Emmy could handle putting on hair mascara or something similar, this was going to be a breeze. Until…
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Noelle shrugged. ‘I dare you to kiss Jared at the Halloween party.’
‘No!’ she cried.
‘YES!’ yelled Rae.
‘You can’t pre-date a dare!’
Rae jumped in. ‘Of course you can, and you have to try now. Bravo, Noelle, I didn’t know you had it in you.’
‘But it’s not going to be a kissing type of party, we’re not in school.’
‘As if you ever kissed anyone at a school party.’
‘Thanks for that, Rae. Besides, he’s not planning to even drink because he’s got a really early shift on the first of November, and he doesn’t even fancy me any more.’ That’s right, bitches, thought Emmy, and her chest swelled with smug pride. Oh, Emmy, you sex goddess.
‘WHOA. He doesn’t fancy you any more? Where did that come from? Did you and Jared already have a “thing”? Did you already bump your nerdy uglies together?’ Rae was practically drooling.
‘No, didn’t I tell you?’ Emmy preened a little.
‘Tell us what.’
‘I thought I told you… what Jared said to me…’ She preened a little more. It wasn’t often she was the one with any juice to share.
‘I’m going to kick you in the fanny if you don’t hurry up and spill,’ Rae said kindly.
‘He might have told me he used to have a bit of a crush on me, once upon a time.’
‘Really?’ Noelle beamed and tilted her head and went all soppy-Disney-princess.
‘Really?’ Rae burst with incredulousness. ‘I mean: cool, really?’
‘Yes, really. He said he never said anything because he thought I knew and wasn’t interested. I, girls, had a secret admirer.’
‘He fancied you,’ Rae said, in the way really only sisters can talk to each other. ‘I’m not being a cow, but you weren’t… Whatever, I’m happy for you. I always knew you were awesome and actually quite funny, I just didn’t realise there were other people outside our own four walls that realised that too.’
Emmy made a face at her and then leant back on her hands. ‘Hey, I have a truth question for the room. Does anyone feel sad about what we’re doing?’
‘Sad?’ asked Noelle.
‘Sad in a sentimental way. Because we’re stripping our family home of, well, our family.’
‘Hmm.’ Noelle thought for a moment. ‘Well, now I do. But it’ll still be ours, just a bit scrubbed clean.’
‘The house is growing up,’ Rae said. ‘Just like us. How about you?’ she asked Emmy back.
‘Nope,’ she said with a shrug.
‘Nothing melting those icy walls around your teenage heart yet?’ Rae teased.
‘Nothing.’ Then she remembered her outburst last week when she was alone, when she’d climbed into her dad’s chair. But she’d just been tired and overworked, and outside her comfort zone. The icy walls were intact, thank you very much.
Emmy’s eyelid twitched.
Chapter 17
‘Emmy? Noelle?’ Rae called for her sisters from where she was sat on the living-room floor trying to figure out how to build a window seat. Emmy came down the stairs and Noelle and Jenny came in off the porch where they had been flirting like teenagers whilst putting together some flat-pack furniture bought at Jenny’s shop.
‘You hollered?’ Emmy asked.
‘Check this out.’ She moved to the side, and under the window, where she’d ripped up the carpet, was a huge mural of a circle with a crescent shape on either side.
‘What’s that supposed to be? A boiled sweet in a wrapper?’ Emmy tilted her head.
‘Is it a crab?’ asked Noelle. Jenny squinted beside her.
‘No, I googled it,’ Rae said. ‘It’s a triple moon – a Wiccan symbol called the Triple Goddess. Apparently, it represents the maiden, the mother and the crone.’
‘Hey, it’s like the three of us!’ cried Emmy. ‘Noelle’s the sweet flower-girl maiden, Rae thinks she’s our mother and – oh.’
‘You’re the crone!’ squawked Rae.
‘I think this is kind of cool,’ said Noelle, crouching down and running her hand over the age-old paintwork. ‘This should be the pattern we use for Mum’s stained-glass window.’
‘That’s a really good idea, actually,’ Emmy said.
Rae looked up. ‘You know what I’ve been thinking? It’s pretty clear that Mum and Dad were indeed into all this stuff, and good for them. But how did they go from having the town storm their house in the night with burning pitchforks, to Mum being feared enough for people to keep a respectful distance?’
‘Jenny.’ Noelle turned. ‘Do you know, as someone who lives here full-time?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘I don’t know. For as long as I can remember, people have been that way around your mum. So any change in the weather must have happened before I came along. Maybe before you all came along.’
Hmm. That was something for the sisters to think about.
‘Something else I want to know,’ added Emmy, ‘is exactly what everyone thinks is so creepy about this house?’
‘Welcome to Creepy History 101 with me, Professor Bonn-izzle!’ Bonnie stood by the living-room fireplace, facing the sisters.
‘Thanks for coming, Bonnie,’ Emmy said, wondering what they’d got themselves into. But this girl had already done all the research, so who better to fill in the blanks? Well, who better on short notice, when this was really only an excuse to further procrastinate from DIY?
‘No problem at all, and you’re going to let me put some of this stuff in the article, yeah?’
‘Yep. Deal. Maybe we could just read it first, before you submit it, okay?’
‘Dealio.’ Bonnie addressed them all. ‘What makes a house creepy? According to research by… me… three factors: location, appearance and rumours of weird things. So, for this house, you’ve got all three boxes ticked. Location-wise, you’re in the woods. Trapped in the woods. You don’t need me to tell you why that’s creepy, you’re Blair Witch era.’
The sisters nodded at each other; she had a point.
Bonnie continued, ‘Appearance. This one you’re working on, but before now this house has been a little rough around the edges, no offence. And everyone knows a crumbling old house is bound to be full of secrets. And, finally, weird things. It doesn’t even have to be ghostly apparitions; literally any weird things can help add to the drama of a creepy house. Your mum and dad were witches or whatever, and that’s – rightly or wrongly – been documented in newspapers. Hey presto, badda-bing, you have a creepy house.’
‘And people just love a haunted house, I guess?’ Noelle added.
‘Exactly. Just look at theme parks. I’m telling you, this Halloween party is an awesome idea. Give them a chance to nose around and they’ll love it, and suddenly you’ll have a hundred new best friends.’
Did they want a hundred best friends? The sisters caught each other’s eyes. They had been complaining about not having friends here, but a hundred seemed like a lot of effort.
‘Finn can’t make it to the party,’ Rae said, unable to keep the irritation from her voice. It was the day before Halloween, and he was due to drive down that night.
She walked across the room and flopped down on the sofa next to Noelle, who was looking through a photo album, on a break from building the window seat while Emmy went to the garage for more tools. ‘You’re always looking at photos of Jenny, why are you so weird and obsessed?’
‘Okay,’ Noelle said, pushing the photo album aside. ‘Wanna talk, Rae?’
‘No. This is about a grown-up relationship, not some bloody little high-school romance like you’re trying to rekindle.’
Noelle nodded and stood up, moving to the front door. ‘Emmy?’ she called outside. ‘We have a sister-bitch situation occurring in here.’
Rae mumbled something about Noelle telling on her just as Emmy walked back in the house,
carrying two hammers. ‘Okay, let’s defeat the window seat! What’s the problem?’
Noelle filled her in. ‘Finn can’t come to the party, so Rae’s taking it out on me.’
‘Why are you blaming Noey?’
‘I’m not, I just asked why she was obsessing over her ex-girlfriend like some reject from Ex on the Beach. Not everything’s my fault.’ Rae pushed her face into the cushion. She was quite aware she was being a massive cow. She should apologise. Instead, she reached out and knocked a book off the coffee table.
Emmy sat down next to her and smacked her on the bottom. ‘Oi. Pack it in. So, Finn isn’t coming down to visit?’
Rae knocked a pen on to the floor. Deliberately.
Emmy’s voice softened. ‘That sucks. I know you were looking forward to seeing him. What happened?’
Rae sat up and sighed. ‘He can’t get away from work. It’s ridiculous. Surely he can get just twenty-four hours off to come and see his wife? What a dick.’ She rubbed her face. ‘But I know he can’t. He wants to, but he can’t. I just miss him a lot. He’s going to try and make it down as soon as possible in the next couple of days.’
Emmy rubbed her sister’s back, while she sat miserably for a while.
‘I wasn’t looking at photos of Jenny, you know,’ Noelle said in a quiet voice. Rae looked over at her. ‘I was actually looking at photos of us. From an Easter holiday we took to some caravan site up country. Look.’ She turned the photo album and there was the whole family posing at the door of the caravan.
It was 1994. Noelle was around the age of six, Emmy eight, and Rae about ten. Noelle and Emmy were in matching pea-green sweatshirts, their big glasses reflecting the flash from the camera. Noelle was in the foreground, a huge grin on her face, holding on to a Barbie doll in a swimming costume, whose hair had been chopped at an angle. Emmy and Rae hung from the door frame, arms wide like they were in a Hollywood musical. Rae wore a Garfield T-shirt tucked into some humongous culottes, her face clean of all the make-up of her future (apart from a cheeky slick of brown lipstick she’d got from the front of a magazine).
Their mum and dad stood behind the girls, only their heads visible in the doorway. They were smiling, like they always were.
Emmy grinned. ‘We did take good Easter holidays, didn’t we?’
‘They were really good. A beach and a caravan, and we were happy as anything,’ Noelle agreed.
‘We never went very far, you know,’ Rae said. ‘It felt like we were in the car for hours, but we were only going to Cornwall, Somerset, North Devon, maybe Wales.’ She looked at her sisters. ‘I don’t mean that as a bad thing, I’m not being ungrateful. We had some really good times, even though some other kids were flying off to Disney World or swanning about at a Eurocamp.’
‘I kept going on those Easter holidays to the bitter end,’ said Emmy. ‘Right up until uni. And one year after, since Noey was still going.’
Rae took a deep breath. ‘We should do one next year. The three of us, with Mum. Let’s just rent a caravan for a week, down in Cornwall somewhere.’
‘That sounds really good, actually,’ Noelle nodded.
‘I’m in too,’ said Emmy.
‘Then it’s sorted. And Noelle, I don’t think you’re obsessing over Jenny. I think you’re actually being quite cool about it all. So sorry for being a huge c-word to you.’
‘Thank you.’ Noelle reached over for the Magic 8-Ball. ‘Should I forgive my sister and stop obsessing over my ex for the rest of the day, so we can plan a total rager of a Halloween party with all our frenemies?… Oh. “Don’t count on it.”’
Emmy took the Magic 8-Ball off her sister and put it down with a smile. ‘Shut up, ghost of Dad. You just don’t want us to throw a party.’
‘I can’t believe so many people are coming tonight.’ Emmy fluttered about, Ashanti blasting out of the stereo that Halloween morning. The sisters were all up at the crack of dawn (though dawn was getting later and later these days) and were scampering about in their PJs touching up bits of paintwork they’d missed, hanging garish orange and black banners in the windows, and googling recipes for blood-coloured punch.
Noelle sauntered past with a witch’s broom. ‘The response has been great, people seem genuinely excited. Maybe they don’t hate us any more after all.’
‘Those arseholes are going to be so gutted when they see our house isn’t haunted,’ Rae said, tying a ghost balloon to a lampshade. ‘Like, actually haunted I mean.’
Noelle then pulled a big bag out from the living room. ‘I bought loads and loads of fairy lights at the shop, so we can keep things really light and bright and pretty. I was going to go with candles but I thought it was a bit too “Wicca”.’
‘Thanks for agreeing to this,’ said Rae, stopping and pulling them both into an un-Rae-like double hug. ‘I really think we’re going to move past the pettiness and bury a lot of hatchets with this party. Tomorrow, one: we’ll see if Emmy managed to do her dare of kissing Jared, and two: we’re going to wake up and, for the first time in Maplewood, feel like grown-ups.’
Chapter 18
‘One, two, three, drink!’ Rae commanded. It was past seven. The invite had said seven. Why was no one here yet? Had they never intended to show up? She was rapidly losing her nerve and her patience, so was resorting to Dutch courage. She grabbed the bottle of vodka. ‘One more?’
‘Rae, they’ll be here,’ said Noelle, but she accepted another shot anyway.
‘Yeah, who shows up at a party on time anyway?’ added Emmy. No really, who does? I genuinely don’t know. Should I call someone? She went to the stereo and restarted the playlist. No point in wasting good Michael Jackson.
Right on cue for the opening wolf howl of ‘Thriller’, the door opened and in leaned Jared, dressed as a werewolf. He howled in perfect synchronicity. ‘What do you think of my costume?’ he asked, coming inside.
‘Looking good, Jared.’ Rae admired his slashed T-shirt and Wolverine-style stuck-on sideburns and fuzzy hands. ‘Very daring.’ She winked at Emmy, who shook her head. ‘Out of interest, will you be keeping the fangs in all night?’
‘Probably not,’ he grinned, showing off the full set. ‘It took me a long time to get over my childhood lisp and this is just bringing it back full circle. Are you guys doing shots?’
‘Want one?’ Emmy asked, tugging at the neckline of her dress, which was determined to keep slipping down and show more cleavage than anyone needed to see. She slid a glass towards Jared, feeling shy under his gaze. ‘What?’
‘I was just trying to remember if I’ve ever seen you in a dress before.’
‘Oh, shut up, this isn’t She’s All That. Of course you have. Now drink with us.’
He laughed. ‘Okay, but I’m only having a couple tonight.’
‘I know, I know, you have to get away early for work tomorrow.’ Emmy made a raspberry sound at him. Oops, this vodka was going to her head quickly!
As ‘Thriller’ turned to ‘Bad Blood’ they heard a commotion in the driveway, and moments later in walked Bonnie, followed by several other wide-eyed teens and a large group of the familiar faces from the Maplewood House in the Woods Facebook page.
‘Here goes,’ whispered Noelle.
‘GIRLFRIENDS,’ bellowed Bonnie, who was kind of in a bat costume but mainly just a few bits of black fabric. She handed over a fresh hamper from The Wooden Café. ‘Thanks for the invite, you have no idea how cool it is to actually spend Halloween in this house. You are legends, and anyone that doesn’t think so is a TWAAAAAAT.’
The teens behind her whooped in unison. They also seemed to be dressed as bats, or vampires, or cocktail waitresses in a Vegas hotel.
‘Ooo,’ said Bonnie, clocking the bottle of vodka, before locking eyes with Jared. She moved to the side. ‘Ooo… Appletiser.’
He smiled, then turned back to the sisters. ‘So, do you want me to reintroduce you to anybody?’ he asked, as a couple more people came stealthily through the door.
‘That’s okay,’ replied Emmy. ‘There’s no time I shine more than walking up to people that don’t like me at parties.’
He squeezed her hand, and off she went, flanked on both sides by her sisters.
‘Thanks for coming,’ they accidentally said in unison to the haunted house Facebook group.
‘Hey girls.’ Becky the ex-girl-bander stepped forward and gave Emmy a one-armed hug. ‘Cool party. I can’t stay long because the kids are at home with their dad but I so wanted to say hi.’
‘Did you? Is that why you came?’ Rae answered but Emmy dug a fingernail into her arm.
‘Of course. Wow, this house is actually really nice inside. You’re going to laugh but I always kind of thought it might look a bit like the Rocky Horror Show house in here.’ She laughed, and the sisters joined in.
‘That’s so funny,’ Rae said through gritted teeth. ‘And did you tell everyone that?’
‘What? No. Well, just you know, when you’re a kid you’re always gabbing about something.’
‘What would you like to drink?’ asked Noelle, leading Becky away.
‘It’s filling up,’ Emmy commented to Rae as they moved on towards another group. ‘Do you recognise everybody?’
Rae nodded. ‘Most people. This was a good idea, wasn’t it?’ She faced her sister in a sudden panic. ‘We haven’t made a massive cock-up? What if they’re all like Becky, or what if someone draws on the walls – it took us so long to paint.’
‘Rae, you sound like me, calm down. There’s no turning back now, and people look happy, not anarchic. And Becky was… Well, she was tactless and whether she meant to or not she was throwing shade all over the place, but she was surprised. She admitted she was wrong. That’s what we wanted, no matter how people got there.’
‘This is true. We should just have fun. Will you have fun with me tonight?’
Emmy scrunched her nose.
‘I’m not talking incest, you bloody weirdo, I’m talking about letting our hair down and having ourselves a party.’
Could she do it? Could Emmy let her hair down for a change? She wondered what that would even look like – but yes, she thought she might be willing to give it a try. In the spirit of distancing herself from the girl she had been when she was growing up, of course.
My Sisters And Me Page 16