I rested my shoulder in the doorframe. “Have I told you that I changed the rules?” I asked.
She looked down at her feet. I felt so bad that it physically made my heart ache, which it turned out was a real thing and not just something people said in books. “You may have mentioned it,” she said.
“Yeah.” I scratched behind my ear. “See, as it turns out I can be an idiot all on my own.”
And that was when she looked up at me and smiled and I felt my chest crack open and knew that Honor Hyde had weaseled her way in and it would be impossible to get her out again.
EIGHTEEN
Lena
“Thought you didn’t need us anymore.” Misty knocked on my bedroom door at seven o’clock and barged inside before I could answer. “Thought you were out there making it on your own and whatnot.” Her eyes were mean.
“I’m a minor,” I said. “I have to live here.” I tucked my stockinged feet underneath the bedspread. Music blared over my stereo speakers.
“Your dad won’t be home until late,” she said, picking at her cuticles. I knew that was code for he was out drunk at a bar and she was stuck here with me. “So just us girls tonight.”
“Lucky me.” I turned up the volume on Rites of Spring again. The problem was that nothing drowned out the echo of Chris telling me to shut up.
I hated finding myself back here. Drake was turning into a much bigger inconvenience than Mrs. Dolsey had been. I would have to focus on getting my own place. Maybe Chris would want to be roommates. The thought perked me up considerably.
“Hey.” She crossed the room in her bare feet and pushed the button on the stereo to off. The music evaporated, leaving an electronic buzz in the air. “Now I don’t know about your father, but I’m not going to let you go on actin’ like a teenager for the entire evening. You hear me?”
I wondered why she didn’t join him at the bar since I was sure they sold wine coolers and other sickly sweet concoctions for her to guzzle. But I could already smell alcohol on her breath, like the very last taste of mouthwash lingering in the air between us.
“If you’re staying here, you’re going to come participate like a proper family. You hear me? Come on now.” She clapped. “Come on. Get up.” She dug her fingers into the collar of my sweater and pulled me from the bed, stretching out the neck in the process.
I let her. I weirdly let her drag me out of bed and when she was finished I smoothed my sweater back down over my stomach.
It was easier to agree than to wait for her to scratch my eyes out with her acrylic nails. I recited the things I hated about her as I followed her out of my room.
1. She talked on her cell phone and chewed food at the same time.
2. She smoked so much I was going to have to start storing clothes in my trunk so that I didn’t smell like cigarettes all day.
3. She made louder noises than necessary when she was having “adult time” with my dad, then wore only a T-shirt out of his room to get water like I didn’t live there only I knew she was parading around like that for my benefit.
4. She pretended to do yoga in our living room.
5. She ate my doughnuts. She left milk cartons out. She never cleaned out the fridge. She never did dishes. She always left her dirty plates out on the TV tray.
If I kept going, it might have taken me all night, so I mentally dropped the list and went back to hating her in the abstract.
She had on a shirt with the fabric in the shoulders cut out, one that she was too old to be wearing. She pushed play on her phone’s Harry Belafonte playlist. It seemed that not acting like a teenager meant having dinner with her in the kitchen.
“Stop sulking, Lena bug.” She used my dad’s pet name for me, making the liquid in my stomach curdle. “You had a fight with your boyfriend, didn’t you? I have a nose for these things.” There was an icy slush in the blender on the counter. She pushed a button, and it began mixing margaritas.
Though she was off in her assessment by a wide margin, her comment still hit close to home. Why had Chris been mad at me? What had I done wrong? It was Honor who—
“I’ve got experience in this department, Lena bug,” she yelled over it. The chopping blades felt like they were scrambling my brains. “Your dad can be a real a-hole, if I’m being honest.” She pushed a button and the blender stopped its grinding.
I narrowed my eyes and stared at her. “Did you ever think that’s because you can be a real bitch?” I asked, surprising myself.
She tensed. Her fingers curled around the handle of a spoon. I thought she’d break it with her bare hands, but instead she slid it off the counter and pointed it straight at my heart. “Ah, ah, ah, now I see what happened here. Now I see what happened. Lena, honey, boys don’t like girls like you. That’s your problem. Not me. Plain and simple. They don’t like a flat butt or a skeleton chest.” She waved the spoon over the parts of me as she explained. “Or a dirty mouth that talks back when it ought to know better.”
The words stung, and my heart began to gallop out of control. To hide my reaction, I turned to the pantry and pushed open the rickety accordion doors. “We’ve got mac ’n’ cheese, Hamburger Helper…,” I recited mechanically.
“Uh-uh-uh. I’m on a diet.” She topped off a glass and slurped the electric green concoction from off the top of it. “We’re eating salads tonight like on Sex and the City.”
“Fine.” I said, shutting the pantry. I didn’t care what we ate. What I cared about was what had gotten into Chris. He didn’t know the pictures of Honor were sent by me. But he seemed angry or at the very least annoyed. Which could lead to a few possible conclusions. He’d been looking for Honor for the sake of the show. He was mad at her about the pictures and was taking it out on me. But if that was the case, it didn’t seem fair. Or, worst case of all, Chris was trying to replace me with her. The thought was a winter’s chill taking up residence deep in my bones.
I pulled a limp ball of lettuce out of the refrigerator that Misty had probably gotten on sale because it was old and wilting. Then I found a bag of sweaty baby carrots in the fresh drawer and set them on a chipped plate, because we didn’t own a cutting board.
“Is your face stuck like that?” Misty slurped her drink. “Or don’t you ever smile?”
The carrots looked like orange fingers.
“You should fix that,” she said. “People would like you better. I’ll tell you a secret. Your daddy thinks you’re an ugly duckling.” My jaw kneaded in and out. She grimaced like it pained her to say it. “But I told him no, no, no, not necessarily; you just don’t have a mother.” She lifted her hand with the glass and margarita sloshed out of the side, splatting onto the floor where she left it. “That’s the problem, see. You don’t know what you don’t know, see. Boys don’t like girls like you, but that’s okay because I’m here now. Skinny, mean, bitchy, ugly little girls. But I’m here now.” Her hair still looked like someone had held an iron to the bottom half until it fried off.
“Chris likes me,” I said quietly. She wasn’t listening. She was drinking and singing lines of Harry Belafonte. She had a decent voice. “Chris likes me,” I repeated.
“You’re so cute. Like a pug. You’re cute like a pug. You know what I mean?”
I felt the wires snapping inside me, letting go of something.
“Chris does too like me,” I said. “He was just upset.” I was so calm, even as my insides were coming undone. So, so calm. My voice got quieter. “Chris does too like me.” I didn’t know whether I was saying it out loud anymore.
I stared at the array of baby carrots and selected a short knife, just longer than the length of my pointer finger. It was from one of those infomercial knife sets with blades that could cut through pennies, but my mom kept washing them in the dishwasher when all the commercials said you weren’t supposed to, so the blades always had iridescent stains on them and the edges couldn’t cut through coins anymore. I didn’t think they ever really could, though.
I held a car
rot on the plate and pushed the knife down into it. The hilt clanged against the plate after each slice. Swish clang swish clang swish clang.
Misty had propped her yoga-pant-clad behind on the bar stool to watch like I was a punk version of Cinderella and she was the evil stepmother. “Ugly girls can still get a man, Lena. I seen it happen all the time.” She nodded seriously, eyeing me over the rim of her glass. “Maybe not the one you want, but still a man all the same.” Misty snapped her fingers and pointed to the blender pitcher, requesting a refill.
It was as if the circuit breakers that kept me running were being shut down one by one. On autopilot, I carried the pitcher across to her and watched as she held it upside down to shake out the last chunks of margarita.
I went back to chopping carrots, dropping the finished slices into a salad bowl next to the sink. Swish clang swish clang swish clang.
“You have any walnuts?” she asked. “I think the girls on Sex and the City were always getting things like walnuts in their salad. Anyhow,” she continued without a pause, “the trick for you’s going to be taking attention away from your face. That and getting you to smile because you still need to do that, hon. You can’t live with me and your dad forever. You could probably land yourself an old man or one who has been in jail, someone like that I bet we could figure out for you. It won’t be easy, but you know, what can you expect?”
I stopped chopping carrots. There were already more carrots than we could possibly need in one salad, and I didn’t have any walnuts. We never had anything like walnuts. “You know I can hear you,” I said, turning to her. I was a rubber band snapping, only very silently and very numbly.
Chris did too like me. Chris did too like me. It didn’t matter if it was in the way that Misty meant. I didn’t even care about boyfriends and girlfriends or prom dates or anything like that at all. He liked me more than Honor. Of course he did. Of course he did. No matter what any of them said. Of course he did. They knew nothing. Honor was trying to get him to break the rules. Girls like her always messed everything up. Girls like Misty, too.
Misty blinked. The spray tan on her face didn’t get close enough to her eyes so there were always raccoon rings of white around them. “Yeah, I’ve been talkin’ to you this whole time.”
I crossed the kitchen to the bar stool where Misty sat looking at me like I was a cockroach on the bottom of her shoe, which was maybe a step up from the semi-goth daughter of her boyfriend that she was forced to share a house with occasionally. But scratch that. She wasn’t forced to share a house with me. She chose to share a house with me. She chose to move into my house, my mother’s house, and she could have lived in her own house or apartment or trailer park and we’d all have been better for it.
I slipped the tip of the knife between two of her ribs and pressed the blade into her. The weird thing was that she didn’t scream right then. She took another sip of her margarita with me hovering right there next to her. Then she looked down and saw the red coating the knife. She looked at me and then at the knife and her raccoon eyes got big and bigger.
I stuck the knife into her fake breast and it started leaking water and blood right away. She cupped her hand over the shrinking breast. That was when the screaming started. Misty jumped off the bar stool. The margarita glass tipped and clunked onto the carpet. She doubled over, gasping and clutching at the pain under her ribs. Rivers of blood trickled between my fingers and down my wrist.
I wasn’t scared of her anymore.
I tried to feel something for Misty, Misty whose shrieks sounded like an animal being eaten alive in the woods, Misty who’d had plenty to drink but not enough to dull the pierce of a knife that wouldn’t cut pennies but would tear through flesh and muscle and organs just fine. The knife tip hit bone. I yanked it out. I was having to follow her now, my thick boots tracking her steps, conscious of every drip of her blood on the carpet that I was going to have to clean before my dad got home.
Her hand planted in the doorframe between the living room and hallway bathroom. She leaned into it, panting.
Without a word, I jammed the point into the left side of her back and twisted as hard as I could. The hilt snapped, and I lost the blade inside of her. Misty let out a groan at the same time as her knees buckled and she went limp, her breaths coming in startled shallow waves.
Red bloomed from a constellation of points on her body. Below me she looked doughy and out of shape. She didn’t look so mean. She was a sad woman, past her prime, who had been ignoring girls like me her whole life.
I stared down at her glassy, almost-dead eyes and smiled.
“Better?” I asked.
* * *
THERE ARE A few downsides to stabbing someone on a whim. Almost to the extent that I wouldn’t recommend it.
Mostly, it was a lot of work and, with the other person dead, there was no one to help.
First, there was the matter of getting her body outside as quickly as possible before she bled out on the carpet and left a stain that no amount of OxyClean could remove. I was small, and she was heavy with middle age and deflated breast implants. I wrapped her in a childhood blanket and dragged her out into the backyard. The floodlights turned on automatically, exposing a few strands of hair sticking out of the top of the blanket in the now complete darkness outside.
There was then the matter of digging a hole, which looked way easier in movies. I wished I could have asked my mother whether she minded sharing the yard with Misty. I knew she would have hated Misty but would have liked that she was dead, so I figured it evened out. In the end, I gave up churning the hard, grassed-over portions of the yard and picked the flower bed nearest the garage. I had to dig up the roots of the flowers first. Mud caked the underneaths of my fingernails. It took me an hour to get a hole large enough to fit Misty, even with her folded in half, because I only had a rake and a garden spade with which to work.
I tried not to worry about my dad coming home early since worrying wouldn’t do any good.
Next, I had to load up all Misty’s stuff in my trunk and in the cabin of my car with another blanket over the top so my dad wouldn’t suspect anything. By the time he stumbled in, smelling sour and vaguely of throw up, I’d cleaned the carpet and taken a shower and was seated in the living room watching a show about tiny houses.
He fell into his recliner and pulled the lever on the side to kick up his feet. “We got any beers left in the fridge, Lena bug?” He kept sniffling the way he always did when he was coming off drunk and moving into hangover territory.
I quietly walked to the refrigerator where I’d already thrown away all of Misty’s old Chinese food containers and popped open a cold can of Miller Lite for my father. He was leaned over the arm of his recliner, running his finger over the carpet when I returned.
“You spill something here, Lena?”
I peered down my nose at the wet spot where a reddish tinge stained a clump of the carpet yarns. “Ketchup,” I said.
He took the beer without thanking me. “You know you’re not supposed to be eating without TV trays, Lena.”
I nodded. “Misty left you,” I said. “She took her things and is gone. Thought I ought to tell you.”
NINETEEN
Chris
I woke up to total darkness, alert and unsure why. My phone buzzed. It was the middle of the night, and my phone was vibrating off my nightstand. From there it took less than a second for a dull panic to reach in and take hold.
My thoughts felt slippery, still doused in the pool of sleep from which I was trying to emerge. These were the order of things as I saw them: There’d been a horrible accident. Something had happened to my dad. Something had happened to my mom. They were dead. My dog was dead. Shit.
I rolled over and stared bleary-eyed at the red numbers of the digital clock on my nightstand before reaching for my phone. 3:00 AM.
Nothing good happened at 3:00 AM. Ever.
Knowing that in the next twenty seconds, my life could change irreparably, I pul
led the phone to my ear without glancing at the screen. “Hello?” I returned to my back and closed my eyes, waiting for the ax to land across my neck.
“Come outside,” came a girl’s voice on the other end of the line.
My forehead crumpled, and I pushed my hair back off my forehead. “Wait, what?” I asked, suddenly weary. “Who is this?”
Rustling. Movement. “It’s Lena,” the voice said. Her voice was hushed and breathy. “Come outside,” she repeated.
I returned my attention to the clock and to the numbers on it that now read 3:01. In the morning.
Now that I knew none of my immediate family members were dead, another feeling was taking over—annoyance. “Lena, it’s the middle of the night,” I said.
“So?”
I rubbed the spot between my eyebrows. “So, you scared me half to death. Is everything all right?”
Lena: “I have something to tell you.”
I pulled the covers up to my chin, not wanting to leave for fear that once I did, there’d be no going back to sleep for the rest of the night. “Then you can tell me in the morning,” I said. “I was asleep.”
As the adrenaline brought on by fleeting panic faded, the threads of sleep began pulling at my consciousness again. Maybe that was why it was taking time for the wheels in my brain to process. Come outside? Come outside? But that implied …
My eyelids flew open. I pushed the covers from my legs, went to the window, and pulled up the blinds.
“Christ!” I jumped backward. The phone dropped, and I juggled it between my hands to keep it from cracking on the floor.
Lena’s face was in the window. Her body a near silhouette in the streetlight. Her dark eyes were trained directly at me.
“What are you doing?” I flattened the phone back to my ear and hissed at her. A shudder passed through the arches of my feet like someone had run a fingernail over them. Lena was a ghostly pale figure standing there. How long had she been waiting? I stretched my neck and shoulders to combat the crawling discomfort that the image of Lena lurking there had elicited.
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