by Megan Hart
“Maddy, it’s important to do what you’re told. That’s why.”
“Why?” She sat back in her chair to look at him. He had more gray hairs in his eyebrows than he had a few weeks ago. More glinting in the stubble on his face, too.
It was because of the man she’d experimented on, the one they’d caught and put in the lab room. Nobody knew it was her for sure, but Mom guessed. She might’ve told Dad. If anyone else in the complex had any idea it had been Maddy, she supposed they’d have said something or at least looked at her funny, but c’mon. Who’d suspect a kid?
“Because if everyone just did whatever they wanted to, everything would become chaos.” Dad rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and middle finger, not looking at her. He sounded tired. “So do the math problems, Maddy, and stop being such a…so naughty.”
Both her brows rose. Then her eyes narrowed. She looked at the problems copied onto the beige lined paper. They’d found an entire pallet of these school notepads in one of the storage rooms, the size of a trade paperback book, the paper soft and pulpy. The blue lines were all slanty. She lifted the paper to her nose to breathe in the scent of old paper and fresh ink. The smell of it was much better than Dad’s stale coffee breath or the stink of his sweaty armpits. This paper had been made of living things. Trees had grown in the soil, pushing their branches and leaves to the sky, nourished by the sun and water…She breathed again.
Again.
Again.
“Maddy!”
She opened her eyes, still a little lost in the perfume of dead trees. “What?”
Dad tapped the book. “Homework.”
Maddy smiled. That’s all she did, but Dad frowned. He scooted back in his chair a little bit.
“Maddy…”
Maddy smiled some more.
Dad looked at her for a long time without saying anything. His eyes wouldn’t quite lock on hers, and that wasn’t like Dad at all. He always said making eye contact was super important when you were talking to people because it told them you meant business, and that you could be trusted. People who didn’t make good eye contact were usually liars, that’s what Dad had said to Ev when he caught him sneaking liquor from the cabinet.
Maddy trusted Dad, though, at least as much as she’d learned to trust anyone over the age of seventeen or so. After that, people started getting shifty, thought they “knew better.” Thought they needed to teach kids stuff “for their own good.” That was a bunch of stinky-poo, as Maddy’s kindergarten teacher would’ve said. The one she’d only had for half a year, because somehow she’d accidentally eaten some bad, poison berries instead of the good kind and she’d had to stay in the hospital for a long time.
“Maddy. You know you can tell me anything, don’t you?” Dad looked serious all of a sudden. He leaned forward to capture her hand across the table before she could pull it away. His hand was sweaty.
Gross.
“I know, Dad.”
“Anything,” he insisted, not letting go of her hand though she tried to slip free. His other hand came around to grab her wrist. Hold her tight. “No matter if you think you’ll get into trouble, or if you think me or Mom would be mad. If there’s something bothering you —“”
“Nothing’s bothering me.” Maddy stopped trying to get her hand free and gave him another smile instead.
It didn’t work the way she thought it would. Dad gripped harder, leaned closer. She could smell the stink of him, and it turned her head. She grimaced.
Something shifted and twisted inside her skull, close to the top of her spine. Something tickled. Something stretched and grew, and it felt so good, so good, that her head lolled back for a second or two. Her mouth gaped. She blinked rapidly against the pleasure of it.
“Tire swing,” she muttered.
A memory.
Grampa has a tire swing in the backyard. It used to be Mom’s when she was a little girl. It hangs from the low branch of an apple tree, just over a little dip in the yard so if you’re brave enough, strong enough, you can swing out and out, way up high. If you’re a chicken fraidy cat like Maddy’s cousin Lila, you just twist around in a circle.
But Maddy’s brave enough. Maddy’s strong enough. And, Maddy likes to swing high.
She’s not supposed to swing by herself all the way down here, so far from the house. There’s a creek down a little further, and beyond that, a set of railroad tracks past a tall chain link fence covered with vines. Hobos and bums hang out down there, Maddy’s not supposed to go down there, ever. Ev says hobos like to do stuff to little kids. She’s not sure what that means, but it doesn’t sound as terrible as she thinks Ev means it to sound.
For now, though, Lila’s in the house because she fell down and bumped her chin hard enough to make blood, and Gramma sent Maddy outside to “get out of her hair.” Lila might need stitches. She might have a scar. Maddy’s a little jealous about that. It will be right on her face where anyone can see it, and everyone will always ask her what happened. Maddy doesn’t even care if Lila tells them, because she had nothing to do with her cousin’s fall, that was just Lila’s stupid clumsiness.
So now, Maddy swings. First she puts her sneaker inside the tire and presses down so she stands on one leg. Swings forward, both hands gripping the rough, frayed rope. She pumps her hips to get the swing going farther and faster, out over the dip. Out over empty space.
Once she has it going, she pushes with her foot again, swinging one leg over the tire until she rides it like a horse. Gripping the tire with her thighs, holding the rope tight, Maddy pumps her hips again to get the swing going as it slows. Higher. Faster. The rope’s knot presses against her.
Something is happening.
At first it’s just a little tickle, tickle, but it grows into a warmth. The warmth becomes heat. Maddy swings higher. Higher. If the swing twists and she hits the tree, it’s gonna hurt bad, but she doesn’t stop. She’s not sure she can.
At the swing’s highest arc, the feeling is so big, so good, all she can do is close her eyes and wait for it to end. When it does, Maddy grips the rope so tight it cuts into her palms and fingers. It leaves her stomach hurting, like riding a roller coaster does, and when she opens her eyes she sees Gramma waiting for her just past the swing’s reach, out of the way so Maddy doesn’t kick her when she swings back.
“Come inside now,” Gramma says. “I made lunch.”
Later, with crybaby Lila still inside pouting, Maddy goes to the tree swing again. She wants to swing and swing and swing. But there’s Grampa with the ladder and big pair of garden shears. He cuts the rope way up high. The tire drops to the ground and rolls down the dip, falls on its side.
“Why?” Maddy cries. “Why?”
“It’s too dangerous for little girls,” Grampa says with a shake of his head. “Gramma said I had to cut it down.”
After that, Maddy hates Gramma.
“No.” The word bubbled out of her, sticky like a mouthful of pancakes and syrup. She blinked rapidly, pushing away the memory, but it wasn’t until she saw the look on Dad’s face that Maddy stared down at her fingers.
She’d dug grooves in the table’s surface with her fingernails.
It didn’t hurt. She flexed them, studying the beads of dark blood, not red but more black, along the rim of her broken nails. She licked it. It didn’t taste quite like blood. It smelled like those flowers that had been in the back of the guy’s skull. It tasted like cotton candy and rotten meat.
Dad made a sick noise. Maddy looked up. She smiled.
That’s when Dad left the room
53
The fourth time the things outside tripped the alarm, Dennis disabled it so they could finally get some sleep. He made no noise about sharing his mother’s bed with her this time, but the truth was Kelsey was way too exhausted to try and get anything out of him but the solidity of his front against her back as she snuggled close. She slept better with someone next to her and always had.
She dreamed.
“You don’t min
d if I borrow this, do you?” Cindy holds up a tube of bright pink lipstick, a palette of eyeshadows. They’re not her colors. They’ll look terrible on her.
Kelsey does care, as a matter of fact, because she works hard to buy expensive cosmetics. Gone are the days when she painted her face with Wet-n-Wild. Now her face cream costs more than dinner in a decent restaurant. It took her a long damn time to get this far, and part of the reason she’s able to do it is because she doesn’t eat dinner in decent restaurants. She shops at consignment stores for the important wardrobe pieces she can’t quite afford — shoes and belts and bags, while she fills in the rest with inexpensive knockoffs clever enough to look like the real thing. She does it by having roommates.
Cindy has lived here for three months. She’s slumming, Kelsey thinks. It’s the only explanation for why a girl with so much money would possibly deign to live in a tiny converted studio apartment. It might also explain why Cindy keeps asking to borrow Kelsey’s clothes and makeup, even though Cindy has plenty of both and can better afford to replace what she ruins.
“I’d rather you didn’t.” Kelsey doesn’t try to grab the makeup away. That wouldn’t be classy.
But it’s not classy of Cindy to ignore her, which she does with a wide-eyed innocence Kelsey has grudgingly studied for its effectiveness. Cindy holds the plastic cases in her palm so lightly it seems as though they might slip out of her fingers. Crash to the floor. The pressed powders will split and scatter. The lipstick break in half.
“C’mon,” Cindy says after a second or two. “That’s what best friends do.”
Cindy is nothing like a best friend, but Kelsey is torn. She has to live with this woman for at least the next nine months, because that’s the term of the lease. She approved her based on references and frankly, the way she dressed and how casually Cindy had dropped a cash security deposit, first and last month’s rents. That money’s already spent, and Kelsey can’t afford to pay it back. She’s stuck with Cindy, and getting along with her is better than not, which is how it worked with Kelsey’s last roommate. That had been horrible enough to make Kelsey reconsider having a roommate at all — if only she could’ve afforded not to.
Kelsey puts on the smile she’s been practicing forever. “Sure. Go ahead.”
But later, when she finds the borrowed and predictably ruined cosmetics shoved into a drawer in the minuscule bathroom they share, something inside her breaks. Staring at her reflection, Kelsey bares her teeth, trying to smile and finding herself incapable of it. Her hands shake as she dumps the broken lipstick in the trash. Blue and green glitter powder coats her fingertips when she dumps that too, and it takes a long time and a lot of soap to get her hands clean.
The toilet paper roll is empty — Cindy’s turn to replace it. The container of skim milk in the fridge that Kelsey needs for her half-cup of daily bran cereal is empty though Kelsey didn’t drink the last of it. Dishes in the sink. A pile of shoes by the front door, tossed without thought like they mean nothing though it makes her heart ache at seeing the expensive leather scuffed and treated so unkindly.
All at once, everything has become intolerable.
She has a lawyer friend, Jeff, who wears three-piece suits, tortoise shell glasses and a pocket watch, totally unironically. If he were straight, Kelsey would’ve tried to marry him. Hell, she’d have married him anyway if he’d shown the slightest inclination toward needing a beard, but Jeff wears his sexuality the way he wears the suits, without pretense or apology. He doesn’t want to fuck her, which is why Kelsey trusts everything he ever tells her.
“There’s no good way to get out of this,” he tells her over lunch. His treat, he always insists, though she hasn’t officially been his client for years. “You could try to break the lease, but unfortunately, the stuff we put in there to protect you is also going to protect her.”
Kelsey refrains from muttering a string of curses and contents herself with digging her fingernails into her palms until she leaves small, crescent bruises. She’s starving but has ordered only a grilled chicken salad with low fat balsamic dressing on the side. She concentrates on dipping a piece of lettuce into the dressing, then into her mouth. Chewing carefully and slowly. Making every bite count.
Jeff watches her closely. “Have you tried talking to her?”
“Have you ever lived with someone?”
“Yes.” He smiles.
Kelsey smiles too. It’s not Jeff’s fault she’s saddled with this nightmare named Cindy. “She doesn’t really listen. She’s not very bright. And she always offers to pay for whatever she uses or breaks.”
“So, let her.”
“She offers,” Kelsey says. “But she doesn’t do it.”
“So…make her.” Jeff sips iced tea. “Bug her until she does it.”
Kelsey’s brows knit until she forces herself to keep her expression neutral. None of this is worth wrinkles. “I shouldn’t have to. That’s the point, Jeff.”
“I know you shouldn’t have too, honey. But you might have to, anyway. Or get a cabinet and lock away the stuff you don’t want her using. Put a laxative in something she usually eats, let her deal with the consequences. Or,” Jeff says, off-hand and not serious, “maybe you’ll get lucky and the apartment will catch on fire and you’ll both have to find a new place to live.”
“Fire,” Kelsey muttered at the scent of smoke tickling her nostrils. Campfire, hearts on fire, you’re so fired. She bolted upright, confused and disoriented, fighting an unfamiliar embrace and the tangle of blankets. “Fire!”
Dennis shifted against her. Dennis, the man who saved her life, whose mother’s bed they were in. Kelsey sagged against him, her heart pounding but relieved she remembered where she was and with whom. There’d been a few queasy times when she hasn’t.
“Dennis, get up!”
The smoke pressed down on them, thick and choking. Kelsey pushed against it like she could shove it away, but of course her fingers swept through nothing and caught the same. Her eyes burned. Thick saliva filled her mouth. She gagged on it, rolling to the side to spit the taste of charcoal.
Dennis wasn’t moving. Kelsey punched at his shoulder. He barely moved. She fixed her fingers in the front of his shirt and pulled, shaking him.
Dead weight.
“I tried to drag her,” Kelsey tells the fireman, his face streaked black. His eyes are very blue. He’s not at all handsome, but she wants to snuggle up close to him anyway, because, hello. Fireman. “But she was just dead weight.”
“You did what you could,” he says, looking past her at the flames shooting from the apartment window. He pats her shoulder. “We’ll get her out.”
“But the apartment…”
He shakes his head, looking sorry for a second before his eyes narrow. He doesn’t smile, exactly, this isn’t the sort of situation that promotes a smile. But she can tell he’s trying to look comforting.
“The apartment’s lost, but we’ll contain it. The rest of the building will be fine.”
Of course it will be. Kelsey made sure of that. Then she’s the one who bites back a smile, hiding it behind a grimace.
Kelsey stopped trying to shout his name or shake him into consciousness. Instead she rolled out of the bed and crawled along the floor, below the pressing weight of the smoke. In the bathroom, she ran cold water on a towel. Then a second. They were dripping when she started crawling back, half-dry by the time she reached the bed. She wrapped one around her face and tossed the other over his.
That stirred him, just a little. Kelsey got on the bed next to him, drew her knees as close to her chest as she could — it was maybe the first time, ever, she regretted the size of her boobs — and pistoned her feet as hard as she could against him. Ribs and hips. She might’ve broken something, but that was better than having them both suffocate or burn alive. She cried out, gasping with agony at the pain in her injured foot, but the force of her kick knocked Dennis off the bed and onto the floor. She followed him to press the wet fabric over his
mouth and nose.
Dennis blinked rapidly. He might’ve been trying to talk, but Kelsey didn’t wait to hear what he was saying. She bent at the knees to save her back, hooked her hands beneath his armpits. She pulled.
He wasn’t a big man, but he was solid with muscle. That was okay. Kelsey had spent hours working out in the gym to get just the right amount of tone in her upper body, to fight off the underarm flab without looking like a body builder. She braced herself, digging her feet into the thick carpet. Ignoring the pain, she pulled again.
This time, Dennis moved. He also roused himself just enough to start helping her, thank God, so that she was able to get him into the hallway. The smoke was just as bad there, if not worse. The heat oppressive. She could see the orange glow of flames licking at the stairs.
“How do we get out of here?”
She wasn’t sure he was able to answer her, but Dennis managed to point, not toward the stairs, but the other end of the hall. He muttered something, so hoarse she couldn’t make it out. She bent closer, her mouth to his ear.
“Attic,” Dennis coughed. “We can get out through the attic.”
She didn’t want to go up, farther from the ground, harder to fall. But with another glance at the stairs, Kelsey saw there was no way they were going down. Her voice choked when she tried to talk, but she rasped out, “What about a window?”
Dennis got his feet under him a little bit more, taking off some of the weight from her shoulder. “Bars.”
Fuck. She’d grown up in a house with bars on the windows, how could she have forgotten? Everything his mother had done to secure this house and keep anyone out was now going to keep them in.
The attic door was nondescript, set into a small alcove at the back of the house. When Kelsey yanked it open, a rush of cooler air swept across her face. She coughed automatically, expecting the burn and sting of more smoke, but the air was fresh and sweet. Not for long, she noticed, as the smoke from the hall began swirling up the stairs.