The Dead Girls Club (ARC)

by Damien Walters

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  Becca could draw as good as a real artist. When we were little, we’d made construction paper books—I wrote the stories and she drew the pictures—and tried to sell them to some of the neighbors. They were monster and ghost stories and were supposed to be creepy, but we were too little to know how to make things scary.

  I had one of her drawings hanging over my bed, a picture of my dog, Roxie. My mom said when I was a baby, Roxie slept on the floor next to my crib. I cried for practically a month straight when she died. Becca’s drawing was perfect, down to the spots on Roxie’s nose and her goofy bat ears. She made it for me right after Roxie died and didn’t even have to use a photograph.

  While she was in the bathroom getting her toothbrush, I tiptoed to her desk. The picture wasn’t of me, but a woman with hair so long it curled on the ground. Her eyes were colored in black, her arms wide open. I knew the drawing was finished because it had Becca’s signature in the bottom right corner, a big B and then a curlicue. It didn’t look like it, but it was supposed to be her name.

  “Every artist has a signature. This is mine,” she’d said when I asked about it.

  Why had she told me it wasn’t finished? Her footsteps clomped in the hallway. I put the drawing back fast and sat back on her bed. She gave me a funny look, lips all pushed out, when she came in but didn’t say a word.

  My mom didn’t order pizza, but she made stuffed shells and garlic bread, which was almost as good. Dad and I play-fought over the last piece of bread, earning a “Please, Joe” from my mom. He won but tore it in two pieces for me and Becca.

  “Thank you, Mr. Cole,” she said.

  “Thank you, Dad,” I said, but I’d taken a bite of the bread, so I had to talk around it. My mom shot me a look, and I tried to look sorry, because I wasn’t showing my chewed-up food on purpose. When she wasn’t paying attention, my dad winked.

  He started telling Mom about work, which was always boring, until he told her about an accident at a job site with a crane, not one he was driving. The guy busted his head open falling in a hole or something, so they had to pour new concrete, and now Dad was going to start working on that job, for a fancy new building near the old cemetery. Then Mom told him about her day at the dentist’s office where she worked part-time. Even more boring.

  After, with a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips, we went to my room to listen to music. But I voted for Whitney Houston and Becca wanted Mariah Carey, so we ended up playing the radio, on our backs on the floor, feet resting against my mattress.

  Becca rabbited her feet, then pointed her toes. “I wish I was allowed to hang posters. She says it would ruin the walls.”

  “My mom gave me stuff that doesn’t mess them up. If you want, I can give you some, too. It doesn’t tear the paper either.”

  “She’d still get mad.”

  I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the first time we’d talked about it, but I felt guilty. In addition to the picture Becca had drawn of Roxie, I had posters of Whitney and Madonna and Paula Abdul. But it wasn’t just the posters. My room was painted bright blue and I had polka-dot sheets. Becca’s was pale yellow, which she hated, and her comforter and sheets had ugly flowers. The only picture on her wall was a framed print of fruit in a basket. Once we stayed in a hotel in Ocean City with almost the exact picture. It was pretty awful. I didn’t understand why her mom was so weird about it all.

  “Do you have a mirror?” she asked.

  “Duh, right there.” I pointed to the wall over my dresser.

  “No, a small one.”

  It didn’t take me long to find one in the bathroom.

  “You have to hold it like this”—she held the mirror at boob level and bent her head over, her hair spilling down in pale, shiny curtains—“and look down.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  I did, but my hair spilled forward, covering the mirror. She gathered it into a ponytail at the base of my neck and said, “Try it again.”

  I was Silly Putty stretched the wrong way.

  “That’s what you’ll look like when you get older,” Becca said.

  “Gross, I’m all squishy. Here, you do it and pull your hair back so I can see.”

  “I look even more like my mom,” Becca said, her words deflated balloons.

  “I bet you don’t. Show me.”

  “Fine,” she said, holding her hair back and tilting the mirror.

  Her mom’s twin was staring up from the glass, but I said, “Your face is way better than hers.”

  “Right. I wish I looked like my dad.”

  I rubbed my palms on my thighs, not sure what to say. Becca’s mom said he’d left before Becca was born because he didn’t want to be a father. A pretty crappy thing to do. He never even called or anything.

  She stuffed a chip in her mouth and spoke around the crunches. “Even though I hate him. I hate them both,” she said.

  I didn’t think I could ever hate my parents, but I might be mad enough to if my dad had left and never knew me. If my mom didn’t even try to make him.

  She turned and peered through her hair. “Hey, have you heard of…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, I’ll wait until tomorrow when we’re all together. At the house.”

  “Oh, come on. You can give me a hint.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, tapping her chin. “One hint. She’s called the Red Lady.”

  I hoped it wasn’t just a made-up story, or if it was, I hoped it was good, with a name like that. “What did she do? Kill her whole family? Her parents?”

  “Nope, that’s all you get.”

  “Not fair. I won’t tell them you told me.”

  No matter how much I asked, she refused to say another word.

  I crossed my arms and said, “It’s probably just something like the angel.”

  “It’s not like the angel at all.”

  A couple months ago she’d told me a story about how an angel tried to kidnap her when she was really little. Her mom had to fight the angel to save her, a real fight ending with the angel’s hair and wings torn off. It was made-up, like all of Becca’s stories, even though she said it really happened and she’d just remembered it.

  “Hey, Becca? What if we can’t break in the house?”

  “We’re not breaking in. Jeez. We’re just walking in like normal.”

  “But what if you can’t get the key?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “But what if you can’t?”

  She sighed, dropping her head. “Let me braid your hair.”

  “It was in a braid this morning. You took it out, remember?”

  “That was earlier. Please?” She touched the half-heart. “Best friends forever?”

  I groaned but gave her the brush from my dresser. Sitting in front of her with my legs crossed, I said, fingertips to my half of the whole, “Best friends forever.”

  Humming “Vision of Love,” she started working out the tangles at the ends.

  “I want hair like yours.”

  “No you don’t. I want to cut it all off, but my mom says it’s too thick and I’ll end up with a giant mushroom on my head. Ouch.”

  “Sorry.” She yanked a tangle of hair free from the brush and waved it in my direction. “Hello, I’m Mr. Octopus. Nice to meet you, yes indeed.”

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said with a giggle as she separated my hair into several sections, more than she’d need for a braid.

  I reached for the mirror; she nudged it away with her knee. I tried to feel my hair, but she smacked my hand. “Nope, stop. I’ll let you see it when I’m done.”

  “Don’t make me a porcupine,” I said.

  She giggled again. “You’re not going to chicken out tomorrow night, are you?”

  “No, but I still think it’s a bad idea.”

  “It’ll be fun,” she said.

  “Unless we get ca
ught.” A super-skinny braid fell forward, and she snatched it back. “Bec-ca,” I said.

  “Hea-ther,” she mocked, tugging a bunch of my hair. “Stop moving.”

  As soon as she finished, I grabbed the mirror. My head was nothing but braids in all different sizes, some flat against my scalp, others sticking up.

  Becca’s shoulders hitched. “You’re a wildebeest!”

  “Am not,” I said. I wasn’t even sure what a wildebeest looked like, but it had to be awful. Tears pricked my eyes. I shouldn’t get upset over hair, but I couldn’t help it. I worked my fingers through the bottom of a braid, untwisting the strands as fast as I could; Becca rolled on her back, holding her belly, laughing so hard she wasn’t making a sound.

  * * *

  “I love them!” Rachel lifted the heart off my neck to turn it over and back again. I waved her strawberry-blonde hair away; as always, it needed brushing. “They’re so pretty. Gia, we should get some, too.”

  “We got the last ones,” Becca said.

  “Oh,” Rachel said, the excitement vanishing from her blue eyes.

  “We can find them somewhere else,” Gia said, and Rachel brightened again.

  We were outside Gia’s house. It wasn’t dark yet, but the edge of the sky was starting to change. Since we were all together, our parents didn’t care if we stayed out late. We were old enough to know not to talk to strangers or get in anyone’s car or help find a lost pet. And it was Saturday night. We were allowed to stay up later.

  The four of us set off, me and Becca in the lead, our sneakers tapping along the sidewalk. It was warm out; not too hot, but still sticky.

  My dad said our neighborhood was shaped like a tic-tac-toe, only with four lines each way, not two, inside a rectangle. Me, Rachel, and Gia lived on left-to-right streets and Becca on an up-and-down. Our row houses were all the same, with three bedrooms, bay windows, and fenced-in backyards. A road with the elementary school made up the bottom piece of the rectangle; a bigger road, the top; and a shopping center, the right. On the left was a field with little hills on each side.

  We got near the end of the street, and Mrs. Keene, who had watched me and Gia when we were babies, was on her front porch and waved as we walked past.

  “She looked prettier before she cut off all her hair,” Rachel said.

  Becca poked my arm. “See?”

  “What?” Gia said.

  “Heather wants to cut off her hair,” Becca said.

  “But you can’t,” Rachel said. “It’s pretty.”

  I shrugged. Everyone said the same thing, but they didn’t have to brush it or wait a gazillion hours for it to dry.

  When we went down the hill to the field, Rachel said, “What if someone sees us?”

  “Sees us what,” Becca said. “Walk across the field? People do it all the time.”

  “But what if someone’s there now?”

  “Hel-lo,” Becca said, sweeping out one arm. “See anyone except us?”

  “No,” Rachel said. “But I don’t think we should do this.”

  Becca came to a stop. The rest of us did, too.

  “Then go home,” Becca said, and started walking again without looking back.

  We all followed.

  The long grass swished across my ankles, making them itch. They used to play little league baseball and soccer games here, but the county had built a bigger field a couple miles away.

  Instead of climbing the hill on the other side, Becca walked alongside it. Near the end, close to a big fence separating the field from a sidewalk running along the road, the hill curved down. Becca led us single-file down a narrow path until we were past the field, behind a bunch of single-family houses. They all had tall wooden fences, not the chain-link kind we had, so no one could see us. Most of them had big trees, too.

  “It’s this one,” Becca said, pointing to the house at the end.

  No fence, but it was surrounded by thick hedges taller than my dad. Becca pushed through a small gap halfway down. I went second, the branches scraping my bare arms and legs. Gia came out next, then Rachel, brushing her face and shoulders.

  The house was gray stone with tall windows. More hedges surrounded the porch. There were so many trees in the yard, it made it darker than it really was. A FOR SALE sign, with Becca’s mom’s name and phone number printed in big blue letters, was stuck in the ground right next to the driveway.

  “What if somebody sees us?” Rachel said, kitten-soft.

  “They won’t,” Becca said, fishing the key from the pocket of her shorts. “Look at all the trees and bushes.”

  I’d have bet we could dance in the middle of the lawn without being noticed. It wasn’t just private. It was hidden, like we were in the middle of nowhere. I’d lived here all my life and I’d never even known this house was here.

  “I can’t believe your mom didn’t catch you taking the keys,” Gia said.

  “I was careful. It’s not like she checks all the keys every night. Besides, Heather and I already checked it out.”

  I scratched my side. Such a lie. My heart was a moth near a porch light, even when we got inside and locked the door. The daylight disappeared, leaving us in shadow. Since nobody lived here now and we didn’t break a window or kick in the door, we weren’t technically breaking in, but we knew we weren’t supposed to be here.

  It was warmer than outside, the air all stuffy. It smelled of paint, and the quiet was bigger than the house itself. We stood in the foyer, still as cats in a sunbeam.

  “I can’t believe we did it,” Gia said, her eyes wide. The gloom made them darker than usual, black instead of brown.

  Rachel was blinking too fast, but Becca didn’t look scared or worried at all. It was pretty neat, like being in school when almost everyone was gone, but better.

  “Let’s check out the upstairs,” Becca said.

  The steps went straight up to a wide hallway with six doors, all open but one. We went room by room, our footsteps whisking on the dingy carpet. The four bedrooms, all with window blinds firmly shut, were huge.

  “My mom said the people who lived here were old,” Becca said.

  “Where are they now?” Rachel asked. “Are they…”

  “Nah, they’re still alive.”

  Back downstairs, the foyer opened into another hallway, archways on either side leading to empty rooms with heavy curtains. The kitchen cabinets were the color of mud, the tile floor patterned in bright-yellow-and-green flowers. Big-time ugly. No wonder it was still for sale. I’d thought it would be creepy, and it was, but it felt sad, too, like it knew its owners weren’t coming back.

  Becca opened a door beside an empty refrigerator-sized space and said, “Come on. We can turn the light on down here and no one will see.”

  Even with the fluorescent tubes buzzing overhead, the basement was dreary. The carpet was the same shade of brown as the kitchen cabinets and wood paneling covered the walls, like my Nana’s basement. Dark curtains covered the tiny, high windows, and there was a small half bath back by an old dryer. It smelled like a bunch of wet towels left overnight in a washing machine. Rachel and Gia wrinkled their noses, too, but Becca didn’t seem to notice. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, and after a second, the rest of us did, too. It was a lot cooler down here, and even with the carpet, the floor chilled my legs.

  “We would get arrested if anyone found us here,” Rachel said.

  Becca huffed out a breath. “No we wouldn’t. We’re not damaging anything. They’d just make us leave.”

  “And call our parents,” Gia said.

  “Maybe,” Becca said. “Don’t be such a chicken. It’s cool.”

  Gia pursed her lips. “You’d never be able to get the keys again.”

  “I doubt that, Georgina,” Becca said.

  “Don’t call me that. You know I hate it.”

  “But it is your name.”

  “Fine, Rebecca,” Gia said.

  “Hey, did you see Mrs. Talbot on the last day of s
chool?” Rachel said.

  “No, why?” I said, glad we wouldn’t have to listen to the same argument Becca and Gia’d had a thousand times.

  “She had on this sweater so tight you could see her bra through it. I want those kind of boobs,” Rachel said.

  Becca got up, palmed her flat chest, and arched her back. Swinging her hips, she paraded the room. Rachel cracked up, rolling on her back and kicking her heels.

  “Becca, you’re obsessed,” I said.

  “So what? I want big boobs, too. Don’t you? Big, massive boobs.”

  “But everyone would stare at them all the time,” I said.

  Gia crossed her arms over her chest super slow, and I wanted to take back what I’d said. She had real boobs, not just bumps, and the boys were always looking. She said she stayed in her room when her older brother Matt had friends over because they stared, too. She was also the only one who’d already turned thirteen. Rachel, Becca, and me all had late birthdays. Gia was the only one who was biracial, too. Her dad was white, her mom Chinese, and sometimes people asked what she was, but they were jerks.

  I mouthed I’m sorry. “Are we going to start sometime tonight, or are you going to keep doing that?”

  “I’m going to keep doing this.” She whirled around. “Or, I could go like this.” She dropped her shoulders to where they should be, lifted her chin, and took small steps. “Children, get in line. Come, come, come. Quiet little mice.” Becca might not have looked like our kindergarten teacher, but she sounded identical.

  I giggled. Raised my arm. “Miss Langan, I have to go potty.”

  “Me too,” Gia said, waving for attention.

  We all loved Miss Langan, Becca most of all, because she’d never teased her about her invisible friend Sarah the way some of the kids had. Once Becca and I started to play together, she didn’t need to pretend to have a friend anymore. I didn’t think anyone else remembered Sarah, maybe not even Becca.

  “Bec?” I said. “It’s going to get too late if we don’t start soon.”

  “Fine,” she said, plopping down. The rest of us scooted in, making a small circle. With a clap, she said, “This meeting of the Dead Girls Club is now in order. So, have any of you heard of the Red Lady?”