The Hollow Inside

by Brooke Lauren Davis

“We could be murdered by then.”

  Neil sighs. “Stuff like that doesn’t happen in Jasper Hollow.”

  “Exactly,” she snaps. “That’s what you always hear about on the news. Sleepy little town, never had a problem before. And then two kids with promising futures and nice smiles turn up dead. I’m telling you, Jasper Hollow is overdue for something.”

  They’re both quiet for a moment. Then she adds, “Don’t you give me that look.”

  He laughs again and adjusts the blanket around my shoulders.

  “I’m serious, Neily.” I can’t see her, but a picture of her is starting to come together in my mind, both hands on her hips, staring Neil down with sharp eyes. “One of these days, trusting every person you meet is going to get you into trouble.”

  -

  Get in, get out. That’s what Mom always told me before I broke into a house. But I’ve been here twenty minutes, and instead of coming up with any ideas, all I can think about is how pissed she must be right now about me getting caught.

  Neil and the girl took their argument to the next room, and their voices are too faded for me to make out now. Once I realize I’m alone, I risk opening my eyes.

  I’m on a dark-gray couch. The walls are cream-colored. The ceiling is high, and wooden beams stretch across it like the house’s rib cage. The second-floor hallway overlooks the living room, the railing polished the same deep brown as the wood floor.

  Neil left the bowl he was eating from earlier on the coffee table, and it’s full of cornflakes that have turned to mush, floating on top of the milk. I sit up to peer down the front hallway, and there are shoes lined up along the wall, all different colors and sizes.

  The house isn’t messy, exactly, but there are magazines and blankets tossed all over and a leaning tower of DVDs on the table. There are black marks on the couch from where people have put their feet up—some of them probably from me. Neil didn’t think to take my boots off.

  It’s nicer than most places I’ve stepped foot in, but I’m still thrown off. I don’t know what I was expecting. The outside is definitely grander than the inside.

  I notice too late that the voices in the other room have gone quiet. When I look up, the girl is standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  Her arms are crossed over her chest, and her eyes are as sharp as I imagined. Sharper. She has the same golden hair as Neil, and it tumbles over her shoulders in thick curls.

  Now I’m certain that this is Melody. The resemblance to her brother is strong, and they look around the same age, like they should—they’re twins.

  Beautiful is almost the right word, but not quite. Beautiful is for soft things, like flowers, and I’ve never seen a flower look so menacing. Her face is hard, her eyebrows narrowed, and her jaw clenched. She might be a sculpture—the kind that makes you reach out and run your thumb over the cheekbone without thinking—if it weren’t for the flush of blood under her skin.

  The way she looks at me makes me want to bare my teeth. But I have to stop myself, because I’m not supposed to scare them. Yet.

  “Should I warm up some stew?” Neil calls from somewhere behind her. He pauses, waiting for his sister’s answer. When she doesn’t give one, he decides, “I’m warming up stew. She might be hungry when she wakes up.” I hear the clang of pots getting moved around in a cupboard.

  Melody’s eyes don’t leave mine. “She’s already awake.”

  Neil appears beside her in the doorway to see for himself, and a big grin breaks over his face as he wraps his arm around his reluctant twin’s shoulders, herding her closer to me.

  “Welcome back,” he says. “Now, please, tell my sister you’re not a murderer.”

  If I really had been passed out and hadn’t heard them talking about me, I would have been jarred by that statement. I’m still a bit jarred anyway.

  I’m about to speak when Melody steps between us and says, “Why were you sneaking around in our yard?”

  I’m still working on an answer for that, so I don’t give her one.

  That’s when she notices the camera where Neil left it on the side table. And her already suspicious expression hardens even more. “What the hell is that?”

  “Mel—” Neil tries to intervene.

  “What the hell is that?” she snaps again. “Were you taking pictures of our house?”

  Neil grabs her by the elbow, trying to calm her down, but she yanks herself away, throwing up her hands. “Neil, in what world is a stranger lurking around our house with a camera not really freaking alarming? The way I see it, she’s either another one of Dad’s crazy superfan stalkers, or she’s trying to snap a few candid photos of us to sell to People magazine. Or she’s just a flat-out creep trying to get pictures of us undressing.” She turns back to me, pointing an accusatory finger. “Neil won’t call the cops on you, but I will. All right? Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Melody—”

  “Well, she’s not speaking up to defend herself. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to a stranger who just threatened her.”

  Melody rolls her eyes to the ceiling, taking a deep breath before she turns back to me and thrusts her hand in my face. “Fine. I’m Melody Bowman. And you are?”

  I hesitate, staring at her hand for a second too long before I think to grab it. I’m almost certain this is the first time in my life anyone has ever shaken my hand.

  Her fingers burn against mine. I don’t know why, but I expected her skin to be cold.

  “Phoenix,” I say.

  “Awesome,” Neil says, clenching his fist like he’s just won a video game. “Melody, you just made your first friend. Are you hungry, Phoenix?”

  He pauses for an answer, and when I don’t give one, he says, “You look hungry. Food will be ready soon.” And he disappears into the kitchen.

  Melody follows, snapping at his back, “I have friends.”

  “If you don’t talk to them after school, they aren’t your friends.”

  “Well, it’s not my fault that Jasper Hollow is full of backward, hillbilly idiots like you.”

  Neil’s deep, rumbling laugh echoes through the kitchen. “Jesus, Mel. What’s with you tonight? Are you still mad about that B minus on your duck sex essay?”

  She sputters for a reply. “Who the hell told you about that?”

  He holds up his hands in defense. “It’s not my fault that you left the evidence in a trash can in my very own house. Or that you used the word phallus four times in one sentence.”

  I can’t see her face, but the clench of her fists is murderous.

  He drops to his knees and grasps her ankles. “I apologize, Great Queen of Jasper Hollow.”

  I wonder if this is how normal brothers and sisters talk to each other.

  “Neil—” she growls.

  “I didn’t mean to question your extended—” He coughs. “Extensive knowledge of the sixteen-inch penis of the Argentine lake duck.”

  And then I see it. There, on the side of her face, while she braces one hand on the doorframe and looks down at her brother—the corner of her mouth lifts into a smile.

  But when she turns back to me, it’s gone.

  “I don’t like this,” she says.

  I can tell she’s about to bark more questions at me that I don’t have any intention of answering when I hear the front door open again.

  I tense.

  A woman’s voice. “Didn’t I ask one of you to vacuum?”

  “Cornelius,” Melody says, kicking Neil’s hands away from her ankles.

  He springs to his feet and goes back to stirring the pot on the stove. “Well, I was kind of busy.”

  “Like you were planning on doing it anyway. I bet you were sitting on that counter watching TV before the girl showed up.” Melody’s eyes go to the bowl he left on the coffee table. “And eating cornflakes!”

  Neil titters from the kitchen. “Good guess.”

  The woman comes into the living room
with a sweep of her long, printed skirt, her arms laden with brown sacks that she can’t see over. She teeters under their weight.

  “Melody,” she commands, and Melody helps her lower them to the floor.

  And then she sees me and responds with a startled, “Oh.”

  “Mom, this is Phoenix,” Neil cuts in. Then he explains how he met me at the bakery this morning, and then I turned up in the woods outside their house a few hours later and passed out.

  I brace for whatever comes next, not sure if she’ll meet me with Neil’s instant, naive acceptance or Melody’s suspicion.

  I sense a little of both as she nods, chewing over my story. But I guess some motherly instinct in her wins out, because she reaches out and does the same thing Neil did before—presses her palm to my forehead.

  “How’s your cheek?” she asks.

  “Fine,” I answer quietly.

  “You don’t feel dizzy at all?”

  I shake my head.

  She sits down beside me on the couch and squeezes my hand. “My name is Jillian Bowman,” she says. “You can call me Jill.”

  “Phoenix,” I say, though Neil already told her my name.

  “Nice to meet you, Phoenix,” she says with a soft smile.

  I know from what Mom has told me that she’s forty-three. Her eyes have all the warmth of Neil’s, but they’re as dark as polished acorns, like Melody’s. Her auburn hair is swept back in a dark-blue bandana printed with an elephant pattern, which somehow gives her a congenial look. Like a cross between a Sunday-school teacher and a hippie.

  She pauses then, indicating now would be a great time for me to fill in all the gaps in my story.

  My brain has been scrambling for the right lie this whole time, and a tenuous explanation has started to come together. But I only want to tell it once.

  So it’s convenient that that’s when the last of the Bowmans decides to walk through the front door.

  He bends to take off his shiny, black shoes and put down his briefcase. He’s in a dark-blue suit that fits him too well. He should be around forty-five years old, but he has the build and moves with the effortless confidence of someone half his age. His golden hair has just started to turn gray at the temples, and it makes him look like someone who knows what he’s talking about. It’s brushed back from his face, but a few strands have shaken free and hang in his eyes.

  Now I can see where Neil got the cleft in his chin, not to mention the blue eyes and those big, pearly teeth.

  The man walks into the living room with a bright smile. But when he sees me on his couch, the smile falters, just a little.

  “Is this one of your friends, Mellie?”

  “No,” she says, in a way that sounds more like hell no.

  Jill goes to him, stepping into his arms for a hug before she looks back over her shoulder at me. “This is Phoenix. And she’ll be keeping us company for the evening, if she’d like.”

  Melody’s opinion of that idea is clear when she knits her eyebrows together and opens her mouth. But it looks like she knows better than to argue with her mother, because she closes it again.

  I nod at Jill.

  Her husband laughs. “Well, I’m all for a little Midwestern hospitality.” Then he holds out his hand for me to shake. And I take it.

  “I’m Ellis Bowman,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Phoenix.”

  I already know his name.

  This is the man who ruined Mom’s life.

  Chapter 9

  I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT Mom was haunted by something, even before she told me what it was.

  At first, she only gave me vague hints into her past, making comments about how we couldn’t trust anyone but each other. And Daddy, I used to say, and she’d respond with a sad smile and an indulgent nod. Until he couldn’t be trusted anymore either, and we were on our own.

  She told me the rest of the story in bits and pieces, flashes of memories that I pieced together over the years until I started to understand why we had to live on the road. Why sometimes the weight of her past sat so heavily on her that she could hardly move or speak under its burden.

  Whenever she talked about what Ellis Bowman did to her, the whites of her eyes glowed an unsettling red. There was heat all over her, burning in her cheeks and flushing her neck and shoulders, glowing hot in her hands as they clutched mine. She was usually so careful to be cold and distant with me and everyone else, but when she talked about him, she was a pot boiling over.

  I listened, and the more she told me, the more I felt that heat rising in my own body, her hurt and her rage becoming my hurt and my rage. And I was eager for it. More, I wanted to say, because in all the years I’d known her, these were the only glimpses she gave me of her heart, in all its raw brokenness. And I finally understood.

  This was the reason she always held herself back from me. At first, I thought it was because there was something wrong with me. That maybe I wasn’t smart or mature or interesting enough to be worth truly caring about. But it wasn’t my fault that Mom couldn’t love me as much as I needed her to.

  It was Ellis Bowman’s fault.

  Until a few months ago, I didn’t know she had plans to return to Jasper Hollow and confront him. For seven years, we focused on surviving.

  Mom had forty dollars in her pocket when we ran away, which we only managed to stretch about two weeks. After that, we resorted to begging. We stopped after the time I asked a stranger for his sandwich and he grabbed my elbow and tried to get me into his car.

  She jumped on his back and bit his ear so hard that her mouth filled with blood, holding on until he slammed her against a brick wall, and she lost her grip. He ran from us, and we ran in the opposite direction, my hand crushed in hers, and hid down an alleyway.

  Most girls want their mothers to have soft skin and pretty singing voices, but I was thankful for mine—her eyes blazing fire, her grip like claws in my shoulders, her teeth stained red with the blood of a man who’d tried to hurt us. Because monsters can’t scare you if the scariest one is on your side.

  That’s the day she told me, “We’re done asking for things.”

  That night was the first time I stole something. I took a box of cereal from a grocery store shelf while Mom distracted employees a few aisles over with a maple syrup spill. There wasn’t a strategy. I just pulled it off the shelf, walked up to the door with it folded against my chest, and then ran like hell. I kept looking back, afraid that a bunch of teenage employees in red vests would be on my tail, but nobody even seemed to notice I’d been there at all.

  We perfected the art of slipping just under everyone’s radar, taking as much as we could shove under our shirts and into our pockets and waistbands. And it was terrifying and empowering at the same time, how invisible I felt in those big, cold, anonymous supermarkets while we stole a month’s worth of food and no one batted an eye.

  Robbing houses was much harder. There were dogs to consider. Security systems with alarms and cameras. Nosy neighbors ready to call the cops. The fear that even though a house looked empty, someone’s grandmother might have been asleep on the couch. But despite the risks, Mom preferred taking things from people’s homes. She said she liked seeing the inside of a stranger’s world. I’ve watched her look around someone’s living room in absolute wonder, like she’d stepped inside their bodies. She liked the way their clothes carried their warmth, their unique scents, the worried edges of their sleeves. She’s always coveted things that feel lived in.

  But just a few months ago, we were running so low on food that we needed to make an emergency stop at a Kmart. The plan was simple—I’d grab what we needed while she hovered nearby and kept watch, ready to distract any employees who wandered too close.

  I was shoving sleeves of peanut butter crackers in my bra when, from the corner of my eye, I saw Mom sit down on the shiny tile floor.

  This was not how we flew under the radar. There was already an employee who had spotted her. In a minute, he was sure to inves
tigate.

  “Mom?” I said, kneeling beside her. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  She was sitting in front of the book section featuring a mix of paperback romances and thrillers and self-help. But one author’s work dominated the shelves, all the books facing out, name featured in embossed letters even bigger than the titles—Ellis Bowman. And right next to the display, there was an obnoxiously large sign that featured one of the covers.

  It depicted a table set for dinner and a man and a woman sitting down with their arms around two toddlers, a boy and a girl with blond hair, the whole family smiling. It was called At Our Table: The Redemptive Power of Family and Food. The advertisement said, Special Anniversary Edition with a new introduction! Over a million copies sold!

  And Mom was holding a copy in her lap, staring down at the pages.

  I knew the book well. Mom already owned one, shoved under the passenger seat in the van.

  It was a memoir about a man who had an unhappy childhood with an abusive father and an alcoholic mother. He managed to escape on a football scholarship, but then his parents died in a drunk-driving accident, and he had to quit school to come back to his hometown and take care of his little brother. He got a job at the local bakery, married his high school sweetheart, and they both worked hard and saved their money until they opened their own restaurant and had two beautiful, perfect children together.

  It might seem like an unremarkable story, but I could understand why it would sell a million copies. It was solid proof of what everyone dreams about—that someone who had faced adversity and been knocked down could pick himself back up. It was a promise that if you kept your head down, followed the rules, and gave it your best, you too could one day own your own business, take care of your family, and take back control of your life.

  I’d seen it in bookstore windows before, on display with other bestsellers. I was sure Mom had seen it all those times too, but maybe she’d just averted her eyes. She clearly wasn’t prepared to stumble upon it here. To find this new edition.

  She was gripping the book so hard now, the soft cover was wrinkling in her shaking hands.

  “Mom,” I said again.