Slice of Cherry

by Dia Reeves

  Kit burst into tears, a shocking explosion. Kit often pretended emotion, but not this time. “Gabriel was the first, the only, no matter what you think about me.”

  “Was it bad?” Fancy went to Kit. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Of course he hurt me!” Kit pushed her away and scooped Kleenex from the box on the vanity. “It always hurts the first time. But it was beautiful.”

  “Only you would think pain and blood and . . . bodily fluids were beautiful,” Fancy snapped. “Stop crying!”

  “Why should I?” Kit threw the box of Kleenex at Fancy’s head. “Because you never cry? Because you don’t know how? Because you never felt anything real your whole life? Well, I have, and I’ll cry all I want—!”

  “Over a stupid boy!”

  “Over how I can’t share something so beautiful with an unfeeling bitch!”

  “I’m unfeeling?” Fancy grabbed a jar of squirrel brain and brandished it. “When you go all psychotic on your precious Gabriel and start doing surgery on him, you ask me again who’s unfeeling. You’re not any better than me. I know you wish you were—”

  “You’re the one who thinks you’re better than me. That I’m an animal because I don’t mind gutting people or get prissy whenever I get a little blood under my nails. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to be better than you. I don’t have to be anything like you. Gabe likes me for who I am.”

  “A killer.” Fancy put the jar back on the shelf with all the other jars.

  “He knows about me,” said Kit defensively, as though she were ashamed of who she was. “I told him everything, even about the happy place. I wanted him to know before we did it. And I love doing it with him. It used to be only stabbing people made me feel connected with them, but . . . it’s so weird. When I’m done with Gabe, he’s not dead or cut up. Just sweaty and whole and in love with me. And I like that. He’s the good one, not me. He’s an angel.”

  “So is Satan. And he’s in hell now. Maybe Gabriel’ll join him there.”

  Kit froze. “You’d better not do anything. I mean it, Fancy; you better not touch him!”

  “I won’t have to.” She slammed out through the screen door.

  FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:

  KIT WAS PREGNANT AND I WAS HELPING HER PICK OUT A CRIB. I PICKED UP A POT INSTEAD AND ASKED HER IF SHE THOUGHT BABIES PREFERRED BEING BOILED OR BAKED. SHE SNATCHED THE POT OUT OF MY HANDS AND SAID, NEITHER. I SNATCHED IT BACK AND SAID, WE’LL SEE.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As Fancy parked her bike outside the Standard before class, she saw Ilan sitting below the deserted ticket stand. She figured he’d be sitting on the bench at the curb on any normal day instead of on the ground, but the bench was inexplicably covered in blood and flies. Fancy sat next to Ilan.

  “What happened over there?”

  He glanced at the bench, then went back to his sketchbook. “Dunno. It was like that when I got here.”

  Fancy looked at what he was drawing: a series of broken mirrors. Just a sketch, but even his sketches looked like they should be hanging in a museum. A face stared out of the shattered mirrors: Ilan’s own face. His eyes in one of the glass shards were a rabbit’s eyes, scared and trapped.

  “Why’re you sitting in the heat?”

  “Cooler out here than upstairs.”

  “Were you waiting for me?” He did that sometimes, but not so often that she took it for granted.

  “Nope. But it’s nice to see you. Especially when you ain’t trying to kill me.”

  It couldn’t have been too nice to see her; he hadn’t looked at her once. “I wanna talk to you.”

  He finally looked at her, and his real eyes, unlike the drawing, were anything but scared. Just the same ironic gaze he always gave her.

  “So talk.”

  She stared around the street. “Not here.”

  “Where then? Someplace public, I hope.”

  “You pick, if you don’t trust me.”

  “I don’t.” He crumpled the drawing and tossed it into a nearby garbage can. She felt a pang to see such beauty so casually disregarded.

  When class was over, Ilan drove Fancy to Smiley’s for cheese fries. Tons of kids were squeezed into booths not big enough to hold them all, or standing at the counter shouting their food orders.

  They snagged one of the tiny, couple-friendly tables by the windows. As she ate, Fancy hummed along to “Sh-Boom” playing on the jukebox.

  Ilan frowned at her humming, half amused and half irritated. “You like that crap?”

  “It’s not crap. It’s historic.”

  “You like history?”

  “No. Just songs from history. They’re soothing.”

  “I guess a girl as full of rage as you needs tons of soothing.”

  “I’m not full of rage.”

  When he just looked at her, Fancy sighed and said, “Yesterday was . . . unfortunate. I’m not like that, usually.”

  To her embarrassment the happy place materialized in Ilan’s water glass, still as foul-looking as it had been when she’d . . . misbehaved.

  “Sorry.”

  Ilan peered into the glass, his lip curled at the sight of the rotting flamingos. “How’re you doing that?”

  Fancy shrugged. “Just happens. It’s a coping mechanism.”

  “What’re you coping with? Trying to kill me and my brother?”

  “This isn’t about you or your stupid brother. This is about me and Kit and how . . .” Fancy faltered, her stomach burning and not from the cheese and jalapeños she’d just swallowed. She pushed her cheese fries away and took a sip of her milk shake. “She won’t even talk to me anymore.”

  “Can you blame her?” Ilan helped himself to her cheese fries. “Trying to kill off the love of your sister’s life is always a dumb-ass strategy.”

  “What about you? What kind of strategy involves pushing your brother down the stairs?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Why’d you do it? Is he horrible?”

  “No.”

  “So he’s a perfect angel?”

  Ilan polished off her fries and said, “There’s a middle ground between horrid and angelic. If I swallow my water, am I gone swallow that flamingo too?”

  Fancy was about to tell him not to be ridiculous when she remembered tossing Kit and Gabriel out of the teapot. So she took a deep breath and made herself calm down, and after a few seconds, the happy place disappeared from the glass. She didn’t bother answering Ilan’s question, though, because she didn’t know the answer. She didn’t know herself at all anymore.

  “What’s the worst thing Gabriel ever did?” she asked, trying to sound casual. Maybe she didn’t know herself, but she was about to know absolutely everything about Gabriel.

  “Why?” Ilan asked suspiciously, and rightly so.

  “I’m curious.”

  “About Gabe?”

  “About why Kit likes him.”

  “It’s a Turner thing. We’re all charming as hell.”

  “I saw you slap him,” she reminded him, lest he get too full of himself. “That day we bought the dresses.”

  “He was sleepwalking,” Ilan said, infuriatingly unapologetic about his behavior.

  “You said you wanted to strangle him.”

  “The way you strangled Kit? Yeah, all the time,” he admitted cheerfully. “Especially when he gets all holier-than-thou.”

  Fancy gave up trying to shame him, as it appeared to be an impossible task. “He got any friends?”

  “Guys from school. Bandmates. Except Tony. About to fire his ass anyway. Tony Castle,” he elaborated, on seeing Fancy’s blank expression. “He’s our bassist.”

  “Why you gone fire him?”

  “Don’t even get me started.” It was nice to see that she wasn’t the only person in the world who irritated him.

  “But why don’t Tony like your brother?” she asked, storing the info away.

  “Tony only likes himself.” Ilan leaned
back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Is this why you wanted to be alone with me? To talk about other guys?”

  Fancy decided to back off. For now. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “You. And me. All these things I wanna say to you. And then do to you.”

  “What things? Like torture?” Fancy was astounded he would admit to such a thing. “Cuz I could torture you a lot better than you could torture me.”

  He gaped at her as though a unicorn horn had sprouted from her forehead. “I’m not talking about torture.”

  “What, then?”

  “Drink your milk and maybe I’ll tell you when you grow up.”

  “Milk shake. Don’t treat me like I’m five.”

  “I thought you liked being babied,” he said, his eyes wide and innocent. “That’s how Miz Lynne treats you.”

  “It’s Madda’s job to take care of me. I don’t need that from you.” To show him how adult she could be, she decided to make a peace offering. “You want this?”

  He looked where she was pointing. “Your cherry?”

  “I don’t like maraschinos.” She plucked it off the top of her milk shake. “Do you want it or not?”

  Ilan took the cherry, carefully wiped it clean, and put it in his shirt pocket.

  “You’re saving it?”

  He smiled, a secret smile that annoyed her; she wanted to know his secrets. “Not ripe enough yet. Soon, though. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Fancy found herself smiling with him—even though his smiles hurt her chest, they were very infectious smiles—but she had no idea what she’d just agreed to.

  Fancy biked through the rain Thursday morning. Tony, like the sisters, lived upsquare, but in the less wooded, more suburban and cookie-cutter part of upsquare, near Torcido Road, in a two-story split level that was more garage than house.

  She checked the address against the one she’d copied out of the phone book, parked her bike, and rang the bell. A boy much more vibrant-looking than his house answered the door.

  “Are you Tony Castle?”

  “Yeah.” He looked her up and down, lingering on her chest.

  “I wanna talk to you.” It felt strange not to have Kit speaking for her. She had to shove each word in the back to get it free of her mouth. “Can I come in?”

  She passed through a mudroom into the living room, nearly tripping on an umbrella. She stopped, wide-eyed, at the state of the living room: the lacy white bra under her shoe, the overturned furniture, the beer bottles rolling and clinking together.

  “Pardon the mess.” He stretched, his jeans low on his hips. He noticed her staring and smiled. “Had a beer bash last night.”

  “Where’re your folks?” Fancy couldn’t even imagine what Madda would do to her and Kit if they wrecked their house the way this boy had.

  “No folks. Just me and the old man. He’s offshore this week.” He opened a box on the coffee table and removed a tightly rolled joint. “You do this?”

  “No.” She’d smoked with Kit once, but she wasn’t about to get high with some stranger. “Why don’t you like Gabriel?”

  “Gabe Turner? He’s the one don’t like me. Cuz of your sister. He don’t like the way she looks at me.”

  “Y’all fight over girls?”

  “Girls fight over me. The band thing. The looks. The gold stars in my eyes. See?”

  He did have gold stars flashing against the brown irises of his eyes. But so what?

  “Hm.” Fancy withdrew from the rancid green cloud surrounding him. “What’s Gabriel really like?”

  Tony sat back. “I dunno. He was cracked for a while. He’d get in these weird moods. Like, we’d be onstage and he’d start crying for no reason.” He laughed. “Like a bitch. I know he was young, but still. This one time he even ran away from home. Course, that was after his pop got killed.”

  “So he’s not like that anymore?”

  “Nah. After he got religion, he calmed way down, like church was some kinda weird-ass shock treatment for him. Speaking of weird-ass, I hear you been taking care of people”—he mimed shooting himself in the head—“around town. Putting bad guys in their place.”

  “Yeah?”

  He sat next to her. “Think you could take care of something for me?”

  “What?”

  “This.” He took her hand and pressed it against his crotch. “You know how, right?” He sat back, getting comfortable. “I know your sister does.”

  Fancy lifted his bass from the floor, gripped it like a baseball bat, and swung it at Tony’s head.

  “Did that take care of it?” she asked, sometime later. But Fancy didn’t expect an answer.

  Not from a corpse.

  Kit was in bed reading a biography of Tori Amos when Fancy got home. “Still haven’t figured out how to kill without getting dirty, huh?” she said, taking in Fancy’s bloodstained clothes.

  She checked the time and put her book aside. “Madda’s gotta be up by now. Get cleaned up and come help me with dinner.”

  Fancy couldn’t imagine chopping onions or straining pasta or grinning at Madda like everything was cool. “You want my help?” Her voice shook. “Are we helping each other now?”

  “Go take a bath, Fancy, and calm down.”

  “Is that your answer for everything? To send me away? You said nothing would ever split us up.”

  “We’re not split up. I’m here!”

  “To make dinner? To run off and screw some boy when I need you? I needed you, Kit. If you had been with me, I never would have killed that boy!”

  “Stop yelling before Madda comes in here and sees you looking like that.”

  “I don’t care what she sees!” The walls began to flicker as the happy place projected onto them. In the stone circle where Fancy had buried Tony, a green shoot had already started to sprout.

  Fallen fruit from the old-man tree rolled into their room, and Kit picked it up.

  “Look what you’re doing. I told you one day you wouldn’t be able to separate real and unreal.”

  Fancy pressed her hands to her eyes, and when she looked again, the fruit was gone from her sister’s hand, and the walls had returned to normal. But Kit was no longer her Kit, and that was just wrong.

  Kit reached for her, but Fancy slapped her hand away. “Don’t touch me. Go touch that little creep you like so much, but don’t ever touch me again!”

  Fancy ran out of the house and into the rainy remains of the day with no destination in mind, but she ended up at Bony Creek.

  She sat on the edge of the water, the rain washing Tony’s blood from her skin and mixing it into the mud beneath her. The rain sizzled against the creek’s surface, and every now and then Fancy saw a flash of Daddy’s face peeping out at her. She wished for him with an almost painful longing. Maybe one day she would miss Kit in the same way, not because she’d been arrested, but because Kit had simply walked away from her. Fancy didn’t understand why people found her so easy to leave.

  A flash caught her eye. A single, shining raindrop hung suspended over the creek. It grew bigger as she watched, openmouthed, expanding until it was a beach ball of water. Daddy’s head appeared within the gigantic raindrop, huge and distorted. Like a view in a fishbowl. He smiled at her. “Fancy?”

  She put her head back and let the rain fall into her eyes. She blinked.

  “You’re not seeing things.” Daddy was so matter-of-fact that she had to believe in what she was seeing. “Why’re you so surprised? You do it too. I’ve seen.”

  “You been watching me?” The idea didn’t embarrass her. The upside of having a serial killer for a father is that no matter what you do, it’s never as bad as what he’s done.

  “I watch all of you.”

  “I can’t do that,” Fancy said, gesturing at the raindrop, impressed despite herself.

  “Yet. You’ll find yourself doing all kinds of tricks in no time. I did, when I was your age.”

  Fancy nodded. “Is that how you got rid of Mr. Turner’s
body? Some trick?”

  She could only see his face, but he looked around as though he wasn’t alone. “I didn’t do anything to his body.”

  “You chopped off his arm. Madda saw you.”

  “Not everybody who gets his arm chopped off dies from it.”

  “So you chopped off his arm and then let him wander off and then somebody else killed him?”

  “We live in a crazy world, Fancy Pants. Y’all plan on visiting me before they sic the firing squad on me?”

  “I dunno. Kit always wants to see you. Do you visit her like this?”

  “No. I popped in on Lynne one night, and she made me swear not to do it again. But you were looking in on me, so . . . You won’t tell Lynne, will you?”

  “No, she hates it when we talk about you.”

  “Do you hate me?”

  “Kinda. You messed everything up when you got caught. You messed all of us up.”

  He nodded. He didn’t have the hardened look of an inmate, wasn’t wild and unkempt. Even in his mug shot he’d looked serene and caring, the way Jesus would look in a mug shot.

  “What I did,” he said, “had nothing to do with how I feel about you and Kit. And Lynne. I love you.”

  “So what? You think you can just say ‘I love you’ and make everything okay? Nothing’s okay.”

  “Nothing was ever okay. We are who we are, Fancy. Nothing can change that. But if there’s enough love, sometimes you can ignore how . . . tumorous the rest of the world is.”

  “I must not have enough, then. Cuz I clearly see that everything sucks.”

  She threw a rock at the water ball and burst it. There was only the rain and silence. And loneliness.

  FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:

  KIT TOLD ME I SUCKED AT BEING A REAL GIRL. SHE SAID FAKE GIRLS WERE EASY TO SPOT BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T SAY I LOVE YOU. EVERY TIME I TRIED TO SAY IT, MY JAW FELL OFF.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Friday, after Mr. Hofstram dismissed them from class, Fancy found herself walking with Ilan. Not with him, exactly, but it was so easy to fall into stride with him. And so when he stopped before the entrance doors in the lobby of the Standard, she stopped too. And waited.