Seeing it, Hendricks felt hollow. The first time she came here, Portia and Raven had obsessed over the menu, trying to come up with the craziest combination of toppings for their pizza. Hendricks had always preferred classic pepperoni herself, but there was something a little sad about seeing it sitting in front of Portia just now. Portia and Raven had always said pepperoni was basic.
“Where were you after school?” Hendricks asked Portia. “I thought we were walking over together.”
Portia and Vi shared a look, and Vi’s cheeks darkened, confirming Hendricks’s theory that Portia had been with her girlfriend. Hendricks arched her eyebrow, remembering her resolve to be more supportive of Portia’s relationship.
“Never mind,” she muttered, taking the seat across from them.
“Did you text Ileana?” Portia asked.
Hendricks frowned. “Was I supposed to?”
“Well, she is one of the seven. I was kind of hoping we could all be here for this.” Portia chewed her lip. “Can you text her now? We can wait.”
“I don’t have her number,” Hendricks said.
“Do we really think that chick owns a cell?” asked Finn. The boys had trickled over from their game, and now Connor slid into the booth next to Hendricks, while Blake and Finn pulled up chairs around the end of the table.
Finn nodded a hello to Hendricks, his lips twisted in a strange approximation of Connor’s familiar, open smile—only Finn’s was just a touch amused where Connor’s always read as friendly. Hendricks smiled nervously back. She couldn’t quite get a handle on Finn. He seemed so different from his brother.
“Yeah, I don’t exactly see her rocking the new iPhone,” said Blake, grabbing a slice of pizza and cramming half of it into his mouth. “Maybe we could call her using, like, smoke signals or something?”
A dribble of grease slipped over his lip. Vi made a face. “For a man of color, you’re being super ignorant of other people’s cultures,” she said.
Blake frowned at her, swallowing. “I just meant that there’s probably some mystical way of getting in touch with her. What’s this about, anyway? You guys look all serious.”
Finn snorted. “Let me guess. We raised a ghost the other night, and now he’s trying to take us out, one by one.”
He said this in a jokey, spooky voice, and did a creepy wiggle thing with his fingers. When no one laughed, the grin dropped off his face. “What?”
Hendricks wasn’t remotely hungry, but she slid a slice of pizza out of the carton and onto a napkin and began picking at a piece of pepperoni.
Portia cleared her throat. “So, okay, we don’t actually know what or who we raised,” she said carefully. Eyes flicking over to Hendricks, she added, “But . . . something attacked me in my bed last night.”
There was a beat of awkward silence. Hendricks flicked at the piece of pepperoni, sending a spray of grease over her napkin.
“Is that why you won’t tell me where you got those scratches? Because they were from a ghost?” Vi was frowning, looking between Portia and Hendricks. “This is a joke, right?”
“Ghosts aren’t real,” added Finn.
“I felt it,” Connor said, in a quiet voice.
Hendricks had now managed to detach the entire piece of pepperoni from the congealed cheese on her pizza, and she was holding it between two fingers, not sure what to do with it. She still didn’t want to eat it, so she dropped it onto the napkin and grabbed another napkin to wipe the grease from her fingers. When she looked up, she saw that everyone else was staring at her.
“Oh, uh, yeah, I saw it,” she muttered. “It was real. It tried to choke me.”
“You keep saying it,” said Blake. “How do you know it was a ghost?”
“Yeah,” Finn added, “couldn’t some pedophile dude or rapist have snuck in through the window?”
Portia was blinking very fast. “That’s a comforting thought.”
“It’s more comforting than ghosts!”
“It disappeared into thin air when I tried to touch it,” Hendricks said.
“It could’ve gone out the window,” Finn pointed out.
“I was coming in through the window,” Connor added. “I would’ve noticed if some guy came past me.”
Finn said, “But you wouldn’t have noticed—”
“Guys,” Hendricks cut in, her voice rising above the rest of the argument. She took a deep breath, like they taught her at camp. “I feel like we aren’t listening to each other. I know it was a ghost because . . .” She felt the words lodge themselves in her throat, and she had to work to spit them out. “Because I . . . I saw it. Him. The night we did the séance. After you guys left, I saw this thing crawl out of a crack in the foundation at Steele House. He looked like a boy at first, but all made out of, like, shadows. And then, just when I reached out to touch him, he broke off into a cloud of—of wasps.” Her throat felt scraped raw, and she couldn’t bring herself to look up from her pizza. “Rapists can’t do that,” she added quickly. “This was something else. It wasn’t human.”
There was a long stretch of silence. Hendricks finally looked around at them, uncertain whether they believed her.
Vi broke in at last. “You keep saying you saw it. But no one else saw anything, right?”
Connor and Portia looked at each other and shook their heads.
“It was dark,” Portia said.
“I could see you and Hendricks moving around in the dark, but I didn’t see anyone—anything else. It just sort of felt cold.” Connor shuddered. “It felt terrible.”
“But you saw it,” Vi said to Hendricks, frowning. “That’s weird, right? That you saw it and no one else did.”
Hendricks shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess yeah, sort of.”
“What did he look like, before he turned into bugs, or whatever?”
Hendricks started shredding her napkin. “I don’t know. Just some guy.”
“Hendricks, come on, tell us,” Portia said urgently.
“Tall. Dark hair.” Hendricks looked up and added, sighing, “I couldn’t see him very well, but . . . he was wearing all black.”
“Sounds like someone we knew,” Portia murmured.
“Jesus, Portia, I’m telling you it wasn’t Eddie.”
“You said you could barely see him,” Portia pointed out, eyes narrowing. “So how could you know for sure?”
“At least I saw something. You didn’t see him at all!”
Portia looked like she was about to keep arguing when Vi touched her arm, “Hey, it’s okay, we’re all trying to figure this out.”
“Yeah, I don’t care whether this thing you saw was Eddie Ruiz or scary Gary the sewer clown, I’m still stuck on the part where we’re talking about ghosts.” Finn pushed his chair back, standing. “Ghosts aren’t real.”
“Dude, what do you think happened at that party three months ago?” Connor asked. “You think that fire was just some kind of freak accident?”
“Yeah, I do,” said Finn. He lifted both hands to his head and dug his fingers into his hair. “Accidents happen all the time. The house was old, its wires were faulty, or someone left the oven on or knocked over a candle, or—”
“It wasn’t a freaking candle,” Hendricks said. “Steele House has been haunted for years. It’s why Maribeth died—”
“No. Maribeth’s older brother killed her,” Finn said. His face was growing red. “And then he killed himself out of guilt. Everyone knows that.”
“Why would Kyle kill his little sister? That doesn’t make any sense.” Hendricks could feel the anger rising in her chest. “The ghosts got Maribeth, and then they got Kyle, and two months ago, they took Eddie, too.”
Finn was still shaking his head. “That’s crazy—”
“You didn’t think it was remotely strange that three kids from the same family all died in t
he same place?” asked Hendricks.
“No, I don’t.” Finn’s face was red with anger. “Because those three kids were from the Ruiz family and everyone around here knows that family is messed up. The only reason you don’t seem to get it is because you were screwing—”
Connor stood up very quickly. “Take a walk, man.”
Finn lifted one shaking finger and pointed it at Hendricks. “Siding with your wannabe girlfriend isn’t going to make her like you any—”
Before he’d finished, Connor had lurched across the table, giving his brother a hard shove that sent him skidding back into his chair. The glasses on the table rattled, and Portia said, “Are you freaking kidding me right now?”
With a jerk of his chin, Finn lunged for Connor, one arm swinging backward in the beginning of a punch. Blake sprung out of his chair first, shoving his body between the two of them.
“Whoa, man.” Blake grabbed Finn roughly, his voice full of warning. “What the hell are you thinking?”
Finn shrugged Blake off, muttering something under his breath. Shaking his head, he turned stalked out of the restaurant. Blake followed him without a word.
Connor didn’t go after them, but he stayed standing, his hands hanging open at his sides, his face bright red.
Hendricks didn’t look up at him, but kept her eyes glued to the table, heat rising in her cheeks. She had the sudden desire to scream. At Finn for taking sides, and at Connor for starting a fight.
Instead, she dug her fingers into the tops of her thighs and stayed silent.
“So . . . what exactly are we saying, here?” asked Vi, after a long moment. “That Eddie’s back?”
“No,” Hendricks said, at the same time that Portia said, “Yes.”
Hendricks cut her eyes at Portia, who pointedly wouldn’t look at her.
“And we need to kill him before he kills me!” Portia added.
“How do you kill a ghost?” asked Vi, frowning. “You think Ileana knows?”
“No one’s taking anyone down,” said Connor.
“Excuse me?” said Portia. “As the only person sitting here who is actually being haunted, I would like to take him down.”
“Will all of you just . . . stop?” Hendricks closed her eyes. A headache had begun pounding at her temples, the pain a steady thud, beating in time with her heart. “We don’t know even know that it was Eddie and if it was, we don’t know why he came back, or what he wants, or—”
“What he wants?” Vi interrupted her. “Portia just said that he attacked you last night. It seems like he made it pretty clear what he wants.”
“That’s not . . .” Hendricks wasn’t sure what else to say.
Tears were pressing at the corners of her eyes, threating to spill over onto her cheeks. For some reason, it was the tears that made her more frustrated than anything else. She had survived so much. She’d always been strong, even when truly terrible things had happened to her. But something about this moment was getting to her. It was sitting here, trying to explain to her new friends that the boy she’d fallen in love with wasn’t the monster they were all making him out to be.
Finn’s words echoed in her head. The only reason you don’t seem to get it is because you were screwing—
“You didn’t know him,” Hendricks said, sliding out of the booth. “None of you actually knew him.”
She made her way toward the front of the restaurant, walking fast. The tears hadn’t started to fall, yet, but she could still feel them there, gathering behind her eyelids. She tried to blink them back.
She was almost at the door when Connor caught up with her.
“Hey,” he said. “Let me walk you home. It’s not safe out there.”
Hendricks hesitated. She was still annoyed about the fight with Finn, and there was a part of her that wanted to turn him down. But he was right, shit kept happening to her when she was alone. It wasn’t safe.
She nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
* * *
• • •
The sky was still its usual gray, but the cloud cover seemed to be holding in the warmth. Hendricks left her jacket unbuttoned. The air smelled like rain and dirt.
She stared at the sidewalk, at the little green plants growing up from between the cracks. They seemed strangely hopeful, those plants. Even though it had been gross and gray and cold for so long, they still believed spring was coming. Hendricks exhaled through her teeth. “I wanted to say that . . . well, that I’m sorry, I guess. For being weird lately.”
Connor cut his eyes toward her. “You haven’t been weird.”
“I feel like I’ve been . . .” Hendricks remembered what Portia had said and added, “Stringing you along.”
Connor cleared his throat and stared off at some point in the distance. A car disappeared around the corner. “You know, I always knew how you felt about Eddie. Even before.”
Hendricks raised her eyes. “Before?”
“Do you remember that night in my car? After we jumped into the quarry?”
Hendricks blushed. That was the night they’d first kissed. “I remember.”
“We saw Eddie walking along the side of the road. And you didn’t really say anything about him or anything, but there was a look on your face when you saw him, like a . . .” Connor paused searching for the right word. “A spark,” he said eventually. “I know that sounds cheesy, but I don’t know how else to describe it. I remember thinking, that guy’s going to be a problem.”
Hendricks closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Connor said. “Me too.”
Hendricks didn’t know what to say.
“He sacrificed himself to save me,” she said eventually. “Back at the house. I was going to let the ghosts take me, but he wouldn’t let them. He gave his life instead. I don’t know how I’m supposed to move on after that.”
Connor was silent for a long time. “I get it,” he said finally. “You’re a good person, Hendricks.”
Hendricks looked up at him. “You really think that?”
“I really do.”
They were outside of Hendricks’s house now. She could see the lit-up windows, and she knew that her parents were probably in the kitchen, waiting for her to come in so they could all have dinner.
“Thanks for walking me home,” she said to Connor.
“Thanks for letting me.” He stuck out his hand. “See you later, friend.”
Hendricks couldn’t help laughing out loud. “Yeah, see you later,” she said, and shook it.
There was a warmth in his hand that felt like it spread into her arm. Hendricks kept thinking about it, even after she climbed the steps.
CHAPTER
14
Hendricks hesitated outside her front door, one hand grasping the doorknob. She could hear her parents inside, the steady rise and fall of their voices. She knew that, if she went in, they’d have dinner as a family, and Brady would be gurgling happily in his highchair, and her dad would want to talk about the construction on the Steele House lot, and her mom would want to know whether anyone had asked Hendricks to prom, and Brady would smile at her and throw his peas.
She sighed deeply. It was all so normal, so happy, but the idea of sitting through a whole night like that made her feel claustrophobic. And she still had so many unanswered questions swimming in her mind. She took her hand off the doorknob and backed down the stairs. She couldn’t do it. She was still too raw.
Pulling her jacket tighter around her shoulders, she turned and jogged the rest of the way down the stairs. Once she reached the sidewalk, she just started walking.
She wasn’t sure where she was going. Without meaning to, she thought of the walk she’d taken with Eddie around the neighborhood back when they were first becoming friends.
You don’t get it, he’d told her. There’s something rotten here.
Rotten, that was the word he’d used to describe the town. It made Hendricks think of something black and decaying just beneath Drearford’s sidewalks, something crawling up toward the surface, like mold. She suddenly realized how selfish it had been of her to try and get Eddie to come back here, now that he’d finally gotten away. Eddie had hated it here. Did she really expect him to return, for her? Because she missed him? How selfish was that?
If he had turned into that dark, evil thing she’d seen last night, she knew she was to blame.
She shuddered and kept walking. Down block after block. Around corners and across streets. Hendricks stared at her feet, watching her shoes rise and fall over the cracked and dirty pavement. She wondered whether she could just keep walking, out of this town, this life.
But when she finally looked up again, she realized she’d circled back without meaning to, down Eddie’s old block, right up to Eddie’s old house.
She exhaled through her nose. The house looked just like she remembered. The paint had long ago faded, showing weathered gray siding and rusted gutters. Old plastic toys littered the yard, and a car without wheels sat on cinder blocks beside the back shed. A few of the upstairs windows had cardboard taped over the glass. Wherever Eddie had ended up, it had to be better than this.
“Where are you?” she whispered.
The wind blew past, the sound a low moan in the trees. Hendricks closed her eyes and saw flickering candlelight, Eddie’s dark hair. She was back in the cellar at Steele House. She’d just told Eddie about everything that went down at her old school with Grayson, but instead of trying to make it better or convince her that it was all over, he’d just listened. He’d told her that the ghosts they made up themselves were more dangerous than real ones, and for the first time, Hendricks felt like there was someone in the world who understood what she’d gone through.
That had been the moment she’d realized she’d really liked Eddie. Maybe even more than liked. It hurt to think about it now.
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