Horrid

by Katrina Leno

  All school buses were the same.

  She tried not to cry.

  She took an empty seat in the middle of the bus and pulled out her phone, staring at it until it lit up with a couple of bars of service. She sent a message to Sal:

  Got to Maine yesterday. Haven’t had service. I’m omw to school now. I miss you so much and I don’t feel good, slept on the floor and will never be warm again. Also will definitely be murdered in this house. Other than that everything is great.

  It was a thirty-minute ride to the school. Bells Hollow High School was a small, unassuming building, nothing at all like her enormous high school back in California, which was brand-new and housed over fifteen hundred students. There were currently eighty-one seniors at Bells Hollow High.

  Well—the fewer students, the easier it would be to avoid them all.

  She pushed through the double doors and walked into the front office, which was right across from the entrance.

  “Hi,” she said to the woman at the front desk. “I’m Jane North-Robinson. It’s my first day.”

  “Jane, of course! It is so nice to meet you. I’m Rosemary,” she replied. “This is a lovely surprise; we weren’t expecting you until Monday!”

  Jane forced a smile and shrugged. “I thought—why wait?”

  “I like that attitude! I have all your paperwork ready somewhere.…” Rosemary opened a filing cabinet next to her desk and pulled out a manila folder. “Your locker assignment is in here, and your schedule of classes. Let me just call Alana—I think I saw her walk in a few minutes ago. She’ll be your buddy. It’s something we do here; we just find it’s really helpful to have someone you can turn to with all your questions.”

  Rosemary lifted a telephone receiver from her desk and Jane heard the announcement system crinkle to life in the hallway.

  “Alana Cansler to the front office please,” Rosemary said into the receiver. She hung it up and smiled at Jane. “So, how was your trip here?”

  “Fine,” Jane said. “Thanks.”

  “What do you think of Bells Hollow so far?”

  “I haven’t really seen that much of it. It seems nice.”

  Rosemary seemed to have exhausted her supply of small talk. She smiled a bit awkwardly until the door opened behind Jane, then she lit up and said, “Oh, here she is now! Alana, dear, this is Jane!”

  Jane turned around. Alana was a white girl with shoulder-length brown hair, bangs, and tortoiseshell glasses. She was wearing overalls with a white long-sleeved shirt underneath. She stuck out her hand energetically, and Jane took it.

  “Nice to meet you!” Alana said.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

  “Why don’t you two get going; Alana, will you show Jane to her locker? Jane, if you need anything, just let me know, all right?”

  “Thanks,” Jane said.

  “I thought you weren’t starting until Monday?” Alana said as soon as they were in the hallway.

  “My internal clock is a mess. I woke up super early. It was either this or help my mom clean.”

  “You’re from California, right? This way.” She led Jane down one of the hallways that branched off from the main entranceway.

  “Los Angeles,” Jane confirmed.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to California. Is it nice?”

  “I love it, yeah.”

  “Well, Bells Hollow isn’t that bad. As your first-day buddy, I’m supposed to tell you it’s amazing, but it’s definitely not amazing. It’s just not bad. It’s fine.” Alana laughed. “Sorry, I should be selling it more. This is you.”

  They’d reached locker 101. Jane consulted the paper that Rosemary had given her and found her combination. She opened it on the first try, put her jacket inside, then closed it.

  “So have you seen much of the town yet?” Alana asked. “Where do you live?”

  “I live in my grandmother’s old house,” Jane replied.

  “Oh, who’s your grandmother?”

  “Emilia North.”

  Alana blinked. “Emilia North?” she repeated.

  “Did you know her?”

  “It’s a small town; everybody kind of knows everybody.” Alana paused, fidgeting a bit. “Do you mind if we stop at my locker first? We still have a minute.”

  “Sure, of course.”

  Alana’s locker was in the next hallway; it just took a few seconds to reach it. She opened it and started pulling books out, then asked, “So… you live in North Manor?”

  “Yup.”

  “It’s been empty for a while.”

  “Two years. Since my grandmother died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. I didn’t really know her that well.”

  Alana zipped up her backpack, shut her locker, and turned to Jane. She looked a little embarrassed.

  “What?” Jane asked.

  “It’s so stupid.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “I feel like a jerk. But if I don’t tell you now, someone is definitely going to tell you eventually.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “It just has a nickname. That house.”

  “A nickname?” Jane repeated.

  “Like… a not-nice nickname.”

  “Okay.…”

  “People call it the creep house. It’s so juvenile, I know.”

  “Creep house?” Jane laughed. “I can think of at least a dozen more imaginative names for that house.”

  “I didn’t say it was imaginative,” Alana said, smiling. “But still, it’s rude. People here are just bored. There’s not a lot to do, you know? The closest movie theater has been closed for renovations for two years. What’s California like? I’m sure there’s just, like, too much to do, right? On Friday nights do you just go hang out with celebrities?”

  “There are a lot of celebrity meetups, yeah,” Jane said seriously. “They get kind of boring after a while.”

  “And was everyone… You know?”

  “Was everyone what?”

  Alana gestured at Jane’s hair. “I mean… So blond?”

  Jane laughed out loud. “Yes,” she replied. “Only blonds allowed.”

  They had the first three classes together, and later, when the bell rang for lunch, Alana led Jane to the cafeteria. Jane purchased the least offensive-looking thing on the lunch menu: a semi-greasy piece of cheese pizza. Her old school’s cafeteria had been huge, with options for every single kind of diet. There wasn’t even a salad in this place; she made a mental note to start bringing her own lunch.

  “Over here,” Alana said, leading the way to a table near the middle of the room, where she introduced Jane to a handful of people whose names Jane forgot almost immediately. She sat between Alana and Susie, a black girl with box braids that fell long and straight down her back.

  Jane thought Alana must have prepped her friends that Jane would be sitting with them for lunch, and although everyone was perfectly nice and welcoming, Jane couldn’t help sensing a tiny bit of wariness from them. She swore two girls across the table whispered something about North Manor as she sat down, and one guy with glasses to her left seemed determined not to make eye contact with her. The only ones who acted normal were Alana and Susie.

  “Alana told me you live on my side of town,” Susie said as Jane took a bite of pizza. “I’m just a few streets over.”

  “Oh, really?” Jane said.

  “Yeah. What do you think of Bells Hollow so far?” Susie asked.

  “There are a lot of trees,” Jane said. “I guess I didn’t know there would be so many trees.”

  Susie laughed. “A lot of trees. A lot of deer. Alana claims she saw a moose once.”

  “I did see a moose. Do you know how big moose are? I mean—too big. Unnecessarily big,” Alana said.

  Jane took another bite of her pizza and felt a dribble of grease slide down her chin. She wiped it away quickly, and looked up just in time to notice a girl walk by their table and kick the leg of Alana’s chair as she p
assed it. She was white with stringy, dyed-black hair that fell to her shoulders and a piercing on her lip, a little hoop that curled over her bottom lip.

  “What was that about?” Jane asked Alana.

  Alana sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “She’s terrible; it’s best not to dwell on it,” Susie said. “So besides the trees, are you enjoying your first day at our famed Bells Hollow High School?”

  “It’s all been uphill since the bus,” Jane replied.

  “The bus?” Alana repeated. “Oh no. You took the bus?”

  Jane shrugged in reply.

  “You probably have lice now. My friend Marian took the bus once, and she had to shave her head,” Alana said sadly.

  “Don’t listen to her; that is absolutely not true,” Susie said. “I can give you a ride home. We’re so close.”

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that,” Jane said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Alana replied. “Susie doesn’t mind. She drives me home, too.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Totally,” Susie insisted. “It’s no problem at all.”

  Jane felt a little awkward about it, but she shrugged and thanked Susie for the offer. It definitely would be better than taking the bus.

  The bell rang a few minutes later and they headed to their lockers for their afternoon classes.

  Salinger texted back around two, a string of emojis meant to convey how much she missed Jane. Jane had last period with Alana and Susie. They sat together at the back of the room, and when the last bell rang, the three of them walked to the student parking lot. Susie had a small SUV; Alana got into the back, insisting that Jane take the passenger seat. Susie let the car heat up for a minute before pulling out of the spot.

  Alana only lived a few minutes from the school, in a little ranch house that reminded Jane of California.

  “See you tomorrow, Jane!” Alana said as she let herself out of the back seat.

  “Thanks again for the ride,” Jane said as they pulled away from the curb. “I really appreciate it.”

  “My parents pay for my gas,” Susie said. “So it’s no problem. I can pick you up in the mornings, too.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Well, thanks. It’s really nice of you to offer.”

  The silence in the car was just slightly uncomfortable, like being in an elevator with a stranger. Finally, Susie cleared her throat and said, “So… North Manor?”

  “Yup. We moved in yesterday. Alana told me about the nickname.”

  Susie groaned. “She did?”

  “Somebody would have told me eventually.”

  “I guess you’re right. It’s been in your family for a while?”

  “It’s always been in my family, yeah. We were never supposed to live in it. But… things changed. So here we are.”

  “You didn’t want to move?”

  “No. It was really sudden. But hopefully I can go back to California when I graduate.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Susie said. “For not wanting to move, I mean. My parents were talking about moving to another town—literally, like, ten miles away—and I started having nightmares. I couldn’t imagine moving across the country.”

  “We didn’t really have an option,” Jane said softly. She didn’t elaborate, and Susie didn’t ask her to.

  Susie seemed to know where she was going, which was good, because Jane wouldn’t have been able to give her directions. All these streets looked the same—tree-lined country roads that wound their way through the town.

  “Give me your number; I’ll text you Monday morning,” Susie said when they reached North Manor. She handed Jane her phone and Jane inputted her number and saved it.

  “Thanks again for the ride,” Jane said.

  “Of course. Have a good weekend. It was nice to meet you.”

  “Thanks. You too,” Jane replied, sliding out of the car.

  Inside the house, the electricity was on and it felt a lot warmer. The window people were there and had already replaced most of the windows on the first floor. With the lights on and the windows fixed and the curtains open and the heat going, North Manor actually felt marginally less creepy than it had the night before.

  Jane found her mother in the kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee. She wore her standard cleaning outfit—ripped jeans, a holey T-shirt, and a bandanna to keep her hair out of her face.

  “You snuck out so early!” Ruth exclaimed, hugging her.

  “I gave you a kiss!”

  “Really? I thought I dreamed that. Ugh, I’ve been going nonstop today. Let’s order in for dinner. Do you have any homework?”

  “Not really.”

  “And? How was it?”

  Jane shrugged. “Not bad.”

  “‘Not bad’ coming from a teenager is basically a ringing endorsement,” Ruth said, kissing Jane on the temple. “Let me finish up and take a shower, and we’ll eat early. I’m starving.”

  A few hours later, they’d gone to pick up Thai food for dinner and were eating it in front of the fireplace. Ruth had poured herself a glass of wine and given Jane a half glass as a little celebration of surviving the first day of school. Ruth didn’t want to sleep upstairs until all the windows were fixed, so they were camping in the living room again. They’d found a stack of old board games—Monopoly, Scrabble, Yahtzee—and Jane had picked Scrabble as their first choice.

  “You know—this isn’t so bad,” Ruth said as she set up the board. She had a container of curry in front of her and kept spearing hunks of potato with her fork.

  “You might not feel that way when I destroy you at Scrabble.”

  “I mean, it’s not ideal. I know that. And I guess we could always drive to a motel. It’s just… Why spend the money if we don’t have to, you know?”

  “At least it’s not windy tonight,” Jane said. “Last night there were moments I thought the house was going to collapse around us.”

  “This is a solid house, Jane,” Ruth said, laughing. “They built them right back then.”

  “We’ll have to explore the upstairs tomorrow; I haven’t even seen your old room yet.”

  Ruth smiled. “Up the stairs, take a left, second door on the left. Although my mother turned it back into a guest room when I left home. You won’t find many childhood trinkets.”

  “How come she did that?”

  Her smile faded. “I told her I wouldn’t need it again.”

  “You never wanted to come back for a holiday or anything? To visit?”

  “Oh, gosh. Life just sort of got in the way, Jane. I met your father, and then you came along, and it was so much easier for Emilia to come west to visit than for Greer and me to lug you all that way. And it was cheaper, too, one ticket versus three. It wasn’t on purpose,” she added—although her words felt too much like a careful afterthought to carry much water. “It’s just the way it happened.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Jane said, although it didn’t make sense to her, not at all.

  In fact the longer they spent in this house, the less sense everything seemed to make. Why did it feel like her mother was hiding something? Why did it feel like she had another reason for never wanting to return to North Manor?

  Ruth played the word secret for sixteen points.

  Jane thought that felt fairly accurate.

  Ruth fell asleep early, and Jane covered her up in her makeshift bed and put the leftovers away, then settled back in front of the fire and took a sip of her wine. She didn’t usually drink, and as a result it was going right to her head, making her sleepy and warm. The fire was still going strong, and she stretched out her legs, letting the heat warm the soles of her feet.

  She must have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes the room was darker and the fire had died down to just a few barely burning embers. She had a crick in her back from the way she’d been sitting, so she slowly stretched her arms over her head and then froze as she heard it—the s
ound that must have woken her up.

  It was a muffled crack, a brief pop with a long silence after it.

  Jane didn’t immediately feel afraid; rather she felt a sort of prickling of her senses, like how in a darkened room you might move to avoid hitting something you couldn’t even see, because you just felt it was there. She got to her feet quietly, trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from, straining her ears in the darkness of the house. Her first thought was the tree that had tapped against the window last night—but this was different from that, louder and farther away.

  She was used to living in perpetual noise. Their house in California had been adjacent to a main road, and there were always cars rushing by and parents pushing baby strollers and kids zipping around on bikes. Enough noise and it all eventually fades into the background, becoming something other than noise, a distant lull to sing you off to sleep.

  She had never experienced quiet as profound as nighttime in New England, where even the sound of your own breathing became deafeningly loud.

  And there was another noise.

  A steady thump-thump-thump.

  The sound of her own heart, she realized.

  A sound that quickened when she heard the cracking noise again.

  It came from the back of the house.

  She pulled out her phone, turned on the flashlight, then dimmed the beam with her hand, letting out just a splinter of light to see by.

  The house was still a mostly unknown thing to her. Furniture crept up on her, the piano seemed to move by a few inches in any given direction, floor lamps erupted out of the dark like people dressed in bronze.

  And now the sound—like a sharp scream. And another sound, following it. The shattering of glass.

  And suddenly Jane wasn’t scared anymore; suddenly she knew exactly what the sound was, and it didn’t frighten her; instead it filled her with a sharp kind of anger.

  She took off at a run, making her way to the mudroom at the back of the house, not bothering to shield her flashlight anymore.