I keep quiet during all the poking because first, I know Lindsey wants me to behave, and second, it’s impossible to talk when someone is painting your lips.
Finally, Taylor stands back. “Perfect,” she breathes.
In the mirror, I seem—not me, but a prettier, more put-together version of me.
“I thought a loose pageboy cut would suit you, right? What do you think?” Taylor asks.
“It’s great.” I say. “Really. Thanks.” And it’s not a lie. Even the makeup is pretty—not too heavy, mostly pinks and browns.
I’ve never had bangs before, and if I had less on my mind, I might obsess over how they feel on my forehead.
But my mind is full to bursting. I get that Lindsey doesn’t want to mess up Taylor’s progress or whatever, but I need to know what’s going on. And if Taylor is being targeted, she needs to know it, too.
“Photo time!” Taylor squeals. She’s generally not the squealy type, but this must be a special occasion. “Kai, will you do it?”
“Sure.” Kai stands, points me over toward the single small basement window. The others watch as Kai makes me tilt my face this way and that, snapping pictures. “Got it!” he announces, holding out the photo for a grinning Taylor to see.
“You’re amazing!” Lindsey says. She gives Taylor a hug.
“Thanks,” Taylor says. “Oh! I almost forgot!” She walks over to a small side table near the basement door. Opening the drawer, she pulls out a small stack of Scissors Kick coupons. “Give these to your friends,” she says, handing me and Lindsey three each.
But it’s not the coupons I’m looking at. It’s the open drawer, and what’s inside. A clear cellophane bag full of strawberry candies—all wrapped in bright red and green. Just like the wrapper I found on my porch weeks ago. About fifty of them in a tidy little bag, tied up with a silver ribbon. And beside it, a small tan envelope.
Edge
“Where did you get that?” I point to the bag.
“You want some? A friend left them. I kind of botched… well, anyway, she knew how bad I felt. She was really sweet about it.”
“Left them? Like at your door?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I don’t really like them. You can have the whole bag if you want.”
“No,” I say, my stomach turning. “No way.”
“We should sit down,” Lindsey says, taking Taylor’s hand, leading her to the couch. “We need to tell you something.”
“What?” asks Taylor.
I let Lindsey do the talking.
She tries to make it as non-creepy as possible, but by the end, Taylor is clearly on the edge of freaked.
“He’s still in jail, right? Tell me he’s still in jail.”
“He’s still in jail,” Lindsey says. “We’d know if he wasn’t.”
“But how is he doing it?” Kai asks.
“No clue,” I say. “Maybe it’s someone who knows him from prison? Some guy who’s out now, and he wants to… I don’t know, mess with us for kicks.” Or murder us in our sleep. Either one.
“It could be someone who knows him. From before,” Taylor says. “Does he get to have visits?”
I look to Lindsey. She shrugs. “I guess so.”
“He wasn’t close to many people,” I say. “I don’t know anyone who would visit Kyle.”
“Well, there was that one guy,” Taylor says. “He thought Kyle was so cool. And when Jamie, you know… he was all talking shit, like Kyle was set up. Remember? What was his name?”
Lindsey and I shrug in unison.
“You know,” Taylor says. “Big guy—always hitting on cheerleaders. Plays that weird plastic horn at pep rallies.”
“Holy crap,” says Lindsey.
“Holy crap,” I say. “Todd Firebaugh.”
Lifetime
“I know where he’ll be tonight,” Lindsey says. “Todd.”
We left Taylor five minutes ago. She was freaked, but Kai said he’d stay with her, and when we left, they were cuddled up on the couch, the shell of him around the shell of her.
“Keep going straight,” Lindsey says.
We’re on Main, and I’m coming up to the turn that leads, eventually, to Lindsey’s apartment. “Why?” I ask as I pass her turn.
“We should go,” Lindsey says. “We should tell Todd we know what he’s doing. The sick bastard. And he can either leave us the hell alone or we’re calling the cops.”
“No way, we shouldn’t tell him. Have you ever even seen a Lifetime movie? You don’t warn the creeper who’s stalking you that you’re on to him. That always ends badly.”
“Seriously? Lifetime?”
“Don’t judge. It’s great when you’re PMS-ing.” I drive past what my mom calls the Fast Food Belt on Main Street. It’s pretty much at the edge of town. Soon, we’ll hit a few outlying neighborhoods, the retirement home, the brickyard, stuff like that, then the road will open up and we’ll be in the country. “Where are we going anyway?”
“Tony’s hunting cabin. He’s having another bonfire. Jamal is going to be there, and Todd has started latching himself onto Jamal. He’s like a friggin’ shadow.”
“Who’s Jamal?”
“You know. Tight end Jamal. Football. The whole team’ll be out there.”
“Robert, too?”
“Yeah. He’s so good to me. When I told him I needed to hang with my girl tonight, he was totally cool with it. With everything that’s going on, though, I’m glad he’ll be there. We can use the backup.”
“I’m not sure we should even go,” I say.
“But we can’t just run and hide! I want to see Todd. See what he’s up to. Plus, a bunch of the cheer squad will be there, and they always know what’s going on. Todd’s messing with us, and we need to know what we’re up against—and if there’s anyone else involved.”
“Okay,” I say, not sure if it’s the best answer, but I keep driving.
Fire
Perched on a rock, I take a swig from a bottle of Dr Pepper and watch the fire flare.
Todd hasn’t arrived yet, so Lindsey is off talking with a group of girls. “Getting info,” she says.
Meanwhile, here I sit, cold hands making a nest for no bird. Even in my hyped-up state, there’s something calming about a bonfire. The crackle and shimmy of the flames. The hypnotic orange. The way, unexpectedly, red-hot embers flash into the sky. It’s a gorgeous distraction. Like life, like desire. A reminder of how we will all one day turn to ash.
Joe Pinsky, one of the muscle-heads from my gym class, lowers himself onto a rock beside mine. Sort of like an ogre squatting on a pincushion. His neck is as thick as my… well, pretty much as thick as any part of me.
“Yo, you’re that girl that clocked that squirrelly guy, right? What’s his name?”
It takes me a second to put together what he’s saying. “Jared. Yeah. Thanks for the reminder.”
Not only will I turn to ash, but I will be remembered as the girl who knocked out Jared Hilley. And broke his heart.
All week, I’ve dreaded seeing him—I mean, what do you say to a boy who thinks your eyes are made of glitter? But he hasn’t been around. Which is weird, now that I think of it. I mean, I didn’t hit him that hard.
“Your hair’s different,” the Neck says.
“Yes, it is.”
“Wanna hook up?”
Well, that escalated quickly.
“Um, I sort of have—” a boyfriend? I don’t want to be throwing around words like that. Charlie never called me his girlfriend. “I’m happy where I am,” I change course. “Thanks anyway.”
“Cool. If you change your mind, I’ll be over there.” He walks back to There, a picnic table where a cluster of his guy friends are playing Downer. From what I can tell, their version of the game basically consists of two rules: 1) the guy who drinks his cup the fastest wins; 2) when the first guy finishes, everybody else has to pour whatever’s left in their cups over someone else’s head.
A year ago, I would have be
en on that table, pouring beer on my own head.
Maybe I should have stayed there. Beer in my hair might be better than this—this gnawing worry that directly behind me, just out of sight, is some wannabe killer.
But even if I found a magical city where everyone’s safe and happy and we all hold hands and sing, even if Kyle and Todd and their type were forever on the other side of a huge, impenetrable ocean, I can’t help but feel I’d still be at risk.
Because you carry the past inside you—the truth of it.
True or False: Kyle wanted to kill me, too.
True or False: My existence will always be a footnote in the story of someone else’s death.
True or False: That “someone else” was much kinder than me. She would have done more with her life. She probably loved Charlie better.
True or False: It’s not fair—what happened to her, what happens to all the lost girls, all the bodies dumped in the scrub by the side of the road, all the lonely, bashed-in skulls, it’s not right, it’s not fair—and what the hell am I going to do about it?
A log low in the fire collapses, buckling down, spraying a constellation of sparks into the air. Lindsey returns from the hive mind of girls on the porch.
“You learn anything?” I ask.
“He’s not coming,” Lindsey says. “Jamal has some kind of stomach crud. No Jamal, no Todd.”
“Let’s go, then,” I say, but as we start walking toward our car, a red truck pulls down the drive and parks.
“Robert!” Lindsey chirps. She takes off, skip-running toward the truck, then falters to a stop.
Robert emerges, followed by Brianna Cole, wearing Robert’s coat. He drapes himself around her, hand on her butt as they stroll toward the fire.
Yorkshire Pudding
There’s this thing my mom cooks called Yorkshire pudding, though it’s not pudding at all. More a type of flaky bread-ish thing. When I was little, she’d turn the oven light on and call me in to watch it rise. It puffs up and up, sizzling in the muffin tins. But if you make a loud noise or open the oven door too fast, all the puff suddenly deflates.
That’s what Lindsey’s face looks like when I catch up to her—her eyes rise and rise and then go flat, as if she’s not quite there, not seeing what she must be seeing, as if the door opened too fast and inside she’s falling.
A low, animal sound comes from her mouth, soft at first, but it builds into an indecipherable wailing. She balls her fists and takes off in a run toward Robert.
He halts mid-step, but Brianna, clueless, keeps walking. The two of them come undone. Lindsey passes her a moment before she reaches Robert. With both palms, she pushes him hard. Big as he is, he takes a step back.
“You bastard!” she screams.
He stretches his neck in a cocky sort of what-about-it gesture, then grabs her wrists and holds them up around her shoulders. He’s saying something I can’t hear. She jerks her head away, yanks her hands free. “Keep telling yourself that,” she barks, then pivots away from him.
Head up, shoulders squared, she walks toward me.
I go to her, put my arm around her. “Let’s go,” I say.
“Yeah.” She nods.
She is not looking at me, and I know her well enough to know that she’s not looking at me because she doesn’t want to crumple entirely. Not here, not yet.
Popcorn
Lindsey and I spend Sunday morning in a listless cloud of loud music. All the diva heartbreak songs. Each time I try to ask her how she’s feeling, she mumbles, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and sticks her head under a pillow.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck in her room, doing homework with Todd’s creepy blue bear. It’s there on the desk—just an ordinary stuffed bear, like something you’d get from a claw machine. While Lindsey lies there, curled up next to the wall, I scoop it up with a tissue and shove it in a drawer. I don’t want that thing looking at me.
By noon I’m hungry and in need of distraction. I wander to the kitchen. Lindsey’s kid sister, Veronica, is reading a textbook at a card table set up in the corner.
“Hey,” I say, leaning against the counter. “Is your mom around?” I’m not asking because I want to find Mrs. Barrow, but because I don’t want her to walk in while I’m poking through her kitchen.
“At the mall.”
I open the cabinet with the cereal and pull out a box of raisin bran. “What are you working on?” I ask.
“Homework,” she says, which is ninth grader for “Leave me alone.”
I pour some milk and go sit on the living room couch with my bowl and my sad little spoon.
After fifteen minutes of flipping channels, I take my bowl back to the kitchen, rinse it out, and return to Lindsey’s cave of doom.
“I should have let you gooooo… oh, oh, ooh,” she half moans, half sings with the music. “I didn’t know… oh, oh… that in your heart, you already said goodbye… goodbye… gooooodbyyyyye.…”
I plop on the bed. “You need to get out of this room,” I shout over the music. “You need food,” I continue. “You need air!”
Lindsey stays buried in her heap. Sighing, I curl up beside her. The mascara and eye shadow from yesterday have migrated south on her face. The smudges make a sort of shadow-face, a smeary mask. Her lipstick, bleared with sleep and tears, halos her mouth with the ghost of red.
I rub her shoulder. “You know I’m not good at this,” I say. “Just tell me: You want me to stay? You want to be alone?” I sound like her cheesy lyrics. What am I supposed to do-oooh-oooh?
She opens her mouth, I suppose to answer, but all that comes out is a hiccup-y whine.
“Awww.” I pat her head and sit up. “You need to eat,” I say. Where are my mom and her muffins when I need them? “I’m getting you some toast, and I’m putting on Austenland, and we’re not going to let some good-for-nothing jerk bring us down.”
Lindsey pushes herself up to a sitting position. “You’re right,” she blubbers. “It’s just—” She collapses again.
“Toast!” I say. “I’ll be back with toast.”
It takes another fifteen minutes to lure her to the living room couch, where she picks at her toast and we watch thirty minutes of Austenland, then twenty minutes of The Avengers, and then nothing because it turns out Austenland reminds her too much of Robert, and somehow The Avengers reminds her too much of Robert, too.
I wish I had some magic word that could make her feel better. Make the love of her life not a cheating mound of dung. Make Todd Firebaugh go lock himself up in a monastery somewhere.
The whole thing with Todd is super weird, and I want to talk it out, but I know Lindsey isn’t up to it right now. So, my questions pile up like unwashed socks: Why is Todd doing this? Did Kyle tell him to? Does Kyle even know? What do they want? And why It’s not your fault? Is he letting us off the hook for something we’ve done… or something that he plans to do to us?
Holy crap.
“Popcorn?” I hand Lindsey the now almost-empty microwave bag.
“I thought—I thought he was The One.” She puts the bag down on the coffee table and lays her head in my lap.
“I know.” I stroke her hair. “But is there even such a thing as a One? We want to believe there’s this one perfect person out there, someone who’s just for us, but it’s… it’s kind of like saying there’s a single perfect family to be born into… or a single city where we’re meant to live… or one perfect piece of popcorn.”
“What about Charlie?” Her voice is gruff from crying.
“Yeah, he’s—” I think about it. I should take my own advice, right? “He’s amazing. Smart. Sweet in ways I wouldn’t have expected. But I bet he thought Jamie was his One. And now… There’s no guarantee. There’s no person who can be your everything. I mean, look at Robert. In all the world, out of the billions of people, there’s got to be more than Robert Leuger—”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” though I don’t know what else ther
e is to say, except maybe to ask the question that’s been poking my brain all day. “What are we going to do about Todd?”
She sits up. “We can’t just ignore it. Maybe we should confront him. I see him at lunch. We could…” She shrugs. “Something?”
“We need to know what we’re dealing with. Do you keep in touch with Blair?” I ask.
“Blair Mattern? Not really.”
“You have her number, though?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“We should check with her. I mean, I’d like to know, did she get some weird delivery?”
“I’ll ask.” Lindsey wipes her swollen eyes, reaches for her phone, and types out a message.
A minute later, her phone buzzes.
“No delivery,” Lindsey says, typing some more.
Another buzz.
“I told her what’s going on. But guess what, her sister is dating a guard at the jail. She’s going to ask if anyone’s been visiting Kyle.” Lindsey types as she talks. A buzz. More typing and buzzing, and then, “Oh, wow!”
She hands me the phone. The message at the bottom, forwarded from her sister’s boyfriend:
Far as I know that douche had 3 visitors. Lawyer, grandma, some guy named Tony. Maybe Todd?
The words go blurry and I realize my hand is shaking.
So, everything at the party, those creepy notes, the “gifts”—that must have been all Kyle.
“We should tell someone,” Lindsey says.
“Yeah,” I say. “But who? The police? What do we even tell them? That some high school guy sent us flowers and a bear?”
Lindsey gives me a gutted look.
“The police are just going to act like we’re stupid, Linds. I can hear them now.” I mimic a police voice, “That’s nice, little girls, but we have real work to do. And then, then we’d have to tell our parents, and my parents are just going to freak.”
How She Died, How I Lived Page 15