Little Creeping Things

by Chelsea Ichaso

  I keep running like I never have in my life, until I reach the familiar barricade of trees. I dive into the small space at the base of the trunks, hearing Asher close on my heels. When I’m nearly through, my hair catches on a cluster of pine twigs and needles.

  His footsteps hammer the earth just yards behind me, but my hair stubbornly refuses to budge. Just as Asher’s fingers pounce upon the bottom of my shoe, I give one final yank of my head. I pull myself free, abandoning a large chunk of brown hair to the tree.

  I drag myself the rest of the way through the trees as Asher struggles to navigate. Once free, I race to the hideout and kick the woven cover off, leaving the tarp in place. Then I sprint around to the opposite side of the hole.

  Asher finally pokes his head through to find himself in what was once the magical realm of my childhood. He brushes himself off, like he can’t commit his intended crime in such a disheveled state. I stand, shaking behind the blue tarp, completely exposed and defenseless. Asher holds the wood carver at his side. “It’s not too late, Cass. We can get out of here together. You and me.” He steps toward the tarp, squinting quizzically at the large blue piece of plastic that doesn’t belong in the natural world.

  He bends down to examine the tarp, but Gideon comes crashing through the wall of trees. He makes his way like a low-riding bullet on the ground, hands outstretched as he shoves my brother forward.

  Asher yells as he falls into the hole, taking the tarp down into the depths with him. Gideon and I push the woven cover over him just as Peter navigates his way to us. The three of us hold down the cover as my brother continues to stab and slash through the flimsy woven contraption with his tool.

  We use feet, knees, our entire bodies to keep the cover down. My body trembles with sorrow and fear, making it nearly impossible to keep my grip. My strength is slipping. I can’t hold on any longer.

  I’m about to let go when the merciful sound of sirens resounds through the woods. We shout at the top of our lungs until footsteps reach the outskirts of the barricade.

  But Asher hasn’t given up. He slices straight through the cover and into Gideon’s hand, which flies upward as blood spurts over the cover. I want to rush over there, but with him down a hand, my two are even more essential. I grit my teeth and put every last ounce of strength into keeping my brother trapped.

  A swarm of officers finally makes it through the trees and we back away, allowing them to cuff Asher, whose frantic efforts to escape the hole have ceased. His face resumes the composed demeanor that I know will haunt me the rest of my life.

  I turn to Gideon in time to see his eyes roll back into his head. Then he collapses, as though he’d been holding on just long enough to rescue me. Screaming, I fling myself over him. I allowed myself to believe Asher’s lies my entire life; now Gideon, who is more family than Asher ever was, is paying for it. I cry in short, staccato bursts, the tears pooling over Gideon’s blood-caked body, until paramedics tear him away.

  They let me ride with him to the hospital, and I sit, holding his hand so tightly. Peter, whose phone call to the police and heroic efforts saved our lives, is left in the woods to answer questions. I catch his eyes trailing after me, his figure becoming smaller and smaller through the back window of the ambulance.

  31

  My brother is secure behind bars now. For a while, my parents struggled with whether or not they should keep his senior portrait hanging in its spot on the foyer wall beside mine. I know they felt like taking it down meant he was really cast out of the family for good. Leaving it up allows them to hold on to some semblance of a family unit, however fictional.

  Seeing his portrait there with those cold blue eyes and that smug, cracked smile always conjures up the memory of Asher’s tear-filled breakdown in his room; I get a stab of pain remembering how I believed his performance.

  I wasn’t the only one who believed my brother’s performance over the years. I often wonder, if we’d all been paying a little closer attention, would my parents have seen the truth about their precious prodigy? Would Gideon and I have noticed a nervous tremble run through the strong jaw of Maribel’s hero?

  Then again, maybe he never betrayed such a tremble. I remember a lot of things about my brother—all lies—but memories, nonetheless. I remember him happy. Sad. Angry. But now when I think of my brother, I see the utter calm, like a pristine patch of snow beneath the dappled light of dawn.

  In the end, my parents decided to keep the portrait up. Of course, this meant my mom had to sacrifice her weekly coffee dates. No one wants to come to your house and drink coffee while the handsome face of a murdering psychopath watches. I doubt the decision was too difficult for my mom, though, seeing how there isn’t much left to brag about where her children are concerned.

  My schoolwork took an unprecedented dive in the wake of Asher’s arrest. Emily eventually forgave me; however, like my mom’s friends, she stays far away from my house. She doesn’t need a reminder of how her daydreams within the walls of my house became the stuff of nightmares. But she stood by me even after my family and I became social pariahs. She knows better than anyone how hard it is to be the sister of a killer in Maribel. I’ve had to get used to a new level of seething glares. I deserve them. I soak them up in silence. My penance for all of the destruction I’ve caused.

  One painful reminder of my destructive nature comes in the form of an attractive blond who can’t make eye contact with me anymore. Peter hasn’t forgiven me for believing he was a murderer. He doesn’t look at me with seething glares; he just doesn’t look at me. Period. I don’t deserve his forgiveness.

  I don’t deserve Gideon’s forgiveness either. I’m part of a family that cracked his soul and his body, to the point where no one was certain he’d recover.

  When I visited Gideon in the hospital, I was prepared for him to scowl at me the way he had the past few months. I feared that even though he’d survived the attack, I’d lost him forever. He’d managed to keep me at a distance for so long, maybe he finally realized he was better off without me.

  Because he was.

  The truth is, I do share something with Asher besides our crystal eyes. There is something broken in me, just like there’s something broken in Asher, that lets people get hurt while I walk away unscathed.

  I know now that much of my identity stems from a lie. I’m not a killer; I didn’t even accidentally kill Sara Leeds. But I let myself believe the lie—the story Asher told me about myself—and it shaped every decision I made. I let those little creeping things embed themselves inside my brain, inside my very core, until they ate away at who I was. They created the hollow person who refused to help Melody. The girl who allowed Gideon’s conscience to rot away so I could stay safe. The girl who let the murderer escape so no one would think I’d killed again. The girl who made Seth into Maribel High’s new target and later put him in jail.

  And the thing is, Seth let the lies invade him too. He let the rumors I started push him into the shadows. He became the skulking loner the way I became Fire Girl.

  But Gideon never saw Fire Girl. He believed in me and defended me starting in Mrs. Kent’s second-grade class. So his reaction at the hospital should’ve come as no surprise. I hovered cautiously over his battered body, afraid he might open the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut and scream for me to leave the room. Instead, when he saw me, he forced the corner of his cracked and bleeding mouth to lift.

  Maybe it was blindness or maybe it was forgiveness. Maybe it was that perfect blend of goodness and audacity I’ve always loved about him. Or maybe I just managed to make my way onto Gideon’s list of people who needed fixing.

  Gracie came to see Gideon at the hospital, and she burst into tears when she saw how his handsome face had been dismantled. While she cried, I thought horrible things about her. How she had no reason to cry over Gideon. How she’d only known a fraction of him. How she probably even believed she love
d him while she let her tears drip onto his hands—hands I should’ve been holding.

  I’m not sure if Gracie felt my thoughts pierce through the back of her skull like lasers or if she caught Gideon’s eyes periodically drift from her tear-streaked face to where I sat on a chair in the corner of the room. But she kissed his hand in that angelic way she does everything, and then she left. And I had the feeling she wouldn’t be back.

  Good or bad, she doesn’t share what Gideon and I share.

  After Gideon’s release from the hospital, we didn’t speak about the hobbit house. Our secret hideout occupied a dark place in my mind, along with Asher and the other horrors I felt responsible for. It made me want to stay far away from the woods, and Gideon seemed to feel the same way. It was like we’d never be able to get past what happened out there, unless we buried it once and for all.

  So one day, I woke up and the sun’s rays landed on my pillow, glittering the way they always did in the spring when the weather was warm enough to spend childhood days outside.

  That morning I decided to return to the hobbit house. And I took Gideon with me.

  By the time we crawled through the evergreen trees on hands and knees, the sun had vanished behind the clouds and a light snow began to fall over us. The hideout, which had seen even more ruin thanks to Asher’s brief stay, was no longer the hobbit house of our childhood. Brown blood still smeared the ground and the torn, mangled cover. The termites I’d dreamed about had actually materialized. We could see the ugly, translucent creatures slithering over the blue cover down in the bottom. Tiny flecks of snow sprinkled the ground. Our once-serene world was now a dilapidated wonderland.

  I continued to peer down into the hole, waiting for a joyful memory to emerge from the pit. Instead, I observed the devastation I’d caused.

  Gideon proceeded to kick some dirt into it, watching the little bugs scamper away as the brown clods fell on them, dispersing granules of dust into the air. I kicked some more.

  Then we abandoned that hole in the ground to the beastly critters.

  We trudged back through the trees in silence. Gideon walked a few paces ahead of me. I noticed he wasn’t leading me toward my backyard, but in the direction of the road. Shivering, I wiped off some of the crystals of snow that had swirled beneath my jacket hood and onto my face. I wondered where he was headed, but didn’t want to interrupt his somber, reflective mood. I followed until we passed through the final line of fir trees, entering the narrow space beside the road.

  There, as cars passed by, swerving to avoid us, we teetered on the edge of the road until Gideon took my hand and pulled me close. He lowered his head and peered into my eyes through snowflake-sprinkled lashes. I recognized his expression, and a familiar wish stirred in me along with a warmth even the chill in the air couldn’t touch. I was home.

  He closed his eyes, causing the small flecks of snow to tumble onto my cheeks. And that’s when our lips met, melding together the way our souls had years ago.

  A driver honked while we kissed, and I held on to Gideon tighter. As I relaxed in his arms, allowing his embrace to heal so much of what was broken inside me, a chorus of catcalls sounded from a car’s open window. Probably some kids from school.

  But I didn’t care. People could say what they wanted. Rumors and expectations were left back in the termite-laden hole in the woods.

  And Fire Girl. I left her back there too.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, all gratitude and praise to my Lord and Savior. Every ounce of hope, joy, and success comes from You.

  Thank you to my amazing agent, Kristy Hunter, for believing in this story. I couldn’t ask for a more hardworking, enthusiastic, and dedicated champion for this book.

  I owe many thanks to my brilliant editor, Eliza Swift, for loving this story and getting it in a way I never believed possible. My thanks go out to the entire Sourcebooks team: Chris Bauerle, Sarah Cardillo, Margaret Coffee, Chuck Deane, Cassie Gutman, Jessica Rozler, Sarah Kasman, Ashlyn Keil, Kelly Lawler, Danielle McNaughton, Sean Murray, Beth Oleniczak, Valerie Pierce, William Preston, Dominique Raccah, Todd Stocke, Sierra Stovall, and Cristina Wilson. Thank you to Kerri Resnick, Tony Watson, and Nicole Hower for the fantastic cover.

  Love and gratitude to my AMM family. Meeting you was truly the turning point in my journey to publication. I’m so grateful to Alexa Donne for everything you do to help aspiring authors. A million thanks to my mentor, Samantha McClanahan, for taking on this story and giving me the kick in the pants that I needed.

  Thank you to the friends and critique partners who have made this book better along the way: Julie Abe, Laura Kadner, Jenny D. Williams, Madeline Dyer, Moriah Chavis, Emily Kazmierski, Katlyn Duncan, Katy Hamilton, Heidi Christopher, Jordan Kelly, and Graci Kim. A special thanks to Kit Frick for your generosity when I needed it most, and to Dana Mele for your wisdom and encouragement since the early days of this story. Love and thanks to George Kienzle, Rebecca Kienzle, and Monica Lewis for reading the very first draft of this book and not telling me to quit writing.

  I’m forever grateful to my parents, George and Rebecca, for supporting my love of books and for watching my kids while I wrote. Thank you to my Ichaso family (Ann, Guillermo, Cristina, and Andrés) for your encouragement and for hanging out with my kids so I could work on this book.

  Many, many thanks and sparkly unicorns to Julie Abe and Laura Kadner for being the best writing friends a girl could have. Thank you for listening, reading, supporting, encouraging, joking, and everything else in between. You manage to brighten up even the worst of days.

  Thank you to my church family for your prayers. A special thanks to Alec Kienzle, Marianne Cota, Monica Lewis, and Leah Huizar for asking me about my writing every chance you get. Your enthusiasm and support have been invaluable.

  All my love and appreciation to Kaylie, Jude, and Camryn, for always listening in the wings, trying to figure out what this book is about, for constantly asking me when I was going to finish it, and for being excited to read it one day.

  Thank you to my awesome husband, Matias, for suggesting I use my active imagination to write books, and for supporting me in every possible way once I took your advice.

  About the Author

  Photo © Jen Alvarez

  Chelsea Ichaso earned her BA in English and her MA in education from Biola University. A former high school English teacher, she resides in Southern California with her husband and three children. When she isn’t writing, she can be found on the soccer field. You can visit her online at chelseaichaso.com or on Twitter @chelseaichaso.

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