Cassidy thought about asking to hold it in the clearing in the woods, but then reconsidered. The clearing was a place that belonged only to her and the March Hare. She didn’t like the idea of others intruding.
With great care she set up the picnic table in the backyard, smuggling some of the cups and saucers back out of the woods. Earlier in the week, her mom had taken her to a vintage clothing shop to pick out a variety of ridiculous hats for everyone, and she even found an old velvet pillow she could use for the Dormouse (her cat’s slightly used toy mouse).
The morning of her birthday, she donned her blue dress and white apron before returning to the clearing. It had rained the night before and the teacups were once again filled with murky water. The pinecone Dormouse’s whiskers had been washed away, and one of its eyes had begun to rot. A puddle collected in the sunken dome of the top hat.
When she and her mother had been writing out the invitations, Cassidy had intentionally messed one up and later smuggled it to her room, where she’d carefully addressed it to the March Hare. Now she set that invitation on the table, leaning it against a cracked teapot.
“I know you probably won’t come,” she said to the empty woods. “But it didn’t seem right to host a tea party without inviting you.”
× × ×
Of course it was Cassidy’s luck that her neighbor Tommy was first to arrive at the party. She’d begged her mom not to invite him but had been informed quite crisply that not doing so would be rude. Cassidy tried scowling at him, hoping he’d get the hint and go home before anyone else arrived, but she had a difficult time maintaining her ire as he tried on hat after ridiculous hat, making up voices and characters for each one.
Which is how she ended up clutching her stomach and braying with laughter the moment the girls from down the street stepped into the backyard. Completely lacking the ability to tell when he was wanted and when he wasn’t, Tommy approached the pack of girls, jester’s cap pulled tight over his head. He pretended to trip, falling into a somersault that left him sprawled on his back at their feet.
With thin-lipped smiles and a smirk or two, the four girls stepped over him. Cassidy’s face flushed as she watched them take in the picnic table. The balloons drifting from the handle of each cup. The old hats and chipped china. For a moment the glamour of her imagination shifted and she saw it all through their eyes. Mortification seared hot against the inside of her ribs.
A handful of other neighborhood kids arrived soon after, some accompanied by their parents, who all gathered on the porch, where a different sort of tea party had been set up for adults. It took a while, but slowly Cassidy’s bruised imagination limped back.
But it did not make a full recovery. Because while the group of girls from up the street were excruciatingly polite, they made no effort to play along. They accepted their mugs when offered and took a small sip of iced tea before leaving the chipped porcelain cups to sweat on the table. They guessed only halfheartedly at the riddles Cassidy had so painstakingly concocted.
The four girls were a weight at the end of the table, a constant drag on the spirit of things. It seemed to leave the few other kids confused, not knowing whether to play along with Cassidy or scorn her efforts. And so the party became like a balloon slowly, agonizingly losing air.
Until finally an acceptable amount of time had passed for the event to be over. The group of girls from down from the street left the way they came: all in a pack, heads tilted to one another in hushed whispers. One of their comments escaped their little bubble to float across the yard: “I mean, a tea party? Really? So dumb.”
The other three girls nodded. A hot wash of tears flooded Cassidy’s eyes, and she turned quickly away. Which is how she ended up facing the forest.
Even through the blur of tears, she recognized the curve of the March Hare’s ears, the white of them set off against the dappled shadows thrown by the canopy of trees. She dropped her chin, a new sort of embarrassment running hot through her—the kind she felt the first time her mom understood how unpopular Cassidy was when she overheard the girls down the street taunting her.
She felt that she had somehow let the March Hare down. That the glamour she’d spun of herself for him had been pulled from his eyes and he was seeing the truth of her for the first time.
As the last guest left, Cassidy concentrated on clearing the table and not looking back at the forest.
× × ×
The next day Cassidy returned her copy of Alice in Wonderland to the library and deleted the movie from the DVR. She balled up her costume, shoving it deep into her closet, and returned the tablecloth to the bottom of the drawer in the corner cupboard. She no longer ventured into the forest.
She was done with tea parties and she was done with her imagination.
Or so she thought. But one afternoon, as fall bit at the edges of weary leaves, she saw a piece of paper caught on a branch just past the end of her yard. When she plucked it free, she realized that it was not, as she’d assumed, a scrap of stray garbage but was instead an invitation. Her invitation.
Except that the information she’d painstakingly written had been crossed out. In its place was a new date and time. She searched the forest for a flash of white, but there was nothing more than the expected riot of fall.
Seventeen Years Old
Jack never did say much about what happened to him. He’d been drunk, he explained, and most of the night was a blur. But he did make one thing clear: “Stay out of the clearing, Tommy,” he’d told his brother. “Promise me.”
Tommy repeated it all to Cassidy, his eyes full of questions. “I’m not sure I believe him,” he confessed. “There’s something Jack’s not telling me.” He waited for Cassidy to fill in the resulting silence with details.
She could have told him. She could have explained that she was pretty sure it had been the March Hare. That he was a master at making one thing look like another and that Jack probably hadn’t tripped.
But she didn’t.
Instead she made a concerted effort to return to life as normal. Which meant avoiding Tommy, ignoring Jack, and staying out of the woods.
Her eighteenth birthday came and went and she spent most of the night sitting in the dark at her window, watching the edge of the forest for the familiar flash of white that never came.
For a while, she thought that so long as she stayed out of the clearing, so long as she didn’t give the March Hare cause, everything would be okay. Everyone around her would stay safe. And as summer tipped into fall, that was true.
But then, one night a familiar wash of chills stole her from sleep. The remnants of a nightmare still wrapped around her like a spiderweb as she strained against the darkness. Her heart thudded, the house silent, as she slipped from the bed and moved to the window.
He stood at the edge of the yard, half hidden by barren branches. At first she thought the splash of dark against his fur was shadow thrown from the moon. But then as he stepped backward into the woods she saw that the shape of the stain didn’t change.
She swallowed, the sudden taste of tea, bitter and hot, clogging her throat. Along with it came the bright coppery memory of blood, wetly thick. Her heart tripped faster and faster as the March Hare retreated. The last she saw of him were the ears, no longer white but a dingier, tattered gray, pausing. Waiting. And then disappearing into the forest.
Without a second thought, she started for the stairs, but before she pushed her way outside, she hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder into the kitchen. In two steps she had their largest knife in her hand, and then she was racing across the yard and plunging into the forest.
The brittle fall leaves collapsed under her feet, a loud crunching swish in the night. Even before she reached the clearing she knew it wasn’t like ten years ago. She could smell the blood. It coated the inside of her nostrils, infiltrating her lungs.
This was wors
e than before. This was more. This was a massacre.
Eight Years Old
It wasn’t until she’d crossed from her yard into the forest a few days later that Cassidy admitted to herself that she was going to accept the strange invitation. Curiosity demanded it.
The path through the trees felt unfamiliar under her feet, the swath of fallen leaves and hungry brambles creating a new landscape for her to navigate. She was so focused on looking down that it wasn’t until she’d crossed into the wide sweep of grass that she glanced up.
She blinked, hard, thinking that surely her eyes betrayed her. But as she stood frozen on the cusp of the clearing, the scene before her remained unchanged. The table was there, as before, along with the half-rotted tablecloth and an assortment of cups and saucers.
Now, however, each stump around the table except for two—one at either end—was occupied. There were four of them, two on each side, and Cassidy recognized them instantly: the group of girls from down the street. The ones who’d laughed at her for her tea-party-themed birthday.
They did not laugh now. Nor did they breathe or their hearts beat. Even at a glance it was obvious that the girls were all dead. Cassidy knew she should be horrified. She should be screaming; already the wail of horror sat trapped in her throat, pulsing and ready to escape.
But she did not let it free. Nor did she allow her feet to turn and carry her home. Instead she approached the table slowly. In the center of it, steam clouded from the spout of a teapot and drifted lazily from the cups set in front of each girl.
This was a true tea party. Nothing about it imaginary.
Cassidy’s ribs ached at the force of her pulse, the thunder of it in her ears. It was impossible for her to swallow, and her breath broke through her lips in wheezing pants.
Her knees felt weak and so she allowed herself to sink onto her stump. In front of her, her apron sat folded and ready, the blue ruffle now an echo of the surrounding girls’ lips.
“Good day,” she whispered. Needing some sort of sound to break the moment open. And break the moment it did, because in response each of the girls nodded at her.
Choking, Cassidy fell backward off her stump, digging her hands and heels into the soft ground as she scrambled across the clearing. The girls replied by lifting their right hands as though in a toast to her. Four chipped cups dangled from four sets of limp fingers, steaming tea sloshing over the rims from the movement.
It was only then that Cassidy noticed the wires. They were thin and clear, like fishing line, and they draped from the branches overhead to wrap around the girls’ wrists and temples.
Turning the girls into macabre marionette puppets. A new thought struck in her gut as she traced the path of the wires up into the trees and down again, searching for the source of their movement.
She knew what she would find even before she laid eyes on the white ears. The March Hare watched her, his hands dancing in the shadows, causing the girls to shift and move. Teacups swinging toward their mouths and splashing them with scalding tea.
The sound came from somewhere deep inside her, a dark expanse she hadn’t known existed until that moment. It was not a scream or a wail, but laughter. And while it may have been edged by panic, it was filled with something horrid and grotesque.
The right thing to do would be to turn back and run screaming for home. Tell her parents and bring the police dogs to bear against the March Hare.
But Cassidy did none of those things. Instead she pushed herself from the ground and pulled the white apron with blue frills over her head. First, she curtsied toward the March Hare, who dipped his head in response, ears flicking forward and then back up again.
Then she took her seat at the table and slipped her finger through the handle of her teacup. “A very happy unbirthday to me.” She lifted a salute to the girls. Each one saluted her in return. “Exactly so,” Cassidy murmured in appreciation. The tea was delicious.
Eighteen Years Old
When Cassidy stumbled through the last of the trees, the scene broke open before her. Even worse than she’d expected. The fat moon overhead lit on a half dozen corpses thrown around the table, and whereas a decade before the bodies had been posed to give the impression of life, now death was apparent on every one of them.
Blood dripped from fingers and elbows, seeped through sweatshirts and sweaters. Throats were ripped open with long ragged gashes that practically severed head from torso. Eyes stared at nothing, mouths open and spattered red. Their deaths had been violent and gruesome.
As she took it all in, she couldn’t stop the words from whispering through her lips: “Off with their heads.” And again, just as she had a decade ago, she felt a dark-edged laughter circling inside her. She choked it back, but still a bit of it escaped as a whimper.
Unable to help herself, she crept closer. She recognized the faces—all of them from her class at school. Perhaps they’d been friends once upon a time, the way neighborhood kids are always forced upon each other for birthdays and holiday picnics, but now she’d call them nothing more than acquaintances.
In front of each sat a cracked teacup filled with beer, traces of foam still clinging to the rims. A keg lay on its side off to the edge of the clearing, its nozzle flipped open, slowly draining into the trampled grass. The scent of it added a sweetness to the air, rounding out the bitterness of blood.
She turned, eyes scanning for a flash of white in the trees. But there was nothing, only the distant crunch of leaves and snapping branches, escalating as someone stormed toward the clearing. Not the March Hare, Cassidy knew. The forest belonged to him, holding tight to every one of his secrets, including the sound of his movements.
Cassidy heard Tommy calling her name just as he came stumbling from the trees, pulling up short at the sight of the bodies. His face blanched, throat convulsing. “Jesus,” he breathed, pressing the back of his knuckles against his lips. He took two steps toward her and then hesitated, his panic-rimmed eyes dropping to her waist and going wide.
“Cassidy . . . ?” He swallowed. “Are you . . . ?”
She glanced down to find a wide stain of blackness across the hem of her shirt. It grew steadily outward, the edges a duller shade of gray, the moonlight having robbed it of all color. Confused, she quickly pressed a hand to her abdomen, as though needing to make sure her flesh was still intact. But as her fingers probed, she found no wounds. Only that she’d been leaning against the table, the fabric of her shirt soaking in the blood pooled there.
She lurched back, plucking the warm, sticky wet from her skin. “It’s not mine,” she quickly reassured him.
Tommy let out a trembling breath, his shoulders sagging with relief.
“And I didn’t do this,” she felt compelled to add.
His lips twitched in a smile, like even the idea of her involvement was absurd. “Of course you didn’t.” He said it so without thought that it set Cassidy’s teeth on edge.
With arms crossed, he circled the clearing slowly, keeping a steady distance from the table as he took it all in. It was several moments before he was able to control the ragged edge to his breathing, the shuddering of his shoulders. He kicked at the ground, shaking his head sharply. “So stupid. I told them not to do this.”
Cassidy blinked. “You knew?”
“I’d heard rumors.” He paused before adding, “With tonight being the tenth anniversary since they found the bodies and all.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.” She bit the edges of the words, keeping them short and sharp.
Tommy’s eyes flicked to the knife still clutched in her hand and then away. He rolled his shoulders, continuing his arc around the clearing. Placing the table between them. “They thought it would be funny to throw a tea party out here. Figured it would be ironic, I guess.”
Her stomach turned over and her neck flushed. It was just like with Jack, sitting on the table and t
oasting her. Mocking her.
This place didn’t belong to them, she wanted to shout. It didn’t even belong to Cassidy. It had always been the domain of the March Hare, his unending party to do with as he chose. She didn’t understand how she could know this so clearly and they could be so dense.
Nothing good ever came out of the forest.
Tommy cleared his throat and frowned. “This isn’t like last time.” There was hesitation to his voice, a cautiousness that hadn’t been there before.
Her back stiffened. “I didn’t kill them.” She said it again because she needed him to understand.
“I know.” His response was just as quick as before, but this time he didn’t meet her eyes.
Already Cassidy felt the weight of what would come next. It would start all over: the police, the media, the questions. They would probably bring the dogs again, the forest would grow flush with experts searching for clues.
The March Hare would be driven away once more. Or maybe this time he would be caught. Something seized in her chest. Not just at the thought of the March Hare being captured, but also at what it might mean for her if he was.
She realized, then, that silence had stretched between them and she glanced up to find Tommy considering her. He stood at the head of the table while she remained at the foot. If she sat, it would be like always: her usual spot. The only thing missing was the apron.
Tommy was the one to break the silence. “I used to follow you, you know. When we were kids and you’d go into the woods all the time.”
The momentum of Cassidy’s heart slowed, almost to a stop. “That must have been terribly boring for you.” Her voice was breathier than usual, strained. “All I’d do is sit here and have imaginary tea parties.”
There was a shift in his eyes. It made him look unfamiliar somehow. “I saw what he did to you, Cassidy.”
She inhaled, sharp. Her back crawled as though spiders skated over her flesh. “Everyone saw what he did—it was on the front page of the newspaper.”
Slasher Girls & Monster Boys Page 5
