Then Janice was there, reaching for my arm, pushing back the sleeve of my jacket. “Here, keep still.”
I steadied myself and tried to focus. She was holding a syringe, but instead of a steel needle, it was fitted with a brass tip that looked too heavy to pierce the skin. I realized with a numb fascination that she was going to stick me anyway, but my head was throbbing and I couldn’t work up the kind of mental investment it took to care.
I had to lean against the reception desk just to stay upright. Janice positioned the syringe, placing the tip against the inside of my elbow and driving it in. A hot pain radiated up my arm as she pushed the plunger down. The serum was a deep brown, rushing out of the syringe and into my blood, burning as it went. I closed my eyes, tipping my head back as the pain peaked and then rolled off. Janice pulled the needle out and I started to shake. The feelings that came next were weak knees and dizziness, unpleasant but familiar. I sank down onto the floor.
Janice put away the syringe, and after a second, I could focus. She was standing over me in her romper and a long, embroidered bathrobe. Her hair was half up and half down, like she’d been asleep.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” I muttered, leaning back against the desk. “Thanks for the shot. I feel better now.”
She crouched down, taking my face between her hands and staring into my eyes like she was checking my pupils. Then she yanked my mouth open and shook her head. “Are you trying to kill yourself? What the bloody blue devil have you been putting in your mouth?” She turned to the Morrigan, who was still standing rigidly by the desk, holding her bell. “He needs to lie down. Put him someplace quiet.”
I’d never heard anyone in the House of Mayhem talk to the Morrigan that way, like they’d talk to a servant or a little kid, but she just nodded and took my hand. Hers was so warm that I almost couldn’t stand it. She pulled me toward one of the narrow doorways and led me down a dark hall.
The room was a high-ceilinged bedroom, and I knew that it had to be hers. The floor was covered with a flowery green rug and there was a big four-story dollhouse in one corner, but most of the room was taken up with a giant canopied bed.
“Here,” she said, pulling back the covers. “Rest here.”
I sank onto the bed in my wet jacket and my muddy shoes, shivering and turning on my side.
The Morrigan stood over me. “Are you ever going to learn that you have certain limitations? You can get along in the world, you can survive, but you can’t be like them. I don’t have a serum or a tonic for that. It doesn’t matter how you abuse yourself. You’ll never be able to live the same life they do.”
I didn’t point out the absurdity of Them. Everyone in Gentry was a member of Them, but so was everyone in the House of Mayhem. I was the only one who was not a part of Them. I was just a wayward stranger, outside all of it.
“I don’t want the same life as everyone else,” I whispered, and my voice sounded breathless and ragged. “I just want to live my life.”
“Well, you need the analeptic for that, and you need to start paying more mind to your health. You’ve been very careless with yourself, but you’re here now, you’re safe, and we intend to take good care of you.”
The Morrigan took out a handkerchief and dipped it in a bowl of water by the bed. She wiped my face, scrubbing at the waxy streaks from Alice’s whiskers.
Then she leaned close and whispered in my ear. “I thought my sister had done this to you. I saw you there at the door and I thought that she’d summoned the Cutter and ruined you.”
I shook my head, trying to tell her that nothing was anyone’s fault. That no one had ruined me.
“I loved my sister,” she said, wiping my eyelids with the handkerchief. The water was cold and smelled like pond scum and dead leaves, but it felt nice against my face. I was starting to think that maybe I was home, even if it was a weird, creepy home where I didn’t want to live. Her hands were small and careful. “I loved her so much, but in the end, I couldn’t support her. Is it hypocritical to love a person and still find fault with their actions?”
I blinked away the water and didn’t answer. The question didn’t make sense. There weren’t rules or instructions when it came to loving someone.
“I did a bad thing,” the Morrigan whispered, climbing onto the bed and settling herself on my shins.
The room was soft at the edges, swimming in and out of focus, and above me, the canopy seemed to go on and on. I felt numb, like whatever Janice had injected me with might have taken care of the pain, but it made me dim and stupid, too drugged-up to function.
The Morrigan wriggled up to lie beside me on the pillow. “My sister takes children sometimes. Not for any real purpose, but just to keep them. She might take one because it’s pretty or because it amuses her. And she took a girl, this lovely, clever little girl, and raised her as a toy.”
I couldn’t follow everything, but I got the part where somehow, the Morrigan thought keeping kids as pets was worse than taking kids to kill them. I closed my eyes, picturing a little girl with a blue church dress and blond hair. The image was faded and familiar, marked with creases like it had been folded, but my head was full of white lights and echoes, and I couldn’t quite place it.
The Morrigan twirled the handkerchief, trailing the corner of it over my face. “I took her back. I went to my sister’s rooms, deep into the House of Misery, and I took her. I brought her back to her family. It was the right thing to do, but my sister loathes me for it. The lake went dry shortly after and then came right back to devil us in the tunnels. She leeches all the joy from the town and sends rain.” The Morrigan leaned close to my ear and there was a low, earnest sadness in her voice. “I betrayed her, and now we are estranged. She will punish me for the rest of my life, for one little girl.”
I nodded, keeping my eyes closed. The damp cloth was cold on my face and I knew where the faded picture came from. I’d seen it a thousand times in the front hall, every time I passed the glass-fronted cabinet with the Dutch figurines and the teacups.
“My mother,” I said, and my voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar, like someone else was whispering in my ear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BLESSED
I woke up in the dark, sprawled on the Morrigan’s four-poster bed with the blankets tangled around my legs. The smell of the sheets was musty and unfamiliar, like the air in a strange attic.
When my eyes adjusted, I began to sort out objects. There was the giant dollhouse and, over in another corner, a heavy dresser with a hinged mirror. The Morrigan was asleep next to me, curled up with her thumb in her mouth and a filthy-looking doll clutched against her chest. Her hair had fallen back from her face and she looked uncommonly peaceful, like a little kid.
I untangled myself from the blankets and swung my feet down onto the floor. The inside of my arm still stung where Janice had stuck me with the syringe, but I felt better than I usually did after a reaction and much better than I had any right to, considering I’d recently had Alice’s tongue stud in my mouth.
I left the Morrigan asleep in her massive bed and made my way back out through the lobby, up the corridor and into the rain.
When I got to Roswell’s house, the porch light was off and his car was in the driveway. It was way past midnight and the ground floor was dark, but there was a light in his window. I stood in his mom’s flower border, in the shadow of the garage, and texted him to come down.
He met me at the side door, looking like he was about to say something, but I shook my head. He shrugged and pointed toward Smelter Park. We walked the two blocks without talking.
At the park, Roswell headed for a wooden picnic table at the edge of the playground and sat down on the bench, leaning forward with his hood up and his coat sleeves pulled down over his hands. I had an idea that everyone was starting to get used to the weather, and if it went on much longer, we’d all just learn to live like this, no umbrellas and no raincoats. We’d all just be perpetually damp all the time.
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I sat next to him, trying to formulate what I wanted to say, but my throat hurt and none of the words were even close to right. “So, what are you still doing up?”
He shrugged. “Working on the phone clock, waiting for a sign that you weren’t dead. I tried to call you, but it wouldn’t even send me to voice mail.”
His voice sounded easy, like classic Roswell, but the way he was watching made me nervous.
He turned and put his hand on my arm, somewhere between hitting and grabbing on. “You scared the hell out of me. What happened?”
I looked out at the empty playground, the rusting slide and abandoned swings, trying to act normal. My heart was racing like it did when I got nervous before a class presentation. On the other side of a low fence, the dump hill was just a hulking outline against the dark backdrop of trees and sky.
I could feel Roswell looking at me, watching the side of my face.
“Okay,” he said finally. “This isn’t like a personal attack or anything, but lately you’ve been way weirder than usual. Would you please just tell me what’s going on?”
My heart was beating so fast that it hurt. I closed my eyes before I answered. “I’m not a real person.”
That made him laugh, short and hard, almost a bark. “Yes. You are a real person. Whether or not you’re a crazy person remains to be seen, but I’m not sitting here talking to myself.”
Hearing him say it was like being absolved. I was supposed to be happy, but instead I just felt awful. I hunched forward and covered my head with my hands.
“What’s it like?” he said. His voice was very low. “Just tell me why you’re like this.”
Like I was missing some key ingredient that would make me as whole and as normal as everyone else.I looked down at the grass so I wouldn’t have to look at Roswell. Then I told him the story in pieces. The open window, the screen, the crib and how Emma wasn’t afraid of me, how she reached her hand in through the bars. How, on some fundamental level, I was nothing but a parasite, the same way cowbirds and cuckoos were.
I waited for him to call me a liar or tell me I was crazy. Gentry was good at keeping its secrets, and people were just so used to denying any part of the picture that didn’t suit them.
The playground was at one end of the park, past the baseball diamonds and a big rectangle of mowed grass. When I was little, I’d wanted more than anything to play on the playground but had settled for games on the grass, first tag, then later, Frisbee and touch football, and Roswell had never minded that I had to stay far away from the monkey bars and the merry-go-round.
Roswell took a deep breath, glancing over his shoulder at the street. “It’s never happened in my family,” he said finally. “The stealing, the switching, whatever. It doesn’t happen to us.”
For a minute, I didn’t even know what to say to that. It seemed like a bold statement, given the history of the town. “Are you sure?”
“Unshakably.”
“It seems like it’s happened to pretty much everyone in Gentry somewhere down the line. I mean, everyone’s cousin or father or grandmother or great-uncle has a story about a relative who got really freaking weird and then died.”
He grinned, shaking his head. “Sordid, right? But in the Reed household, it doesn’t happen.”
I stared at him. “Why not?”
He shrugged. “We’re charmed.” He said it like he was making a joke, but it was the truth.
Roswell was exuberant, indestructible. He was the kind of son a normal family should have. If I could have been like him at all, even a little, my entire life would have been different. I thought about what the Morrigan had said. Intent matters. If you believe you’re charmed, capable, likable, popular, then you are.
Suddenly, Roswell’s normal smile was gone. He was staring at his feet. “It’s not like I feel guilty, exactly. . . .”
“But you do.”
He nodded down at his shoes, grinning in a bitter way.
“Is that why you hang out with me, do you think? Like, you don’t mind how weird I am because when it comes down to it, you’re kind of weird too?”
He quit studying his shoes and looked over at me. “It’s not like that. I hate to break it to you, but there are other reasons to be friends with someone than mutual weirdness. You are actually kind of interesting, you know. And with you, I’m not always having to be happy or funny. I can say what I’m thinking. You pretty much suck at being honest, Mackie, but you’re easy to talk to.”
It was nice to think that Roswell could have a legitimate reason for being friends with me, besides the fact that our dads both worked at the church, but it didn’t change the fact that I was something deceitful and strange. “Mackie Doyle’s dead. I’m not anyone.”
Roswell leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Look, Mackie is you. I started calling you Mackie in the first grade—you—not someone else. I’ve never known a Malcolm Doyle. If he’s dead, then I’m sorry, but it doesn’t mean anything. He’s not you.”
I couldn’t look at him. “Are you . . . look, if you’re dicking me around, I need you to tell me.”
“Mackie, don’t take this the wrong way, but all my life you’ve been the weirdest person I’ve ever met. That doesn’t make you not a real person. In fact, it makes you pretty goddamn specific.”
I dug my fingers into the edge of the picnic table. “This is the defining event of my life and you’re treating it like it’s normal. Like it’s nothing.”
He leaned back, looking up at the sky. “Well, maybe it should stop being the defining event. There’s a whole lot more to an average life than something that happened before you were a year old.”
I knew that he was right, but it was scary. I looked away because I didn’t want him to see how lonely I’d been. It was disorienting to think everything that had defined me for so long was only circumstantial.
“I did something so stupid tonight,” I said, hearing the catch in my voice.
“I figured. When you went all convulsive, I figured it was something big. Tongue ring, huh? Was it because you just like her that much—I mean, so much you’d kiss her anyway?”
I shook my head. “She . . . acts like I’m normal. Nothing different, nothing strange. Like I could be anybody.”
Roswell laughed so loud I worried that someone might come outside to see what was going on. “And that’s your criteria? A girl who makes you feel like you could be anybody?”
“No.” I leaned back on my elbows and looked up into the rain. “I just mean, sometimes it’s nice to hang out with someone who makes you feel like you’re not completely freakish.”
We sat on the picnic bench, staring out at the playground.
It was Roswell who spoke next, sounding like something had just struck him as funny and he was trying not to laugh. “Who would you get with, then, if normal wasn’t an issue? I mean, if having them think you were ordinary and boring wasn’t part of the equation.”
“Out of anyone?” I ducked my head and pulled my sleeves down over my hands. “Tate, probably.”
I waited for him to laugh, maybe ask if I meant Tate Stewart or if I was talking about some other girl who had the same name but a less dire attitude.
He just nodded and knocked his shoulder against mine. “So do that, then. Don’t get me wrong, she’s kind of terrifying, but she can be cool. I mean, at least she’s not a sorori-whore in training.”
I laughed, but it sounded fake, so I made myself stop. “There’s no way. I pissed her off like you wouldn’t believe. Way beyond repair.”
Roswell shook his head. “Nothing’s ever beyond repair. Jesus, the fact that the twins made a working snowblower out of two nonworking ones and some dryer parts should prove that. And people are pretty predictable once you know them. They don’t change all that much. Do you remember in seventh grade, when we had to do current-issues debates and she and Danny got in that huge thing about capital punishment? She didn’t speak to him for like a month, but she forgave him.”
“Great. That was over a civics assignment. And she was twelve.” I sighed and scrubbed my hands over my face. “Roz, you have no idea how hugely I’ve already screwed this up. If she’s got any judgment at all, she hates me.”
Roswell shrugged. “Fine, then she hates you. And if you want to date her anyway, then you suck it up and you tell her you’re sorry. If she’s a reasonable person, she forgives you. If she’s not, you might have to just let this one go and settle for girls who think you’re normal. No tongue rings, though.”
We sat on the picnic bench, not talking, not looking at each other, but being quiet and okay. The rain was almost gone, nothing but a thin, chilly fog. For now, I just wanted to sit on the picnic bench with him and not be anything but fine and uncomplicated.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE FIGHT
The next day was significant, mostly because it was the first day in weeks that it wasn’t actually raining. The sky was still overcast, but the air was cold and dry. It was the first indication that the rain couldn’t last forever and winter might be coming after all.
Drew and Danny were in a weird mood at lunch, looking pleased with themselves and grinning at each other. When Roswell asked what was so funny, they just looked at each other and started laughing.
I leaned on my elbows, trying not to yawn. “You look happy.”
Danny tossed a french fry at me. “You look like shit.”
“We fixed the Red Scare,” Drew said. He was smiling, trying to keep it under control and failing. “Last night. It’s kind of a MacGyvered mess, but it works.”
I wanted to ask how they could stand to know the truth about anything when nothing good could come of it. How anyone could stand to be put on the spot. What it felt like to let someone else know their secrets.
After school, I started home the long way, skirting the edge of the parking lot and studying the soggy ground. I’d only gotten as far as the white oak tree when Tate and Alice came out of the school together. Which was unexpected.
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