The Good Sister

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “What’s your GED?” Carley asked.

  “High school diploma,” Johnny explained, setting to work peeling his apple. “I had to drop out. I work two jobs.”

  “Oh!”

  She stayed there talking to him for another minute as he impressively peeled the apple and tucked the knife back onto the shelf, but then told him she had to hurry to class.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about Johnny being in school. It meant he wasn’t the kind of guy who reads Hemingway for fun. And maybe it meant he wasn’t quite as old as she’d assumed, that a lot of things about him weren’t as she’d assumed.

  “You know what they say,” Nicki used to tell her, with a big grin. “Whenever you assume, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’!”

  Carley loved that clever saying, but she never repeated it because she tried to avoid using words like “ass”—unlike Nicki, who delighted in it.

  On that day, the day she found out she’d been voted Spring Fling princess, everything Carley had ever assumed about anything seemed to have been proven all wrong.

  She ran home from the bus stop to share her big news with Mom, who was so thrilled that of course she started crying, because that’s how Mom is.

  “Oh, Carley! Oh, I’m so proud of you! See? I told you! I told you!”

  Her joyful tears were contagious and Carley found herself crying, too. Crying and trembling and laughing in her mother’s embrace as they stood there in the front hall on a glorious winter afternoon when the sky was a deep, perfect blue and the sun was shining . . .

  Or maybe it wasn’t.

  Maybe Carley just remembers it that way.

  In any case, that day was drastically different from today.

  Drastically different, too, from the day not long after when Carley found out the truth: that it had all been a cruel prank.

  The social worker, Sister Linda, called Mom and told her.

  “Sweetie . . . are you okay?” Mom asked when Carley came home from school that afternoon.

  That time, Carley didn’t say she was fine.

  She said, simply, “No.”

  There were tears in Mom’s eyes, and this time, too, they threatened to be contagious.

  “You don’t have to go back there,” Mom said. “Not ever again. I’ll arrange for you to switch to Woodsbridge right away.”

  Woodsbridge—with Nicki.

  Carley longed to say yes; longed to leave Sacred Sisters behind without a backward glance.

  But . . .

  At Woodsbridge, she’d have to see Nicki every day. Plus . . .

  What are you going to do, Carley? Leave school? Let them win?

  She forced herself to tell Mom that she wanted to stay at Sisters. Then she went straight upstairs and shut herself into her room, where no one could see her as she wept toxic tears laced not just with grief, but with shame.

  Ever since that day, Mom has behaved differently toward Carley. Either she’s bending over backward to be nice, trying to engage her in awkward conversations, or she’s looking at her sadly, maybe critically, as if she wishes she could make Carley over into the perfect daughter.

  As if she’d been hoping I’d turned out differently, more like her. As if I let her down.

  Dad gives off pretty much the same vibe, when he’s around—which isn’t very often now that it’s tax season. He’s always busy at work, worried about losing his job like a lot of other people at his company.

  Only Emma treats her the same as always—which is, basically, like crap. But she almost welcomes her kid sister’s bad attitude these days, because it makes her feel like her old self.

  Carley tears the gold foil wrapper from another candy bar and crams the whole thing into her mouth. Chewing hard, she feels a twinge in one of her molars as the chocolatey caramel coats what is probably the beginning of another cavity.

  Great. She had perfect teeth until she turned thirteen.

  “You’re the lucky one,” Mom used to tell her. “You won’t even need braces like Emma.”

  No, but she needed two fillings and a root canal.

  There are worse things, even, than needles in your gums and drills in your teeth and braces.

  Worse things . . . like having everyone you know turn against you—including your ex-best friend.

  That, more than anything else, is what hurts. She could probably have handled everything the girls at school have dished out—the taunting, the snickering behind her back, even the Spring Fling nightmare.

  But what Nicki did? She can’t bear to even think about it.

  So don’t. It’s over. It happened months ago. Who cares about her?

  Carley moves her stuffed animals off her bed, carefully rearranging the collection on the built-in window seat, where they seem to watch her like an audience of supportive friends. Some of these guys, like a fluffy flamingo named Bubblegum, have been sleeping with her since she was a little girl and afraid of the dark.

  Maybe she’d still be afraid of the dark if it weren’t for them.

  Imagine how the girls at school would react if they knew she still sleeps with stuffed animals and sometimes even talks to them in her head.

  Nicki knew that—well, not about the talking-to-them-in-her-head part. But she’s slept over in Carley’s room a million times and she knows Carley sleeps with the stuffed animals carefully arranged around her pillows. She’s the one who gave Carley many of her fake-furry friends, including Bubblegum, as gifts over the years.

  Nicki knows, too, that Carley sometimes still reads Charlotte’s Web and the other books from her childhood, and that she even takes out her Barbies once in a while to change their clothes and brush their hair.

  Nicki knows all her deepest, darkest secrets.

  That never bothered Carley until now.

  Lying on her stomach on her bed, she opens her laptop and pops a third Twix into her mouth before typing in the first few letters of the Web site she visited late last night.

  B . . . U . . . L . . .

  The rest of the link pops up. She clicks it and is transported to a virtual world populated by people who are exactly like her.

  Well, not exactly: Many are female but a few are male; most are kids, though some are adults. They all have one thing in common with Carley, though: They are—or were—victims of bullies.

  They post their stories here in a public forum; stories that tend to begin with lines like: It all started in sixth grade, or I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but . . .

  More often than not, the entries end with variations of: I wish I were dead.

  Yeah. Carley knows the feeling.

  Not that she’s brave enough to actually do anything about it.

  There’s a lot of talk of suicide on the forum, but that, Carley knows, is a sin. If you kill yourself, you don’t go to heaven.

  But sometimes, when she climbs into bed after a cruel day, knowing that tomorrow will bring more of the same, she wishes that she could just go to sleep and never wake up.

  Who cares about heaven when your life is pure hell?

  QT-Pi is online.

  The message flashes in a corner of the screen like a beacon.

  “Ah, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  QT-Pi—whose real name, of course, is Carley Archer—will have just gotten home from school.

  The dismissal time at Sacred Sisters is 3:12, and the metro bus ride home to the South Towns should take anywhere from thirty to forty minutes, with stops. Carley—concealed, or so she believes, behind the QT-Pi screen name and the little portrait of a kitten—usually pops up on the Internet after four o’clock.

  But here she is, and it’s only 3:55 right now. Either the bus was early, or she was in a particular hurry to get online today.

  Probably the latter. Misery loves company.
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  “Aw, what’s the matter, Carley, did you have another bad day at school? Is that why you’re here?”

  Here, as in an online forum populated by fellow victims of bullies.

  Safely concealed behind the screen name Angel 770—a meaningful screen name created just for this Web site—it’s tempting to engage QT-Pi in a private chat or at least bait her for comments on the message board.

  But maybe that’s not a good idea.

  No, given Angel’s plan for tonight, it’s probably wise to keep a low profile right now. And in the days ahead, for that matter.

  No one would ever in a million years think Angel might be responsible for what’s going to happen tonight—or, for that matter, to the others, including Carley Archer, when it’s her turn.

  Still . . . you never can be too careful.

  Angel was careful when it came to Sandra Lutz.

  The Realtor’s death, widely covered in the local papers and on Eyewitness News, was ruled accidental. Her body was found just inside the front door of the fire-gutted house, which was locked from the inside. The key to the double-cylinder dead bolt turned up nearby in the rubble.

  The fire investigators reported that the fire had started in the living room, where a burning candle had ignited draperies.

  Sandra must have been frantically trying to get out, couldn’t locate the key, and was too overcome by panic and smoke to escape through a window. Those closest to the door, facing the street, were all closed and locked. And the smoke detectors on both floors were useless without batteries.

  The fire chief used Sandra’s sad demise to teach the viewing public a fire safety lesson.

  “This woman’s death could have been prevented,” he grimly told a television news reporter, “if she had taken a few simple steps. Smoke detectors should be in working order. Lit candles should not be left unattended. Keys should be left in locks that open from the inside, in case an emergency makes it necessary to get out quickly.”

  Sandra, he made it clear, had done everything wrong.

  Ah, but she hadn’t—other than talking too much, asking too many questions, snooping and finding that notebook . . .

  It was Angel who removed the batteries from the smoke detectors. Angel who closed and locked the front windows. Angel who hid the key to the front door lock before Sandra even came home.

  It was Angel who held the lavender candle to the curtain panel until it caught fire, then set it on a table beneath the window as flames hungrily licked the wall.

  And it was Angel who hastily climbed back out the mudroom window, replaced the old-fashioned screen, and scurried away as flames engulfed the house.

  Sandra Lutz’s body was burned beyond recognition, according to ghoulishly graphic reporters. That meant the investigators wouldn’t have realized—or suspected—that the woman had been lying unconscious by the locked door long before the fire started.

  Smiling faintly, Angel remembers the satisfaction of knocking her out by shocking her carotid artery and jugular vein with a well-practiced, well-placed sharp blow to the side of her neck.

  It had been so easy.

  All of it.

  No problem finding the house, the broken window screen, even the key above the door . . .

  Angel has Sandra herself to thank for that.

  You just didn’t know when to shut up, did you?

  You got what you deserved.

  And now, so will the others.

  Angel leans away from the keyboard with arms folded and hands clenched around fingers that are twitching, eager to type, eager to reach out to QT-Pi . . .

  No. Not yet.

  For the moment, all Angel can do is watch her.

  And wait.

  But it won’t be long now.

  Entry from the marble notebook

  Saturday, November 30, 1985

  When I heard someone unlocking my bedroom door late last night I thought it might be Mother, having a change of heart about locking me in here as punishment or at least bringing me water. But it wasn’t.

  It was him.

  “I thought you might be lonely,” he said. Bastard. I’d rather be locked in here alone for a year—for the rest of my life, even—than spend one minute with him.

  Before he left, I begged him to sneak me some food or even just water and let me out to go to the bathroom, but he wouldn’t.

  “You heard what your mother said,” he told me. “You have to stay in here until it’s time for church Sunday morning. You have to make atonement.”

  My sin this time: sneaking up to the third-floor bathroom to wash my hair while she was at work at the drugstore. She found hair and shampoo residue in the drain. She must inspect it every day like she inspects everything else around here.

  She won’t let me take a bath more than once a week because she says it’s sinful to be vain and wasteful of hot water. I think she wants to make me ugly because of him. As if he cares what I look like.

  I wish no one else did. I’m the only girl at school with dirty, greasy hair and it makes everyone hate me even more. But not as much as I hate myself, or as much as Mother hates me. She knows what he does to me and she doesn’t stop him. And worse yet, she blames me for it, I know it.

  At church tomorrow morning, I’m going to pray that something terrible happens to him. That’s not a sin, is it? It’s the same thing as just wishing someone dead when you blow out your birthday candles. You can’t go to hell for that.

  Chapter 5

  After wiping her eyes again on the soggy cuff of her flannel pajama top, Jen fumbles in her pocket for the wad of damp Kleenex she’s been carrying around the house with her for the past hour, ever since the first wave of grief washed over her with the grim news that arrived when the phone rang at six, much too early for a Saturday morning.

  “I just don’t understand,” she tells Thad, pressing the useless clump of tissue against her streaming nose, “how a sweet, beautiful girl who had everything to live for could . . . take her own life.”

  Take her own life . . .

  They might mean the same thing, but the words sound less jarring than the phrase that was on the tip of her tongue: kill herself.

  For once, she’d caught herself. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that as having been unable to say the ugly word.

  Kill . . .

  Kill . . .

  Kill . . .

  Dear God, it’s so violent, so utterly out of place in this safe suburban world.

  Crazy, terrible things can happen anywhere.

  That’s what Thad told her last spring, when she said she wanted to keep Carley insulated at Sacred Sisters.

  “I feel sick.” Trembling, she sinks down beside him on the couch. “This is so . . . it’s so . . .”

  “It’s tragic.” He shakes his head, putting an arm around her. “That’s what it is. Tragic. What a waste.”

  They fall silent, sitting side by side in the formal living room they so rarely use.

  Hearing footsteps and creaking floorboards overhead, Jen looks at Thad. “That’s Carley.”

  He nods, well aware that Carley has the steadier, heavier footfall, while Emma tends to bounce and prance, even at this hour.

  “What are we supposed to tell her, Thad? Kids aren’t supposed to die. Not this way. Not at all.”

  “No. But they do.”

  She nods mutely and they listen as the footsteps go down the hall, away from the stairs. After a brief lull, the toilet in the hall bathroom flushes, the footsteps retreat, and Carley’s bedroom door closes again.

  She’s gone back to sleep—for now, anyway.

  Relieved by the momentary reprieve, Jen tells Thad, “She’s going to be devastated. How is she possibly going to deal with something like this?”

  “She’ll have to.”

  “But how?”


  “She’ll face it and eventually she’ll get past it. It’s a part of life. It happens to everyone, growing up. You lose people.”

  She nods bleakly, remembering how her beloved Pop-Pop, who lived two houses away, had a heart attack and dropped dead in his backyard one morning while he was pruning his fig tree.

  “My grandfather died when I was in high school,” she tells Thad. “But that was different. He was old. When you lose someone your own age . . .”

  “Kids die suddenly, too. When I was a junior, a friend of mine, Chase Rivington— Did I ever tell you about him?”

  “No. Yes. I think so.”

  Her brain is shrouded in a fog of grief right now. Still, she remembers, long ago, commenting about the name: Chase Rivington.

  “He sounds like such a prep school kid,” she told Thad at the time. “Even more than Thaddeus Leland Archer the third.”

  “What’s wrong with prep school?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I just forget sometimes that we grew up worlds apart. If we’d met back then, we wouldn’t have given each other the time of day.”

  “If we’d met back then, you would have told me you were going to marry Mike what’s-his-name.”

  Morino was his name. Mike Morino.

  They grew up in the same neighborhood but attended different Catholic schools and never met until the summer after her freshman year, when their paths converged at a church lawn fete. She wore his class ring on and off through high school and beyond, enduring quite a few breakups and an unfounded pregnancy scare before he finally drifted out of her life for good—just as Thad walked into it.

  Thank God for that. Thank God for Thad.

  They were both twenty-two and recent college graduates when they met at a bar on the Elmwood Strip, though Jen assumed he was younger. He had a baby face, and a sweet, kind disposition that grabbed her attention immediately.

  “He’s the type of guy,” she confided in her sister Frankie the morning after she met Thad, “who would never hurt someone.”

  “Everyone in the world is capable of hurting someone, Jen.”