The Agony House

by Cherie Priest

  I could come look. No promises.

  Denise wasn’t asking for promises. No promises. Just options. Just possibilities. Just a chance to come home, and be home—if that’s what this was—and bring somebody she loved along for the ride.

  Trish signed off: Ok then. Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the ghost-bugs bite.

  Denise told her good night, and then told the other kids the same. It’d been a long day. But tomorrow, she promised everyone, We’ll pick up where we left off.

  She plugged her phone in and flopped back down on her bed. From there, she stared around and realized she needed some wall art. Posters, or pictures, or blown-up pages of comic books that no one ever published. That and a few throw pillows, maybe a couple of cute rugs, and a lamp, and it wouldn’t be the world’s most embarrassing place to have a guest.

  It wouldn’t take much. Just a little time, and a little money. Or a lot.

  “Good night, Vera,” she mumbled sleepily to the room at large. “Thanks for everything.”

  Then she turned off the lamp and fluffed her pillow, punching it into a shape that worked, and she did not notice the shadow that perched on the window seat. She did not smell any perfume, and she did not hear any music. She didn’t even hear a woman’s voice, not then. But later, when she checked her messages in the morning, she’d see that someone had turned on the microphone again—and then she would know that she wasn’t alone, and this time, that was all right.

  Good night, dear girl. Thanks for everything, yourself.

  Turn the page for another thrilling read from Cherie Priest!

  Libby Deaton and May Harper invented Princess X in fifth grade, when Libby’s leg was in a cast, and May had a doctor’s note saying she couldn’t run around the track anymore because her asthma would totally kill her.

  Their PE teacher sent them into exile on the little-kids playground—where the kindergarten teacher sat in the shade, reading a romance novel with a mostly naked man on the cover. A crowd of nervous six-year-olds watched the newcomers from behind the swing set, big-eyed, silent, and ready to bolt. For all the little kids knew, fifth graders were capable of anything.

  But Libby and May just sat off to the side, against the brick wall, their legs stretched out across the asphalt. They had nothing to do. Nowhere to go. No one to talk to but each other, and it wasn’t like they were friends or anything. Libby had changed schools after her parents bought a new house, and May had just moved to Seattle from Atlanta. They barely knew each other’s names.

  Still, there was solidarity in boredom, and sidewalk chalk lay all over the four-square court that no one was using right that minute. May kicked a piece that some tiny Picasso had ditched, and then crushed it with the heel of her shoe. The cement turned a satisfying cherry red, like the pavement was bleeding. She leaned her leg toward a blue piece, ready to smash it into dust as well—but Libby scooted forward, leveraging herself along with that cast-heavy leg.

  “Hang on,” she said. “This might be cool.”

  She gathered the remaining candy-colored chunks, lining up the pieces according to color until she had a rainbow, more or less. When she was satisfied, she called over to the little kids: “Hey, do you guys want to watch me draw?”

  The kindergartners exchanged wary glances.

  “Come on,” Libby pressed. “I’ll draw anything you want. I’m kind of good at it.”

  Curious, May leaned forward. May couldn’t draw for squat, but she liked watching other people be good at things.

  Slowly, the kindergartners emerged from their hiding places. One particularly bold child shouted, “Draw a dog!”

  Libby obliged, producing a green dog with a yellow collar and big blue eyes. The kindergarten girl adjusted her glasses and stood on tiptoes, squinting to see all the way over to the drawing. She nodded and looked back at her classmates. “It’s a good dog,” she declared.

  And in five seconds flat, a mob of demanding munchkins descended on Libby and May, each one yelling a request.

  “Draw a cat!”

  “A boat!”

  “A horse!”

  “Do a haunted house!” urged a curly-haired kid with untied shoelaces.

  Libby grinned. “A haunted house … I like that one, yeah. May, give me some purple, would you?”

  May paused, not because she objected to purple but because she was a little surprised. It was the first time anyone except her teacher had said her name at school. Finally, she replied, “Yeah, sure,” even though it was hard to say “sure” without her Georgia accent coming through.

  She handed over the chalk and watched as Libby spent the next few minutes drawing something right out of a scary movie—except it was sort of cute instead of frightening. The house’s shape was cartoony, and behind the broken windows, all the ghosts were smiling.

  A boy in a Mariners baseball shirt stomped up to the finished drawing and assessed it with a critical eye. “Now you have to draw a princess who lives there!”

  “A princess who lives in the haunted house. Got it.” Libby reached for the yellow, pink, and red nubs of chalk. Soon, a figure took shape—a blue-haired girl in a puff-sleeved princess dress, wearing a big gold crown and red sneakers.

  May was transfixed. She’d never seen anybody draw anything half so good, at least not since that time at Six Flags, when a guy at a booth drew her picture for ten bucks. When Libby was finished, the little boy in the baseball shirt said the princess was awesome, and everyone agreed. Especially May.

  But then the boy said, “Wait, it’s not done. You forgot her wand. Give her a magic wand.”

  May shook her head. “Nah, Libby,” she said, forgetting her accent for once. “Don’t give her a wand. Anyone can be awesome with magic. You should give her something cool instead.”

  “Something cool, okay. Like … what?”

  “Ooh!” she exclaimed. “Give her a sword!”

  “A sword! Yeah …” Libby took the purple chalk and swept it along the concrete. “A sword takes skill.” When she was done, she put the chalk down and wiped her hands on her pants. “How about that?”

  “The sword looks kind of weird … ?” May said. She had forgotten about the kindergartners too.

  “It’s a katana sword. Like the kind ninjas use. They’re basically the best swords ever.”

  “Oh yeah, right,” May said, pretending she knew all about ninjas. “You can really mess somebody up with one of those.”

  “Now we just have to give her a name.…” Libby looked up. “May? You got any ideas?”

  May pondered the question. She needed a good answer. She might have a new friend in the works, and she didn’t want to blow it.

  “If she’s got a sword, she’s probably on a mission,” she said. “Maybe she’s a spy, or a soldier, or like you said—she could be a ninja. She could have a code name.” It couldn’t be too complicated. It should be easy to remember, and quick off the tongue. “We could call her … Princess X.”

  “Why X?” Libby asked.

  “Because X is the most mysterious letter,” May told her. “And things with X’s in them are usually pretty cool.” She hoped she was right, and it was cool enough.

  Libby considered this, and then nodded. “Okay. That works for me!”

  May exhaled and smiled. “I’m glad you like it.”

  “I do like it,” Libby replied as she added the final touches. The glimmer on the princess’s crown. The logo on her Chucks. “It’ll work just fine. So here she is—I give you: Princess X!”

  Libby and May did not leave Princess X on the sidewalk. They took her home, and together, they built an imaginary empire. The princess’s haunted house sat atop a hill, surrounded by an impenetrable iron fence as thick as a labyrinth hedge. From there she fought monsters, ghosts, and other unsavory invaders wherever she encountered them.

  May wrote a lot, Libby drew a lot, and by their last year of middle school, they’d created an entire library dedicated to Princess X. The stories filled big, fat n
otebooks, huge spiral sketchbooks, shoe boxes, crates, and reusable grocery bags. They archived this vast collection at Libby’s house. Libby’s dad was an engineer at Microsoft, and they had a house not far from “Millionaire’s Row,” so she had a big bedroom with a big closet, and that’s where everything went.

  May lived with her parents in a small apartment, in an old building from back when a bedroom held nothing but a bed. She was always the shortest one in the class, always cheaply dressed, with straight brown hair and thick-lensed glasses that she hated. When she got teased about them, she said they were so strong she could see into the future, and the power persisted even after she traded the glasses for contacts.

  Libby, on the other hand, looked like a Forever 21 model by the time she was twelve. She wore dangling earrings and designer jeans, and she was naturally cool, so cool she told everyone her grandma was a ninja, and everyone believed her. Except that Libby’s own mom came from Japan and said there weren’t any ninjas anymore. She also said the real reason Libby’s grandmother never came to visit was Libby’s dad, since he wasn’t from Japan. He was born someplace else—wherever white people come from—and there wasn’t much Libby could do about that.

  So she drew a lot of stories about ninjas because she could do something about ninjas. Probably. If she ever met any.

  Neither May nor Libby ever quite made any other good friends, because they didn’t need any other good friends. They played a lot of video games, read a lot of comics, watched a lot of TV, and ate a lot of junk food. They climbed on the troll statue out in Fremont, taking selfies under the neon artwork of ballroom dancers, rocket ships, and diving ladies in old-fashioned swimming caps. They did each other’s homework and sat up late with flashlights under the covers, downloading dirty books onto Libby’s e-reader and giggling madly until they got caught. They spent their allowances on arm warmers, magazines, and hot chocolate at their favorite local joint, Black Tazza—pretending it was coffee so they could feel like grown-ups. But even with all the regular real-life stuff, they still found time for Princess X, dragging their binders to the coffee shop and spreading out their notes, making up character sheets for all the good guys, bad guys, and other assorted guys who populated the country of Silverdale. The princess became their alter ego, their avatar, their third best friend.

  One day, on the sidewalk in front of Pacific Place mall, Libby got hollered at by a wild-eyed white guy with a crazy sign that listed all the reasons America was going to hell. The sign was particularly concerned about how everyone was marrying everyone else, and soon America wouldn’t have any black, white, yellow, or red people anymore—just gray ones.

  May called the sign waver stupid and said, “Anyway, gray’s a great color—especially in Seattle. Around here, gray’s practically patriotic.”

  “Heck, yeah, gray’s a great color,” Libby said, mustering a smile. “Just look at me: I make gray look cool.”

  A few weeks after that, they took a standardized test at school. One of the questions asked for the student’s race, and Libby wrote in gray next to the line that came after other.

  The teacher gave her a fresh sheet and made her do that part over. He said that when Libby grew up, she could call herself anything she wanted; but on that test, she’d have to pick one of the ovals and fill it in, even if it wasn’t quite right.

  But of course, Libby didn’t grow up. She died in Salmon Bay instead.

  Supposedly.

  Mrs. Deaton fell asleep while she was driving Libby home from gymnastics. She drove off the Ballard Bridge, and it took the search-and-rescue people two days to find the car. When they did, Mrs. Deaton’s body was still strapped into the driver’s seat, but Libby was missing. Her backpack was lying on the floor on the passenger side, and her window was broken out.

  For years, May would dream that Libby had escaped—that she’d somehow kicked free of the sinking car and clawed her way to the surface through the night-black water, cold as a soda from the fridge, the city lights sparkling above her like stars. Leading her up. Leading her out. She’d burst through the surface of the Bay, her soaked hair spilling down her shoulders like a mermaid’s, trailing behind her as she swam toward home.

  And then May always woke up cold and crying, because that wasn’t what happened at all.

  What happened was, they found Libby’s body a couple weeks later, slapping slowly, squishily against a sailboat at a nearby marina. She was half-destroyed by the nibbles of sea creatures, and swollen with water, unrecognizable to anyone. She was identified by her clothes and the soggy student ID in her back pocket.

  If they’d only let her see Libby’s body, May might have never had those dreams, she thought. She might’ve never picked up her old glasses, wearing them to bed at night in case she could see something better than the future—she could see the past too. If she’d only gotten a glimpse of what was left of her best friend, her imagination wouldn’t have lied with that same stupid dream of Libby’s escape, over and over again, year after year.

  Sometimes she’d go for a few months without it, and almost forget … and then the dream would sneak up on her, and she’d sit up shocked and shaking, so perfectly confident that she’d seen Libby, and she was alive, swimming to freedom. Swimming to May. Reaching for her outstretched hand. Almost grabbing it.

  And then sinking back into Salmon Bay, because May didn’t wear glasses anymore, and fortunes were just stories that weren’t ever true in the first place.

  There was a funeral—closed casket, natch. May tried to pry the coffin open when no one was looking, but they’d really locked that sucker down. Maybe everyone knew her better than she thought.

  They buried Libby beside her mother in a distant suburb, so May couldn’t visit her very often. The last time she went, she knew she probably wouldn’t be back again anytime soon, or maybe ever. While her parents bickered quietly behind some tombstones and trees, May whispered to Libby as loudly as she dared.

  “My parents are probably getting a divorce,” she told her.

  It felt weird to say it out loud, because her parents hadn’t said it out loud yet. That didn’t matter. She could see it coming from a mile away. She sat down cross-legged beside the grave, still lumpy and fresh, with just a smattering of new grass growing all scraggly over the top. She picked at the young, green blades, pulling them one by one and dropping them into a little pile.

  “If they do get a divorce … or when they do, I guess … I’ll probably have to go back to Atlanta with my mom.” She barely breathed the words because she’d cry if they got any louder. “I’ll have to go to a new school, and that’s really going to freak me out. I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to share a locker with somebody else.” She swallowed hard. “Our locker, yours and mine … it’s just like you left it. Your dad never asked for any of your stuff back, so I just kept it there—I hope that’s okay.”

  Libby’s biology textbook with all her notes stuffed inside. Her gym clothes in a cotton bag, all lumpy where her sneakers were stuffed down inside it. Her water bottle. Her iPod.

  “When school’s out, I’ll just take it all home with me. Not trying to steal your stuff.” She let out a shaky little laugh that threatened to turn into a sob. “I just won’t let anybody throw it away, that’s all. I wish I could just leave it like it is, like, maybe put some kind of memorial plaque on it or something.…”

  Her parents’ voices got louder, and it didn’t sound as though they were arguing anymore. Just talking, and coming back for May. On the one hand, she was annoyed. On the other hand, at least she didn’t have to tell Libby about losing Princess X.

  She wasn’t sure she could say that part, even to a ghost. It was hard enough just to think about it.

  It had happened like this: A week after the funeral, May’s mom drove her over to the Deaton house one last time—but Mr. Deaton wasn’t home. Nobody was there except the housekeeper, Anna, and she was wiping down bone-clean counters and sweeping prehistoric Cheerios out from under the ref
rigerator.

  The place was empty. No furniture. Not even any curtains.

  May ran past Anna up to Libby’s old room and threw open the closet door, where their Princess X archive was kept.

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry,” the housekeeper told her gently, once she’d caught up. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “But everything’s gone.”

  Mr. Deaton had quit his job, packed a suitcase, and set off for Michigan, where he’d grown up. He’d hired a company to empty the house in his wake, donating everything to Value Village or Goodwill. Then he’d tossed Anna the keys and told her to clean it up for the realtors. He wasn’t coming back.

  And neither was Princess X.

  Frantic, May demanded that her mother shuttle her to every thrift store in King County, and she was loud and crazy enough that her mom obliged her. Or else her dad did, because that way her parents didn’t have to spend any time together. They’d rather babysit their daughter through a nervous breakdown than face each other over supper.

  May never did find those boxes filled with Princess X adventures, comic strips, and catalog cutouts of things the princess might wear or places she might go. Her parents never patched it up; they went ahead and split a few months later. Her dad stayed in Seattle, and her mom took her to live in Atlanta most of the year, with summer and alternating holidays back in the Northwest—so her accent got Southern again, and she was often cold and lonely.

  Libby was dead. Princess X disappeared.

  May lost her best friend again, and again, and again.

  Three years passed.

  And then there was a sticker.

  May saw it on Broadway, in the corner of a shop window that would be demolished within days. The store was already empty—cleaned out and picked bare, with nothing left inside but dust bunnies and spiders. Everything was shuttered because the city was making way for a light rail station on Capitol Hill.

  Every year when May returned for the summer, things were different like that. Sometimes it was a small boutique or coffee shop different, like when Black Tazza had closed during the spring. Sometimes it was a whole neighborhood different, like how these buildings would all be gone in a week.