by Dia Reeves
As night fell, Rosalee drove us to a rural area with unlined roads snaking through trees and rolling hills. By this time, the laughter had tapered off enough that I could pay attention. “Where are we?”
Rosalee gave me a strained smile. “Way upsquare.”
We got out of the car and walked down the road to a huge lake circled with houses, like the lake at my old summerhouse in Finland, only the bloated McMansions surrounding this lake weren’t at all like the simple, rustic cabins I was used to.
The deep blue sky was clear and the stars were bright. The moon was out, just a sliver of light. I laughed at the moon and the moon laughed back, a high, whistling sound like the wind blowing over the tundra.
Rosalee was on her knees near the edge of the lake. “You okay over there?”
I twirled, finally finding a use for those long-abandoned ballet classes. “Perfect.”
“Do you see?”
“See what?” Air blew cool off the lake; unseen things sang in the dark and hopped in the grass at my feet. “Oh, it’s pretty up here.”
“Hanna,” said Rosalee sharply. “Pay attention. Do you see the swimmer?”
Starlight stippled the lake and reflected eerily on the lone figure cutting slowly through the dark water. “I see him.”
“Hanna.” Her voice compelled me to look at her, her eyes fiery in the golden light of the flash lantern she’d set on the ground. “Bring him here.”
“Okay.”
I walked down the long pier, teetering in my heels. When I reached the end, I dropped to my knees, bruising them on the wood. The pain made me laugh.
“Hey!” My voice carried clearly across the water to the swimmer, who paused midstroke and then swam toward me.
The lights at the end of the pier made it easy to see him once he was close enough; I got quite an eyeful, actually.
“You’re skinny-dipping!”
“Sorta.” His deep, almost sexy voice didn’t match his appearance. He was my age, give or take, with too many zits.
“Who goes skinny-dipping alone?” The thought made me laugh. “Come up and talk to me.”
“Um …” He was eyeing his discarded clothing next to me on the pier.
“Aw. Are you shy?” I took pity on him and shimmied out of my clothes and shoes and threw them atop his. My nipples, like two big goose bumps, brought home to me how truly cold it had gotten. “Now we’re even,” I said, through my chattering teeth. “Don’t be scared.”
The wooden slats beneath my icy feet creaked and groaned as he climbed the ladder onto the pier. The harsh white light revealed him. His entire body was covered in zits—red, angry ones. Even his toes. He flushed beneath my scrutiny.
“Moonlight is supposed to help,” he mumbled, edging around me to get to his clothes. “Gran says …”
“You don’t have to explain.” The boy was nothing to look at, but Rosalee wanted him, and that made him sparkle. When he reached for his clothes, I kicked them into the lake, his and mine, and fell over laughing at the look on his face.
“Hanna!”
The boy ducked down behind me. “Who’s that?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, chuckling. “It’s just Momma.”
“Your mother?”
“She’s very sympathetic,” I assured him, “and she really wants to meet you. Come on.”
We walked to where Rosalee was sitting, the boy hesitant and dragging his feet and kind of hiding behind me the whole way. My giggling had tapered off in my efforts to coax the boy along, but when I saw Rosalee, I started laughing all over again.
Rosalee’s bare skin was so honeylike I was surprised not to see a swarm of bees buzzing around her. The wind blew off the water and played fetchingly in her hair. She had spread a blanket on the ground, and with the wicker basket nearby, it looked like we were about to have a picnic, nudist-style.
“Here he is, Momma,” I said. “I would have gift wrapped him, but there was no time.”
Rosalee smiled at the boy. “Nice work.”
The boy, like a peeled shrimp, looked from her to me and then back, trying to hide his erection. “Are y’all … witches?”
“Do we look like witches?” Rosalee asked.
“Y-yeah.”
We laughed, and the boy backed away from us.
“No, you don’t.” Rosalee held out her arms to him, and when he didn’t rush into them, I gave him a push.
“Go on; she won’t bite.”
Rosalee took his shaky hands before he could bolt and drew him down to the blanket. She offered him a drink from a silver cup, which rattled briefly against his teeth as he drank. He immediately gagged and spat a mouthful of brown liquid onto the blanket.
“What is this?”
“Magic,” I said, stifling my giggles so he’d take me seriously. “A potion. Much better than moonlight swims.”
“Really?”
His hopeful expression made me reach out and pat his wet head. “Of course.”
He drank deeply.
Rosalee and I exchanged a conspiratorial grin, never mind that I had no idea what the conspiracy was. “Is it a magic potion?” I asked Rosalee while the boy choked down his drink.
“There’s no such thing as magic, Hanna. You’re worse than he is.” She plucked the cup from the boy’s hands and pushed him onto his back on the blanket while he sputtered in surprise.
“Why’d you take your clothes off ?” she asked me as she straddled him, moving his erection aside so she could sit comfortably on his stomach.
“So he wouldn’t be embarrassed to come out of the water. Why did you?”
“Because you did. I wasn’t sure what you promised him, but I figured you might need help.” Rosalee smiled down at the boy. “You?”
He had to swallow several times before he could speak, his eyes glued to her breasts. “T-to get rid of my zits?”
I explained, “A moonlight swim in the lake is supposed to help.”
She pulled on the black gloves once again and removed the spindle from the basket. “Green tea would have done more for his zits than lake water.”
The boy’s gaze sprang from Rosalee’s breasts to her eyes. “W-would have?”
Rosalee fed a towel into the boy’s mouth. Her eyes briefly flashed blue as she cut into his zitty forehead with the red-hot spindle. “Should’ve waited for the mushroom juice to kick in,” she muttered, and when the boy began to fight her, she dug her knees into his sides as though he were a fractious horse and continued cutting.
Who knew a person could scream while gagged? The boy was making an odd eeeeeeee sound in his throat that was hilarious.
Rosalee flipped her hair from her face, smiling at me. “Wanna help?”
I smiled back. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
“Just me and your aunt?”
“It’s easy to hurt people you love.”
“Is it? I could never do this to you.” Rosalee’s fingers pressed the boy’s face so tightly that his skin had turned paper white. He would have her handprint marking his face for years if she ever decided to let go.
“Why are you hurting him?”
“Cuz Runyon wants him marked. And cuz it’s fun.” She laughed. “Sure you don’t wanna get in on this?”
I shook my head, giggling.
Rosalee tsked at my squeamishness. “Can you at least do something about his erection? It’s distracting the hell outta me.”
I laughed so hard, I had to crawl away and vomit again into the high grass edging the lake, to the startlement of several crickets.
I fell onto my back on the cold ground and laughed until I cried, hope bubbling within me. If it was okay for a boy to hold on to his erection while being tortured, then it was okay for me to hold on to my love for Rosalee.
No matter what she did.
Chapter Twenty-nine
I awoke to pink dawn light, a soft light that nonetheless stabbed my eyes and threatened to split my head open. I buried my face in my pillow, but the s
tickiness of the pillowcase repelled me. Tacky red smears stained it. Tacky red smears everywhere: my hands, the sheets. The dead boy on my—
I sprang to my feet, dragging the sheets with me, exposing the body.
I remembered the boy from the lake, remembered his zits. He still bore the glyphs Rosalee had carved into his forehead—tiny, precise shapes like chains. I remembered his ordeal, how he’d fought, but I didn’t remember the boy having no arms.
Laughter startled me.
I whirled, and although Rosalee sat naked across the room in my plum-colored reading chair, it was Runyon who looked out at me sniggering, blue eyes full of mockery.
“Momma!”
She blinked, and like that, he was gone. She looked around my room dazedly. “Uh … good morning …”
I crept over to her, as if one hard step would shatter me into a million pieces. I pointed at the boy in my bed. “Is that good?”
But she was already staring at him, tugging at her red bracelet. She seemed horrible to me. Unknowable. The most horrible thing was how much she reminded me of myself.
“What happened at the lake?”
Rosalee explained, starting and stopping, listening, telling me a story that she was also hearing for the first time.
“Runyon needed someone to remove the Key. So he had me carve special glyphs into the boy’s head that would make him do whatever he was told. When Runyon told him to pull the Key off the Ortigas’ door, the boy had no choice but to try and try again. Until his arms ripped off. It took a real long time, but after his shoulders dislocated, they just pulled right off, like drumsticks off a chicken. But the Key never even budged.”
I tried to imagine it, the effort it must have taken the boy to tear away from his own arms. “Why wouldn’t I remember something so … ?” The horror of it stole my voice.
“You passed out at the lake,” said Rosalee. “This happened afterward.” She smiled humorlessly. “The Happiness was a bad idea, I guess.”
“You guess? Why is he in my bed?”
The smile fell away, was shamed away. “Runyon thought it would be … funny.”
“Did you think it was funny?”
Rosalee tugged on her bracelet so hard the key snapped off. “No.”
“But you let him anyway.”
“He wanted to use you,” she said, fiddling with refastening the key so she wouldn’t have to look at me, wouldn’t have to see what she’d done to me. “He wanted to use you, put the glyphs on you. For convenience’s sake. I had to nag him into finding somebody else.”
“Should I congratulate you? For making me help you lure a boy to his death?”
She struck her fist against the chair arm. “He wanted to use you! Don’t you get that?”
“You’re the one who doesn’t get it! What about next time? I’m assuming he’s already planning another way to get the Key, right? So what is it? Does he want you to scare up a few babies for him to strangle?”
“I can’t be responsible for the whole world. I’m only responsible for you.”
“You’re doing a kick-ass job so far!” I threw out my arms so she could drink in the naked, bloody state she’d left me in. But she refused to look at me. “You’re not responsible; you’re a puppet. His puppet.”
“I’m just me.”
“Then tell him to leave.”
Instead of telling him to leave, she cocked her head and listened to him.
I stormed into the bathroom. Turned on the shower. Turned around and saw her standing in the doorway watching me, but now I couldn’t look at her.
“You need to trust me, Hanna,” she said softly. “I won’t let him hurt you. I promise. After last night, he knows how I feel about that. Knows what I’ll do and what I won’t do. So please don’t worry. Okay?”
But it wasn’t okay.
Everything was a zillion damn miles from okay.
Wyatt stood in his doorway holding a Pop-Tart; he looked shocked. “What’re you doing here?”
I had thrown on a sundress before fleeing my house, a thin, summery thing unfit for the change in the weather. I stood shivering on Wyatt’s stoop in the early morning air, my elbows thrumming like crazy so close to his damnable Key. “I saw a dead body.”
“Yeah?” He bit into his Pop-Tart, waiting for me to get to the bad part. When I said nothing more, he stepped back to let me inside. “Well, that’ll happen, won’t it? Dead bodies?”
Instead of stepping inside, I stepped into his arms, but he shoved me away as if we were strangers and hurried away from me.
“Paulie, c’mere.”
I followed him dejectedly into his house as his little brother came out of the kitchen, still in his pj’s and nibbling his own Pop-Tart, with Ragsie curled around his leg. Wyatt pushed Paulie toward me. “Hold her till I get back, all right?”
Paulie shrugged, as though he had to hug freaked-out girls at least once a day. As Wyatt marched off, Paulie held out his arms to me. I had to get on my knees so we’d be the same height.
Holding on to a four-year-old boy wasn’t weird, as it should have been. It was comforting. Like holding an incredibly sticky teddy bear.
Ragsie clambered up Paulie’s leg and sat on my shoulder as Paulie patted my back and said, “There, there.” Ragsie’s little arms circled my head. Was I that pathetic, that even a stuffed doll felt sorry for me?
“Why’re you crying?”
“Am I?” Was I?
“See?” Paulie swiped one of my tears with his crumb-specked hand and showed it to me.
I squeezed him and let his little-kid scent of Play-Doh and sunshine tranquilize me. “I’m having a bad morning.”
“Me too. There was arms on our doorstep.” He briefly halted his comforting pats to take a bite of his Pop-Tart. “Bloody arms not even attached to anything.”
I thought of the lake boy helplessly dismembering himself and shivered. “Were you scared?”
“They was just arms.” Paulie looked into my face, reading me. “Are you scared?”
I nodded.
“Of what?”
“My mother.”
His round face filled with shock, as if the idea of being afraid of one’s own mother was somehow worse than finding bloody arms on the doorstep.
Eventually Wyatt came back and took over. “You go on upstairs and play,” he told Paulie, shooing him out of the room.
Wyatt sat me in the yellow chair and handed me a cup of tea, something lemony and herbal. “Why’re you here?” he asked again. “I know you’re not crying over a dead body. It’s not like you ain’t seen ’em before.”
“I need somewhere to stay.”
“You wanna stay here?” His lip curled. “You ain’t scared I’ll kill you?”
“You already did,” I reminded him. “At the dark park. The suspense is gone.”
But he was dead serious. “You should be scared.”
“You won’t hurt me.”
“Wanna bet your life on that?”
“Yes.” I wasn’t afraid for myself, but for Rosalee.
The quickness of my reply seemed to startle him. The coldness melted away, and he just looked confused.
And then his cell beeped.
He frowned at it, then at me. “I gotta go.”
“So go. I’ll stay here.”
“Ma’ll throw you out if she catches you here,” he said, exasperated.
“She won’t catch me. Your dad won’t either.”
“He’s at work. I ain’t worried about him.”
“Are you worried about me?”
The question seemed to piss him off. He shot to his feet. “So come on, if you’re coming. I can’t sit around here all day.”
He snuck me upstairs and led me down the hall, past the raucous harmony of Sera’s singing voice and the whine of the vacuum.
But once I was safely inside his room, he ignored me and gathered some daggers and a fresh stack of glyph cards from the shelf near his desk and shoved them into various pockets. Then
he grabbed the hunter green coat I’d made him and shrugged into it. It fit him perfectly.
I tried to put my arms around him again, but he pushed me away. Again. Why were people always pushing me away?
“Don’t touch me,” he hissed, mindful of Sera’s proximity. “How can you even wanna touch me?”
“I saw what happened, Wyatt. Petra asked you to do it. I wish I had the balls to ask someone to put me out of my misery.”
“What misery?” he exclaimed. “You got zero problems, Hanna. You can do whatever you want. You never gotta make hard choices like—”
I burst messily into tears. I was too tired to even be embarrassed. Too unsettled and clueless about what to do to help Rosalee. I held my hanky to my face to muffle the noise.
For a long time, Wyatt stood awkward and unhelpful in the face of my unhappiness. But then a burst of inspiration crossed his face.
“Hey. Look. Look what I got for you.” He grabbed something off a dresser from which clothes sprouted like half-eaten spaghetti. He shoved something into my hands—a purple, gift-wrapped box.
I sniffled and opened the box, uncovering a silver necklace from which a teeny swan—no bigger than my thumbnail—dangled.
“I was gone give it to you that day at church,” he explained. “But then I got called away, so …”
I held the swan to the light beaming through the window and watched it sparkle. “It’s sweet.” I sniffed. “Really sweet, Wyatt.”
He shuffled his feet, pleased, but not wanting to be. “You told me you liked swans. In the truck that day?”
When I put my arms around him this time, he didn’t push me away. But he didn’t hug me back. He stood still and stiff and quiet. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he whispered. “You shouldn’t.”
I silenced him with a kiss. Strange how he didn’t understand that his ability to do what was necessary was something I admired. I sucked at doing the right thing, especially when it was hard or painful.
His phone beeped again, and he moved away reluctantly. But he looked more like the boy I was used to seeing, although more sorrowful than I liked.
He took off, and I stayed quiet in his room and read all morning, mostly his graphic novels. I was missing school, and I would almost certainly miss tomorrow as well, but I was so far ahead in all my classes, I really didn’t give a damn. I wasn’t in the mood to face anyone.