Horrid

by Katrina Leno

“Yeah, you were right,” Melanie said.

  Her boyfriend laughed. There was something familiar about that laugh, something that nagged at Jane’s memory.

  Oh, right.

  Of course.

  Jane could almost hear his exclamation in the middle of the night—Oh shit!—right after Melanie had thrown a rock through her window.

  He had laughed then, too.

  “Can you go away now, please?” Alana said.

  “Shut up, Alana,” Melanie snapped. “I’m just talking to our new friend.”

  “Jane is not your—”

  “You do realize I could go to the cops, right?” Jane interrupted.

  Melanie’s smirk grew wider. “Are you threatening me?”

  “What are you talking about?” Alana asked. “Mel, what is she talking about? Go to the cops for what?”

  Melanie turned toward Alana. “How about you tell your new friend that if she threatens me again—”

  “I’m not threatening you,” Jane said, her voice rising, her blood starting to pump faster. “I’m telling you: If you come to my house again, if you throw another rock through one of my fucking windows, I will call the police.”

  “You did what?” Alana screeched.

  “Stay out of it, Alana,” Melanie snapped.

  “Babe, let’s go,” the boyfriend said, tugging Melanie’s arm. “Mr. Foster just came out of his classroom.”

  Melanie let him pull her a step away from Jane. Jane’s eyes were burning; she could feel her cheeks getting hot.

  “Look,” Alana said, her voice quiet. “You don’t have to worry about Jane telling the cops. Because if you do anything to Jane or that house again, you or Jeff, I’ll tell your mom, okay?”

  “You were always such a little tattletale,” Melanie said.

  “And you were always such a little bitch,” Alana shot back.

  They stared at each other for a moment and Jane realized they had the exact same color eyes. And the way Alana had said your mom.

  The boyfriend—Jeff—kept pulling at Melanie’s arm until she finally broke eye contact with Alana. Jeff practically dragged Melanie down the hallway. Jane watched Mr. Foster nod to himself and go back into his classroom.

  Jane was losing it. Breathing heavily, she turned and faced her still-open locker, putting one hand on the door. The metal felt cool underneath her fingertips. You can’t lose it here. You can’t lose it in front of Alana.

  “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe she came to your house,” Alana said.

  Jane made herself reply, struggling to keep her voice even. “All the windows in the house were smashed when we moved in. She threw a rock through one on Friday night.”

  “What an asshole,” Alana said.

  Calm down calm down calm down.

  Jane took a long, shaky breath. She could feel Alana lean a little closer to her.

  “Are you okay, Jane?”

  “Sorry, just… She just made me a little mad.”

  “I totally get it. She’s been making me mad my whole life.”

  Jane turned to her, curious, letting the curiosity replace the anger, letting anything replace the anger.

  “You guys are…?”

  “Cousins, unfortunately,” Alana confirmed.

  “Is everyone in this town related?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Has she always been like that?”

  “Not this bad. She’s always been a little… off, I guess. But it’s gotten worse.”

  “Did something happen?” Jane asked, because Alana was whispering now, and something had changed in her face. She looked almost sad, almost wary.

  Alana took a deep breath. “Melanie’s older sister is very… ill. Because of something that happened when she was younger.”

  “What happened when she was younger?”

  “We don’t have to talk about it,” Alana said quickly. “But recently, her sister has gotten worse. A few years ago, she took a bunch of pills and… She’s been in the hospital ever since. Mel kind of… broke. After that. At first, I tried to be there for her. I really did. I mean, she’s my cousin, too. But Melanie’s made it clear that she doesn’t want my help. She doesn’t want anyone’s help.” She paused. “Now that you’re here… I think you should just try to stay away from her.”

  “Now that I’m here? What do you mean?”

  Alana’s expression darkened. She opened her mouth, but it was a moment before she spoke. Like she was deciding what to say. “I just mean… you have nothing to do with her issues. So just… stay away from her. I’m sorry she did that to your house.”

  “Let’s just hope she doesn’t come back.” Jane paused. “You weren’t… doing her homework for her, were you?”

  “Just every now and then. An essay or two,” Alana said. “I don’t know why. It’s guilt, maybe. She spends a lot of time at the hospital. With her sister. I just… I want her to be able to do that. I want to be able to do something. So here we are.”

  “You’re a good person,” Jane said. Her breathing was returning to normal, her skin was cooling down.

  Alana shrugged. “Part of me hates her. Part of me just feels really, really bad for her.”

  Jane closed her locker. “That sounds fair to me.”

  “I’m glad it sounds fair to someone.” Alana smiled sadly. “Come on, let’s go eat.”

  Ruth wasn’t home when Susie dropped Jane off after school. North Manor was quiet and still, the emptiness a palpable, alive thing. Jane went up to her bedroom and changed into pajamas and sat on the floor in front of her bookcase.

  She hadn’t written in her journal in such a long time. She pulled it out of the bookshelf now and held it. The last entry was from just a few days before Greer had died. So maybe she didn’t want to use it now, because in its pages, Greer was still alive. If she never wrote another word, Greer would always be alive. Whatever happened to this journal after Jane died, if anyone ever picked it up and read it, they would never know he had died.

  She put it back on the shelf.

  She dug around in her backpack for her homework and spent the next hour or so working on it, then she pulled out the copy of Destination Unknown she’d bought at the little mystery bookshop and held it on her lap.

  You be careful up there, Paula had said. In Bells Hollow. These old towns all have histories. Some of them are darker than others.

  Some of them are darker than others.

  What the hell had that meant?

  Jane thought back on earlier, on meeting Melanie, and Alana saying something had happened to her sister when she was younger.

  Was that a dark history? Alana had seemed slightly evasive about details, and Jane hadn’t pressed her—she knew firsthand how it was better to sometimes keep the past in the past. It was less painful that way.

  Jane shook her head. Whatever had happened to Melanie’s sister wasn’t any of her business. She opened Destination Unknown and read it until she heard the front door open and close.

  “Janie, I’m home!” Ruth called from downstairs.

  “Be down in a sec!”

  Jane finished up the chapter she’d been reading; when she went downstairs a few minutes later she found Ruth working on paperwork at the kitchen table.

  “Mom, it smells amazing in here,” Jane said, collapsing into a kitchen chair. “You already started dinner?”

  “Oh, I just put a lasagna in the oven, honey. I had it ready to go in the fridge; I’m starving. Didn’t get a chance to eat lunch.”

  “How was your first day?”

  “Oh, it was fine. Busy. They’re in terrible shape, accounting-wise. Hence this.” She waved her hands over the small mountain of paperwork.

  “They’re lucky to have you.”

  “What about you, honey? How was school?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Good.” Ruth yawned.

  “Can I pour you a glass of wine?”

  Ruth laughed. “Do I look like I need it?”

  “Kind
of, yeah,” Jane said, smiling. She got up and patted Ruth on the top of the head. She got a wineglass down from the counter and poured a generous amount of Cabernet into it. She set it on the table in front of Ruth.

  “Thanks, honey,” Ruth said. “I’m gonna go wash up. Be right back.”

  Ruth left the kitchen and Jane stole a sip of her wine. It smelled rich and oaky, like some kind of deep fruit and…

  Roses?

  Jane put the wineglass down on the table. She sniffed the air. She could definitely smell roses, overpowering even the smell of the lasagna.

  She walked over to the window and cracked it open; the smell of roses wafted in so strongly it almost took her breath away.

  She went to the mudroom and opened the door. It was just after seven, and although the sky was dark, it had an almost-purple quality to it. The color of a bruise. She stepped out into the backyard and closed the door behind her.

  Outside, the smell of the roses was so strong it made the back of her throat itchy.

  It wasn’t a nice smell anymore.

  There was something deeper about it, almost rotten. A thick, too-sweet odor that took up more space than it should have.

  She started walking to the rose arbors.

  Ruth had left big piles of the dead plants she had cut down. Jane could see them, rotting there—was that why the smell was so strong?

  But no—

  That wasn’t possible.

  She took a few steps closer, then paused.

  How was that possible?

  Because she was close enough now to see that the arbors were covered with roses again, even thicker than before, twice as many blooms that crowded one another and fought for space—

  But they weren’t the reds and pinks and oranges they had been before.

  No, as Jane got closer she could see that every single rose was black—

  A dark, thick black, a black like the night sky, a starless expanse of nothingness.

  Jane stared at them.

  She knew nothing about gardening. Was it normal for roses to grow back this quickly? Were they supposed to be black? Ruth had only just cut them, but they already covered the arbor again. Jane moved underneath the archway and it became instantly darker; all the light was blocked by the cluster of leaves and thorns above her.

  The smell was even stronger than before.

  Wrong and overwhelming.

  It brought tears to her eyes.

  As she stood underneath the rosebushes, a breeze blew through the arbor.

  It gusted among the plants and sent a shower of black petals down around her.

  She held a hand out and one petal landed in the center of her palm.

  And as she held it, it curled dramatically in on itself, rotting before her eyes, drying up and dying in a matter of seconds.

  She let it drop to the ground.

  She suddenly found she didn’t like the smell of roses anymore.

  Right in the middle of her forehead

  Ruth refused to talk about the roses; in fact, she wouldn’t even go out to the backyard to look at them. She ate dinner without saying so much as a word, then she refilled her glass of wine, told Jane she was tired, and went upstairs to bed.

  Jane cleaned the dishes and put away the leftovers and felt a growing pit of strangeness in her belly.

  Why was Ruth acting so weird? Was it really just because she was tired? Or was something else going on?

  She got her laptop out of her backpack and set it up at the kitchen table to facetime Salinger. It rang three times before Sal picked up; she was lying on her bed with her long brown hair spread out around her, and Jane felt her eyes well up with tears immediately. She wanted to be in that bedroom so badly, working on homework or trying on Sal’s clothes or making Sal braid her hair into a crown around her head.

  “I’m sorry, who are you? I don’t have this number saved in my phone,” Sal said, not yet looking at the camera, rolling her eyes back in her head. When she did finally look, she sat up, her face instantly concerned. “Jane? Are you crying? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Everything. I hate it here. Everything sucks. I just want to come back to California.”

  “Fuck, I picked the wrong time to guilt-trip you for not facetiming me sooner,” Sal said, softening.

  “You really did.”

  “Great, now I’m crying. Stop crying, you’re making me cry. I miss you so much.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “What is going on?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just… Something isn’t right. About this house.”

  “Janie, it’s just an old house. I understand wanting to find something to hate, something to blame, but—”

  “Stop therapizing me,” Jane said. “I told you my mom went all Rambo on the rosebushes, right?”

  “Yeah, she was clearly working through some stuff and took it out on those poor plants.”

  “Well, they grew back.”

  “Isn’t that what plants do?”

  “No, like, not this quickly. And also—all the roses are black now.”

  Salinger made a face. “Oh. That’s…”

  “Weird.”

  “Very weird. But there is probably a totally normal explanation for it. Like a plant virus or something. Or a fungus, you know?”

  “Maybe,” Jane said. She was used to Salinger’s calm, rational explanations for things, and it was actually making her feel slightly better. If Jane was the one to overreact, let her emotions get the best of her, Sal was the one to take a step back and analyze things from every logical angle. She was like Greer, in that way. Always practical. Always calm. Basically, the opposite of Jane.

  “Try and forget the roses,” Sal continued. “How is everything else? How is your mom?”

  “She’s been fine. Really focused. You know how she has a tendency to kind of throw herself into tasks and ignore everything else?”

  “I’m aware, yes.”

  “So it’s been a lot of that. Organizing, cleaning, calling repair people. But today was her first day of work, and she just seems… off.”

  “I’m sure she’s tired,” Sal said diplomatically.

  “Tired, yeah. But she wouldn’t even go look at the roses. And she hardly said a word at dinner.”

  “Look, I’m just trying to be the voice of reason over here. You’ve been through a lot, and it makes sense that you’re feeling all sorts of weirdness because of that. But I think you need to cut yourself a little slack, cut Ruth a little slack, chill a tiny bit, and just try and go with the flow for a while.”

  “I wish I was there.”

  “Me too.”

  “So I could smack you in person for telling me to go with the flow.”

  “Have you considered having some matcha and meditating in a room filled with crystals? It’s the Los Angeles way,” Sal said, smiling goofily.

  “I love you. And I want to smack you still.”

  “Ditto.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Now, go do something relaxing. Make yourself some fucking tea, okay?”

  “I will make myself some fucking tea.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Jane clicked the red button to end the call.

  As soon as Sal’s face disappeared, she burst into tears.

  Ruth was quiet at breakfast the next morning; they hardly said two words to each other before Susie got there to pick up Jane. Jane moved slowly through her day, trying not to think about roses, trying not to think about Sal, trying not to think about Greer, trying not to think about anything. She was mentally exhausted by the time the last bell rang, and so grateful she almost cried when Susie offered to drive her to Beans & Books for her shift.

  “Are you sure?” Jane said, exchanging books at her locker.

  “Definitely. Free coffee and a quiet place to do homework. I have twin six-year-old sisters, so my house is not a quiet place.”

&nb
sp; They dropped off Alana first, then drove into town. Susie parked in a tiny lot next to the building and showed Jane a back door that led into a small room with a fridge, a conveyor toaster, and some cabinets and hooks with aprons on them.

  “You can put your stuff in here,” Susie said, knocking her shoe against one of the cabinets. “And grab one of these.” She took a forest-green apron off one of the hooks and held it out to Jane. “Take your time. I’ll tell Will we’re here.”

  Susie walked through a set of swinging café doors that led to the behind-the-counter area; Jane could just see the top of Will’s head as he walked back and forth taking care of a customer. She put her backpack into the cabinet, then slipped off her jacket and hung it on an open hook. The apron was actually kind of cute; it had a decal on the front of a stack of books with a coffee mug on top. She slipped it over her head and looked at herself in a mirror hanging next to the hooks.

  Her hair was messy and loose so she put it into a bun, twisting it around until it was all out of her face. When she was sure it would stay put, she pushed the café doors open slowly. There were a few customers sitting at tables, and Will and Susie were laughing about something behind the register.

  When Will saw Jane, he said, “Hate to tell you this, but you’re fired. I thought you seemed suspicious before, and now that I hear you’ve befriended my sister, it’s confirmed. You can’t be trusted.” He tried to pull Susie’s hair, but she ducked out of his reach.

  “Ha-ha,” Susie said. “You better be nice to Jane; she’ll tell me if you aren’t.”

  “In that case I will refrain from spilling hot coffee on her to test her commitment to the craft of making lattes,” Will said.

  “Actually, that sounds like an efficient vetting process,” Jane said. “You should have gone for it.”

  “I changed my mind. I like you again.”

  Susie rolled her eyes and said, “All right, someone make me a drink. I have homework to do.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Will said as Susie went and sat down at an empty table. He turned to Jane. “Welcome to your first day. This is the espresso machine. Those are the tables. Past those you will note the bookcases. Any questions?”

  Jane smiled. “Nope. I think I pretty much got it.”