“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” Sammy called, peeling off his star map T-shirt, kicking off his sneakers, and diving into the water in his shorts. Lisa peeled off her shorts and T-shirt, stripping down to her bathing suit, which was blue and covered in a light print of fish scales. Evie called it her mermaid skin. Evie took off her heavy boots and belt with the knife. She wore her shorts and layered T-shirts into the water. She didn’t own a bathing suit. Her huge boy’s shorts billowed in the water and the shirts clung to her skin, the edges of her white men’s V-neck peeking out from under the Harley T-shirt. She was a lousy swimmer and spent most of her time crouched in shallow water.
Sammy dove down to the bottom and popped up, hair slicked back and nearly down to his shoulders now that it was wet.
“You need a haircut,” Lisa told him.
“And you need a reality check,” Sammy said, going under, then coming up again and spitting a long stream of water at her. “Fairies!” he said, once his mouth was empty. “How can you actually believe that?”
Lisa shook her head. “How can you not?”
“Because there’s no such thing as little green creatures with lacy wings. I hate to be the one to tell you, but Tinker Bell’s made up, Lisa. You can clap your hands all you want, but believing isn’t going to make them real.”
Evie scowled, her arms cutting the water in slow circles around her, making her own little whirlpool. “Maybe they’re not like that,” she said.
“Huh?” Sammy said.
“I’m just saying,” Evie went on. “Maybe they are real, but they’re not anything like what we think.” She plucked at the front of her T-shirts, pulling them away from her body, but when she let them go, they snapped back into place, sticking worse than ever.
“And what are they supposed to be like then?” Sammy asked.
Evie shrugged. “More like us, maybe. That’s what my mom told me once. That it isn’t like in all those cutesy little picture books—real fairies look like humans, only they’re not. They’re like our shadows, she said. Dark. Magic. Here one minute, gone the next.”
Sammy laughed as loud and hard as he could. Soon his laughter was mixed with the crashing of footsteps running down the bank.
Lisa turned. “Shit,” she said. Gerald and Pinkie. And they weren’t alone. Behind them were Gerald’s two best friends, Mike and Justin. And a girl Lisa sort of recognized from school—a friend of Pinkie’s named Franny. The girl was as pale as Pinkie and had braces.
“Let’s go,” Lisa said to Sammy and Evie.
“But we just got here,” Sammy whined. Lisa threw him a furious look.
“Yeah, stay,” Gerald called. “We’re all friends, right?” Then he turned to Mike and Justin and said something in his made-up, Minarian language. Lisa caught only the last few words, “Bach flut nah.” The other boys laughed.
Gerald could be moderately obnoxious on his own, but when he was around Mike and Justin, he always acted like a total idiot, showing off and saying dumb stuff that didn’t make any sense and was supposed to make him seem all impressive and super smart-assy. It was ridiculous, really. Mike and Justin didn’t need to be impressed—it wasn’t like there was any danger of them ditching Gerald. They were airplane-model-building, computer-gaming geeks, just like Gerald. Three peas in a pod. But for whatever reason, Gerald had to be King Pea. Lisa smiled at this newly thought-up title.
“What’s so funny, Nazzaro?” Gerald asked.
Lisa shrugged. “It’s just that whenever you speak that language of yours, you sound all phlegmy—like someone with a bad cold clearing his throat.” She made her best cat-coughing-up-a-fur-ball noise to accentuate her point.
Gerald’s face turned red.
“Hi, Sam!” Pinkie called, waving so hard she nearly fell into the stream. She had on long sleeves, gardening gloves, and a pink baseball hat draped with mosquito netting.
“Hey,” Sam said, nodding in her direction. “You coming in the water?”
She shook her head.
Gerald laughed. “She only swims in pools. Can’t stand the feel of muck or pebbles under her feet. And the fish and bugs are way too much for her. She’s what you call delicate, Becca is. Aren’t you?” he asked, looking at his sister. “Then there’s all the diseases and parasites, right, Bec? All kinds of nasties floating around in there.”
“Oh man, tell me you haven’t been showing Becca your parasite book again, have you? That’s just cruel,” Mike said. He peeled off his T-shirt to reveal a pale white chest that was sunken in at the center, as if someone had crushed his sternum with a baseball bat.
“It’s fascinating stuff, really,” Gerald said, not taking his eyes off Pinkie. “Amoebic dysentery, giardia, cryptosporidiosis. Then there’s the bacterial stuff: cholera, E. coli, typhoid. That water there is teeming with tiny little organisms just looking for a nice warm body to call home.” He winked at Pinkie.
Mike gave Gerald a playful cuff on the shoulder. “Don’t mind him,” Mike said. “He’s just a little obsessed with the microscopic world. It’s all the research he does for our game. There’s nothing in that water that can hurt you, Becca.” With this, he took a running leap into it, Justin right behind him. Both boys squealed as they hit the cold water.
“See, Becca, it’s safe enough to drink,” Mike called, scooping some up in his hand and slurping.
“You’re going to be pissing protozoa,” Justin teased.
Mike took a second sip. “Amoeba, yum!”
“Actually,” Sam said, trying to sound older by lowering his voice, “most microscopic organisms are safe to ingest. The truth is, our bodies are full of bacteria all the time. We’ve even got E. coli in us, living in complete symbiosis most of the time.”
Lisa rolled her eyes. What was this—attack of the geeks?
Franny moved closer to Becca, leaned in, and whispered something in her ear. Becca nodded, then they both giggled, looking at Sam, then away.
Lisa couldn’t stand girls like that, no matter what age. Girls who tittered and breathed secrets in one another’s ears. Dainty girls who didn’t want to get dirty.
“Come on in, man,” called Mike. “You only feel like you’re freezing your balls off for the first thirty seconds or so.”
Gerald took his T-shirt off carefully over his glasses, kicked off his running shoes, and made his way slowly toward the stream, stepping gingerly over stones, as if his feet were ultrasensitive. He stopped at the edge.
“What have we here?” he asked, picking up Evie’s belt and knife.
Lisa took in a sharp breath. This was trouble. Bad trouble.
“Looks like a bushwhacker to me,” Mike called from the water. “Bach gloon neot?”
Gerald laughed and nodded. “Totally!” he snorted, pushing his dark glasses up his nose.
“Drop it!” Evie snarled from her crouched position downstream.
Gerald unsnapped the sheath, pulled the knife out, and whistled. “Quite a blade on it. Could kill an elephant with this thing, probably. And what is this down by the handle? A little dried blood? Christ, Stevie, what have you been cutting up?”
“Shit, man, maybe it is blood,” Mike said. “You know what they said about her great-grandfather, how he made some kind of pact with the devil and did sacrifices and shit out in those woods? Maybe Stevie’s just following in his footsteps!”
Gerald shook his head. “A pact with the devil? Nah. I heard Old Doc O’Toole was the son of the devil. He had powers. Could hypnotize people with his eyes. That’s what my mom said. Hell of a family tree you’ve got, Lisa.”
“Enough, Gerald,” Lisa warned, swimming toward him.
“I’m just saying. You might be in danger, Lisa. I mean if cousin Stevie is going around like a young psychopath slicing and dicing cats or something, wouldn’t you be concerned? Didn’t you know that’s how Jeffrey Dahmer got his start—cuttin
g the heads off of dogs and cats and impaling them on sticks.”
“Eew!” squealed Pinkie.
“No way!” said Franny.
“Yes way,” Gerald said. “Totally true.”
“Put it down!” Evie growled. She was still crouched, her body a tight ball, the water up to her neck.
“Oh, and are you gonna make me? Not so tough now, huh? Now that I’ve got your big, bad blade of death here.”
Pinkie and her pale friend looked on in silence, both of them frowning. Mike and Justin were treading water, watching. Mike moved closer to shore, walking toward Gerald, water pooling in the well of his sunken chest. “Looks like a sacrificial blade to me, for sure,” he called. “I’d be careful if I were you, man. It might have some serious mojo.”
Lisa got to the bank and stepped out, moving toward Gerald. “Give me the goddamn knife.”
Gerald gave a disgusted-sounding snort. “Not much of a man, are you, Stevie? Getting your pretty little cousin to do your dirty work for you. She is pretty. Don’t you think so? I know you do, Stevie.”
“Ooh!” crooned Justin from the water. “Stevie has a thing for her cousin? That’s so sick!”
Evie stood up, arms rigid at her sides, hands clenched into fists.
Gerald hooted. “Nice swimming trunks!”
Evie’s green fatigue shorts hung down to her knees, her belly bulging out above them. Her legs were pale and covered with dark hair. The wet T-shirts clung to her so that you could see the curve of her breasts, even the outline of nipples beneath the bald eagle and flag. The words AMERICAN LEGEND were stuck to her belly, jiggling as she walked.
Mike and Justin laughed. Pinkie let out a little squeal, then covered her mouth and looked away, tittering. Franny did the same.
Evie moved toward Gerald, her eyes blazing, a low growl coming from the back of her throat.
Gerald flinched, then held up the blade, waving it through the air like a conductor’s baton or a magic wand.
“And I don’t think I’ve ever seen boobs like that on a dude before. Have you, guys? Maybe Stevie’s one of those . . . whatdayacallit?”
“Hermaphrodite?” Justin said.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Half girl, half boy. An It.”
Evie froze in her tracks, knee-deep in the creek. She crossed her arms over her breasts, her chest heaving as the growl broke apart and her eyes filled with tears. Lisa could see the outline of the key hanging from the bootlace around Evie’s neck. Evie’s fingers fumbled their way under the neck of her shirt, reaching for it.
It’ll save both of us one day.
Lisa had to look away.
“Here you go, It,” Gerald said, dropping the knife and heading out into the water, away from Evie.
“Asshole!” Lisa yelled after him.
Evie continued her slow walk to shore, where she stood bent over and dripping as she pulled on her boots. She sheathed the knife and looped the belt around her waist, buckling it with shaking fingers.
Lisa started putting her own clothes on as Evie walked past Pinkie and Franny. Franny gave her an awkward smile. Evie ignored it and began climbing the path up the bank.
“Come on, Sammy,” Lisa called.
Gerald said something to Sammy in a low voice. Sammy ignored it, but the other boys laughed.
Lisa shoved her damp, sandy feet into her sneakers and waited for her brother. At last, he was out of the water, pulling on his shirt. “Let’s go,” she said.
“See ya, Sam,” Pinkie said, as they hurried by her, Sam carrying his shoes. He gave her a half wave.
When they got to the fire road at the top of the hill, both of the bikes were still there, but Evie was nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER 11
Phoebe
JUNE 5, PRESENT DAY
“The one good thing about the chaos of their day was that Phoebe hadn’t had much time to obsess about the possibility of being pregnant. But now that they were back in the car, racing up to Burlington on Interstate 89, it was all she could think of.
Once again she toyed with idea of saying something to Sam—but he had enough on his plate at the moment. She needed to know for sure before she talked to him. She’d go to the drugstore and get a pregnancy test. Maybe she could sneak away tomorrow, but if not, it could wait until Monday, when they both went off to work.
Relieved to have a plan in place, Phoebe looked out the window to her left. They were driving through Waterbury, and in the dying light she could see the old state hospital complex with its giant smokestack, the letters VSH climbing up into the sky.
She looked over at Sam driving, his hands on the wheel, eyes on the road ahead. There were so many little things about him she loved: the long, almost feminine eyelashes; the way he licked his lips before answering a hard question; how funny his pale legs with their knobby knees looked each summer when he finally got hot enough to take off his jeans and put on swimming trunks. She loved the raised scar above his collarbone that no one could remember the origin of. Sometimes she’d kiss him there, her mouth covering the thin white line, making it disappear.
What if she was pregnant? Would they keep the baby? Sam had never come right out and said he didn’t want kids, but whenever she brought up the idea, his face clouded over and he quickly changed the subject, or sometimes he nuzzled her neck and said, “But you’re my family, Bee. You’re all I need.”
And what about her? Could Phoebe really be a mother? It was such an absurd idea that she found it impossible to visualize. But the alternative, the idea of actually having an abortion, scared her too. Her mother had had an abortion once, when Phoebe was in fifth grade. What Phoebe remembered most was her mother finding out she was pregnant. She’d bought a test, gone into the bathroom, and come out pale and shaking. She didn’t look overjoyed, that was for sure. But she didn’t seem shocked or surprised, either. What it looked like to Phoebe was that her mother was frightened. Terrified, actually.
“Ma,” Phoebe said, “did it say yes?” Phoebe was torn. Part of her secretly wished for a baby brother or sister, but she knew, deep down, wishing to bring a helpless baby into her sorry excuse for a family was just cruel.
Her mother didn’t speak, went straight for the vodka, drinking until she passed out on the couch. Phoebe went out to cover her with a blanket before going to bed herself. Her mother stirred, squinted up at Phoebe, and said, “You poor thing, you.” Phoebe smiled at her mother, let her raise up her hand with its broken nails and nicotine-stained fingers to stroke Phoebe’s hair. Her mother smiled back, said warmly, with love, “I should have drowned you at birth.”
Phoebe took a step back, letting her mother’s hand fall back down to the couch.
Her mother closed her eyes, murmured softly, “That would have saved you.”
In the morning, she made the appointment and went off to the women’s health clinic in Worcester. Her ma had acted like it was no big deal—like she’d had a rotten tooth pulled at the dentist. Phoebe knew it wouldn’t be like that for her. But shit, she probably wasn’t even pregnant, in which case she was running her brain in frantic circles for no reason at all.
She closed her eyes, heard her mother’s smooth, low, bourbon-slurred voice in her head: Ain’t no point worrying about what’s been or what’s gonna be. You just gotta do your best right now. And trust everyone else is doing the same.
Maybe the only smart thing her ma ever told her.
Most everything else was complete horseshit. Like what she said when Phoebe first told her about the Dark Man.
“There’s something in my room,” she’d cried, heart pounding, hands sweaty. She was seven years old and they were in the Belcher Street apartment. It was just past midnight and Phoebe had closed her eyes and run from her room, finding her mother in the kitchen. Her ma staggered back against the counter, scrunching her face so that she was looking through one e
ye and a haze of cigarette smoke.
“What?” she drawled. Her ma had only lived in North Carolina till she was eight, but sometimes, when she was good and drunk, Phoebe could still hear a southern twang.
“A man,” she said.
“And what’s he look like, lovie?”
“Dark. Like a shadow.”
Her ma looked startled, then smiled. “Where did he come from, this Dark Man of yours?”
“Under my bed. There’s a door there.”
“You’d best figure out a damn good way to keep it closed. Once the Dark Man comes, he’ll be back. And once he gets inside of you . . .” She shivered, turned to pour another drink. “Have a nice big sip of this, lovie. It’s like medicine. It’ll help you sleep.”
“Sam?”
He took his eyes off the road and blinked at her.
“Did you ever think Teilo was real?”
He shook his head. “Not then. But I do now. I don’t think he was a fairy or anything like that, but I do think there was a guy out there, messing around with my sister.”
“And Evie, what did she think?”
“She thought Lisa should stay the hell out of the woods.”
“Why did you stop talking to Evie?” Phoebe asked. “I mean, it sounds like the two of you were really close as kids.”
Sam turned to look at her, his face lit by headlights of cars from the southbound lane.
“Sam,” she said, “we’re in this together. You’ve gotta give me a little to go on here. There are these whole huge chapters of your life I know nothing about.”
The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle Page 84