by Kara Thomas
He hooks right, and I tug on his leash. “No. This way.”
My dog is not the brightest or fastest, but he has impeccable hearing, and he can bark like a motherfucker. If there’s anyone lurking in the house, Mango will hear him or her and go berserk.
The leaves on the lawn crunch under my feet. Once every two weeks, the owners come and mow the grass to placate my mother. I cross onto the driveway and climb. It slopes hundreds of feet up to the house, and Mango gets lazy halfway through our hike. By the time we get to the front door, he’s lagging behind by a good foot, resisting every tug I give his leash.
The outside of the house is complete, but there’s no door to the garage. The hair on my arms pricks. Anyone can get inside. I swallow and head through the door off the garage, which matches the one on our house.
A thin layer of sawdust coats the floor of the kitchen, and none of the cabinets have doors. A chandelier without lightbulbs hangs from the dining room ceiling, the wiring still exposed.
I spot the outline of footprints in the sawdust.
I straighten, slowly. Trace the footsteps out of the kitchen and into the living room. The footsteps stop at the bay window facing the street. A cigarette butt is inches from my shoe.
The bay window offers a near-perfect view of my house that makes my stomach turn.
I approach the bay window.
On the ledge, there’s an envelope. I almost don’t want to touch it. How long has the person I’ve been texting been coming here? Has he or she been watching us? Two hours ago, he/she texted me saying they could prove they were friends with Jen. Somehow they made it here between sending me that text and before I got home from Rachel’s without my mother noticing a car pulling up outside the house and getting suspicious.
Petey’s soccer game. He and my mom wouldn’t have gotten home until after four. Plenty of time for him or her to come here, drop the envelope off, and leave without being seen.
A piece of loose-leaf paper, folded in half. I swallow away the dry lump forming in my throat and unfold it.
At the top of the page is a sentence written in neat cursive.
I’m not okay.
Beneath it, in block letters formed by a black felt-tip pen:
DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT?
Yes.
I cover my mouth. Trace the rise and fall of my sister’s handwriting with the tip of my finger.
I don’t want to go home, but I can’t stay in this creepy-ass house either. I slip out the way I came, nudging Mango toward the wooded area behind the house.
When I get back to my house, I tell her I ate a late lunch at Rachel’s and I’m not hungry, that I’ll eat the leftover chili in a couple hours. She makes a sound of acknowledgment, mid-argument with Petey about how he can’t go to his friend TJ Blake’s house, because even though there’s no school tomorrow TJ’s parents still have to go to work.
I sit at my desk and take the envelope out of my sweatshirt pocket.
I’m not okay.
I think of the furry purple diary with a flimsy lock that I kept under my bed until middle school. The things I scrawled on the pages in a fit of anger. Jen is soooooooo mean sometimes. Mom likes her SO MUCH better. Everyone thinks she’s perfect and it’s so annoying.
Why wasn’t she okay?
Was Jen the diary-keeping type? I don’t know.
If Jen had a diary, Mom would have gotten to it first.
No—my mother hadn’t even gone through Jen’s things after she died. My sister’s bedroom door had stayed shut for almost a year before my mom said she was going to hire someone to pack up all of Jen’s things and get rid of them. I told her that I hated her. She closed herself in her room, and Tom left the house and returned an hour later with a stack of storage tubs from Walmart and packed up everything himself.
Jen’s stuff is in the basement now, which is somewhere I have no good reason to be. Around ten, when the laugh track of the evening sitcoms Tom watches in the living room quiets, I wait for him to come upstairs.
When his bedroom door clicks shut, I slip out of bed and inch down the hall, down the stairs, and straight down the basement steps off the garage entrance.
The heating system is making noises like fingernails tapping against a tin can. I feel around on the wall for the light switch.
The fluorescent bulb overhead hums to life. I step down.
The storage bins of crap from our old house are stacked in the corner, next to the hot water heater. I climb over the box that holds our fake Christmas tree to reach them.
There are three tubs with JENNIFER written on the sides in Sharpie. I take a breath, the loamy smell of the basement filling my nostrils. Pop the lid of the box closest to me.
A cardboard shirt box rests on the surface of the contents. I lift the top off, delicately pushing the tissue paper aside. A white lace dress and a bonnet. Jennifer’s christening outfit.
I snap the top back on and move on to the next. Pick through art projects, graded research papers, programs from her honor society induction ceremonies and wind ensemble concerts. Her flute case.
I pull out a marble notebook labeled English 10H, Mr. Ward. English, tenth-grade honors. I thumb through it, reading Jen’s haphazard script, a writing prompt copied at the top of each page. Five years from now, I see myself…Write a paragraph convincing a friend not to take drugs…Which character from a book would you like to meet and why?
A copy of Wuthering Heights. I remember reading this in Mr. Ward’s class last year, and my chest tightens. Jen was reading it when she died, and it didn’t occur to Tom to return it to the school when he came across it in her things.
I thumb through the book. She was a few pages into chapter fourteen, her place marked with a folded piece of loose-leaf paper. Green writing shows through.
I unfold it.
I WATCH YOU CHEW ON YOUR PEN CAP WHEN YOU ARE THINKING
I WATCH YOU IN THE HALL, LAUGHING, YOUR EYES MISSING MINE
I WISH I KNEW WHAT YOU WERE THINKING
I WISH I WERE IN ON THE JOKE.
The hair on the back of my neck pricks as I skim the rest. It’s more of the same. A demented poem. A stalker’s manifesto, written in the same handwriting that’s on the note resting on my desk.
* * *
—
In the morning, I wait until I hear the clanging of cabinets in the kitchen before heading downstairs. Tom is spooning cereal into his mouth, both eyes on a copy of the Daily News.
“I think we should get security cameras,” I say.
“Oh yeah?” Tom doesn’t look up from his bowl of Cheerios. “Why’s that?”
“This house is too big. I don’t feel safe when I’m here alone.”
My mother shuts the fridge door with a thud. “You’re rarely here alone.”
Tom and I follow her with our eyes as she exits the kitchen. Moments later, she shouts for Petey to come down and eat or she’s taking the iPad away.
When the clomping of Mom’s feet on the stairs fades, Tom sets down his bowl and levels with me. “Is this about Juliana and Susan?”
My spine straightens. I haven’t heard him use their names in years. “Maybe.”
“I didn’t know this still scared you.”
A flash of me, five years ago, curled up at the foot of my mother and Tom’s bed like a dog. Too scared to sleep in my own bedroom after the murders. “Of course I get scared. I can’t just forget it ever happened.”
“I didn’t say you should. You haven’t brought the girls up in a long time, that’s all. Why are you thinking about it now?”
I don’t know if I’m imagining the note of suspicion in his voice. “It’ll be five years soon.”
“Mon,” Tom says. “Nothing like that is ever going to happen again.”
“You can’t say t
hat for sure.”
“I can’t say for sure that a tornado won’t hit us tomorrow. But it’s still unlikely it’ll happen.”
I wonder how he thinks that’s supposed to make me feel better.
“I’ll look into cameras.” Tom stands and squeezes my shoulder. “Try to enjoy today. It’s nice out. Maybe take that fat pig of a dog for a walk.”
Hearing the W-word, Mango trots into the kitchen. Tom heads into the living room and tells Petey that he’d really better put the iPad down and eat before Mom finishes her shower.
I sit at the island. My brother plods into the kitchen, eyes glued to Clan Wars as he slides onto the stool across from me, where Mom has left an empty bowl next to his box of Cocoa Puffs.
When the sound of Petey’s crunching becomes unbearable, I stand up. I need to think; there’s nothing I can do about figuring out who wrote that poem to Jen until tomorrow morning, when I’m able to talk to Mr. Ward.
My thoughts settle on the house across the street. He or she said that I don’t know them, but he or she knows where we live. He or she is also confident that Tom is a liar, among other things. So there’s a possibility that the letter writer knows Tom—and knows him well enough to have our new address.
It’s almost as unsettling as the idea that some random creep is stalking us.
The cigarette butt by the bay window. He or she might have left something else behind.
Mango is still splayed out on the kitchen floor like a frog, his tail flicking back and forth. I grab his leash from the hook on the wall.
“Tell Mom I’m walking the dog,” I call to my brother as I steer Mango out the door. I stop short when we reach the street.
A van is parked in the driveway of the house. Next to it, a man is leaning against a shiny black SUV, in conversation with the van’s driver. Mango starts to bark; the man looks up at me.
I haven’t seen anyone outside that house since we moved in; it can’t be a coincidence that the owners or contractors or real estate agents—whoever the hell those guys are—have returned the day after I prowled on the property.
Did someone see me?
I bow my head, breaking eye contact with the man, and make a right. Keep walking until the new constructions thin out and less ostentatious houses appear.
In front of a small two-story house with peeling yellow siding, Ginny Cordero is gardening. By herself—she’s not helping anyone, like how I used to help my mom weed the front yard at our old house. Ginny is bent over, tugging bent and dead stems out of the dirt, as if this garden is all hers.
“Hi,” I say.
Ginny turns around. She holds up a hand in a feeble wave, confusion knitting her brow. Water drips from the can dangling from her other hand.
Ginny meets me at the bottom of her driveway. She looks at Mango, but she doesn’t bend to pet him, like most people usually do. “What’s his name?”
“Mango.” There’s a beat of awkward silence. And then it tumbles out of my mouth: “My sister named him.”
Ginny is quiet. But the look on her face says I haven’t made her feel awkward; she almost looks sad. “She was really nice. Your sister.”
I hesitate. “Do you want to take a walk with me?”
“Sure.”
Ginny leaves the watering can on her front stoop. A black and white cat comes up to the glass door. When it sees Mango, its tail goes erect. Mango lets out a howl, and the cat rockets away.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s okay.” Ginny rejoins me, and we head down the driveway together. “It’s hot out.”
“I know.” I don’t know if I can do this: make painful small talk about the weather. I don’t know why I even came here.
“You know, Jen went to the same gym as me,” Ginny says. “A long time ago.”
Mango stops in his tracks. He sniffs where the lawn meets the street several houses down from Ginny’s. He starts circling; if Ginny weren’t here, I’d tug at him to keep moving. But I don’t want Jen to escape—to disappear into the graveyard of dead conversations.
“I remember seeing you at the gym,” I say.
“Your sister was kind. There aren’t a lot of kind people.”
Her voice trails off, and I’m hit with the memory of ninth grade, sitting in the back of the class in earth science. The girls next to me snickered whenever our teacher called out Ginny’s full name during attendance. Virgin-ia, they’d say, emphasis on virgin—look at her linebacker shoulders and flat chest. She probably doesn’t even get her period yet.
And I did nothing, because it wasn’t my problem. I said nothing, because Kelsey Gabriel, who was taking the class for the second time, was the one who dubbed Ginny Man Arms.
Ginny finally looks at me, her train of thought recaptured. “Your sister deserved better. All those girls did.”
“You know that house across from mine?” I ask.
“The unfinished one?”
I nod. “Have you seen anything weird? Like someone who doesn’t live around here hanging around the house?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Ginny’s forehead scrunches up. “Why?”
Whatever pressed me to ask her about the house is also telling me not to say I found something weird in the house. If I did, I’d have to say why I was in the house in the first place. Would Ginny even believe me if I told her?
“No reason,” I say. “I should get home. Thanks for walking with me.”
Ginny nods. As I’m turning around, she says my name. She holds up a hand. “See you at practice tomorrow.”
The first week of school last fall, Mr. Ward moved my seat across the room from Rachel’s because we wouldn’t stop talking. We took to texting, and Mr. Ward spent the rest of the year eyeballing our phones under our desks and sighing like he was questioning every choice he ever made in life.
I kind of sucked back then.
Anyway, Mr. Ward doesn’t look too psyched to see me standing in his doorway after last period Monday afternoon. He shoves a stack of papers into his briefcase and blinks. “Are you looking for Ms. Axelrod? Her class was upstairs last period.”
“I actually wanted to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”
“Sure, sure. Come in.” Mr. Ward tugs at his tie to loosen it and cranks open the window behind his desk.
I step into the room, inexplicably nervous. Mr. Ward sits in one of the desks at the front of the room and drags another chair so it’s facing him. He gestures for me to take it. As I set my bag on the desk and settle into the chair, I notice a dab of crusted mustard on his tie.
“So what’s up?” Mr. Ward crosses his legs at the ankles.
“My sister was in your class when she was a sophomore.”
Mr. Ward blinks, like he can’t tell if I’m asking him or telling him. “Yeah, she was. Really talented writer.”
“This is going to sound weird.” I relax the hand that’s holding the poem I found in my sister’s copy of Wuthering Heights. I’d been clutching it so tightly that I’m worried the sweat on my palm will make the ink bleed. “I’m looking for someone. I think they were in your class the same period as my sister.”
“Okay. Who is this someone?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s a boy.”
Mr. Ward’s forehead creases. “Can you tell me anything else about him?”
I think of the argumentative text messages and the refusal to tell me his identity. “He was probably kind of a jerk.”
Mr. Ward leans far back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head. “Why do you think he was in my class?”
“I found a poem he wrote in her copy of Wuthering Heights,” I say.
“So a tenth-grade boy who wrote poetry to girls. That describes half my honors classes.”
My face must fall, because Mr. Ward pushes
back in his chair and says, “Let me pull up my old class rosters.”
I drum my fingers against my knee while Mr. Ward moves to his computer. There’s some hollering in the hallway, and a guy in a backward baseball cap comes to a short stop in the doorway when he sees me. “Is the newspaper meeting still in here?”
“Yes, at three,” Mr. Ward calls out to him. “Come back then.”
The kid retreats and closes the door behind him, muting the sounds in the hallway. At the computer, Mr. Ward is tapping his finger against his mouse, eyes on the screen. “System’s slow,” he mutters.
I don’t know where to look, so I study the Globe Theatre fashioned out of Popsicle sticks atop the bookcase in the corner.
“Got it,” Mr. Ward says. “Jen was in fifth-period honors English.”
He hums to himself as he scans the screen. “Oh.”
I sit up straight. “What is it?”
“Ethan McCready was in Jen’s class.” Mr. Ward frowns.
Ethan McCready. I turn the name over in my head, waiting for a face to pop up. Nothing. I look down at the paper in my hands. Its edges have gone soft from my folding and unfolding it so many times.
I walk over to Mr. Ward, holding the poem out to him. “This is what I found.”
He takes the paper from me and studies it. Mr. Ward sets the poem down on his desk, his eyes still on it. “Wow. Ethan McCready. Now that I think about it, he sat behind Jen.”
“Did he have a reputation for stalking girls?”
“Not that I know of.” Mr. Ward rubs his chin. “He was one of those kids who made everyone uncomfortable, though. Bit of a loner, only wore black, always had to ask him to take his headphones out.”
Mr. Ward doesn’t need to elaborate. Every grade has a kid like that. “Did my sister ever complain about him?”
Mr. Ward almost looks sad. “No….From what I saw, Jen was always kind to kids like that.”
The knot in my chest tightens. Of course my sister would have been kind to Ethan McCready. Sometimes she was kind to people who didn’t deserve it.