Rooms

by Lauren Oliver

  Before I had time to scream, Old Joe Higgins, resident crazy, stepped into the light: trouserless, grinning, his dick wagging between his legs like a pale fish.

  After that I didn’t believe in ghosts anymore.

  So when Cissy took me back there I wasn’t scared, just disappointed and maybe a little curious. She led me down into the basement. I had to duck and Cissy was practically doubled over. A little sunlight came trickling in from a broken window high in the wall, and I saw she’d stocked the place with flashlights, an old beach chair, and some moldy-looking books stacked on a rotting shelf. And jars. Dozens of jars, plus glass terrariums like they had at pet shops for the lizards and snakes. At first I thought they were empty.

  She switched on a flashlight and did a sweep. Then I saw beyond all those thin panes of glass: spiders, some of them as small as a speck, some of them bigger than the palm of my hand. I’ve never been squeamish about bugs, but it turned my stomach.

  “What the hell is this?” I said.

  “Spiders,” she said calmly, as though I couldn’t tell.

  “But . . . what for?” Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the darkness was full of glittering eyes. She kept doing the back-and-forth with her flashlight, and I saw knitted clouds; webs sewn tightly against the glass; small dark blurry shapes, bound in pale thread. I wondered whether she hand-fed them.

  “I like spiders.” She shrugged and clicked off the flashlight. She seemed disappointed, like she’d been expecting me to cheer. I was relieved when she turned back toward the stairs and I could follow her up and out into the sun. “Spiders are prophetic, don’t you think?”

  That was another thing about Cissy. Even though, like me, she thought school was a load of bull and was nearly flunking her classes, she was smart. She was a reader, too, and always using words I didn’t know.

  “Spiders are nasty,” I said.

  We sat outside looking out at the swamp. I smoked a cigarette, and Cissy had three in a row. She smoked like she wished she could eat the cigarette instead.

  “There’s something else I want to show you,” she said, after a while. She transferred her cigarette to the corner of her mouth and started unbuttoning her blouse, squinting a little. I thought maybe it was some lesbian thing, like she was going to show me her tits and ask me to rub them. I’d never heard her talk about a guy, never seen her primp or fix her hair or worry about whether she would get a date to such-and-such dance. She knew she wouldn’t, anyway. She was too tall, too skinny, and too weird.

  She was wearing a white cotton bra, I remember, and her tits were small and pointy and proud, like the stiff-backed peaks of whipped cream. It wasn’t until she inched her blouse down her shoulders that I realized I’d never seen her without her clothes on. Never in a bathing suit, never changing in the locker rooms before gym class, never even on the rare occasion we had a sleepover. She always went into the bathroom and came out in her pajamas.

  Her spine was so pronounced it reminded me of sketches I’d seen of certain dinosaurs. She leaned forward, hugging her knees, still puffing away on her cigarette with no hands, and I saw her back and arms were blotchy with fat bruises, blue and black and purple as a twilight sky, and ragged red holes like where she’d been burned with a cigarette.

  “What happened?” I said, or something idiotic like that. Funny how in really serious moments people always say the stupidest things.

  “My stepdad,” she said, straightening up again and almost immediately shrugging her blouse back on over her shoulders. She seemed like she was going to say more, but then she stopped herself.

  It was clear enough what she meant. Her stepdad had done this to her—twisted butts out into her skin, paddled her with a belt or a switch or maybe just one of his big, meaty hands. I thought of the local TV advertisements that showed his face, big and red as a balloon, smiling in front of a room full of baseball mitts and footballs, and felt like spitting.

  “Why doesn’t your mom do something?” I said.

  Cissy ground her cigarette out carefully in the gravel. “My mom hates me,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “That’s not true,” I said. Another stupid thing. How the hell could I know? All I knew about the woman was she smoked Virginia Slims and wore high heels to the store.

  Cissy didn’t say anything, just lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes against the sun. Wreaths of smoke went up around her hair, and I thought of the webs I’d just seen inside, the way they obscured the glass, made it difficult to see.

  I kept pressing it. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m not going to do anything,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “I just . . . I felt like showing you. That’s all.”

  “Why don’t you split?”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me.

  “Run away,” I continued. “Just pack up and leave. I’d go with you. We’re old enough. There’s nothing for us here, anyway. New York or Chicago. Las Vegas even. Leave everything behind.” It wasn’t just talk. I’d been planning my escape for years. I figured as soon as I could get together cash for a train ticket and first month’s rent, I’d be out. That’s pretty much what I did, too. Left three months shy of graduation and spent my eighteenth birthday crashing with a bunch of junkies in a freezing tenement on Grand Street watching a guy even younger than I was puking up his guts in the single working toilet.

  Cissy smiled. She looked old: her skin stretched as tight as a corpse’s, already crisscrossed with faint lines. “You can’t leave it behind,” she said. “It doesn’t work like that.” She stood up. “It’s like the spiders,” she said, and even though I didn’t know what she meant, I let it drop.

  I was angry at her, I’ll admit it. She wasn’t a great friend but she was my only friend, and she wouldn’t stand up for herself or do anything.

  I wasn’t the one who let the friendship drop. After that day with the spiders, Cissy acted like nothing had happened, and I was happy enough to pretend with her. But something had changed. She was never the most talkative, but when I saw her after that, she was even quieter than usual, more prone to long stretches of silence and to disappearing for days at a time. There were fewer dares, and more cigarettes. I couldn’t help but feel like she was judging me for something I’d done.

  Or something I hadn’t done.

  By junior year she was hardly coming to school and I’d got my first boyfriend—a dipshit named Barry, but he had a Chevrolet Impala and a decent laugh and a nice way of touching my lower back when we were walking—and Cissy and I barely saw each other until we didn’t see each other at all.

  One time I passed her when we were driving in Barry’s Chevrolet; she was walking on the side of the road away from town, away from her house, toward nothing I could think of: just swampland and crowded forest, fat mosquitoes and wild hogs as big as heifers. Maybe on her way to get more spiders. Our eyes met for a second, and on impulse I raised a hand to wave. Maybe she was going to wave back—but Barry had just finished his beer and chucked the can, and instead she flinched and had to sidestep to avoid getting hit. I reamed him out for that one.

  The last time I saw her was just before Christmas, 1969. I came home and found her standing on the porch, leaning against the door with her long legs crossed at the ankles, just exactly like she had so many times before. In her coat she looked even skinnier, like she was being swallowed by the fabric.

  “Hey,” she said, peeling away from the door, like it hadn’t been almost a year since we’d actually hung out. “I wanted to give this back.”

  She was holding a red sweater of mine. I’d loaned it to her once when we’d been caught in a downpour and then forgotten about it. It was ugly as shit, a gift from my mother’s mother, who I saw once a year.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said, taking it from her. Even standing right next to her it was like there was a big barrier between us, hard as an elbow.

  She didn’t seem uncomfortable, tho
ugh. “It’s yours,” she said.

  For a second we just stood there. It was cold for Georgia, near freezing, and the sky was low and white-gray, the same color as Cissy’s skin. Her eyes looked like two bits of chipped ice, and she looked like she’d aged a hundred years since I’d last seen her. Her hair was fine and cut real short, and I could see patches of her scalp.

  I was trying to remember what to say, how to talk to her. How you been? I was about to ask, when she smiled and said, “Take care of yourself, Sandy.”

  “You, too,” I said.

  Would it have made a difference? If I’d said, “How you been, Cissy, come on in, why don’t you sit down?” Probably not. Still: something to feel awful about.

  She was found by Zulime on Christmas Eve morning. Cissy’s parents had gone north for some reason and weren’t expected back until that evening. I can still picture it: the bloated purple face against all that white, her skin puckered around the rope. Cissy had obviously planned it that way. She’d left a note with Zulime’s name on it, which Zulime recognized, although she couldn’t read a single word but that one. So a frantic Zulime took the letter to a neighbor, and that’s how the information got out, finally.

  I’d had it all wrong. Cissy’s stepdad wasn’t hurting her, at least not in that way. He’d been crawling into her bed at night since she turned six and her mom had been punishing Cissy for it since she found out. All of it in that house as white as snow.

  A few days after I heard the news, I woke up in a panic about the spiders, and what would happen to them. It was just barely dawn when I set out, all quiet except for a dog that started up in the distance. I don’t know what the hell I thought I was going to do when I got there, but I kept thinking how Cissy would be so sad if all her spiders froze to death over the winter. But when I got to the Barnaby Estate, I found the basement totally empty. The books, the flashlights, all the terrariums and jars—everything was gone except for that awful beach chair, and a single spider spinning a web between its metal legs.

  Want to know something nuts? I took the damn thing. The spider, I mean. Cupped it in my palms and carried it all the way home and into my bedroom and put it on the windowsill where it could watch the world outside and spin. I figured it would eat flies and ants if any dared to come in, and, besides, it was almost kind of like a sign from Cissy. I know, signs are bullshit. But that’s how I felt—like maybe she didn’t blame me after all.

  All of January it stayed by the window, and I was careful not to let my mother in the room since I knew she’d freak. She was pretty much always at church, anyway. And I watched it spin this enormous web that looked like frost on the pane, and finally I knew what Cissy had meant when she told me you could never really get away, just like the spiders.

  Because it wasn’t just spinning, it was forced to spin, and so it was just as trapped as any of the bugs it managed to catch.

  In early February, I came home and saw my mom scrubbing the kitchen, and without looking over her shoulder she said, “I cleared out a spiderweb in your room. I don’t know how it got so big.”

  A week later I got a train to Raleigh, and from there to New York City. I don’t know what happened to any of the rest of them—Zulime, Cissy’s parents. Alls I know is I hope that Cissy isn’t stuck in that godforsaken place, trapped like residue on the lip of a glass.

  That’s what we are now, me, Alice, and the new ghost, whoever the hell she is: smudges, crusty bits, fingerprints, like stains left over from a faulty dishwasher.

  Who knows. Maybe this is the price we pay. Penance, like my mom believed in.

  You want to know what we’re paying for?

  Like that old song says: Go ask Alice.

  TRENTON

  Trenton hadn’t thought that it would be so quiet. Whenever he’d pictured his suicide—which he had, many times, although he especially liked picturing the parts that came after: Minna thudding to her knees beside his body and wailing; the police swarming the house and filling the rooms with crisscrossed police tape; Caroline bloated with grief; everyone at school humbled, shaken, and girls crying in the halls, hugging themselves—he’d always imagined an accompanying soundtrack.

  Now, as he fumbled and sweated in the basement and tried to figure out the fucking knot, he wished he’d thought to bring down his iPod dock. But maybe it was more tragic, more authentic, in silence. Like that old quote about the world ending with a whimper, not a bang.

  Still, the silence was getting to him, because in the silence, he could hear.

  Whispers. Mutters and coughs and the occasional hacking laugh, like a smoker was caught somewhere behind the walls.

  Sometimes he thought he heard his name. Trenton. A bare, faint rustle, but definitely a word. Other times he heard, with sudden clarity, whole phrases, as though someone had turned up the volume in his mind. For example, he had very clearly heard a woman say: I tried talking to her already. Why don’t you try talking to her? Then the voice faded abruptly, as if whoever had spoken had passed out of earshot.

  He’d spent an hour last night on his laptop, signing in again and again to the shitty Wi-Fi, researching different mental disorders. He was a little too young for schizophrenia but not that young; he thought it was probably that. Good thing he was never going back to school. Or he’d be Schizo Splooge.

  He’d decided, finally, on a rope. He was still curious about the gun he’d found in his dad’s study, but he didn’t even know how to tell if it was loaded. Plus he kept thinking about what Minna had said, about the woman whose brains got splattered on the study wall.

  That was the second possibility: that he wasn’t crazy. That the house was haunted. But ghosts didn’t exist, everyone knew that. Which meant that the fact he was even considering it was crazy.

  Back to square one.

  It was Thursday, almost twenty-four hours since he’d found out his dad had left him the house, and the first time he’d been alone since they arrived back in Coral River. His mom, who still could hardly look at him—not that she ever really looked at him—had gone with Minna and Amy to do something involving his dad’s body, which Trenton did not really want to think about. He didn’t like the idea of cremation, although he disliked the idea of burial more. Stuck forever in a box.

  He guessed his body would probably be burned. He wondered whether his mom would try and get a two-for-one deal. His dad wanted his ashes buried on the property. Trenton couldn’t think of a single place he’d like to be buried. Not Eastchester, Long Island, for sure.

  Maybe up here, in Coral River. He had only been six when his parents separated and Caroline moved downstate, but in some ways he’d always thought of it as home. Even though his dad never invited them up to Coral River—even though Trenton had forgotten where the cups were kept, and whether the downstairs bathroom was the first or second door on the right of the hallway, and that the study was painted a deep hunter green—other memories remained, totally vivid.

  He remembered struggling behind Minna through deep snow, and breaking up ice on the creek with the blunt end of a blackened stick. He remembered summer days when he went screaming through the fields to startle the birds, and how Minna showed him how to catch toads by making a cup with his hands. He remembered: the kitchen warm and smelling like rosemary; his mother’s favorite tablecloth spotted with red wine; early spring evenings on the back porch, bundled in a blanket, raw wind on his face, and candles dancing in small conical holders.

  So. Definitely here. With his dad.

  He was having trouble getting the rope to knot. He’d looked this up online, too, but most of the instructions seemed to be written for people who already knew a lot about ropes. Like mariners, or people in the army. His hands were shaking a little, which wasn’t helping.

  Finally he got it. Now he just had to tie off the rope to one of the pipes overhead. The back of his neck had started to sweat. He could practically feel another pimple growing there. He wondered how long it would be before Minna and his mom came back—they
’d been gone at least an hour and a half. He’d heard the phone ring at some point. Maybe they were trying to reach him on the house line.

  A small part of him was stalling. He thought that if he were interrupted or miraculously discovered, maybe it would be a sign that he shouldn’t do it.

  But nobody came.

  He found a dirty stepstool crammed in among the clutter of boxes, old trunks, and discarded furniture; he positioned it directly under one of the sturdier-looking pipes. It took him a while to maneuver onto its seat. He’d never been athletic—he’d been practically forced off his Little League team in fifth grade—and the accident had fucked with his balance. Something to do with damage to his inner ear because of all the shards of glass. He was lucky, his doctor had told him, that he wasn’t deaf.

  “I’ll bet . . . won’t go through with it . . .” He heard suddenly, the words fading in and out, like a bad radio frequency.

  He removed the note from his back pocket, which he had written out carefully before thinking he should have typed it, since no one could ever read his handwriting.

  The voice came in again, sharp and clear, as if it was speaking directly into his mind: “He wrote a note! Little Shakespeare. Let’s hope he has better luck than . . . ” It faded out again.

  “Shut up,” he said. Then again, a little louder. “Shut up.”

  His heart was beating dry and frantic, high in his throat, like a moth’s wings.

  It was weird. He had hardly felt anything in six months, except for a brief, gut-tearing desire to puke when his mom had come into the basement, where he’d been playing World of Warcraft, and announced that his father was dead. Since the accident he could barely even jerk off—although he did anyway, approaching it with grim determination, like a soldier in front of the firing squad, bracing for the inevitable explosion.

  After two fumbling tries, he managed to sling the rope over the rusted pipe. He realized belatedly that he should have fixed the rope to the ceiling before making the noose, and he felt briefly annoyed with himself for screwing up something as simple, as elemental, as suicide. He should have used the gun after all—or better yet, just swallowed some pills. But that had seemed like a cop-out, somehow, even more than the act of suicide itself. An overdose was something that could be mistaken for an accident. He was hoping that his final act would mean something. That it would make Derrick Richards sit up and say, Jesus. I never knew Splooge had it in him.