by Tim Curran
Bad Girl
in the Box
Bad Girl
in the Box
by
Tim Curran
Copyright © 2021 Tim Curran
Front Cover Design by Kealan Patrick Burke
Interior art by Bob Veon
Formatted by Kenneth W. Cain
Edited by Kenneth W. Cain
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Day One
1
A perfectly ordinary Thursday on Birch Street. The July sun was bright, the grass oh-so green, yards blooming with periwinkle and marigolds, vibrant purple asters and brilliant red zinnias. A day to be alive, to breathe in the smell of summer perfection and make it your own. Men in sweat-stained tees were planting shrubs and peonies. Women in sundresses and straw hats weeding garden patches. Their daughters picked daises and daffodils, their sons raked grass clippings. Those too young for gardening and beautification chores skipped carefree up the walks or scribbled on them in chalk, mouths bloodied from cherry Kool-Aid. There were lemonade stands on the corners and hot dogs smoking on charcoal grills in backyards. And even though it was early in the day, people were already gathered on porches, drinking beers and laughing, wiping sweat from their brows and prophesying tomorrow to be another scorcher.
Once upon a time, Birch Street was a well-trodden dirt road that really was fronted by huge stands of yellow birch. It serviced a few farms and the only sounds were the mooing of cows in grassy lanes and the sound of wind blowing through fields of corn and barley. But time clear-cut the birch trees, and the farmhouses fell to make room for austere saltboxes and trim post-World War II brick ranch houses which were soon enough squeezed out for plywood McMansions and kid barns. There were more of the latter than the former now, garish faux Tudors, Victorians, and Colonials with pyramidal roofs, cathedral windows, and blatantly phallic cupolas. The effect was not only disconcerting, but disturbing.
Still, nobody saw this. Not today. Not on a July afternoon in the old nabe when ball games could be heard on radios competing against tinny strands of music and the flappety-flap-flap of playing cards in bicycle spokes. Now and again, a severe weather bulletin was heard against the steady suburban thrum of power motors. They’d been calling for building thunderstorms for days but the air remained warm and still, nearly breezeless. Nobody believed a storm was coming. No one at all. The sky was just as blue as the eye of a homecoming queen. The sun shiny and bright as a new coin.
This was summer on Birch Street. Summer purified and made golden, summer suspended and held forever, pressed like rose petals in a book of memories.
No storm was going to ruin this sort of perfection. The residents of Birch Street were certain of that much.
And on this fact, they were very wrong.
2
“I’m not up to this,” Bria Candliss said to her half-brother as he slowly drove across Newton to Birch Street, taking the long way so she could build up her nerve for what was about to come. “This is going to kill me. You have no idea.”
Aiden smiled. “Just get it done with. In a couple weeks, you’ll be leaving. How bad could that be?”
Bria gave him her patented death stare, dark eyes huge and unblinking.
“Okay, that was the wrong thing to say,” he admitted.
“I still don’t see why I couldn’t sleep on your couch for a while. I won’t be in the way.”
Aiden sighed. “No, you totally wouldn’t be in the way, and I’d love to have you over…but you have to do this. Trust me, while you’re away at school, I put myself through this shit at least once a month.”
“But you don’t have to live there twenty-four/seven. You stop by, then you leave.”
He didn’t argue the fact.
“This was a mistake; a terrible mistake and I know it. She’s probably waiting at the door for me right now, ready to wade in and make me miserable. And don’t you laugh. You know that’s exactly what she’s doing.”
Aiden did not laugh. In fact, he cringed.
Bria watched the neighborhoods sweep by as the SUV brought them closer and closer to Birch Street. Her heart was beginning to pound. Her throat felt dry, hands sweating.
“Now, come on,” Aiden said. “She’s your mother. You go in there and let her know you’re not going to put up with her shit. You’re not interested in her advice, her guilt trips, that I-told-you-so nonsense.”
Bria grunted. Oh, it all sounded so good in theory. “Sure. I’ll get right on that.”
With trembling fingers, she fished a cigarette from her purse.
“Come on, don’t smoke in here. You’ll reek it out.”
Bria couldn’t care less about that. All she cared about at that moment was calming her jittery nerves which were jumping like live wires. Going home to see her mother, even for a few weeks, was a purgatory nearly beyond description. Like going before the principal, a nasty childhood bully, and a deranged relative all at the same time. Two hours with Alice Candliss was enough to strip nerves bare and twist guts into square knots, let alone two weeks.
You haven’t seen her in nearly three years. You have to do this.
Yes, familial obligations.
Alice was all alone now. Daddy being long dead. Twelve years already? Good God. Alice buried him the way she buried just about everything in her life sooner or later. She remarried to Aiden’s dad, a real sweetheart everyone called Giggling Roger because he was always smiling, always joking, always finding the silver lining to the darkest fucking clouds imaginable, always there when you needed him. Seven years with Alice wiped the smile from his face, though, turning him into a slat-thin alcoholic wreck who suffered through a series of nervous breakdowns before the gods, in their infinite wisdom and mercy, dropped him in his tracks four years ago with a massive stroke at the age of 46.
Bria put away her cigarette. Not so much to please her step-brother, but because if she smoked Alice would smell it on her, and if she smelled it, it would mean a thirty-minute lecture on the evils of tobacco.
And how much you wanna bet said lecture will segue into your personal life and all your poor choices?
No, no smoking. She wasn’t going to give Mother Alice any more ammunition because that woman was already locked and loaded for big game.
Aiden drove on and Bria became more agitated, everything inside her knotting and twisting up like a tangled net. She felt like a sacrifice being brought to the cave of some flesh-eating ogre. But the idea of Alice would do that to you, oh yes. She’d taken her share of offered virgins and left nothing of them behind but burnt black bones.
“Are you okay?” Aiden asked.
“That’s a hell of a question.”
“Well?”
What a thing to ask at this moment and to me of all people, Bria thought with more than a little self-directed antagonism. She knew the questions he really wanted to ask but did not dare because they were a point of contention. He wanted to know if she was eating, actually putting something in her stomach and leaving it there, not offering it up at the porcelain altar of the greater bulimic god.
“I’m quite well
. Thanks for asking.”
He sighed. “Ah, the sarcasm. Really, though, are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“No bad thoughts.”
“Of course not.”
You don’t have bad thoughts. You don’t do bad things, a voice in the back of her head chided her. Only bad girls have bad thoughts and do bad things. That’s why bad girls are locked in boxes.
There was an uneasy silence for a minute or two. It played out, whispered, reverberated with something like far-off angst and guilt.
“How’s Sady?”
Aiden just shrugged. “You know Sady, she’s hard to know. She has…”
“Issues?”
Aiden didn’t comment on that, and he didn’t need to. Sady was their sister. Technically, their half-sister. The child of Roger and Alice. As Aiden said, she was hard to know. Very hard to know. There was ten years between her and Bria, an immeasurable gap that had been hard to bridge when Bria lived at home and nearly insurmountable since. She could be very sweet or very distant or unpleasantly critical, depending on her mood, but one thing was for sure, she was never open about what was inside her or who she really was.
“I’ve called her a dozen times in the past two years,” Bria admitted. “We just can’t connect. We end up talking about the weather or nothing at all. She doesn’t Facebook or Twitter or anything. I tried to get her on Snapchat, but she won’t do apps.”
“She’s always been a little off,” Aiden said.
“Sometimes I think it’s more than that.” Bria stared out her window. “All these years living alone with Alice. It’s surprising she’s not in a straitjacket.”
“It’s amazing we’re not all delusional.”
“Okay, one last time,” Bria said, her voice getting shaky. “This is your last chance to call this slaughter off. I’m your sister. At least, I’m supposed to be your sister. That should mean something. It should ignite some mercy in you. So, let’s drive back to your place, order a pizza, drink some beer, and pretend we weren’t going to throw me to the lions. We could play Xbox. I’ll even let you win at Boogie Bunnies.”
“I always win at Boogie Bunnies.”
“Okay, I’ll show you all the glitches in Breath of the Wild.”
“I showed them to you.”
“Shit.”
Aiden sighed again. “Just go home, deal with her, and if you can’t handle it, text me and I’ll pick you up. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“Fair, he says. I’ll be skewered and peeled alive long before I can pick up a phone.”
He smiled. “You’re on the fencing team, dear, so defend yourself.”
“Against Alice the Cut-Throat?”
She breathed in and out several times. Yogic. It was supposed to relax you. That’s what they taught her in the Dark Castle. So much for that; her guts still felt like they were full of tacks.
“All right, drop me off here.”
“We’re not even to Birch yet.”
She nodded. “That’s the idea. I need to walk and relax if I can. Besides, you pull up at the house and you don’t come in, oh boy, there’s going to be recriminations and you know it.”
He chuckled.
She looked over at him, her handsome half-brother with his dimpled face and sparkling green eyes that all her teenage friends had been in love with. She groaned at him and kissed him on the cheek.
“I’ll remember this,” she said.
He laughed.
She stepped out, grabbed her bag, and sucked in a draft of heavy July air. Hot, God, it’s hot. This is probably what the perimeter of hell feels like. She stood there by the SUV, her palms sweating.
“Hey, sis, you know I love you. You need anything at all, you just call and I’ll come to your rescue.”
“Yeah, fuck you, Aiden, you prick.”
They both laughed and then he was gone, his shiny new SUV disappearing in the haze of the distance until it seemed like maybe it had never been there to begin with, that she’d always been standing here, desperately, terribly alone.
Okay. Time.
Birch Street was only a block away. Time to start the long walk. As she moved down the sidewalk, she thought of Aiden and playing video games, how he’d practically been her best friend through her trying teenage years. She smiled, then frowned.
She could feel Birch Street getting closer and closer.
At least when they sent Link into battle, they gave him a sword.
She walked on.
3
About five minutes later, she was certain a storm was coming. The crazy thing was that the sky was still the most perfect blue you’d ever seen, but scudded by some very dark, very angry-looking clouds. They just didn’t belong. In fact, they seemed so out of place that Bria stopped there on the curb, Birch Street now in sight, and stared up at the sky. Was it her imagination or did those clouds look strangely…unclean? That was the word that jumped into her head and once there, would not leave. The clouds did not look like clouds so much as fuming puffs of noxious smoke from a foundry stack. And even that wasn’t completely right.
“Funny looking, ain’t they?” a voice said.
Bria jumped. A mailman stood there with a heavy blue bag slung around his shoulder and a cream-colored pith helmet on his head as if he was not delivering letters and circulars, but off to find the hidden tomb of Queen Nefertiti.
“Yeah, they are.”
“We must be in for a good one.”
He walked away and she waited there, watching those filthy clouds marring the cerulean sky. It was crazy, absolutely crazy, but they gave her the worst sort of feeling deep in her stomach. She had the craziest sense that she had seen something like them before, maybe in a nightmare. The thought terrified her in ways she could not explain.
But what sense did that make?
They were just clouds. Her nerves must’ve been strung very tight if she was imagining weird stuff like that. She looked down to the curb and the pavement, studying her shadow. Then back up at the sky. Clouds like that simply didn’t belong.
Shrugging, she crossed the avenue to the outer edge of Birch Street where summer was in full progress. Her throat tightened. Sweat trickled down her spine.
In the distance, thunder rumbled.
She looked up, above the tall oaks and elms. She expected to see an advancing wall of darkness, purple thunderheads spilling over the horizon. But there was nothing. The sky was perfectly blue save for those dirty clouds rolling over the town now and again.
Birch Street, finally.
Oh, God.
She heard thunder again and there were a few flashes of lightning. They came and went. Crazy. Perfectly crazy. Lightning flashing on a clear day. Back at the U, she had a roommate who was studying atmospheric physics. She wondered what she would have made of something like this.
Sucking in a stale breath, Bria stepped onto the sidewalk of Birch Street.
Okay, Alice, here I come.
4
There was lead in her shoes as she made her way to 2314 Birch, which was technically home even though it had never honestly felt that way. Especially today. Her throat was so dry she could barely swallow. She studied the green lawns and tall elms at the boulevard. The blooming Walmart flowerbeds and squared-off hedges, the decorative shrubberies and ornate Lowes’ birdbaths. Ah, this was Birch Street at full flower, where perceived social status was more important than physical value. Ostentatious sheetrock McMansions squeezed onto lots that once held houses a half, if not a third their size. Squatting in the shadows of them were the older homes, which still maintained a sort of regal dignity despite the garish, mass-produced whorehouses that sprouted around them like toadstools after a hard rain.
Gone were the vacant lots of her youth. Huge willows had been cut down, thickets cleared. Even the ballpark at the end of the street had been parceled and sold off by the city fathers, anxious to spread their legs for ready taxes. Birch Street, in he
r eye, was a travesty of a neighborhood. Just the sight of it made her sick to her stomach and not all of it had to do with what she was about to face.
A couple of kids on bikes passed her. They were both playing on their phones, oblivious to what stood in their way. They nearly ran her down. She didn’t recognize them. Probably the spawn of new parents on the block, the shills and brogrammers that had replaced the old, tired working-class types that just gave up and gave in, dwindled south.
Okay, here was a ranch house. Mr. Hammerberg sat on the porch, waving away flies with his copy of the Newton Register, an actual print newspaper that would no doubt go to its deathbed once the current crop of oldsters died off. It was probably already digital, but Mr. Hammerberg wouldn’t know that.
He was a retired teacher and self-proclaimed patriot, just don’t ask him about his deceased wife, Donna. It was a touchy subject with him. His only son Joey was killed in the first Gulf War when his helicopter was shot down. Donna blamed him for it and never let him forget it. She killed herself with pills when Bria was in 7th grade. Nasty stuff. He was a fairly nice man around the neighborhood, but a real douchebag as a teacher (ask anyone). After his wife’s death, his life was hanging out his flag each morning, chipmunk feeders in the yard, and an unrepentant hatred for his current crop of students.
Bria made sure she didn’t make eye contact because he was a watcher, always staring…
5
He was staring now, fixated and pop-eyed, remembering Bria. Remembering her as a little girl skipping up the sidewalk and later as one of his students, bright but unfocused, a fine mind as yet untuned. He thought of her mother, Alice, a legendary hag-twat that would have been burned at the stake or hanged from an oak limb 300-years before. And that brought Donna to mind, how he found her that morning with the yellow froth of vomit drying on her mouth. And that made him remember Joey. Joey so long gone but never forgotten. He could see Joey on the day he left for the Army and that look in his eyes, that haunted look that said, I don’t want to do this but you expect me to, so I will. And ever since, Mr. Hammerberg had seen those eyes and that look—and the guilt of it—tore his guts out.