The Good Sister

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  And so I told her I was. It felt so good to be like the rest of them for once, and I wanted her to know I had a date. When I told her who it was, she made sure everyone around us heard, too. She kept repeating it. “You’re waiting for Mike Morino? Are you sure?”

  That was when the staring and whispering turned into laughing. People were laughing right at me, right in my face.

  I just held my head high. I kept thinking about how ridiculous they’d all feel when they saw me in Mike’s arms. I knew he was going to show up.

  And he did.

  When I spotted him in that crowd, he was smiling at me. That’s what I thought. That’s what I saw.

  But . . .

  I guess you were right about one thing, Mother. You always said there are none so blind as those who will not see.

  I walked toward Mike, and I realized that he wasn’t smiling at me after all. He was smiling at his date, Jen Bonafacio.

  I couldn’t believe it. But it was true.

  All day, I’ve been thinking about what happened last night. All day, I’ve been wondering how I can ever set foot in that school again tomorrow and face them, any of them, especially Mike and Debbie and Jen.

  The answer is that I can’t.

  I won’t.

  I have two final requests. Granting them is the least you can do for me, under the circumstances.

  1. I know you won’t be able to give me a funeral Mass or a Catholic burial, and I’m not even sure God hears your prayers, because He doesn’t hear mine, but just in case, will you please pray for mercy for my soul, that He might forgive my sin?

  2. Please don’t ever tell Adrian what I’ve done. When it’s over and I’m gone, just tell him that it was an accident. Tell him to always remember how much I loved him, and that he was my little angel.

  You know how, whenever someone dies, people say they’re in a better place? Well, I know that I’m going to go to hell for what I’m going to do. But if Adrian asks where I am, you can say I’m in a better place.

  All things considered, it won’t be a lie.

  Ruthie

  Chapter 17

  “See that? I told you!” Holding the flashlight he grabbed from his apartment before he and Bobby and Glenn cut through the yard, Al aims the beam at the footprints in the mud beside the back door of the Addams House. “Someone’s been here.”

  “Well, they’re not here now,” his brother says, “unless they’re hanging around in the dark.”

  He’s right about that. Dusk has fallen, but no light spills from any of the windows in the Addams House.

  They walk around the perimeter, just to be sure. The timers have yet to turn on the lamps in the front rooms. The place is dark, and feels deserted . . . for now.

  “We need to go in there and see how much damage these kids have done,” Al decides. “It makes me sick to think of them running wild, vandalizing the place.”

  “Why? It’s not like it’s your house,” Bobby points out.

  “No, but . . .” Al just shakes his head.

  Bobby would never understand about Sandra and her respect for old houses. He would never understand Al’s lingering feelings for her.

  No, Bobby always called her Snobby Sandy, just like the others did.

  He thinks of her in silence broken only by droplets plunking softly to the grass from the eaves and towering tree branches high overhead. The rain stopped a little while ago, giving way to damp mist.

  “We need to go in,” he says again, decisively.

  “But—”

  “He’s right, Bobby. No one wants to see this old place burn down.” Glenn slurs his words a little. “It’s a neighborhood landmark.”

  “Exactly.” Al looks at his brother. “Go ahead and do your thing, locksmith.”

  Carley says a silent Hail Mary, trembling violently when she gets to the last few words of the prayer. She’d never really paid close attention to them before.

  Now and at the hour of our death . . .

  Did Nicki pray before she slit her wrists?

  Was she, too, chilled by the final line of the Hail Mary?

  Maybe not, because she actually chose the hour of her death.

  How could she have done it? Even now, Carley can’t make sense of Nicki’s suicide. Maybe she’ll soon find out the answer, though. Maybe Nicki will be waiting on the other side to greet her, and—

  Then she remembers: Nicki might not be in heaven, because Nicki took her own life.

  Mom doesn’t believe in that, though. She said that a merciful God would never punish a troubled soul.

  Carley hopes she’s right.

  Oh, Mommy . . . I love you so much. You and Daddy and even Emma, and Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Frankie . . .

  Carley is crying again.

  They’re going to be so sad. Especially Mom. She cries over sappy television commercials; how is she ever going to get through something like this?

  She prays that her family, especially her mother, will be all right without her, and that they’ll somehow know how much she really did love them.

  I should have told them. And it’s too late now.

  Now is the hour . . .

  She begs God to make her death quick and painless, and to let Nicki be waiting for her . . .

  If she is, she’ll probably be pretty upset with Carley. She’ll want to know how Carley got herself into this situation.

  You’re too gullible and naïve, she’ll tell Carley, not for the first time.

  And yeah, no kidding. If she weren’t gullible and naïve, she wouldn’t be here.

  If she hadn’t listened to Sister Linda on that long-ago day . . .

  What are you going to do, Carley? Leave school? Let them win? Wouldn’t you rather hold your head high and show them that they can’t get the better of you?

  But . . . I can’t. I just . . . I can’t . . .

  You can’t hold your head high? Sure you can, if you grow a spine . . .

  I was a fool for listening to her . . .

  A fool for believing that the girls had voted me Spring Fling princess in the first place.

  That was her last happy day on earth, she knows now.

  She remembers how thrilled she was, floating giddily around the school . . .

  No. Don’t waste precious time you have left thinking about that.

  Now is the hour . . .

  Seeking comfort, she thinks again of Nicki. Heaven wouldn’t be so bad with her there.

  Heaven isn’t supposed to be so bad no matter what. It’s supposed to be paradise, remember?

  But Carley can’t imagine being happy anyplace all alone, without her family.

  So yes, Nicki has to be in heaven, too, waiting for her. She has to be. Nicki will be her old self, hugging Carley and talking a mile a minute . . .

  Why the heck didn’t you try harder to escape, Carls? she’ll ask.

  Maybe I could have, if my hands and legs were free, but there was no way. What was I supposed to do? Snap my fingers and pluck a magical pair of scissors out of the air so that I could saw through the . . .

  Carley goes absolutely still.

  Once again, that day comes back to her—the day she found out she’d been voted Spring Fling princess. But this time, she lets the memory in. She needs to remember every single detail as if her life depends on it . . .

  Because it does.

  Angel is on her way out of her office when she hears the muffled sound of a ringing cell phone.

  Her own phone.

  She left it in her desk drawer, along with the memory stick and a couple of other items she’ll be back to retrieve as soon as . . .

  Why is the phone ringing, though?

  The only people she’s ever contacted from this number are Nicki and . . .

  Carley.


  But only posing as each other . . . until this morning.

  This morning, Angel remembers, in a tizzy over not being able to reach Carley, she’d sent a text to Carley’s phone—forgetting that she herself had programmed in the number to coincide with Nicki Olivera’s contact information.

  See what happens when you get impatient? You make sloppy mistakes.

  Yes, and in her eagerness to finish this job, Angel had confiscated the girl’s laptop, but had sloppily forgotten to take her phone, too. It must be in her pocket.

  But how can she possibly be dialing it?

  She can’t be, Angel assures herself, hurrying back to her office to check her ringing phone. It must be a wrong number.

  Yes. When she pulls the phone out of her drawer, she sees that the call is, indeed, coming from an unfamiliar number with a 716 area code.

  Deciding she’d better answer it, Angel presses a button and barks a gruff “Hello?”

  There’s a pause on the other end of the line.

  Then a male voice asks, “Who is this?”

  “Who is this?” Angel returns, irritated.

  “I’m looking for—”

  The line goes dead.

  Angel stands for a long time, looking at the phone in her hand. Then, with a shrug, she turns it off and tucks it back into the drawer.

  She’ll deal with it later.

  Carrying Carley’s backpack—which contains her laptop and a hardcover copy of The Virgin Suicides—Angel leaves her office again.

  First, she’ll take these things down to the gym and get everything ready. That, of course, is where the suicidal would-be Spring Fling princess would go to kill herself. Right there, amid the garish decorations for the dance, Carley Archer is going to slit her wrists just as her best friend did.

  Just like Ruthie . . .

  No. Ruthie didn’t slit her wrists, and she didn’t die in the school gym at Spring Fling. Not officially, anyway.

  But Angel knows the truth.

  Ruthie’s life was over the moment she walked alone into the gym that night, looking for Mike Morino—and found him with Jen Archer in his arms.

  “Why did you do that?” Thad asks Frankie, who all but shoved Jen and Emma aside to grab his cell phone out of his hand and disconnect his call in mid-sentence.

  “Because you were going to say you were looking for Carley, and . . . I don’t think that was a good idea.”

  “Why not?” Jen asks her sister.

  “I think something strange is going on.”

  “It was a man who answered. We need to call Debbie,” Thad says abruptly, “and find out where Nicki’s cell phone is.”

  “I don’t think that’s Nicki’s cell phone. Not with a Long Island area code. I think someone was playing a trick on Carley and programmed that number into her phone to make her think it was Nicki. Someone was posing as Nicki, saying terrible things Carley thought Nicki had said. That’s how their friendship ended.”

  “What do you mean?” Jen asks her sister.

  Frankie quickly explains about the girls’ final interactions with each other—how everything unfolded via text and social networking sites.

  “You mean they never even talked it out?” Thad asks incredulously. “After all those years of friendship?”

  “I can’t believe that.” Jen shakes her head. “They were so close. They wouldn’t just—”

  “Mom, they used to see each other every day,” Emma cuts in, “but not anymore. They were in different schools. How do you think they got in touch with each other? Online and by text.”

  “But that’s—”

  “That’s all anyone does. Trust me.”

  “She’s right,” Frankie says. “These kids aren’t doing a whole lot of talking or face-to-face problem resolution.”

  “So you’re saying . . .” Thad frowns, shaking his head. “You’re saying one of these other girls—these bullies—was posing as Nicki, making Carley think Nicki—”

  “I think there’s a strong possibility,” Frankie cuts in. “And I think you need to call the police right away and tell them about this.”

  “Why?” Jen’s parents ask in unison, not following.

  But Jen understands exactly what her sister is thinking, and she feels faint as the dreadful possibility hits her.

  “Because someone might have been doing the same exact thing to Nicki,” she says, “and now Nicki is dead.”

  The moment he walks into the Addams House, Al inhales a distinctly charred stench in the air.

  So it wasn’t Sandy’s ghost signaling its presence by setting off the smoke alarm after all. Yeah, he didn’t really think that anyway.

  Not really.

  “I told you someone burned something in here this morning,” he tells his brother and Glenn.

  “Why are you whispering?” Bobby asks.

  “I have no idea.” Al clears his throat and walks across the kitchen, bouncing the flashlight’s beam around the room.

  There’s no mistaking the evidence that someone has been staying here. A frying pan and a plate sit soaking in the sink. There’s a box of crackers on the counter. Al opens the refrigerator and finds a few basics: eggs, butter, milk. He checks the expiration dates. Next week, next month . . .

  “I don’t think it’s kids,” Glenn says, looking over his shoulder. “I think someone’s squatting here. Some homeless person, probably.”

  “That’s not good, either.” Al closes the fridge and moves toward the doorway leading toward the front of the house.

  “Wait, where are you going?” Bobby asks.

  “To walk through the place and see what’s what.”

  “Why?”

  Because it reminds me of Sandra, that’s why. The last time I saw her . . .

  “Let’s call the cops, go back to Louie’s, have another drink . . . Maybe not in that order,” Bobby adds.

  Behind them, Glenn has opened the fridge again and taken out a bottle of beer. “You think this is any good?”

  Bobby groans. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I thought that if the milk is good, then this might be, but you’re right. It might be skunky.”

  Leaving the two of them in the kitchen, Al crosses the threshold into the butler’s pantry, lined with empty shelves behind glass doors, then into the dining room.

  His footsteps echo on the bare hardwoods, and he shines the flashlight around the empty room, thinking of all that furniture sitting in his storage unit. What will become of it? How long will it be before some new family moves in here and makes the place their own?

  The beam dances across the walls, across the floor . . .

  Startled, Al realizes there’s a laptop computer lying on the hardwoods across the room. And a book, or . . . no, it’s a notebook, he realizes, walking toward it, keeping the light trained on the spot, right beneath the built-in window seat—

  What the hell?

  Shreds of rotted flesh clinging to skeletal human legs and feet . . .

  Al lets out a bloodcurdling scream.

  Finding the Peeps icon on her sister’s cell phone, Emma hopes Carley saved her log-in information. If she didn’t . . .

  But she did.

  Seeing the screen name and row of asterisks symbolizing a saved password, Emma quickly hits enter, and the page loads.

  “Mom . . .” She reaches out to stop her mother, who keeps walking back and forth with her hands clasped against her chest. Emma isn’t sure if she’s praying, or just clenching. “Look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Carley’s Peeps page. She—”

  Wait a minute. No, she didn’t.

  Emma frowns, staring at the profile that just popped up on the small screen.

  Carley Theresa.

  She quickly scrolls through.
/>   Favorite authors: E. B. White and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  Cheesy pictures of kittens.

  “What? What is it?” Her mother is looking over her shoulder.

  Emma shakes her head, trying to figure out how to explain. She’d already admitted, earlier, that she’d snuck away to see Gabe today. Her parents opted not to add to her punishment for the moment—though she’s sure they will when this is over and Carley is home.

  If Carley comes home, Emma thinks, wondering what’s going on with her.

  “The reason I went over to Gabe’s,” she says, to boost her case for not being further punished, “was because he said Carley had a Peeps page where she was talking about killing herself.”

  “What?” Her mother grabs her upper arms, hard.

  “Mom, wait—I did see the page, on Gabe’s computer, and it did say all this stuff, but . . . it didn’t sound like Carley at all. It was just really dark, and—”

  “Emma! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now. I thought it was Carley’s real page, and that she just had this fake page to hide what she was really doing, but . . . it looks like this is the page she’s been using all along.”

  “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  “Maybe somebody set her up, Mom. Like . . . you know, a joke. Kids do stuff like that all the time, especially to people like Carley.”

  “People like Carley . . .” Her mother’s voice is all choked up. “She’s a good kid. She never hurt anyone. Why would anyone want to hurt her?”

  Emma shrugs. “It’s just the way things are” is all she can possibly say to that.

  At last, everything is ready.

  The laptop, the book, and the knife are waiting in the gym. In a matter of minutes, this will all be over.

  Angel descends the stairway toward the custodial area where she locked Carley into a closet, bound and gagged.

  She couldn’t just leave her there in the gym. What if someone came along?

  No one but the custodial staff could possibly stumble across her down here, and the only person working today—Johnny—is long gone.

  Still, Angel has to make this quick.

  All is silent behind the door as she approaches.

  The key to this closet was laughably easy to find and duplicate, days ago, just lying around the custodian’s office.