Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

by April Genevieve Tucholke

  I blinked.

  “She has very nice legs,” Paisley said.

  Katie-Marie finally opened her eyes and crawled over to join us by the window. “I hope he doesn’t bake her in his oven like he tried to do with you, Pais,” she whispered.

  Paisley nodded solemnly.

  We lost the will to make jokes or even talk. We watched as Leonard unlocked the front door and his friend entered his house. We knew the layout because there were only five different kinds of architecturally approved homes for the subdivision, and his was the one with the front porch and the sunken living room and the two bedrooms that had windows like eyes on the second floor. She must have gone down to the living room, because we didn’t see a light come on.

  Leonard came out once more and headed for the trunk. He seemed so eager. We watched him lift something out, and at first we assumed it must have been a suitcase, but then we noticed the odd, bulky shape and the way he had to circle it with his long arms. The birdcage was round and empty, as far as we could tell from this distance, and it had a latched and gated entrance that flapped in the wind. He carried it toward the house and didn’t return for more luggage.

  Her legs had told us one thing. Her lack of suitcase another. But it was the quivering smile on Leonard’s face when he walked under the porch light that told us so much more.

  × × ×

  The first night there were no birds, as usual. The first night was dark and quiet. The first night was long.

  The second night, Paisley and Katie-Marie stayed at my place again, even though Katie-Marie’s house had satellite TV and all the premium channels, and we perched at my Leonard-facing windows. We’d skipped dinner. We were worried for his lady friend and had lost our appetites. She hadn’t come outside all day, which meant we hadn’t seen her leave. We discussed ways of sending over a warning, like slipped in the mail slot, or left on the welcome mat to tell her she should not feel so welcome, but we knew he’d see it before she did. We tried looking up his number and couldn’t find it, so we couldn’t call and feign wrong number if he picked up. We were deep in discussion when she appeared at the window across the way.

  The light came on, a bright spot in the darkness, and we ran to the window, huddling under the sill. One by one, we popped a head up.

  Paisley said she was prettier than she thought she’d be—a high nine to Leonard’s withering two—but to me, her face was exactly how I’d pictured it, as if I’d selected her from a catalog. Or conjured her up from the Vogue-glossy pages of my imagination and sent her here. In a way it felt like I had.

  She was all mystery. She had dark, low-lidded eyes and a small, subtle mouth that did not seem capable of making a smile. Her cheekbones reflected stabs of light. Her hair was purple-black, much like her nails. It was wild, ragged, coasting into her eyes. I wanted to get close enough to see her eyes.

  “Do you think she goes to our school?” Katie-Marie said.

  We were getting bothered by how young she looked. She wasn’t so much a lady as a girl like we were. The age difference couldn’t have been much. Chop off a couple, and she could have been us.

  “No,” I said. “No way she goes to our school.” She didn’t look like she lived around here—she didn’t look like any girl we knew.

  “We should go in there,” Paisley said. “Tasha, your parents made you water his plants when he was away on vacation that one time, didn’t they? We need a key to his house.”

  I knew where the hide-a-key was kept—it looked like a rock under the fifth shrub. But should we break in right then, in the middle of the night? Should we barge in, guns blazing? The only weapons we had were a field hockey stick and a bottle of slick, sticky leave-in conditioner to aim at the eyes.

  “We can’t go in there!” Katie-Marie said. “We have to talk to her from here.”

  I nodded.

  She was in the bathroom window, at the sink. We could tell by the way she bent down, and how when she came up, her face was dripping wet. Cleaned of makeup, she looked even younger. She didn’t see us through the curtain at first, but then our waving must have gotten her attention. She parted his ugly curtains and she put her pretty face to the screen. It pressed against her skin and waffle-ironed her cheeks.

  She was watching us as we’d spent the weekend watching her.

  “Tell her to run,” Katie-Marie said. “Tell her to get out of the house right now.”

  “We can’t yell that,” Paisley said. “He’ll hear.”

  “Tell her she can come over here,” Katie-Marie said. “You have that extra sleeping bag, Tasha. Tell her.”

  I hesitated.

  “We can just yell fire?” Katie-Marie suggested. “Then she’ll know it’s an emergency and come out?”

  “They both will then,” Paisley said. “And Tasha’s parents and brother will wake up too. And they’ll be like, Where’s the fire? And we’ll have to say there isn’t one.”

  “Let’s write her a note,” I said.

  We started off with a simple message. I used my special notepad with the lavender paper and the pink lines, so she wouldn’t be scared, and used marker to write in the biggest letters that could fit on the page so she could see from across the way.

  WHO, I wrote, ARE YOU?

  She cocked her head in the frame of the window, eyeing our words. She made no reply.

  I held my arms as far out the window as I could, waving our sign, but still . . . nothing.

  “Do you think she doesn’t speak English maybe?” Katie-Marie asked. “Do you think she’s from another country?”

  “Oh, everyone speaks English,” Paisley said. “Tell her our names. She’s probably just shy.”

  PAISLEY, I wrote, with an arrow, and held the sign under the face of Paisley. KATIE-MARIE, for Katie-Marie. Then I shoved my body out of my window and showed her: TASHA, I LIVE NEXT DOOR, HELLO.

  No change in expression. She bent down once more and came up with a wet face again. She dried her face with a towel. She barely blinked.

  We offered her my cell number. We asked if she was in danger. We said, Do you need help? Should we call 911?

  There wasn’t any hint she understood.

  We stopped, frustrated.

  Then she made a movement. Sudden, like time skipping. There’d been a screen in the window, but she must have popped it out. Her bare arm, purple-taloned and catching the moonlight, came thrusting out into the open air. In her fist was something white and balled-up, like a hunk of tissues, but when she opened her hand, the white thing cascaded into one long, light expanse and caught the wind and fluttered down and down. I thought for a moment that she was performing a trick—a gasp of supernatural, like that time our few fingers lifted Paisley’s body a whole inch above the carpet and when we removed our fingers, she stayed aloft from our concentrated energy alone. At least it felt like she did.

  But no. The girl in the window had only thrown something white-colored out through the frame and it landed in a heap over the fence and on my side of the lawn.

  A bedsheet? No, not a sheet from a bed. A veil.

  The kind a bride would wear on her big day. Why was she showing this to us? Was this some kind of clue?

  The veil drifted languidly in the faint wind, and understanding came over me.

  “That’s his wife,” I said. The word turned my stomach. “He found some girl to marry him and he brought her home.”

  “No,” Paisley said in horror.

  The girl in the window watched us watching her. She did not scream. She didn’t have to.

  “Oh my freaking god,” Katie-Marie said, and the dread in her voice made our hearts seize and our fear spike. “Do you think he made her marry him? Do you think he stole her passport? Do you think her parents know where she is? Do you think she’s a prisoner?”

  What did we know? Only that we had suspicions. We had to assume
she was here on false pretenses, because who would marry Leonard by actual choice? We suspected we were the only ones alive who were aware she was here on Azalea Street, inside that house. He could have gotten her from anywhere. Maybe he found her in a parking lot. Maybe he picked her up on the side of the road and offered her a ride. Maybe he bought her off the Internet, like Paisley had innocently suggested. Maybe the girl came from nowhere we could name, and would fly off to nowhere we could pinpoint on a map, and maybe, ever after, we would remember her and think about where she could have ended up.

  She replaced the screen in the window and turned off the light. We couldn’t see where she went in the darkness, but we felt her there, right next door. Our subdivision vibrated with the sense of her, this stranger among us, this caged girl.

  We didn’t suspect then that she had come as if we’d called for her, as if our magical thinking on the night Paisley still smelled like yeasty-wet dough had come to fruition, rising up like the browned loaf of bread before it turned charcoal and burned.

  “We have to help her,” I said.

  × × ×

  We tried to stay up all night, making plans that became all the more impossible, until Katie-Marie crashed on one side of my bed and Paisley crashed on the other and there was no room for me to sandwich in between, so I had to take the sleeping bag on the floor.

  I curled up on the carpet, near the window. Just as I was about to drift to sleep, I sensed stirring over the fence. Something pulled on me, forced me to sit up.

  I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. I was right: She’d come outside. I spied the girl through the window. There she was, his new bride, in the backyard of his house. His lawn actually touched our lawn—the same grass grew—but the white wooden fence stood between. Still, seeing her bare feet in the dewy-green blades of grass, mashing her toes in, like she wanted to wake the ants and gather up all the mud, it felt like she was walking my patch of green grass, wandering my backyard.

  Where was Leonard? Sleeping. The light in his bedroom was off.

  The girl was out there alone, in her fur-lined coat. Nothing on her feet and nothing holding back her hair. Without the makeup and the stockings, she looked smaller than before. She looked skinned.

  She turned her face up, and then up some more, and at first I thought she was counting the stars above our subdivision, seeing if the stars here were the same ones she remembered from there, wherever she came from.

  All this I could see through the window of my bedroom.

  Then I noticed the sag in her cheeks and the shift-shaping of her mouth and realized she wasn’t doing what I thought she was. She wasn’t stargazing. She was searching the tree branches. I don’t know why. Each one she came to was empty.

  She reached the farthest tree. She put one hand, palm out, onto the rough bark and pressed it in, like she wanted the ridges imprinted on her skin. Then she pressed her other hand into a nearby spot. Then she pressed her face, the whole side of her face, cheek and chin and eye-bone and nose bridge and nostril, into the bark of the tree and stayed that way for some time.

  The sounds of the neighborhood filtered through. I could hear them faintly: Mrs. Abernathy had her car alarm set too sensitive again and the acorns dropping kept setting it off. The Willards across the street were up way too late watching a sports game of some kind, I could tell by the cheers. A dog barked—the Ruiz dog. Another dog barked—that mini screechy one that belonged to the McCoys. A car pulled up, quiet, and a door opened, a giggle emerged, and then so silently like it was lined with cotton, the door closed. That was Aggie home from the party with her boyfriend; her mom would kill her if she knew she’d stayed out till three.

  All around, the usual things were going on, and down there in Leonard’s yard was the girl we thought could be his child bride, hugging a gnarly tree instead of sleeping in bed with him. It was the saddest thing I’d seen all year, even worse than the time Miranda from school showed us her suicide notes and asked us to pick the best-written one so she could impress her dad.

  The girl stood still. She looked up in her dark coat at the branches. The clouds moved to cover the stars and not even an owl hooted, but far away, down the street, Mrs. Abernathy’s car alarm sounded again like a sudden, lonely song.

  I closed my eyes. I told myself to get up, get to my feet, put on some jeans, they didn’t have to be clean jeans, go outside. Go help that girl.

  When I opened my eyes, the sky was filled with them. It was night, and they never came out at night, but there they were, a ferocious fog of winged creatures, covering her coat and coating her hair and seeming to beat all around her, to drone a cyclone around her body, to buzz. The birds had come back.

  I couldn’t have said for how long this went on. A few minutes at least, maybe more. I really had to pee, so it seemed much longer.

  Then the flock of birds lifted, and the black sky was full of static like a dream had already been long going, and I was asleep and didn’t come to again until sunrise.

  × × ×

  We decided to knock on Leonard’s door in the morning. We couldn’t wait. We’d considered calling the police and leaving an anonymous tip to check his house for a missing girl, but then Paisley said we should see her in person first. How many times had we said Leonard squicked us out and our parents responded by saying we were exaggerating, making fun of the poor man, being cruel? If we saw the girl in daylight—better yet, if we could speak to her, face-to-face, if we could introduce ourselves and say a proper hello—then we’d know for sure if she needed saving.

  It was Paisley’s idea to bring the empty bag of sugar and ask if we could borrow some (we dumped it out in the garbage so it would look like it needed filling), and it was Katie-Marie’s idea to invent a baking project we were doing to raise money for field hockey. We’d noticed how he paid extra-careful attention to us whenever we wore the plaid skirts home from practice.

  We did look for it in the grass, walking all up and down the white picket fence trying to find it, but it wasn’t there. The bridal veil. The wind must have blown it away in the night, or else the birds must have snatched it.

  When we entered his yard through the fence divider, that’s when we noticed them. Birds on the branches above us. Birds all along the bushes and on every shrub. Birds clamoring at his feeders and lining the sloping arc of his roof. Birds on the gutters. Birds perched on the roof of his car. There were so many. Silent. Pointy beaks aimed down on us, following our path to the back door, beady eyes on our every move.

  Paisley knocked.

  When he came to the door, he didn’t open it all the way. Through the crack, the Sunday sunlight showed us his pink-tinged face, and his mouth, so fat, it looked swollen.

  I held up the empty sugar bag but swallowed my words too fast. Katie-Marie grabbed on to my shirt from behind, pulling the neck tight and practically strangling me.

  “Hi, Leonard. Good afternoon. I mean good morning. Um. We were hoping we could borrow some sugar?” Paisley said, taking over. She talked fast. Bake-sale, she was saying. To raise money for the team. He didn’t need to know that the season was over or that not all of us were on the team.

  “What are you making?” he asked, and his words jolted us, because we’d forgotten to determine what it was we were pretending to make before we walked over.

  “Cookies,” Katie-Marie said from behind me while at the same time I said, “Cupcakes,” and Paisley said, “Cake pops.”

  We shot glances at one another, alarmed.

  “You’ll need a lot of sugar, then,” Leonard said. “It’s early, so I’m not decent yet. Wait here.”

  He closed the screen and then the door behind it. Paisley had her body pressed up against the screen, and it practically scraped off the tip of her nose. She rested an ear to it, trying hard to listen. But she shook her head: nothing. We strained our ears in case the girl was crying for help, and we wondered from wh
ere she’d be calling—from the basement? From the broom closet beneath the stairs? The windows were shuttered. The walls were warm.

  “We need to go in there,” Katie-Marie said.

  My hand reached out and there was this brave bolt of energy in my body that made me turn the knob. The screen door came open and then there was one more door to open and in seconds we were inside.

  Leonard was in a pair of boxer shorts and a stretched-out V-neck shirt that horrified us with its display of chest hair. He held a large ceramic container that said SUGAR on one side. His glasses were crooked on his nose. “I told you to stay outside,” he said. What—who—was he hiding?

  “It’s cold, we were cold,” Katie-Marie started, but Paisley had had it with the lies.

  “Where is she?” she said.

  “Who?” Leonard said. He was holding the sugar container in front of his crotch, but believe us, we were already averting our eyes.

  “The girl. The girl with the purple hair. The girl with the fur coat. The girl we saw you bring inside. Where’s the girl!”

  He set the sugar down. Outside a bird shrieked. Another followed, and another. The room was very hot, and his oven wasn’t even on.

  Katie-Marie was so shaken, she’d begun to cry. Paisley was on alert, hands in fists. I held the empty bag up like a weapon and a few grains of sugar rattled inside. We were not prepared.

  “What girl?” Leonard said. We watched his pink lips. How carefully he said it, how slow and with a drawl, like he believed that because we were girls ourselves we could be fooled.

  “We saw her, Leonard,” Paisley said. “We saw her come in.”

  “There isn’t any girl,” Leonard said. “Apart from you three.”

  Once he said that, it happened. The sound of rustling from another room.

  His neck snapped toward the noise, knowing he was caught, then trying to hide it. But he couldn’t hide her.