The bedroom is weird. There was a weird ghost hiding in the steam just now, trying to grab you, to gut you with its claws, but you didn’t see it, and that’s weird, too.
Ben presses one hand to Chase’s forehead. “You don’t feel warm. And you know how Mom is. Unless you’ve got a fever, get yourself to school. Plus…” He trails off, looking toward the hallway and the living room beyond, where Ralph Rey is almost certainly sprawled out on the sofa, sleeping off last night’s bottle of Old Crow.
Chase, who definitely doesn’t relish the thought of spending the day with the man, says, “I’m okay. Anyway, it’s Halloween. If I stay home, Mom won’t let me go out tonight.”
“Ah. Priorities.” Ben laughs and then stands up slowly, one hand on his back like an old man. He doesn’t groan again, though. Not with Chase watching.
“Do you think we could do that movie thing tonight?” Chase asks. “The FrightFest or whatever? I’m too old to trick-or-treat, and it sounds like fun.”
“You want scary movies after the dreams you had last night?”
Chase rolls his eyes. “Movies aren’t real. Anyway, you know the ones they show will be baby stuff.”
“So, no costume? No candy?”
Ben looks a little sad when Chase shakes his head, and while it could be because he won’t get his half of the loot, the expression triggers that odd feeling again. The one that tells Chase that something about his brother isn’t right. Not in a dangerous way, or at least Chase doesn’t think so. Just different.
“Fine,” Ben says. “We’ll do the movie instead. But get your ass in gear so we can go. I’m thinking doughnuts this morning. What say you?”
“If we stop for doughnuts, you’ll be late picking up MB.”
Ben reaches for his leather jacket on the back of the door. “Not if you hurry. And anyway, we need doughnuts. Marybeth can wait a few minutes.”
Two
DAISY
Daisy leans against the wall, listening to the piano. She’s trying to muster up the courage to go downstairs when she hears a loud thump from her sister’s room. Something hitting the floor. No. Someone hitting the floor, judging from the stream of curses that follows.
She opens the door to find her sister sprawled on the throw rug next to her bed, her legs tangled in the bedcovers. The room is dark, thanks to the blackout curtains Dani prefers, so Daisy flips on the bedside lamp. Only then does she get a clear look at her sister’s face. Dani is deathly pale, with damp strands of hair pasted to her face. She looks awful. Still pretty, of course—Dani was pretty even when she had the stomach flu the previous summer—but it’s clear that something is wrong.
Dani scrubs her mouth with the back of her hand, like she’s tasted something horrid. Her eyes flash around the room, disoriented, as she unwinds herself from the quilt cocoon.
Daisy reaches a hand down to help her up. “Sick? Or just hungover?”
“That music. Do you hear it?”
Daisy smiles. “Yes! Isn’t it great?”
&nb
sp; “Great? It sounds like something out of a slasher film. That’s probably what gave me the nightmare.”
“I don’t care what it sounds like. Dad’s playing again. Come on!”
Daisy decides not to mention what she’d thought initially when she first heard the music. How she’d thought that if she held the image of her mother at the piano in her head until she was downstairs, then maybe, just maybe, it would be her hands moving across the keys. She knew it wasn’t rational. It was, to use her doctor’s phrase, a lapse into magical thinking, in response to hearing the piano come to life for the first time in two years.
They find Bill Gray in the parlor, already dressed in his suit and tie. A steaming cup of coffee is on top of the piano, next to a stack of music books. He doesn’t notice when they enter. Daisy stops Dani as she reaches out to touch his shoulder, nodding toward the loveseat against the far wall. They sit down to listen, both of them still and silent. The air feels fragile—almost as if one wrong breath would shatter the morning, the music, and maybe even their father.
As delighted as Daisy is that he’s playing, she has to admit her sister is right. This song is a major downer. Before, back in the good days, they often awoke to the sound of the piano. Some mornings it was their mother playing, sometimes their father. Occasionally, it was a duet. Both girls complained from time to time, especially when the song was the ragtime or boogie-woogie stuff their dad favored, but Daisy had secretly loved it. She’s certain that her sister did too, although getting Dani to admit something like that is next to impossible.
When Jenny died, the piano became a piece of furniture that Bill Gray dropped his coat onto at the end of the day. Daisy stopped playing, too. She’s missed it, but somehow it felt wrong to sit down at the keyboard again when her dad still couldn’t.
The song morphs from the minor-key dirge that Dani had complained about into something more cheerful and melodic, and after a few minutes of that, Bill reaches for his coffee. That’s when he catches sight of the girls, and he startles so badly that coffee nearly sloshes onto the top of the piano.
“Holy—” he says, laughing. “Where did the two of you come from?”
“What was that first song?” Dani asks. “I’ve never heard it before.”
Bill shrugs. “I don’t know. Something I dreamed, I guess.”
“Me too,” she mumbles.
“Sorry if I woke you.” He looks down at his watch. “Yikes. Gotta finish packing. And you girls need to get a move on, too.”
He turns back to the keyboard and pounds out the opening riff from Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll,” the song he’d often played to jar them out of bed in the mornings when they were small. Dani groans, but they all smile, and it helps to ease the eerie feeling that permeated the room as he played that first song.
When he’s gone, Dani turns toward her sister. “That was…weird.”
Daisy crosses over to the piano and closes the case over the keys, brushing her fingers across the wood for the first time in ages. “I know. When I first heard the music…” She shrugs but doesn’t finish the thought.
“You thought you’d come down here to find Mom.”
“Yeah. Isn’t that stupid?”
Dani sits down next to her. “Not really. I dreamed about her last night. Then I woke up to…that.”
“What happened in your dream?”
“Don’t remember.”
Daisy cocks an eyebrow at her sister. “You know I can tell when you’re lying, right? Your mouth does that little twitchy thing.”
“Maybe I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Mom always said if you don’t talk about a bad dream, it’ll come back.”
There’s a long pause, and then Dani says, “Okay. Fine. It’s like…I was digging at a gravesite. Mom’s gravesite. Only it was next to a lake. Or maybe a river. I could see the water in the background. Smell it, even.”
Daisy’s heart stops. All she can think about is the mirror in the hallway. Which is weird, because there was no lake in the reflection she’d imagined. Just the room with the reversed sign over the doorway. Every Day…something, something. It’s slipping away, too, almost like a dream.
You could always go look again, says a snide little voice inside her head.
“Anyway,” Dani says, “Mom was there. Alive…sort of. Telling me to keep digging, while she played the piano. While she played the same weird song Dad was playing. It was a different piano, and she was different, too. Like it was her, but also not her. There was this bird, and then the bird was dead, and it was me in the grave. I woke up with the taste of dirt in my mouth.”
“God. No wonder you freaked.”
Bill calls from upstairs. “Get moving, Dani. It’s after seven.”
“Shit,” Dani mutters. “Can I just, like, not go today?”
Daisy snorts. “You say that every morning.”
“I mean it every morning.”
“It’s Halloween. That’s gotta count for something.”
Dani rolls her eyes. “So? I doubt that old bitch Kennedy is bringing candy for all the kiddies today. And if she did, it would be poisoned.”
“Who?” Daisy asks.
“Kennedy. Every day is Halloween for her. I mean, the office used to be a fucking morgue.”
“You mean the principal’s office?”
Dani gives her a look that clearly says duh.
“The morgue was in the basement,” Daisy says. “And why would Julie Kennedy even be at the high school?”
Dani looks utterly confused for a moment. Her face goes blank after that, almost like someone wiped her expression away with an eraser. And then she’s back with yet another eye roll.
“Snyder. Kennedy. Same thing. You know who I mean.”
Daisy’s not at all sure why she would know that, since Snyder and Kennedy don’t sound anything alike. Plus, Dani had said bitch and she. Snyder is a guy. A royal jerk, and definitely male.
“Can’t believe you mixed up Dad’s girlfriend with Principal Snyder,” Daisy says. “Geez, how much did you drink last night? You know that stuff kills brain cells, don’t you?”
The sliding glass door in the kitchen thumps open, causing both girls to startle. They can’t see the door from the stairwell, but it’s instantly clear who it is.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice calls from the other room. “Bill? Dani? Daisy? Anyone home? I brought muffins.”
“Speak of the fucking devil,” Dani whispers. “Do you think she poisoned them?”
Three
BEN
Ben is late, and despite what he told Chase, he’s certain that Marybeth will be livid.
It’s seven thirty, fifteen minutes until the first bell, when he finally turns his rusted-out truck into Marybeth’s driveway. It’s the last house on the left, a two-story cottage with gingerbread-colored trim and a small front porch. He honks twice, expecting Marybeth to storm out immediately, ready to rip his head off. But they can still make it on time if she hustles.
The only movement, though, is a big orange cat that emerges from under the porch, its bushy tail twitching.
Ben’s head is pounding, his mouth is dry, and he’s exhausted. Chase tossed and moaned all night. The kid is prone to nightmares, but this was way beyond his typical bad dreams. He’d even talked in his sleep. Pretty loudly at times, too, but his speech was so slurred and sleep-drugged that Ben hadn’t been able to piece together what was troubling him.
The kid had been strange this morning, too. Ben guessed all twelve-year-olds were strange from time to time, but this was different. He acted like he had no memory of the night before, even though he’d definitely seen the start of the fight. In fact, he’d been about to get whacked hard before Ben stepped in and told him to get the hell out of there.
Ben honks again, even though he has half a mind to reverse the truck and drive right back to Chase’s school. Have a talk with the guidance counselor and make sure everything is okay on that end. But giving the sch
ool a reason to look into their home life seems unwise. It’s a blue-eyed wonder they aren’t poking around already. Best not to draw too much attention, at least not until he’s eighteen and can get them both out of the situation.
He shifts in the driver’s seat, pain shooting down his back and legs. That’s the other reason he hadn’t slept worth a damn, much more so than Chase’s tossing and turning across the small room. No matter how he tried, Ben had never found a comfortable position. It’s hard to doze off when you have to get up and piss a stream of blood every thirty minutes or so.
Hard to sleep when you’re filled with rage, too.
He honks the horn a third time. Where the hell is she? After another minute, Ben groans and pulls himself out of the truck. Football practice is going to be a bitch this afternoon.
He raps on the door three times with his fist. Pauses. Raps three more.
“Babe?” he yells to the closed door. “Hey, MB, open up. You overslept. We’re gonna be late.”
Bam, bam, bam. He bangs the side of his fist against the door.
“Shit, Marybeth. Come on.” Ben presses his face against the cool wooden door for a moment. Then he steps back and peers through the curtain into the dark, still living room. Empty.
She’s either comatose or she took off without him. Walked, maybe, or called one of her friends for a ride.
Ben has no problem imagining the scene ten minutes ago, or whenever it was that she decided she’d waited long enough, damn it. He can see her angry expression, her long blonde hair catching the breeze as she slams the door behind her.
He steps off the porch, ignoring another wave of pain, and shuffles back through the leaves. The orange tabby appears again, seemingly out of nowhere, and jumps onto the railing of the porch like it owns the place. Watching him with its unblinking amber eyes. Was it a stray? Or had MB gotten a cat without bothering to mention it? It’s the kind of thing you’d think she might tell him, since she knows he’s allergic.