and went against the world.
I breathe in. The food smells good.
38
MAXINE
The smell of food is a hook lodged in my hunger. It reels me in, pulls me up the hill.
All that hope Linnea’s always blabbing about? Strength is what really matters. Still, there won’t be any hope or strength unless I eat.
I crash the cafeteria.
“I’m starving,” I say, loving the look on Linnea’s face. I had already thought she was pretty, even when I assumed she was a sadist messing with my family. But shock makes her even prettier. Her big eyes even bigger. Pretty doesn’t equal healthy, though. Her skin is ashen, her lips pale, her eyes glassy.
“What are you doing out of bed?” she says.
She doesn’t get the chance to say more, because Chris bursts in brandishing an arrow with something furry and limp impaled on it.
“Rabbit!” he announces proudly, like we’d all been dying for one.
“Oh, Jesus,” Linnea mutters, eyeing the poor dead thing. “Now?”
“Hey, Max, you’re looking good,” he says, winking.
I ignore him.
Chris plunks the rabbit on a butcher block. The arrow quivers.
“I thought you were making a trap,” Linnea says.
He flicks the arrow with two fingers so that it trembles even more wildly. “Dead rabbit is dead rabbit. What do you care how it gets dead? I remembered we did archery here, so”—he mimes pulling back the bow and spreading his fingers—“pow!”
“Um … what’s going on?” Linnea says, gesturing my way.
He shrugs. “I unlocked her. You only whined about it a million times. I thought you’d be glad.”
“Oh, yeah,” she says. “Of course. I am.” Even a blind man could see she’s lying. She turns to me. “You really should be in bed.”
“I’m done with being in bed.”
Chris takes two chairs off the tabletop and sets them on the floor with the one already there. He motions to one with a flourish. “Sit down,” he says to me. “It’ll be a while.”
I keep standing.
“No, it won’t be a while,” Linnea says. “It’s ready now.”
“I killed a fucking rabbit,” Chris says, steely, “so you’re gonna cook a fucking rabbit. Wasn’t that one of your selling points, that you can cook?”
“Fine,” Linnea says through gritted teeth. “Good. Rabbit. But the mushrooms are ready now, so let’s eat those before they get cold.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Chris says. “Mushrooms are a side dish tonight. They can wait.”
“I’ve never skinned a rabbit,” Linnea says. “It’ll take me forever. And you heard Maxine. She’s starving.”
Chris laughs. “You think what happened before means I’m gonna trust you with the knife all of a sudden?”
Hand it over to me. I’ll cut you in two seconds flat.
“What happened before?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. And then to Chris, “It’s not like the thing can wriggle out of its own skin.”
“No kidding.” He comes over to her, drapes his arm around her shoulders like it’s a scarf and she’s a coatrack. Why doesn’t she push him off? Why does she just stand there?
“I’ll do the skinning,” he says.
The light outside is fading fast. The caf dims. Chris lights one of the lanterns and stands over it as if to guard its fragile glow.
She sighs. “Fine. But can we please eat the rest of what I cooked now?”
“Nah,” he says. “Don’t want to ruin my appetite. Besides, a mushroom is a mushroom is a mushroom. We’ve had ’em last three meals.”
She sighs even harder. And then, weirdly, she bursts into tears.
“Hey, hey,” Chris says, rubbing her shoulders. “What’s going on?”
Her face is squinched up in tears and it’s blotchy red and her eyes are already puffy. She looks even less healthy now.
Chris whispers to her, but not soft enough. “Do you get really emotional after … you know … ?”
WTF?
She shakes her head, looks at the floor. She manages to splutter through her tears. “I worked really hard on the dish and we don’t have a microwave or anything and it’ll be ruined if we wait.” Then she looks up at him. Pleadingly. And with something else in her eyes, something I can’t define. But the look makes me want to break her pretty nose. “Please, Chris. Just this once?”
Now it’s his turn to sigh. “Fine.” He points to one of the chairs he set up, looks my way. “You jealous, Max?”
“Jealous?” I say.
Linnea brings two plates over, sets one in front of him, one in front of me.
“Eat,” he commands me.
I sit down. Not because he told me to, but because if I don’t eat, I might as well stay chained up.
“Here,” he says, taking a big forkful from his plate and glopping it onto mine. “Just to prove you’re always my best girl, no matter what.”
“No!” Linnea says.
“Whoa,” Chris says. “What’s your problem?”
“That was for you.” She sulks. “It was just the right amount.”
“What is this?” he asks. “Goldilocks and the Three Goddamn Bears? ‘Just right’?”
I pick up my fork and stab a bunch of ’shrooms.
Rushing toward the table, Linnea must trip on a curled-up edge of linoleum. She falls onto me before she rights herself and my dish flies off the table and lands, food first, on the floor. My fork is jostled out of my hand too.
“Watch it!” Chris says.
“Oh, shit,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Good thing we have the rabbit,” he says, and he pushes his plate forward. “But for now, dig in.”
“No, you eat yours,” she says. “Max and I will eat mine. It’s on the stove.”
“You’re worried about us now?” I say to him.
“Maxine, shut up,” she says.
“No, don’t shut up, Maxine,” Chris says, his voice icy. He drops his fork onto his plate. “What do you mean by that?” He draws his lighter out of his pocket and wakens another lantern on the table. The hollows of his eyes are dark and prominent with the watery light striking his face.
All of a sudden the gamey stink of the rabbit hits me. I gag. “I meant that we’re not—”
“She didn’t mean anything,” Linnea interrupts, bringing over the pan with mushrooms in it, a spoon sticking out of it. “She’s still delusional from being sick. Just eat, Maxine.”
“I don’t need you to speak for me.” I stand up. “We’re going to die here, and you’re acting like this is Little House on the Prairie.”
“Nobody’s going to die,” she says. “We’re just working things out.”
“What exactly are we working out?” I ask.
Linnea grabs my forearm, squeezes. “Just stop,” she whispers. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“You wanted to leave home,” Chris says to me, anchoring an elbow on the table, pivoting his stiffened torso so he’s looking at me straight on. “There were too many people there.” He adds a mocking whine. “Your brothers, your mother, Ezra.”
“Leave my family out of it. You’re deranged.”
Linnea sets the pan down, covers my mouth with her hand. “Max, don’t,” she hisses. I shove her away. She yelps.
“Why don’t you tell the truth for once?” I say to Chris. “What do you really want with me?”
“Max.” He pushes his dish away, pushes away from the table. He comes toward me. “We’ve always been honest with each other. That’s why we work. You’re nothing like your sister.” “I said leave my family out of it!”
“I’m your family now,” he says.
“No!” I step back. I turn away. “Never.”
“Oh Jesus,” Linnea wails, hiding her face in her hands. “Maxine. You’re ruining everything.”
“Everything’s already ruined!” I say. “Maybe you’re too s
ick to see it. You can barely stand up.”
Her face, when she peels her hands away, is a blotchy, creased mess. “Stop. Just stop.”
“Why? To spare his feelings? He doesn’t have feelings.”
Chris yanks his knife out from under his shirt.
Linnea screams.
39
HARPER
I scream.
I wedge myself between Max and the monster. “Shut up, Max!” I shriek, but I know that look in her eyes. The wriggling fury. Just like her big sister. She’s gearing up to fight.
“You think you can hold me hostage and I’ll be your little wifey?” she spits at him.
I need to silence her. To keep her safe.
“Chris,” I say, “don’t listen to her, she’s just—”
“Let her talk,” he says, sheathing his knife. “Let her hang herself. She’s unspooling the rope.”
I don’t exist for Max in this moment. She’s in his face, on her tiptoes so she’s closer to meeting his eye. “You’re vile,” she hisses, spittle flying, fists so tight her forearms turn ropy. “You killed my—”
I grab the pan off the table and whack her on the side of the head with it.
She crumples to the floor. I cry out. I did it, but I’m in shock anyway.
He yells, “What the fuck?”
I fall to my knees, check to be sure she’s breathing. I find her pulse at her wrist. It’s steady. Oh thankgodthankgodthankgod.
“Why in the hell’d you do that?” he says.
“She’s too emotional right now. It’s her time of the month. She didn’t mean any of it.”
Please forgive me, Max. Afterwards, you’ll understand.
“She’d better be okay,” he snarls.
“She’s fine.” There are mushrooms on her chest, on her forehead. I wipe them off. The pulse in her neck beats steadily. Thank you, Jesus.
I’m kneeling in mushrooms. Oh, Jesus Christ, these are the safe mushrooms. At least the important batch is on his plate, but I need a safe batch to play the game. And I’ve already cooked all I gathered for the day. I grab an empty plate. I scoop mushrooms from off the floor and heap them onto the dish.
He thuds into a chair. “She hates me.”
“No, no. She loves you.”
“Bullshit.”
“Just let her sleep it off,” I say. “She’ll be fine when she wakes up.”
“What’re you doing?”
“I made a mess when I conked her out.”
“You can’t eat that,” he says.
“It’s fine.”
“That’s disgusting. There’s rat shit and stuff on the floor.”
“It’s fine,” I repeat. “Really.”
“Just eat mine,” he says. “I’m not hungry anyway.”
“I worked hard on this meal. I wanted it to be special for you.”
“So we’ll share it,” he says. He hikes me up by my elbow. “Jesus, you’re bleeding.”
“I am?” I press a hand against my heart.
He points to my stomach. There’s blood oozing through my shirt. And now I feel the pain underneath.
“I must’ve …” I feel woozy. “I must’ve bumped up against the knife … when I got between you and Max.”
“That was stupid of you.”
I latch on to the table for balance. He goes to the kitchen, comes back with a roll of rough brown paper towel. He tears off a length of it and hands it to me. “‘Righteous blood cries out for vengeance.’”
I apply the paper towel over my shirt; I can’t get sidetracked by my wound. I have to get him to eat. That’s all I’m here for.
Thinkthinkthink.
“Everything’s all fucked up now.” He paces a path in front of Max’s splayed body. Like he’s building a fence of footsteps.
“No, it’ll be okay.”
“How can you say that?” he practically shrieks. “Maxine and I were supposed to be together and now—”
“You’re still together.” The paper towel feels sticky and warm under my palm.
“She should’ve been over it by now,” he says.
“Over what?”
“She still thinks about her sister’s boyfriend.”
“No, not true,” I say. “She never liked him.”
He does a double-take. “What the hell you know about it?”
“She told me.”
He looks at her. I look at her. Please stay knocked out a while longer.
I take his hand, even though I’d rather pick up that poor arrow-pierced rabbit. I murmur as seductively as I can. “God wouldn’t put a desire in your heart unless he wanted you to act on it. Max’ll come around. But I’m here now.”
He grunts a grunt that could mean anything.
I go on. “You’ll see that the way I show my love is through feeding the people I care about. And right now, there’s nobody I care about more than you. Let me feed you.”
His eyes soften. His breath slackens. He pulls me to him. I think he’s leaning in for a kiss, but he bites my bottom lip so hard I nearly yelp.
“You just made me hard,” he says.
“I’m glad,” I force out. “Come on, let me nourish you.”
He sits at his place. He smiles at me while picking up his fork. I set his dish back in front of him, hoping the tremor in my hand doesn’t show.
“Ladies first,” he says.
“Oh. Sure. Thanks.” I dig into the mushrooms that had been on the floor.
“Not those, I said!” He wipes out the plate with the whisk of an arm. It lands somewhere south of Max’s feet, abstract mushroom art on a linoleum canvas.
Now we’re down to poisonous mushrooms or no mushrooms. A seesaw I don’t see a way off.
He glances at me and then back at his dinner. He narrows his eyes. “Is there something wrong with mine?”
“What?” I force out a laugh. “Of course not!”
He sends the plate over to my side of the table. “Sit.”
I sit. I force myself to smile. I try to nudge my setting to autopilot: pierce food with fork, force food into mouth, chew, swallow. “Mmm, delicious.” I take another bite. Happy now?
He watches me for a minute as if to see whether I combust. “More,” he says, his voice all edge.
“I really should get to work on the rab—”
He glowers at me. “More, I said.”
I take more. He wags his finger at the plate. I take more still. “I’ve eaten more than my share,” I say. “And I want to take care of you. I feel like that’s what I’m here for.” To take care of you once and for all.
I smile at him. Which feels as hard to do as knowingly swallowing poison.
He drags the plate back to him and starts shoveling big forkfuls into his mouth, grunting again. There’s a loud screech from outside. A bird of prey. A great horned owl? A hawk? One’s a harbinger of death. That should cheer me, considering I need this man to die.
“You need to teach Maxine how to show her love,” he says, his mouth full of food.
“I will, I will.”
“I’m gonna show you mine.” There’s a piece of mushroom dangling from his lower lip. He’s staring at me greedily, like he can pierce me with a fork and swallow me down. “Now,” he says, “let’s go back to my cabin.”
He slurps up the last bit of food and eyes me like a conqueror. His expression makes me unbearably nuts, makes me want to do something stupid like pick up that skillet again. I calm myself by imagining his arrogance a riptide dragging the poison through his blood with great speed and perfect aim.
Go ahead. Leer.
I think he eats plenty.
The problem is, I have, too.
40
HARPER
Maxine is still out cold on the floor. She murmurs occasionally (I think I hear “Race,” but I could be wrong), so maybe she’s merely sleeping now and not knocked out. I want to fold up a dish towel and put it under her head, but I’m afraid to wake her. She’s safer unconscious. That way her fu
ry just maybe won’t get us killed.
The rabbit’s still dead on the counter above where Maxine sleeps, the arrow still burrowed into its flesh. The slash at my stomach still weeps. He swipes his finger across his plate and licks it.
I need to throw up. And fast.
“Where the hell you going?” He digs the blade of his knife into different spots on the tabletop. Taptapdig, taptapdig.
“Outhouse.”
“Just piss in the grass.” Taptapdig, taptapdig. “And after that …” After you do the unthinkable to me all over again, you God-fearing lunatic?
“After I’m gonna teach you to skin that fucking rabbit.” Digdigdig. “Flay the ssskin.”
My heart leaps. Was that a slur? Is the poison working? He’s a big guy. There’s a chance he didn’t eat enough to kill him or at least make him sick enough where I can get his keys.
That’s if I can even lift a set of keys by then. I feel like a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. How much is it this heart being shut out by a body hostile to it, and how much the poison I’ve consumed, I’ll never know.
“I’ll only be a minute,” I say. Please don’t follow me.
“Hurry up,” he calls, still at the table.
The night is cool and clear. The stars are noisy. The air is bright with cricketspeak.
I scuttle down the stairs and duck under a tree on the opposite side of the cabin. I stick my finger down my throat. Way back. My fingernail scratches the roof of my mouth. Finally, I gag. But that’s all it is. A dry heave.
I try again, this time with more courage and force.
Another eye-watering dry heave, but one that comes from deeper in my gut.
I thrust my finger back there again and this time the heave pulls something up besides air: a hot splash.
Once it starts, the waves take over. My throat burns and stings. I’m left exhausted, wrung-out, terrified … and, something I haven’t felt in days … hopeful.
Something grabs my hair. At first I think it’s the talons of an owl, mistaking my head for a rabbit.
“What the hell you doing?” He yanks my head back. He squats beside me.
“I’m sick.” Shit. Did he see me force it? He’ll know. He’ll do it too! He’ll survive. If I hadn’t retched up every drop of liquid this body carries, I’d burst into tears.
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