“You know I can’t drive with those things down.”
“What…?”
Ben smiled apologetically. “The sun-flaps. I know it’s silly—it’s just a thing with me.”
Alice blinked. “I know that, but the sun’s—” She pointed out the front windshield. “We’ve been driving straight into it.”
“Your makeup looks fine.”
“Ben, I can’t see.”
He sighed, giving her a glance before turning back to the road. “Look,” he said. “I’d let you borrow my sunglasses, but I’ve got to drive. And I can’t drive with those flaps down.” His fingers drummed the steering wheel. “Close your eyes, if it helps. We’ll be driving through trees soon. That should block the sun.”
Alice shrugged and swung the sunshade up flush with the ceiling. Ben smiled, leaned over, kissed her cheek without taking his eye off his driving. “This is going be fun,” he said. “I think you’re really going to love this place.”
“I’m sure I will.” His sunglasses had crushed against her ear when he kissed her, and she massaged the lobe between her fingertips. Just a thing with me. Well, you put up with a lot of funny things for the people you loved. That’s how Alice saw it. And if she didn’t love Ben Alden now, she had a gut feeling she was well on her way there. Or would be, after the trip was over. If she could work herself up to it.
Riley snorted and tapped Alice’s shoulder, thrusting her phone screen in her face with a giggling “Lookitthis”—and as Alice turned her head to look at the cartoon on the screen, she glimpsed Kaity sitting forward in her seat and glaring with all her might at the back of Ben’s head, as though she could melt through his scalp with her stare. Then she caught Alice’s eye, grinned, shrugged, and went back to her music. Yeah, you put up with a whole lot of things for the people you love, but that’s how you knew you loved them, wasn’t it?
And Alice Gorchuck would do just about anything for Kaity Brecker.
It’d been over a year since the Halloween party, but Alice could still see the ghostly strands of toilet paper dangling from the trees in the frat house’s front lawn, hanging in great parabolas alongside the strings of cheap orange lights, ethereal and almost floating, half-shrouded in thick gray mist belching from the rented fog machine on the brick front porch. Music and flashing lights spilled from the front door, and Alice’s hands were starting to sweat. She’d felt braver than a jungle cat when she had picked out her costume, but bravery is a fine thing when you’re in the costume shop two weeks before the party, not when you’ve got to walk into the lion’s den wearing a corset and fishnet stockings for the first time.
There was a caved-in and rotting jack ‘o lantern squatting next to the fog machine, and whenever the clouds cleared Alice could feel its drooping eyes taking her measure. Her chest felt like a windup toy cranked past its limit—this was long before she’d discovered the soothing sorcery of Ativan, so the only cure for this awful tightness in her midsection was to get back in the car, tear off this ridiculous getup, and make an Alice-blanket-burrito on the couch until this whole stupid holiday blew over. But Kaity had squeezed her shoulders and adjusted her wig and grinned at her through about a pound of mottled-blue Bride of Frankenstein face paint.
“You look badass,” she’d assured her. “You’re a big beautiful badass, Alice Gorchuck.”
“Kaity, I don’t know—”
“You’re going to kick a criminal amount of ass at this party. They’ll call five-oh for sure this time. And throw away the key.”
“Kaity—”
“We’ve sold our souls, Alice. We… Tell me again. Tell me who we sold our souls to.”
Silence as Alice chewed lipstick. Kaity persisted:
“A-L-I-C-E, who’d we sell our souls to?”
Finally a sigh and a slow helpless grin. “We sold our souls to rock ’n roll,” she admitted.
Kaity nodded solemnly, her plastic bolts bobbing. “Bought and paid for,” she intoned. “C’mon, Thing Two—we owe it to ourselves to burn this place to the ground tonight.”
Only then had Alice allowed herself to be led up the drive, through the door, and into the pulsing, bassy maw of the party. And though the fist in her stomach never quite unclenched, Kaity’s hand on her shoulder put honey in her blood. Time seemed to blur, and as Alice slowly drained the plastic cup of dubious punch in her hand, the noise and motion of the evening eventually swirled and melted into a single wave of sensation that lapped against her over and over again—a forceful tide, but never powerful enough that it threatened to bowl her over. And when inevitably red-and-blue lights flashed on the lawn and the cry of COPS began to sound over the music, it was Kaity that propelled her out the back door, over the high wood fence, and led her by the hand out into the maze dark streets beyond, into the night, to safety.
“I have to whizz,” Riley announced brightly.
Ben shrugged and pulled off the highway, coming to a bumpy stop at a gas station with a lot half-covered in loose gravel. “Everybody else go while we’re here,” Ben said. “We can’t stop again after this. If it’s dark by the time we hit the county line, we’ll never find the cabin. No street lights,” he added in an aside to Alice, who was unbuckling and hunting under her seat for her purse.
“Ben used to come up here as a little kid,” Alice said, twisting to face Kaity. “He was telling me the other day. With his family. And their uncle—what was it? Teddie?—would get up in the middle of the night and drive out so he could turn the porch light on for the rest of the family to find. He’d be dog tired the rest of the day, but it was the only way anybody could find the place in the dark without GPS.”
Kaity pulled her headphones off her ears and shook her hair out. “Sounds like a swell guy,” she replied, offering a wan smile.
Ben grunted and swung his door open. “Yeah, well. Uncle Teddie runs a meth lab now, I think,” he announced. “Let’s shake a leg, huh?”
Alice climbed out of the car and stretched and looked around. Though the waystation was just off the highway, it was the only building around seemingly for miles: to the north, the road became a bridge that curved out of view, while to the south was a long straight stretch of two-lane that drew to a point on the horizon. Behind the gas station was an empty gray field that looked as if it had once been farmland, and beyond that a stand of trees visibly swayed. A big cold wind began to slap Alice’s hair around, and she tugged her jacket tighter around her shoulders and fumbled for the zipper.
“Jesus,” Riley was saying as she hot-stepped towards the door. “Where’d this bullshit come from?” Kaity stood and stretched audibly before shuffling inside after her, with Alice and Ben close behind.
The bathrooms were singles. Ben did his business and pushed back into the wind to put gas in the station wagon, while Alice and the other two girls made a line outside their door. Riley emerged first, shaking out her splayed fingers like she was drying her nails. “No hot air,” she mused. “Or paper towels. Place is a hole. Listen—I’m going for smokes. You want anything while I’m up there?” Kaity shrugged and locked the bathroom door behind her. “Alice, anything? Snacks, booze…”
Alice’s eyes went round. “Do you think you can?”
“Well, so long as I get cooperation,” came the reply, accompanied by a sly grin. Alice followed her gaze to the pimply teen picking his nose behind the checkout counter. “Let’s see what’s in his wallet.”
Riley flounced off, but motion outside the convenience store drew Alice’s gaze. Ben leaning against the rear bumper of the station wagon: he waved, then mimed pulling up his sweater sleeve, checking a nonexistent watch, and going into what looked like a seizure of disbelief. He waved her outside, but Alice crossed her legs and rocked back and forth before smiling apologetically. Ben shrugged and slouched off towards the driver’s seat.
“Alice!”
Something tapped her elbow, and Alice turned: there stood a beaming Riley with a cardboard box in her arms and a plastic bag slipped over the crook of one elbow. �
��Hope you like Bud,” she scoffed, adjusting her grip to tug the neckline of her shirt back up. “All they had. Plus,” she whispered, leaning in, “they’re Mitch here’s favorite, apparently.”
“What’s that on your hand?”
Riley shifted her grip, revealing a ten-digit number scrawled in blue pen across the back of her hand and wrist. “Oh, I’ll wash it off when we get to the cabin,” she said. “Listen, let’s get this stuff in the trunk before Lover Boy’s manager comes out and tells us some bad news.”
Alice glanced at the bathroom door. “You go. I still have to… you know.”
“Suit yourself.” Riley hefted the box and pushed the door open with her back, then banged on the station wagon’s trunk. The trunk swung up, and Alice watched her friend heft the big box inside as another car pulled up near. The bathroom door creaked behind her and Kaity appeared, flicking water off her hands with a brisk one-two motion, then wiping her palms on her jeans. There were streaks under her eyes, hidden by a rub of the palm against her cheek and a wide yawn.
“Your boyfriend is an asshole,” Kaity mumbled through the last of the yawn.
“What’s that?” But Kaity was already gone, ambling off behind a rotating display rack of cheap sunglasses towards the front counter.
Alice watched her disappear. For a moment, something tight and cold rose from her chest into her throat, but she forced it down with a burst of will. This wasn’t Kaity’s fault. This wasn’t Kaity at all—some afterimage, perhaps, something stripped down and flayed. Something hurting. This was something that had been done to her.
And Alice would never forgive Lutz Visgara for that.
She pulled the bathroom door shut, then forced the rusty lock to slide home with a grunt. In between that cold January night and now, how many times had she imagined it? How many nights had she lain awake, staring at the popcorn ceiling of her dorm room and tried to guess at the horrible thing Lutz must have inflicted upon her friend? And though they were no more than fantasies, how many times had the images she conjured soaked her pillow in sweat, driven the breath from her body as she trembled in the grip of some terrible sympathy? The plastic seat was cold against her bare thighs. She focused on this sensation, trying to ignore the pictures flickering across her mind. She had envisioned this scenario so many times that it began to bring with it a kind of shame—as though she was keeping Kaity’s pain alive through sheer force of imagination alone. Alice thought again of the wet streaks under Kaity’s eyes, and her hands moved, without her permission, to her face. She rubbed her eyes, ground the knuckles against them, her fingers coming back glistening…
The crash shocked her back to reality. A noise like something breaking, then Kaity’s muffled curse—Alice was already hiking up her pants and hobble-jumping towards the bathroom door. She was fumbling with the rusty lock when something stopped her in her tracks.
“What the fuck are you doing here.”
Kait’s voice, stern and cold—how she always sounded when she was scared out of her mind. Alice pressed her ear to the door, squeezing her eyes shut, her mind racing. Then:
“Oh, come on, Heart-Brecker, don’t be like that.”
Alice’s eyes flew open. Kaity spluttered something incoherent and angry, but before she could finish, that voice rang out again in a laugh, a stop-and-go, hiccup-y kind of laugh. Alice had heard that sound before—like Cindi Lauper yelping her way through “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” mixed with a toad’s wheeze.
“C’mon, at least say you’re surprised to see me,” Lutz Visgara said. “It doesn’t even have to be a good surprise…”
Alice burst through the bathroom door and there he was, standing in the store doorway with his shoulders slumped forwards and his hands thrust into the pockets of a brown hoodie jacket. His face was hidden behind a jutting box of candy bars and a rack of trashy romance novels, but she could hear the grin in his voice—that crooked fault-line smile he fished out for every photograph she’d ever seen of him on Kaity’s social media. The knees of his tight blue jeans were muddy, and what little she could see of his hair was windblown and piled high on his head like an eighties heartthrob. She caught herself holding her breath, and she let the air out of her lungs in a shuddering whoosh.
“Just tell me how you found me.”
Alice swung her gaze: Kaity was backed against the sliding glass doors at the back of the store where the beers and cold drinks were kept. On the ground beside her lay an upturned rotating sunglasses rack—maybe a dozen pairs were scattered across the peeling tile at her feet, a few with the lenses popped out and crushed underfoot. Her eyes were serious and her mouth was set in a sneer, but her cheeks had gone the color of butcher paper and the fists at her sides were trembling. Behind the store counter, the pimple-faced sales clerk’s round eyes flicked from Lutz to Kaity to the mess on the floor, his mouth hanging half-open, not speaking.
“I didn’t,” Lutz replied, walking forward. “I’m as surprised as you are, honestly. Maybe I should ask you if you’re following me, huh?”
“Get bent.” Kaity’s mouth twisted. Her eyes met Alice’s, standing in the doorway of the bathroom with the door cocked against her sneaker heel. Kaity mouthed something across the store to her, then turned back to Lutz. “I don’t, I don’t care how you got here. Just go. Just—”
“Kait, that’s unkind,” Lutz answered jovially, stretching out the pockets of the hoodie. “I miss you. It’s been weeks. Try to think of how I feel.”
“I don’t give a shit how you feel.”
He had almost reached her. To Alice, watching him in the big fisheye mirror above the cashier’s counter, he looked almost tiny against the dingy white tile of the floor. Like a Q-tip with legs—much smaller than Alice herself. But he was slouching forwards, stalking Kaity like a hyena sniffing up to a wounded animal, and she found herself frozen in the doorway, one hand on the cold steel knob and one twitching helplessly by her side. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak—her breath was beginning to catch inside her, the sweating hand on the doorknob squeezed as tight as her heart, tight as a constricting noose.
“Then at least tell me why you thought you had to run so far away,” Lutz said, his voice hoarse with emotion. He was gone from the fisheye mirror, his body now blocking Alice’s view of Kaity, blocking her friend’s path to the door.
Kaity made a strange sound, halfway between a scream and a frightened gasp—and then Alice was there, across the store and by her side, her body positioned directly between her friend and Lutz. Whatever had gummed her up before was gone, and she stared down at Lutz with wide, cold eyes, while her every heartbeat pounded in her head. Lutz didn’t meet her gaze at first, bobbing his head back and forth trying to see over first her right shoulder, then her left. But when he couldn’t manage to see Kaity through her, he at last let his eyes settle on Alice’s. Thank God, she thought through the haze of her anger, that I was born a big girl.
“You’re Alice, then,” Lutz said, trying to force a smile. “I think Kait introduced us—didn’t you, Heart-Brecker? That one Halloween? Hey, remember—”
He tried to dart around Alice’s left side, but she moved to intercept him, nearly pinning him to a three-stack rack of bagged chips. Kaity made a strange noise behind her.
“She doesn’t wanna talk to you,” Alice said.
Lutz frowned, then managed to twist that into a smirk. “Look—you’re being a good friend,” he said. “I get that. Ex-boyfriend shows up out in the middle of nowhere… I know how it looks. I understand the situation. But I need to talk to Kait right now. You can have her back when we’re through, Thing Two.”
Alice’s face flushed, and to her great surprise the edges of her vision actually tinged a dull blood-red for a second or two. “She told you to get bent,” she replied, her voice deep and strange in her ears. “So get bent.”
The bell over the store entrance jangled; Riley peered in the doorway, her eyes flicking from Lutz to Kait to Alice and back to Lutz. “Kaitlyn, honey,” sh
e called, her voice even, “come on out to the car, okay?”
Kaity put a hand on Alice’s shoulder and started to sidle past, picking her way through the broken sunglasses on the ground, though one broken lens did crunch under her heel. Lutz wheeled towards the door, towards Riley, his eyes and mouth wide open. And as Kaity passed him, his hand flew out of its jacket pocket and snatched at her wrist. “ Heart-Brecker, stop—”
Alice’s fist struck him on the cheek, just beside the nose and above his top lip. It happened so fast: his fingers wrapped around Kaity’s arm, then her own fingers were balled into a tight fist and striking out, and then Lutz was splayed out on the ground, flailing among the broken sunglasses as Kaity ran for the door.
“You bitch,” he was sputtering, “you colossal pig bitch…”
But he was laughing, actually laughing through the bubbling blood flowing down under his hands. “You actually—urghh—you actually broke my nose. Do you believe that? Jesus Christ, I think you broke my nose.”
“Leave us alone,” Alice told him, staring in disbelief at her stinging knuckles. “We’re on vacation.” Then she strode past the gobsmacked cashier and out the door to the car.
Riley pounced on her the instant she neared the station wagon. “That was so badass,” she crowed, skipping around the back of the car to clap Alice on the back. “You laid him out, girlfriend. You—hold on.”
Her expression hardened as she gripped Alice by the shoulders and spun her around to face the store entrance. The door opened, and Lutz shambled through, a fistful of paper towels mashed to his nose. “Jeezy-pete, did you lay a number on him,” Riley murmured in Alice’s ear as he shuffled off around the back of the building. She released Alice, who turned around, surprised by the contemplative look on the other girl’s face.
“Maybe we should hit the road, huh?” Riley said, regarding her coolly. “Looks like we’ve done all the damage we can do here.” One orange-and-black fingernail tapped the station wagon window: inside was Kait, hiding in her headphones and hood once more, eyes squeezed shut as she bobbed noiselessly to the music. Alice nodded and tried to smile back. Her heart was still between her ears, but the roar of her blood was dulling to a hoarse whisper now.
The Unwelcome Page 3