A Girl Called Dust

by V. B. Marlowe

  Scarlett put her laptop to the side. “I want you to put things in perspective when it comes to Bailey and Fletcher, that’s all.”

  I was over Scarlett trying to turn me against the only people who wanted to hang out with me. She had no idea what it felt like to be me. “I think we should end this session early.”

  Scarlett watched me over her purple-rimmed glasses. “Arden, you can’t do that.”

  I jumped up from the couch and slid my backpack over my shoulders. “Watch me. Maybe I need to find a new shrink. One who knows what the hell they’re doing.”

  “Arden—”

  I stormed toward the door, already pulling my phone from my dress pocket. I needed Dad to pick me up early.

  Somehow Scarlett moved a lot faster than me and threw herself against the door. “Arden, please. I want you to take a deep breath and have a seat.”

  I shook my head. “I’m never sitting on that couch again. How much are my parents paying you to judge me and my friends? You don’t even know them.”

  “No, I don’t,” Scarlett admitted, “but I’m going on what you tell me about them.”

  Stop, Arden. Scarlett is your friend and she’s helped you through a lot of stuff. She doesn’t deserve this. But I didn’t stop. “You’re a crackpot scam artist. Maybe I should become a psychologist too. You get paid a fortune to sit around and talk out of your ass.”

  Her face crinkled with hurt. I wanted to take the words back immediately, but words can’t be taken back. Besides, the look on her face told me that the damage had already been done. Why was I so angry? I rarely felt that way. Was it because she was right about Bailey and Fletcher?

  I had two options. I could calm down, apologize, and carry on with the session, or I could stand my ground and leave.

  “Move!” I shouted, and she slid out of the way, slamming the door behind me after I left.

  Mom was head over heels that night. You would have thought she was going to be hanging out with Bailey and me. She hadn’t even mentioned how I’d stormed out of my therapy session. When Dad had picked me up, he looked slightly disappointed. “Scarlett can’t help you if you don’t let her do her job,” he’d said, and that was the end of it.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Mom asked as she stirred brownie batter in a bowl. Of course I didn’t eat brownies, but they were Bailey’s favorite. “Just be normal, and things will work out.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” I muttered, but I was happy simply because she was.

  Bailey arrived at seven, and we’d ordered Chinese since we’d had pizza the night before. Mom let us eat upstairs, promising to bring the brownies up when they were done.

  In my room, I turned on some music, and Bailey and I curled up on my futon. She looked around the room. “You’ve redecorated.”

  I had. Once I started high school, Mom let me paint my walls a grayish-blue, and everything else, including my bed comforter was white. It didn’t look like a typical teenager’s room, but it was my space, and I liked it.

  I bit into my eggroll, not sure what to say to her. There had been a time when Bailey and I never stopped talking. We gabbed from one subject to the next, talking over each other and barely taking a breath. Now things were quiet and awkward.

  “So,” Bailey said, putting her plate to the side. She’d barely eaten anything. “What’s going on in your life?”

  I shrugged. “Not much. Just school. I’m still making my dresses and hanging out with Fletcher. That’s about it.” Great. I must have sounded like the most boring person alive.

  Bailey nodded. “I don’t think Fletcher likes me. He’s a weird dude. What do you guys do together?” She narrowed her eyes slightly, and I could tell she was asking me if Fletcher and I were more than friends. I wished.

  “We just talk. Do our homework together. He goes with me to buy fabric. Just stuff like that. We’re only friends.”

  Bailey looked me up and down like she didn’t really believe me. “You should get out more. Hang out with other people. This is high school. You’re supposed to be having fun.”

  “I have fun.”

  Bailey smirked. She could always tell when I was lying. “Yeah, when was the last time you went to a party?”

  I looked down at my plate. I hadn’t been to a party since the eighth grade, so I didn’t bother answering her question. What kind of loser went through high school without going to one single party?

  Bailey moved from the futon to my bed. She picked up my stuffed bear, the one I hid my Prozac in, and hugged it to her chest. I hoped she didn’t feel the pills stuffed inside. They would be hard to explain. She made a sad puppy dog face. “It’s all right. This is only our junior year, and the year’s still young. You can turn things around.”

  Could I? I couldn’t see my last two years of high school being any different from the first two. “I don’t go to parties because I don’t get invited to any. Lacey hates me, so everyone else does.”

  “Everyone doesn’t hate you, Arden. They just don’t know anything about you. As for Lacey, well, you just have to ignore her.” Her eyes widened. “Trista’s throwing a huge Halloween party. You’re coming with me.”

  The thought of even going to a party made my head swim with anxiety. “Trista won’t mind?”

  “Who cares? I’m going to tell her I’m bringing you, and that’s that.” She grabbed her phone from where it was charging on my nightstand and gasped. “I should change. Be right back.”

  I didn’t understand why she was in such a hurry to change into her pajamas, but whatever. She seemed to be done eating, so I carried our plates back down to the kitchen. Mom told me to cut the brownies into squares and put them on a plate. After Paige and Quinn grabbed their share and we set a few aside for Dad, I carried the remainder up to my room for Bailey.

  As I changed into my pajamas Bailey came out of the bathroom looking as if she’d just stepped out of a music video. She wore a tight black tube dress with black ankle boots and silver accessories going up one arm. She had her hair pulled back into a chic low ponytail.

  I looked down at my ensemble—an oversized T-shirt that used to be my Dad’s and an old pair of PE shorts. “What’s going on?”

  Bailey stood in front of my full-length mirror adjusting her dress. “Oh, I hope you don’t mind. I’m meeting Trent. He’s a few years older than me, so my parents don’t like him, and we kind of have to sneak around. He’s going to get me into this club where his friend works.”

  I felt so stupid. I should have known she wasn’t genuinely trying to rekindle our friendship. She only needed me for a cover.

  “So you used me? I thought we were really going to hang out tonight.”

  Bailey stepped away from the mirror looking slightly apologetic. “I didn’t think you would mind.”

  “Well, I do. You lied to me.”

  “I’m sorry about this, but I would like for us to start hanging out again. I mean that. I really do.” She sprayed herself with some body spray from her bag. “Your Mom probably won’t check in, but if she does, tell her I’m in the bathroom.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  She shook her head. “I’m staying at Trent’s. Don’t look at me like that.”

  It seemed as though I had missed a lot. When had Bailey started clubbing and spending the night with boys? “Why didn’t you just tell me up front? Why’d you have to pretend to want to sleep over here?”

  She stepped close to me and pulled me into a hug, but I didn’t hug her back. “Sorry for lying. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  I pushed her away, and she let me go. “What do you think you’re doing right now?”

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated, “but I just can’t spend the night over here again. Our sleepovers were always fun until . . . well until it was time to go to sleep.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Bailey looked at me as if I should have known what she was talking about. “You do weird things in your sleep, Arden.”

  I plop
ped down on my bed, just ready for her to leave. “What?”

  “Yeah. You wake up in the middle of the night and crawl around on all fours. You growl and bark and scratch at the floor. It was really scary. You didn’t always do it. It started when we were in the seventh grade. I thought maybe you were just having nightmares or something. You’d crawl back into bed and fall asleep like nothing had happened, so I just ignored it, but the last time I spent the night over here was the worst.”

  I didn’t believe anything she was telling me, but I wanted to know where she was going with this. “Really? What happened the last time?”

  “You tried to kill me.”

  I hopped up. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Bailey backed away and put her hands up as if I were going to hurt her. “I was asleep, and I woke up to you choking me. You had your hands wrapped around my neck and were squeezing so hard that I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die that night. All of a sudden you just let go and crawled back into your bed. After that I was afraid to go to sleep. I sat up the rest of the night just watching you. The next day I didn’t say anything because your mom was always mad at you about something and I didn’t want to get you in trouble. I chalked it up to another nightmare.

  “I wore a scarf that day, but when I got home, my mom saw the scratches and bruises on my neck, and she said I couldn’t hang out with you anymore. She’s the reason we stopped being friends. Well, actually you were. You really hurt me that night.”

  I studied Bailey, wondering why she was making up such lies. What did she have to gain from it? I knew. She needed an excuse for why she had flushed our friendship down the toilet, and she actually had the nerve to blame it on me with some outlandish story.

  “Just go.” My voice had barely been a whisper.

  She grabbed her leather jacket from the back of my desk chair and slid her arms into it. “I’m sorry. I really am. Look, next week we’ll really hang out. I promise.” Her cell phone dinged, and she fished it from the pocket of her jacket. “Trent’s outside. I should go.”

  I sat back on my bed and didn’t speak another word to my lying ex-best friend. My room had double doors that led to a balcony, and from the balcony you could shimmy down the rose trellis, which was pretty sturdy. Getting down was easy enough. My parents might have been worried about it if they actually had a daughter with a reason to sneak out of the house.

  After Bailey grabbed her backpack and disappeared, my eyes settled on the patch of scratches on my hardwood floor. You growl and bark and scratch at the floor. I thought about all the mornings I’d woken up with red, sore fingers. Then whatever I was thinking, I pushed those thoughts away. Sheba was the reason for the scratches on the floor. Bailey was a liar.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’d spent all weekend mulling over Bailey’s words and Sunday afternoon in the park trying to dodge Fletcher’s questions about Bailey. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him he had been right and Bailey had been using me.

  Monday morning’s biology class found Bailey sitting next to me at my station. Lacey kept shooting us dirty looks, and Bailey looked slightly uncomfortable. I had planned on not speaking to Bailey, but a question popped into my head that I had to ask.

  “Did you tell Lacey what you told me about the barking and the scratching and stuff?” It would have made sense. Lacey started being mean to me around the time Bailey claims that I choked her.

  Bailey reddened, and I knew. “How could you?” I demanded. It was bad enough to make up a lie, but then to spread it around . . .

  “I didn’t, Arden, I swear I didn’t. My mom told her mom and her mom told her. You know how they all talk. I had nothing to do with Lacey finding out.”

  I believed her. My mom, Bailey’s, Lacey’s. I called their group the Real Housewives of Everson Woods. They were stay-at-home moms with housekeepers and kids who were in school most of the day. Bottom line, they had too much time on their hands, and all they did was stay in other people’s business.

  “I’m sorry,” Bailey whispered as Ms. Melcher began class, but I wasn’t listening to either of them. I was too busy wondering how many people Lacey had told.

  That day in class was a lecture day. I much preferred the days when we did hands-on activities, but after the crayfish incident, I longed for those days when I could sit quietly at my station and blend into the background. Blending in was safe. Ms. Melcher was busy talking about genetics and random chromosome segregation—whatever that meant.

  That made me think of my family and our genetics and how I seemed like the thing that didn’t belong. Fletcher’s words echoed in my head. Those aren’t your parents. They can’t be. They smell different.

  My thoughts were interrupted by Ms. Melcher, who had suddenly developed a light purple haze around her. It was beautiful, but it didn’t belong there. I looked around at the others. Bailey scribbled notes, furiously trying to keep up. Lacey twirled her hair with a stupid vacant expression on her face. Everyone else was either jotting down notes or staring into oblivion. Clearly no one saw the purple cloud around our teacher but me.

  Maybe something was wrong with my eyes and they were playing tricks on me. After a minute the haze turned to gray, then black. The deepest black I had ever seen. It swirled around Ms. Melcher faster and faster like a whirlpool, then it closed in, looking as if it were swallowing her. The haze disappeared. Weird.

  On the walk home, Fletcher was going on and on about dodgeball. For some crazy reason, he had never played it before he moved to Everson Woods. I told him he was lucky because it was the worst game on the planet, and it seemed like a punishment when Coach made us play, but he was intrigued by it. “And then the ball hit Brandon right in the head. He ran into the locker room saying he had to pee, but we all knew he was crying.”

  I smiled at his recollection of the event. It was rare that Fletcher got excited about anything. When he was done, I told him about Ms. Melcher.

  “I saw this weird purple swirly light around her. It turned gray, black, and then went away.”

  Fletcher stopped dead in his tracks.

  “What?” I asked. The look of shock on his face frightened me. I don’t know what I had expected him to say but I hadn’t been expecting that reaction.

  “You need to meet my parents. Tomorrow.”

  “Oh, okay. Why all of a sudden?”

  He stared at the ground as we continued to walk. It was strange seeing him go from joy to fear so quickly. “It’s just time.”

  I didn’t bother to argue with him because I knew he wouldn’t tell me anything else. I had been looking forward to meeting the Whitelocks for a long time anyway.

  The following day, Fletcher told me his mother wanted me to come over for dinner. I hoped things turned out better than when Fletcher had come to my house.

  I’d had to tell my parents that I was having dinner at Bailey’s because there was no way they would have approved of me setting foot in the Whitelocks’ house. Taking a deep breath, I rang the doorbell. Fletcher opened the door about ten seconds later. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” I stepped inside. Fletcher’s house seemed surprisingly normal. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting to see, but the Whitelock home looked just like any other.

  “Mom’s in the kitchen.” Fletcher led me to the back of the house, where his mother stood over the sink washing glasses.

  Exploding microwave

  Mrs. Whitelock’s long braid could get caught in the garbage disposal

  The running blender is sitting awfully close to the sink

  Fletcher’s mom, with large blue eyes and auburn hair pulled back into a messy braid, appeared to be a normal mom on the surface. If she’d produced a strange kid like Fletcher, there had to be some weirdness lurking under that ordinary appearance.

  “Mom, this is Arden.”

  His mother lowered the glass she held into the sudsy water and stared at me. “Oh, wow. It’s nice to finally meet you, Arden.”

  I
nodded. “Likewise.”

  After drying her hands off on a dish towel, she stepped very close to me—too close—and held my face between her damp hands. That was quite forward for a first meeting. Fletcher stood beside us, watching. Mrs. Whitelock’s eyes bored into mine. It was so awkward I eventually looked to the refrigerator on my left.

  After what seemed like forever, she let my face go. “She’s a late bloomer,” she told Fletcher, who nodded.

  I looked down at my scrawny, frail figure. Rude. Who said something like that right to someone’s face, and why was Fletcher agreeing with her?

  “What?” I asked, and then I reminded myself that this was Fletcher’s mother. He must have gotten his bluntness from her.

  “She’s not ready,” Mrs. Whitelock added.

  “Excuse me? Ready for what?” I asked.

  “Okay,” Fletcher replied to his mother.

  “Ready for what?” I repeated.

  Mrs. Whitelock paused. “Honey, trust me. Knowing is no walk in the park. Savor every moment of your ignorance. The truth is a doozy.”

  Well, that totally did not help at all.

  Fletcher moved toward the small table and pulled out a chair. He turned and looked at his mother. “What are we going to do about Ms. Melcher?”

  “Leave it alone,” Mrs. Whitelock replied briskly.

  Fletcher frowned, and his shoulders slumped. “Mother, we can’t—”

  “I said leave it alone, Fletcher!”

  “What about Ms. Melcher?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he replied, glaring at his mother. He pulled the chair out farther. “Sit here.”

  I took my seat at the table, trying very hard not to feel insulted by Mrs. Whitelock calling me a late bloomer.

  Fletcher and his mother placed several dishes on the table. Everything smelled great, but the selection was a bit strange. A pot roast, a tray of pork chops, a whole chicken carved into pieces, giant turkey legs, and some kind of beef in gravy. Everything was meat.

  I had just served myself a pork chop when a man joined us at the table. The man had white hair and gray eyes and looked nothing like Fletcher. He said nothing as he dumped food onto his plate and began eating as if he hadn’t seen food in a month. The way he shoveled food into his mouth was barbaric and almost animalistic.