Dark Room

by Tom Becker

  She wandered through the cool house taking sips of water, coming to a halt by a large glass case at the foot of the stairs. Nearly half the size of the West Academy’s trophy cabinet, it contained the mementos of Natalie’s mom Kimberley’s teenage pageant triumphs. There were photographs and certificates, sashes and tiaras, and – at the very heart of the cabinet – the beautiful red sequinned dress Kimberley had worn the night she had been crowned Miss Saffron. It was impossible to walk through the house without seeing it, a constant reminder that in her day Natalie’s mom had been the prettiest girl in the county. “Pretty enough to model in New York,” Kimberley used to tell Natalie, with a hint of sourness that suggested it was somehow her daughter’s fault that she had married Benjamin McRae instead and never left Saffron Hills.

  When she was little Natalie would sit at the top of the stairs and watch her mom stand motionless in front of the cabinet, lost in its reflection. Kimberley would beckon her down and take her little hand in hers.

  “When you grow up,” her mom used to whisper, “you’re going to win that pageant and bring that title back home where it belongs.”

  She had never asked Natalie whether she actually wanted to enter Miss Saffron, or any beauty pageant for that matter. It wasn’t really about her, Natalie knew. The only thing that mattered was that Kimberley McRae’s daughter was as pretty as Kimberley McRae had been.

  Turning her back on the glass case, Natalie trudged up the stairs and went into her bedroom. Even though she was alone in the house, it was still a relief to close the door and shut out the world. Her room was shrouded in gloom, the windows filled with sullen rainclouds. She turned on her bedside lamp and went straight to her dresser mirror, pushing a stray lock of blond hair behind her ear. On the dresser beside her closet, a carved wooden Japanese box lay open filled with jewellery: diamond ear studs, delicate gold bracelets and rings of fiery ruby and cold sapphire. So many expensive things, all of them bought by her father – part of his continual, unspoken apology for leaving her alone with her mom.

  Opening the closet, Natalie reached up and sifted through the stack of shoeboxes on the top shelf. Her hands alighted upon a brown Louis Vuitton box at the bottom of one of the piles, and she carefully manoeuvred it free. She was alert now, her ears pricked for the sound of anyone unexpectedly coming home. Natalie carried the shoebox over to her bed and opened it. Inside there was an instant image camera, on top of a sea of photographs. She had secretly bought the camera online – her friends would have scoffed at the old-fashioned technology but Natalie didn’t want to leave the pictures she took on her phone where anybody could find them, and there was no way she would ever put them on the internet. The contents of the Louis Vuitton shoebox were her secret, for her eyes only.

  She took out the camera and sifted unhappily through the photographs at the bottom of the box. Every shot was a near-identical picture of her own face. Natalie had photographed herself every day for two years, carefully examining her features for the slightest blemish. She didn’t take the photos because she liked the way she looked – it was exactly the opposite. Every faint line, every patch of greasy skin was a fresh nightmare. But if she examined herself for imperfections, maybe one day she would be able to take a perfect picture. Maybe then, Natalie told herself, her mom would be happy.

  Her face was still red from the jog home, her hair in a sweaty tangle. Any photo she took now would only make her even more miserable, but Natalie knew that she couldn’t wait until she had showered and changed and put on make-up. It was almost as though she was punishing herself – although for what, exactly, Natalie couldn’t say. She wondered what Sasha would say if she could see her shoebox. She’d probably be laughing too hard to speak.

  Natalie held out the camera and trained it on herself. She composed her face and took a picture. There was a bright flash, followed by a click and a whirr as the photograph slid out of the camera. Natalie took it by the edges, waving it dry in the air.

  A loud beep came from downstairs. Natalie glanced up, and heard the electronic voice of the alarm announce that it was re-setting. She frowned.

  “Mom?” she called out. “Is that you?”

  She put the drying photograph down on her desk and went over to the window. Through the glass, she caught a glimpse of a red pick-up truck parked across the street. Natalie couldn’t remember whether it had been there when she came home, but she remembered the feeling of being watched in the driveway. Had the pick-up followed her home? Briefly she thought about calling security. But what would she tell them – that she was worried because the alarm had reset and someone had parked outside her house? Most likely by the time the guards turned up the pick-up would be gone, and it would take Natalie for ever to get rid of them. They loved to poke their noses around the mansions, to see how successful people lived. They weren’t even proper cops, Natalie thought disdainfully.

  Distracted, she went back over to her desk and picked up the photograph. As Natalie stared at it, the room suddenly went very cold. Her face was red and there was a cluster of pimples on her forehead. But that wasn’t why the sweat had frozen on her skin. Behind Natalie’s shoulder, through the open closet door, there was a pale, blurred oval in the shadows.

  Another face.

  The photograph fell fluttering from Natalie’s fingers. She backed slowly away from the closet, and felt her back bump against her desk. Scrabbling through her things, she snatched up a pair of scissors, her hands shaking as she held them out in front of her.

  “Who’s there?” she called out.

  The bedroom stayed silent, the closet door remaining tight-lipped. Whoever was in there must have been hiding behind the racks of clothes when Natalie had brought down her shoebox, close enough to touch her. The thought sent a shiver of horror down Natalie’s spine. Running her tongue nervously over her lip, she glanced towards her bedroom door. Four, five paces and she would be away – no one would catch her when she started running.

  So why was she still standing there?

  “Come out, whoever you are,” she said. “I’m not scared of you.”

  She was – more scared than she had ever been. But Natalie was also angry: at her lousy boyfriend, her cold, bitter mom and her coward of a dad, and now whichever creep was hiding in her wardrobe.

  Wait a minute.

  Her lousy boyfriend.

  Whom she had stood up only an hour earlier, and might be looking for a way to pay her back…

  Natalie laughed with disbelief. “Ryan?” she said. “If that’s you hiding in there, we are so over.”

  Marching over to the closet, she raised the scissors above her head and yanked open the door. A dazzling light exploded in her face, blinding her. Natalie stumbled backwards, opening her eyes just in time to see a silver blade slicing down through the air, slashing her face. She screamed, hot blood pouring from her cheek.

  Natalie dropped the scissors and staggered out of her bedroom clutching her face. There was no pain, her senses numb with panic and adrenaline. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the knife swinging towards her again – instinctively she ducked, and heard the thud of the blade as it buried itself into the landing wall. Sobbing, Natalie ran down the stairs, focusing on the front door and the safety that lay beyond it. She had almost reached the bottom step when she felt a rough hand in the small of her back. Natalie went flying forwards, careering headfirst into Kimberley McRae’s trophy cabinet amid an explosion of shattered glass.

  Things went very still for a time: Natalie must have blacked out with the pain. When she came to, she found herself lying on her back on the hallway floor, surrounded by glass shards and torn pageant sashes. There was blood on her face and hands and she was in so much pain she could barely move. A crunch of broken glass alerted her to the fact that someone was standing over her. There was another flash of light – had they taken a picture of her? Her eyes were swimming with blood and tears, it was hard to tell. Natalie could just make a figure dressed all in black as it knelt down be
side her and carefully sifted through objects from the destroyed trophy cabinet. Something glinted in the light – one of her mom’s diamond tiaras. She wanted to beg for her life, but all that came out of her throat was a wet bubbling sound.

  The last thing Natalie McRae saw was the tiara’s brilliant gleam as her attacker raised it high into the air, and then everything went black.

  Chapter Eight

  Darla sat quietly in the backseat of the truck as Frank drove it out of the school lot, battling a cranky stick shift. Sasha had ignored Darla’s polite attempts to turn down her invitation, all but dragging her into the truck. The spiky punk sat in the front passenger seat fiddling with the radio, jumping from station to station.

  “Hey, stop!” said Frank. “I like that song!”

  Sasha gave him a cold stare. “Franklin K Matthews,” she said, “you may be driving but this is my vehicle, and while I have breath left in my body, on no account will there be any country music played in it. Understand?”

  “Loud and clear,” said Frank. “But at some stage, you do realize you are going to have to accept that you live in the South, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Sasha accepted. “But not today.”

  Something about Sasha’s defiant attitude and look – and her beat-up truck, and her job in the record store – had made Darla assume she lived in the poorer neighbourhood of the town, somewhere close to her and Hopper. But to her surprise the pick-up headed up into the hills, its engine grumbling as it struggled up the steep road past all the expensive properties. Giving up on the radio in disgust, Sasha looked through the window at the glowering sky.

  “Storm’s coming in,” she said.

  “Good job we’re here, then,” replied Frank.

  He turned into a driveway through a set of automatic gates, following the black tarmac as it swept around a grassy expanse towards the house. There was a swimming pool at the back, tables and chairs arranged neatly across a paved terrace. As Frank parked the pick-up in front of a twin garage, besides a bright yellow sports car, Darla gazed around in wonder.

  “You really live here?”

  “No, Darla, I’m training to be a realtor,” Sasha said sarcastically. “Of course I live here. Come on inside.”

  She cut across the lawn towards the house, stomping across the grass in her heavy boots. As Darla followed behind, Frank jogged up and slipped his arm through hers. Up close, Darla noticed that his eyes were a sparkling blue colour. He didn’t look anything like Ryan or TJ, with their brash style and expensive clothes, but in his own quiet way Frank was almost as attractive.

  “Not quite what you were expecting, is it?” he whispered. “No shabby trailer down by the creek for Sasha Haas, no sirree. She might prefer that, but her mom and pop have got used to a certain lifestyle, if you know what I mean…”

  As she looked around at the immaculately manicured lawns, Darla couldn’t imagine anyone who would prefer a trailer to this. She bet that Sasha had never had to put out buckets to catch the drips from a leaking ceiling, or chase raccoons away from her trash in the middle of the night.

  The interior of the house was just as luxurious as the exterior, the entrance hall leading out into a huge open-plan living space with polished wooden floorboards and thick rugs. Bookshelves lined the walls, and a vast widescreen TV hung over the fireplace.

  “Sasha, honey?” a woman’s voice floated out from somewhere deep within the mansion. “Is that you?”

  “Yes!” Sasha shouted back. “I’m going upstairs, don’t bother coming out!”

  She grabbed Darla’s arm and quickly steered her up the stairs, stopping on the landing outside a door with a padlocked latch. Fishing out a small key from the depths of her bag, Sasha opened the padlock.

  Inside the room the drapes were drawn, and it took Darla’s eyes a few seconds to adjust to the gloom. Sasha’s bedroom, she realized, was a complete mess. The floor was strewn with old clothes and plates with pizza slices and half-eaten sandwiches on them. There was no furniture, not even a bed – just a mattress in the corner of the room, the pillows strewn about and the covers thrown back, a pile of books, and a stack of records by an ancient-looking record player. The walls were covered in scrawled graffiti, slogans and song lyrics written in block capitals. There was no mirror; in its place Sasha had drawn a rectangular outline in marker pen on the wall and stuck a magazine cutout of a woman inside it. The woman was beautiful, in a slightly haunted way, wearing thick black eye shadow and bright pink lipstick, her bare arms covered in tattoos. She looked like she might be famous, but Darla didn’t recognize her.

  “Welcome,” said Sasha, collapsing on to her mattress. “Make yourself at home.”

  “Can we start by opening a window?” asked Frank, pinching his nose. “It smells like used gym socks in here.”

  Sasha shrugged. “Be my guest.”

  He pulled back the drapes and pushed open a window, allowing a welcome gust of fresh air inside the room. Darla moved an empty pizza box and sat on the floor, her back against the wall. Blobs of used chewing gum clung to the wall like tiny snails. She couldn’t understand it. If Darla had been given a room in a beautiful house like this, she would have kept it neat and clean and fresh. Why had Sasha destroyed hers?

  She glanced up again at the woman in the ‘mirror’. It felt as though she was watching Darla.

  “Her name’s Brody Dalle.” Sasha paused, waiting to see if Darla knew who that was. “She’s a singer and guitarist. Her stuff’s pretty cool.”

  “Oh,” said Darla politely. “I don’t know much about music.”

  “You and Frank should get on just fine, then.” Sasha stretched out across the mattress. “So what’s your story, Darla? Where are you from?”

  “Round and about,” Darla replied cautiously. “We move about a lot because of my daddy’s work. Don’t tend to stay in any place too long.”

  “You like Saffron Hills?”

  “I guess. It’s really pretty, all these amazing houses.”

  “Shame about the people who live inside them,” Sasha replied. “Sorry for all the drama by the lockers today, that was a pretty rough introduction to the Picture Perfects.”

  Darla blinked. “The Picture Perfects?”

  “Natalie and her friends,” Frank explained. “It’s how they’re known.”

  “Know your enemy, Darla,” Sasha said seriously. “Chief Perfect is Natalie McRae. She’s from a super-rich family and her mom is a psycho ex-beauty queen who practically runs the local country club. Natalie’s spent her whole life being told she’s beautiful and better than everyone else and now she believes it. The other blonde is Carmen Russo. Her dad is the CEO of a cosmetics company who’s made a fortune out of pressuring girls to look pretty. So maybe he got the daughter he deserved.”

  “How so?” asked Darla.

  “I’m not saying Carmen’s stupid, but she thinks a menstrual cycle is something you ride in the gym. Then there’s Gabrielle Jones. Straight-A student. Member of the state girls’ volleyball team. Sings at Pastor James’s church every Sunday. In fact, Gabrielle’s practically perfect in every way. Oh, apart from the fact she’s a complete bitch.”

  “What about Ryan and TJ?” Darla said. “When I saw them at the mall, they were all hanging out together.”

  Sasha nodded. “Natalie and Swim Team have been going out since, like, whenever, and TJ Phillips is Ryan’s best friend.”

  “They’re jerks,” said Darla, with feeling. “If I’m not good enough to even speak to TJ why did he take a photo with me? Just to mess with me?”

  Frank and Sasha exchanged a glance. Then Sasha shrugged her shoulders, and pulled out a laptop from under her bedcovers. The laptop, Darla couldn’t help noticing, was brand new and ultra sleek. It appeared that there was at least one expensive item Sasha didn’t mind having. Her internet browser opened on her Instagram page, which was filled with selfies: Sasha standing in the front row of gigs; messing around with Frank, wearing his glasses; alone in her room, m
oodily staring back at the camera.

  Sasha quickly moved to another Instagram page and handed Darla the laptop. The new site was filled with photographs of teenage girls – not girls like Natalie and Gabrielle and Carmen and Sasha. These were normal girls: overweight girls and girls with thick glasses and girls with frizzy hair.

  Or, as the site called them, ‘Plain Girls’.

  In every photograph, either Ryan or TJ was standing with the girls, their arms draped around their shoulders. The girls had the same expression of startled amazement, as though they couldn’t believe these good-looking guys were having their photo taken with them.

  Which was the joke, of course.

  Her heart sinking, Darla scrolled down to the second row. Sure enough, there was the selfie of her and TJ in the mall. She was squinting into the camera, her eyes half-closed and her mouth twisted into a weird grimace. Beside TJ’s polished features, her face looked frecklier than ever, her ears sticking out through her hair. But even worse than the photo were the comments beneath it.

  This dirt-eater has got it all over her face LOL!!!

  Ugh.

  Hillbillies don’t wash: FACT.

  Darla pushed the laptop away. No wonder she thought people had been whispering about her in class. She had been humiliated before she had even walked through the door.