by Carrie Laben
By that time she would have been popular if she’d been in a different school, around people who didn’t know that she and Martha were creepy by definition. But of course by sophomore year there were a few kids who desperately wanted to be as creepy as they thought she was, kids who had discovered Nine Inch Nails and Manic Panic. A girl named Kristen who scribbled poetry in a notebook with a black velvet cover during math class. Electric Carl, now Kristen’s boyfriend—still supposedly the smartest kid in school by the IQ tests and final exams, but he wanted nothing in life but to sneak sips of vodka out of a Snapple bottle and avoid going home to his prison guard dad. Duane, who was a senior and had been held back a year and mostly just read comics and stared at the world through uncomfortably thick glasses. A clique, a gang, friends of a sort although Abby found them irritating half the time.
It was Duane who caused the trouble. Being a senior, he decided to ask Martha to the prom.
For once, the forces of the student body and the school administration aligned; both were appalled by the idea. There was already a rule, in fact, that only juniors and seniors could attend the prom, although no one could remember the fiasco that had led to this (rumors assigned blame to one of Paula Piechowski’s older cousins, the one with all the babies). Duane should have known, it had been explained to all the seniors in some kind of handout, along with the dress code and the fact that you couldn’t bring a date from another school. Abby suspected that the handout hadn’t included enough pictures for Duane to bother reading it.
That explanation wasn’t good enough for the school, though. Somehow it had to be Martha’s fault, or at least Martha’s fault too, and that in turn meant that somehow it had to be Abby’s fault, and that meant they were sitting in the counselor’s office together again.
“What you have to understand, girls, is that at your age you start to have a lot of power.” Abby had tuned out everything Mrs. DeAngelo had said up until now, concentrating on soaking up the edges of her fluttering concern, but the mention of power caught her attention.
“Boys can’t help what they are,” the woman said nervously. “If you get them too wound up, they can’t handle themselves. It’s not fair to ask them to break the rules for you.”
“But I didn’t…” Martha had been explaining this for a week, and if anyone was going to believe her Abby assumed they would have started by now.
“And you can get hurt,” Mrs. DeAngelo said firmly over Martha’s protest. Her knobbed fingers, just a few years shy of arthritis and retirement, curled slightly—not a clench but the ghost of one.
“You don’t get hurt when you have power!” Abby was surprised at how offended she felt by the notion. “You get hurt when you don’t have enough power.”
Mrs. DeAngelo frowned. It was the first time Abby had spoken during the meeting, and it took the counselor a moment to put together her response.
“You both,” she said, emphasizing the word both, “need to think very hard about the path you’re on. I know you think you’re very smart at this age, but acting out for attention isn’t going to get you anywhere good in the long run.” Then she dismissed them, and math class wasn’t even over yet.
So that was annoying. But the worst of it was at home. The same day, after school, Mom walked into Abby’s bedroom without knocking, and sat on the bed.
“So tell me about this Duane kid,” Mom said. She seemed to be aiming for curious, maybe gossipy, the way she talked to her girlfriends while they drank wine, but she sounded annoyed.
“He’s no big deal,” Abby said, annoyed herself. “He’s a lump. He hates everything except Batman and Rush.”
“And Martha, apparently.”
“I guess.”
“You guess? Mrs. DeAngelo said they’re together constantly, that he cuts gym class to go sit with her in the newspaper office.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s because everyone’s there. Kristen and Carl and whoever.”
“But he didn’t ask Kristen to the prom.”
“Carl would probably kill him.” Carl spent hours of his days coming up with elaborate scenarios for killing people, and lists of potential victims. It was easy to get on the list and as far as Abby could tell no one had ever gotten off. Mrs. Grant was on the list, that was why Abby and Carl were friends, even though he’d been getting less electric for years and was barely any more use than anyone else now.
“And he didn’t ask you.”
As gross as Duane was, Abby could tell Mom thought this was an insult, and that made it prickle. “That’s because he’s stupid, Mom! Martha doesn’t even like him!”
“Oh, she’s got so many boys after her that she can afford to be picky, now?”
“No!”
“Don’t raise your voice to me, young lady. I asked you a simple question.”
“And I answered it. Now leave me alone. I need to do homework.”
“Homework?” Mom snorted. “That’s a first.” But she left.
Obviously she didn’t need to do homework. She always had Martha stretch a study hall so she didn’t have to carry books home, and copied off of Carl if even that wasn’t enough. What was actually happening was that she’d been inspired by the combination of Kristen’s poetry and the memories of Grandfather’s notebooks to start writing down everything she could think of about drawing power from people. Sure, she’d stumbled on the whole thing by accident but that didn’t mean that writing it down might not somehow help her get better.
The problem was, she’d plateaued. After the first breakthrough, after Grandfather died, it had seemed for a while that she could just keep on harvesting more and more energy. Besides the reliably electric few, she’d discovered that most people flickered on and off, giving her a jolt sometimes and other times just lying dead.
It had something to do with whether they were paying attention. Just because they were looking at her or talking to her didn’t always mean she could use them, but when they were ignoring her it was no good, no matter what she did.
At least they could never manage to ignore her for very long. She didn’t even need to do anything particularly flamboyant, no matter what Mrs. DeAngelo said. Once every few weeks it would occur to some classmate that she was a bad person and something needed to be done. Sometimes it would go too far—they’d tossed her library books into a puddle once, and she’d had to pay a fine, and another time one of the girls from Bush Gardens had decided to fight her in the parking lot after school for reasons that no one could quite explain and she’d ended up with a fat lip and a torn shirt that she hid in the bottom of the closet so Mom couldn’t complain about having to buy her a new one. But usually someone just insulted her or prayed at her and she’d gotten pretty good at handling that. She harvested the energy from them then, if she could. If she could do it every time, she’d be doing great.
But she couldn’t. There was still more power out there for the taking. There was a way to get it. There had to be. If she wrote down everything she knew, maybe she could figure it out. It had worked for Grandfather.
But in five minutes she was frustrated. Everything she was writing was vague, and sounded dumb even to her. She went by instinct, by feeling, far more than by the techniques Mom and Grandfather had taught her. The techniques she only half-remembered, and the feelings were a bunch of bullshit when she wrote them down—the ones she could put into words at all. She sensed something big and pure and not bullshit at all, inside of her brain somewhere. But she couldn’t get it out on the page.
Maybe if she tried again later, when she wasn’t irritated at Mom and school and the big fat hairy deal everyone was making about Martha and stupid Duane. The attention didn’t do Martha any good, she couldn’t use it. She didn’t even like attention. Abby shoplifted plenty of black lipstick and eyeliner for everyone on their biweekly expeditions to the Walden Galleria, but Martha never wore hers; instead she let her hair fall down over her face and mumbled on the rare occasions that teachers bothered to call on her.
Dow
nstairs, the phone rang and Abby listened hopefully for Mom or Martha to call her name. Nothing.
She closed the notebook and stuffed it between her mattress and bedspring. Flipped on the TV, intending to tune in to Tribes, but Sally Jesse Raphael was on and something about the line-up of guests caught her eye.
Three sets of twins, all teens, all girls. The levels of sullenness and defiance varied, but none of them looked happy to be there. One set was gothed up, far more extreme than anything Abby had ever attempted to get past the doors of Alden Central School. The second set, who looked Mexican she thought, were severe and scowling in tank tops, their hair cropped short and spiky. One of them had a tattoo on her bicep, some kind of bird. The third set of twins looked far too tame for the show, sad, wispy, almost Martha-like although they were short, round-cheeked redheads. Sally was grilling one of the redheads now, and the girl was so hunched over and folded-in that she could as easily have been twelve, or ten, as the sixteen that the banner at the bottom of the screen claimed. Evidently she and her sister had tried to poison another girl at their school by putting antifreeze into a Snapple.
“You say she was plotting against you,” Sally said. Her red glasses struck Abby suddenly as though they’d been painted on the screen, a trick of the light. That wasn’t a real person, with those glasses and a name like that. It was a messenger.
“She was.” The hunched redhead sounded certain, despite her miserable pose. “It was her or us.”
Sally drew up with that air that adults used to dispense their most dubious wisdom, but Abby leaned in anyway. “She had her own problems. Everyone in high school does. She wasn’t plotting against you, she wasn’t even thinking about you.”
“She’d stare at us. All the time. Give us mean looks.”
“Don’t be so stuck on yourself. Most people aren’t thinking about you, even when they’re looking right at you.”
Just then, when Abby thought she’d almost seen through the whole issue, there was a knock on the door. “Can I come in?” Martha’s voice. Sad, helpless. The voice that went with the girl on the screen.
The camera had switched focus to the Hispanic twins. Abby sighed and said, “Come in,” in as pained a tone as she could muster.
Martha opened the door, which had started to whine on its hinges—Abby had thought about getting oil for it but frankly if people were going to barge in they deserved the awful noise—and, almost in one motion, threw herself down on the bed. Abby hesitated just long enough to make her point and muted the TV.
“Just make Duane stop,” Martha said, sounding close to tears. “Everyone hates me since he started acting like this, and he won’t leave me alone, and I don’t want to date him! He’s weird and he’s ugly and he’s not even nice to me.”
“He asked you to the prom,” Abby said without turning from the screen. “That was pretty nice.” The banner at the bottom now was saying something about the boot camp the twins were going to be sent to. The insight she thought she’d had was gone.
“No, it wasn’t! Not when I don’t want to go to the prom! You won’t be there, and everyone will pick on me. Anyway, I told him to stop calling here and he called again and every time he does, Mom looks at me like I’m doing it on purpose!”
“Fine. I’ll make him knock it off.” Abby turned the sound back up. One of the goth girls was crying, eyeliner creeping thickly onto her white cheeks. Martha settled in beside her to watch, and Abby didn’t make her leave. Sometimes, although she’d never admit it, she missed sharing a room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
That night they ended up at a La Quinta near Madison. It was a good choice even if it wasn’t the cheapest—not a hole, and no extra fee for pets.
Abby updated her Twitter feed with a note about how much better she was feeling, her Instagram with a picture of the nondescript pizzeria salad she ended up eating from what they ordered in. That wasn’t enough so she followed it up with another picture of Buddy, eating canned chicken and rice from the new pawprint bowl Martha insisted they buy for him. The likes were warming, which was helpful, because whoever had the room last turned the AC far too high.
Then she sat down to fiddle with the GPS unit she took from Ryan’s truck. No more wandering off course. The GPS came with half a dozen voices—Han Solo, a clipped British aristocrat, a movie mobster. Abby couldn’t imagine not being annoyed by any of them after five turns or so. She let it return to the default, the nondescript woman with the same carefully enunciated accent that Abby once trained herself to use. In fact, it could almost be Abby’s voice, except that Abby knew when to get louder, when to sound like she was having fun or was genuinely upset.
“Go to State Route 19,” the woman said, when Abby entered their destination. “Turn left.”
Martha picked up the remote and started flipping through the channels. Buddy jumped onto the bed between them and began licking Abby’s shoulder.
“Hey!” She pushed his nose away. “You’re getting me damp!”
He drooped his head and then looked up at her, mimicking shame very convincingly. But as soon as she went back to her phone, he started again.
He was licking the mole. She remembered when that story about cancer-detecting dogs came out. She thought they had to be trained, though.
Martha put her arm around Buddy, pulled him away. “Don’t piss her off, Buddy. You wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.”
“He’s okay,” Abby said. She was too unnerved to be offended by the implication that she was some kind of dog-abusing monster. She almost hadn’t thought about the mole, this past day, and that seemed impossible when really it was the point of the whole exercise.
Was now a good time to tell Martha that she was dying? They could open the Moscato, finally, have the difficult conversation. Martha would feel bad, because… Martha would feel bad for her.
Abby turned and almost opened her mouth, but the sight of Martha stroking Buddy’s head changed her mind. Martha was happy right now, and a happy Martha was a cooperative Martha, while a distressed one tended to screw everything up in new and exciting ways.
Somehow, she drifted off to sleep without noticing. That was the only way it could happen that the voice of the GPS woke her up.
It was calm, pleasant, precise. It was reciting the words of that goddamned song.
She laid her back against a thorn, it said. All alone and so lonely-oh. And there she had two pretty babes born, down by the greenwood side-o.
Buddy was tense beside her, and when she put her hand on his back she could feel the hair of his ruff prickling up.
She took her penknife long and sharp, all alone and so lonely-oh, and with it pierced their tender hearts, down by the greenwood side-o.
Martha moaned quietly, a noise between sleeping and awake. Abby knew that she needed to get up and make the chanting stop before Martha heard it, but she just lay there, that first move not so much too hard as simply in a different universe.
Buddy began to growl.
As she came to her father’s hall, all alone and so lonely-oh, she saw two pretty babes playing at ball, down by the greenwood side-o.
“Abby?” Martha’s voice was quiet, but the fear came through. “Are you saying something?”
“The GPS is malfunctioning, is all. Don’t worry about it.”
Oh mother, oh mother, we once were thine, all alone and so lonely-oh. You didn’t dress us in scarlet fine, down by the greenwood side-o.
Abby absently wondered whether it was creepier without the music, or if it was just being jarred out of sleep that made her feel that way. The repetitive nonsense that glided by in a folk song now seemed intentional, demented.
Martha whimpered—too late now to stop her realizing what was going on. Buddy responded by increasing the volume of his growls a notch. Now that Abby’s eyes had adjusted she could see that his ears were swiveled forward and his teeth were bared. Too bad this wasn’t a problem that could be solved by biting.
Oh babes, oh babes, what
have I to do, all alone and so lonely-oh, for the cruel thing that I did to you? Down by the greenwood side-o.
“It’s still after us. It’s one of them after all, isn’t it?”
That was enough. “He can’t actually hurt us, not like Enoch and Briggs could,” she said. “Or he’d do that, instead of throwing birds at us and making our gadgets act up.”
“Are you sure?”
Abby wasn’t. But then she felt a tingle around the edge of her mind. Weak, pointless, easily swatted away, but he was trying to break in. Her words pissed him off, probably.
Good.
“Which of them do you think it is?” Martha asked in a low monotone.
“How am I supposed to answer that? They never had names.” But they were different, she knew that. One hungrier and stronger than the other. She remembered. And she’d bet this was the hungry one.
“You know how. Mine or yours.”
She tried to feel. Was it the hungry one? Or the other? She mustn’t underestimate the other just because she’d be the hungry one in their shoes.
She couldn’t tell. It was too tangled. It wasn’t like a person at all after all this time. It had barely been like a person at all to begin with.
They saw Duane every morning on the bus; he was so bad at being a senior that he had neither a car of his own nor a friend close enough to give him a ride to school, though his brother Charlie, who had graduated the year before, gave him rides home sometimes when his work schedule lined up right. It was the work of half a minute to tell him to lay off Martha; she barely even had to push, once he heard her tone of voice. He just looked at her with his over-sized stuffed animal eyes and nodded.