The moon would be a tiny sliver when it rose. The stars sparked bright, popping out one at a time, and Lily paused to watch them. Since moving here, she hadn’t bothered to spend much time looking at the night sky, but it was different than it had been back home in Boulder. Colorado’s stars seemed close, the sky so wide and endless. Here, the trees crowded around like a picture frame, and the stars twinkled proudly, high up and distant. If she could solve this problem, free herself from this strange, ghostly cage, maybe she would have a chance to enjoy the night again instead of dreading it.
She went back to tossing bags, now with a renewed sense of panic. Dark was Britney’s time. Dark was when the shadows seemed to move and shift like water and oil mixing, when she couldn’t trust what was real and what wasn’t. But this was real, she told herself. She had chosen to do this. And if she screamed, no warm hand would wake her. She was completely alone.
Some of the bags were too heavy to toss, so she shoved them away, toward the boxes near the ladder. She found familiar pieces of furniture, an old vacuum, a broken chair. Her arms burned from lifting so much, and her legs were drenched with collected rain from the plastic bags and who even knew what else. She was getting closer and closer to her goal. She found the old aquarium, almost cut herself on the broken glass. At least the dead snake was still inside it, not rattling around in the dumpster with her.
She stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat out of her eyes.
And then she heard the sound she’d been dreading.
Just a voice, but it made her blood run cold.
“I told you to go away.”
28.
Lily couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from, so she just picked up her pace. Desperately now, she ripped bags up from the pile, strained under their weight, and threw them out of the dumpster with a grunt. She pulled the flashlight out of her mouth and shoved it in her armpit, clenching her arm. If she lost it, she wouldn’t have any way to see.
“I can’t go away,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm, reasonable, and bright like Glinda the Good Witch. “I’m a kid. My parents live here, so I have to live here, too.”
Yank, toss, thump, shove, yank, toss.
Her arms and shoulders ached from the heavy bags, but she couldn’t stop.
She almost dropped the flashlight and resettled it.
“I don’t like this,” Britney warned. “I don’t like what you’re doing. You should go to sleep so we can play.”
Lily shook her head but didn’t stop her work.
She hadn’t let herself think too deeply about it, but now understanding rushed in.
All these dreams she’d been having, even the nice ones—was that Britney’s work, too? Was Britney…possessing her? Is that how she could swim and whistle so naturally? Could Britney be…
…inside her?
She shuddered at the thought and went back to work. She was getting so close now. She yanked Britney’s old comforter out of the stack—it was soaking wet and heavy, going dark with mildew and rot—and hefted it over the edge of the dumpster. It splatted in the sandy dirt below.
“Playing is fun,” Lily said, trying to buy time. “Maybe we could be friends.”
She heard the creaking thumps of someone climbing up the ladder outside, the sound of water dripping down the rusted metal.
“I don’t have friends,” Britney said, her voice sharp with scorn. And hurt. “They don’t like me. Only Buddy likes me.”
Lily started pawing the black bags apart, hunting for the right one. It had to be near here. It would be soft, nothing hard or heavy at all. Just a child’s collection of clothes. And stuffed animals.
“I know,” she told Britney. “Buddy is a good dog.”
Britney sighed, and her breath sounded thick and wet, like she had pneumonia. “He didn’t mean to do it,” she said softly.
“Do what?”
Britney went still behind her, but Lily didn’t stop in her own work, just kept tearing at the bags, hunting for the right one as she listened.
“I was fishing on the dock and I fell over. I didn’t mean to. Mama said to not ever tell anybody about the fall-overs. That they would take me away and give me bad medicine. So I didn’t tell Grampa Brian. I hid it from him. I didn’t know I was gonna do a fall-over. But I did, and I fell in the water, and Buddy jumped in and tried to help me. But he just kept hitting me with his paws, and I couldn’t stop doing the fall-over. I never can. It feels bad. It hurts my teeth.”
Lily thought she knew what Britney was talking about.
“Epilepsy?” she asked, goose bumps crawling over her skin. “Is that what you had? Seizures?”
“Yeah,” Britney said really softly. “The fall-overs.”
Lily didn’t stop shoving bags and garbage aside, but she felt tears well up in her eyes. This poor little kid, keeping a secret like that. And because of it, she died. For no reason. No wonder she was so angry.
“That stinks,” Lily said, totally honest and not acting at all. “But I’m going to find Mine for you. That’s what I’m doing right now. That’s what you need, right? He’s in here, somewhere.”
“She!” Britney shouted, all softness gone. “She!”
There was a soft, wet thump behind her.
Britney—whatever Britney was now—was in the dumpster with her.
29.
Lily took a deep breath and scrambled for the next bag. But when she went to toss it out of the dumpster, it didn’t quite make it. The bag bounced back inside, knocking her over.
The cardboard boxes on the other side shifted as Britney slid deeper among the bags.
Lily shook her head and refocused. She had to do this. She reached down and felt around and ripped open a black plastic bag. She was so sure it was the right one, but it just held old curtains, thick and graying white. She tried to toss the open bag aside and nearly lost her flashlight. The curtains unfurled around her, tangling her up, and she thrashed and cried out as the memories descended.
The last time she’d seen curtains like this had been in Colorado, at Mr. Smith’s house. Mr. Smith was Dad’s boss, had been for ten years, and he’d invited them over for the annual Christmas party. It was the first year Lily was old enough to attend, and she had gone into a monologue for the adults, showing off her mastery of Shakespeare, swirling the hem of the long curtain around her like Titania’s dress, and then the curtain touched a nearby candle, and…
No. She couldn’t go there. She had to focus on Britney now.
“She,” Lily choked out as she untangled herself from the curtains and pushed them away. It was just too much, adding the guilt and shame of the past to her current fears all at once. Britney seemed to slow down whenever Lily was talking, so she just kept going. “I’m sorry. Yeah. Because Mine is your pink bunny. She. I’m looking for her right now. I bet you really miss her.”
“You threw her away. You took Buddy’s collar, too,” Britney accused. “You want to take my stuff.”
“I didn’t know,” Lily argued. “I’m trying to find the collar, too. I don’t know where my mom put it. I’m trying to make it right.” She glanced at the curtains again, remembering the numbness she’d felt, standing outside Mr. Smith’s house under a firefighter blanket as the artisan-polished wood walls went up in flames, destroying everything in front of her dad’s entire office crowd. “I’m trying to make everything right, but it’s so hard.”
On the far side of the dumpster, the cardboard boxes shifted again. One slammed into Lily’s back.
She had to stall Britney before she made it across the dumpster.
“My mom took my stuff.” Britney sounded so sullen, so angry. Lily could feel pressure building in the sky again, and everything went a shade darker, the clouds covering the scant light of the moon and stars.
“Did she?” Lily prompted.
&nb
sp; “Mama took things,” Britney growled. “That’s why I scratched her out of the pictures and threw them in the potty. I didn’t want to see her anymore. She was mean. But she never took Mine. You did that.”
“I know,” Lily agreed softly. “And I’m sorry. I’m going to fix it. Promise.”
Behind her, where she didn’t dare look, she could hear the soft, heavy weight of a body working its way across the leftovers of two broken lives, wading through bags of junk. No more time to toss out bags. She felt around for a soft one and ripped it open. No—just old towels and artificial flowers.
“You can’t fix it. It’s too late. But we can play. I like it when we play. You see better than I did. I swim better than you can. It’s fun to be you.”
Bile rose in Lily’s throat as she thought about her dreams, about floating in the blue water, about how she’d started reading books she’d never liked before and how she could suddenly whistle with two fingers and knew how to tie on a fishhook. Those things…
How did she know those things?
She remembered now. It all came back. It was like being in the audience, recalling what it felt like to angrily strip the bed or sit on the dock at night, throwing her own books far out into the water. She could still taste the paper from when she’d torn up and eaten the note she’d written to Britney. She could see it so clearly, see exactly what her hands had looked like as they reached out on their own to shove Rachel down the stairs.
Thump.
Something hit the trash bags right behind her.
So, so close behind her.
Lily reached for the next black bag, the one on the very bottom of the dumpster. She ripped it open, and shirts tumbled out.
Small shirts, still folded.
It was the right bag.
She fell to her knees on the bottom of the dumpster and plunged her hands into the bag. But she was so frantic that she forgot the flashlight under her armpit. It clattered into the shadows below the trash and clanked against the metal, rolling out of sight. The bags behind her hit her back, and a piece of cardboard slid overhead like the lid of a coffin. A cold, wet hand landed on her arm, squeezing hard.
“Mama said I was bad, but I’m not bad. And I don’t want to be alone anymore,” Britney whispered.
Lily yanked her arm away and felt around in the plastic bag, racking her memory for each of the stuffed animals she’d tossed. Not this doll, not that horse, not this hippo.
There! She couldn’t see anything, but she could feel it. A dirty pink bunny with floppy, torn ears. And across its belly in faded, ripped embroidery, the words she hadn’t quite noticed: Be Mine. She grabbed it and spun around, holding it in front of her like a shield as she knocked the cardboard box aside to reveal the sky.
“Here she is, Britney,” she said. “Mine. I’m sorry I took her from you.”
In that tiny amount of light, Lily could see a body standing just above her in the dumpster. A girl, small for eight years old, her hair cut jagged by an old man’s trembling hands. Her skin looked too puffy, and water dripped steadily from her wet clothes. Her face was hidden in shadow, and Lily had never been more grateful for anything in her entire life.
“Mine,” Britney whispered, and it was gentle and soft.
Cold fingers scraped against Lily’s hands, taking the bunny away.
And then, in between one breath and the next, Britney was gone.
30.
The entire world changed in that instant. The clouds lifted. The moon and stars shone down. The night’s soft noises rose on hot, honeysuckle-heavy air. And the outside bulb that had refused to work clicked on, flooding the dumpster with golden light.
Lily looked around, making sure Britney was gone. There was no visible sign that she’d even been here, other than some wet spots on the pile of cardboard boxes. But everything just…felt different.
Before, it felt like someone had always stood behind Lily, watching her. Like she could get lost at any moment, like the very land repelled her. Now it just felt like…a normal place. No malevolence, no strange pressure, no evil. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with air, and it was like she hadn’t been able to breathe for days.
Like she’d been invisible.
Like she’d been drowning.
Like maybe she hadn’t been able to breathe properly since she started the blaze that burned down her dad’s boss’s house and got her dad fired, his reputation destroyed. It didn’t matter how many counselors had told her it wasn’t her fault—her dad had decided it was, and so it was.
That thought had clamped down on her, dominating everything, at least until Britney arrived.
But if she could make Britney go away, maybe she could banish the ghost of what she’d done, too.
She reached down and picked up the fallen flashlight, tucking it in her pocket so her dad wouldn’t yell. And that was another revelation—knowing that the worst thing that might happen that night was getting yelled at by her dad over a flashlight.
Lily hurried back toward the other end of the dumpster, stood the wooden ladder up, even though it wobbled, and clambered up toward the sturdier metal ladder outside. She toppled the wooden ladder over the edge and back onto the ground, climbed down, and went to work tossing the black bags and old lamps and garbage back inside the dumpster. It wasn’t easy, and half the bags had broken open like rotten pumpkins, but she scrambled to clean up as much as possible before her parents got home from their date.
Much to her surprise, she succeeded. Thank goodness it was a long date. She even had time to put the ladder back in the detached garage. By the time the car rolled into the driveway, there was almost no sign of what had happened in the dumpster, as long as nobody looked inside it. When they came in the house, her parents found Lily sitting on the couch inside, reading a book as if nothing at all had happened.
Well, mostly.
“What on earth is that smell?” her mom asked as she put her purse on the counter.
Lily looked down. Uh-oh. She had forgotten about that part. She was still covered in dumpster juice.
“I did some more cleaning,” she said. “Just trying to make sure everything is ready for tomorrow.”
Her dad shook his head at her. “Well, go take a shower. You smell like garbage, drama queen.”
Lily smiled. She couldn’t even be annoyed with him right now. To the outside observer, smelling like rotten garbage actually was a bit dramatic.
“Yes, sir,” she said, saluting him before marching off for a shower and fresh pajamas.
The bathroom felt safe and clean, but when she saw the small green-black handprint on the back of her arm, reality came crashing down.
It had happened. It was really real.
And it was over.
She stood under the hot water, scrubbing and scrubbing until her skin was red.
For the first time in months, she allowed in the dark thoughts, the memories of what had happened in Colorado, that night at the Smiths’ house. She remembered how much she was loving the spotlight, having so many adults enraptured by her monologue and impressed with her memory and skills, commenting that surely she was too young for Shakespeare, and then she remembered that first hiss as the curtains caught fire and the flames leapt straight up to lick the wood ceiling.
She could still feel her dad’s hands on her arms, yanking her away as the fire tried to jump to her dress, and all the adults moving in to beat the fire away or try to stop it with a tiny extinguisher from the kitchen. But the fire grew so fast. The house had been built like a fancy log cabin, all gleaming honey-tan wood and natural fabrics. Everyone had to run outside in a burst of black smoke, a hundred people screaming and crying and hysterical, the entire party huddling by their parked cars, too horrified to move. She remembered every word Mr. Smith shouted into his phone, demanding that the fire department hurry and then
screaming so hard at Dad about his stupid, terrible, foolish, idiotic daughter that Dad ended up crying right there in public, something Lily didn’t even think was possible.
“You’re a bad kid,” Mr. Smith had said to her right before they drove off, the fire flashing off teeth bared like an animal’s.
And her dad? He hadn’t argued.
Since then, they’d had lots of talks. About responsibility. About less drama. About being normal. About being good. But what Lily had heard, over and over again, was that she was bad. That the fire and everything else that had happened—her dad losing his job and being unable to get another, thanks to Mr. Smith’s rage; their family having to move down here to escape the embarrassment around town—were her fault. She’d come to believe that there was something wrong with who she was.
But now Lily saw it clearly. She was just a kid, and kids made mistakes.
Terrible ones sometimes.
But mistakes were mistakes, and accidents were accidents. It was true for Britney, and it was true for Lily.
The next morning, a big truck backed down the driveway and brought the storage container that held all of their belongings. A fleet of college guys in matching T-shirts carried everything inside, and when Lily’s mom offered them some extra cash, they carried out all the old furniture that had come with the house. Britney’s bed, the old sofa, the ancient recliner. They tossed it all in the dumpster until it was overflowing. And then the next day, another big truck backed down the driveway and took the dumpster away, leaving nothing behind but a rectangle of dead brown grass.
The house was completely different once they had their own furniture and towels and artwork in place. Working together, all three of them, they got the TV hooked up to the Wi-Fi and set up the desktop and put down rugs to cover the dusty wooden floorboards. They hung paintings and unpacked boxes. Lily had never really thought much about decorating or her mom’s obsession with throw pillows, but now she recognized the wonderful feeling of familiarity, of home. Of how a thing went from someone else’s to mine.
Mine Page 16