But this particular prostitute, although her hair was similar to Bailey’s, was about as opposite to Bailey Howard as opposite could be.
And everything this skanky harlot said and did ruined the vision he held in his mind of how things would likely develop with Bailey Howard.
“I’m ready,” she called.
He opened the door and went in.
The room illuminated with pale light that filtered in from the living room.
“Bailey?” he called softly, role playing, trying to make the best of it.
“Yes, Mr. Renly. Come to bed. I’m horny.”
Stuart Renly cringed. Bailey Howard would never have said that, he knew.
“Keep your mouth shut,” he told her.
“Yes, Mr. Renly. But before you close the door, I have a condom for you to wear.”
He cringed again!
Stuart Renly wished this woman, this whore, would simply quit talking! She was ruining his fantasy!
Ignoring her, closing the door, he whispered, “Hush, Bailey. Let’s just snuggle a while.”
“Your money, dude,” the whore said. “Do I need to stay awake for that?”
“Relax, Bailey. Everything will be okay,” he said, mounting the bed.
As soon as his face neared hers, she writhed away, turning sideways. “Man, go brush your teeth! Please,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take another whiff of your coffee breath! I’ll die if I do!”
Stuart Renly grabbed her by the hair, dragged her back to the middle of the bed, and began to choke her neck with his hands. Her knees came up defensively. She tried to scream. He plowed his knuckles into her mouth. When she tried to bite him, he worked his entire fist into her slobbery hole, practically jamming it down her windpipe. She twisted away, freeing her mouth, and he used her twisting momentum to flip her over and stuff her face down in the pillow. Repositioning his hands to the back of her neck, he cranked down repeatedly, like giving her CPR, until the small bones inside her neck cracked loudly and gave.
He caught his breath, inhaling deeply.
She hadn’t sprayed enough perfume on, he decided.
A few hours later, at two o’clock in the morning, he shoved her body under the bed.
Chapter 10
Casey Crawford arrived late with the sound system, so at 7:15 on Saturday evening Eric called Bailey with an apology and asked if she could drive herself to the barn.
Of course she could, she had answered.
She was brave and courageous, wasn’t she?
Yeah, right!
All day, she had felt physically drained, waiting around in anticipation of tonight. Eric’s picking her up and escorting her to the party had been her only solace. Now, the thought of having to walk into the party alone spiked her anxiety to a level that was almost debilitating. It was ridiculous and absurd, she knew.
Driving to the farm, she felt jittery.
Parking her car, she felt short of breath.
Walking to the barn, she felt she could puke.
It wasn’t until she stepped into the barn and saw Eric Cady, Brad Townsend, and Casey Crawford still working like a road crew, setting up speakers amongst bales of stacked and pre-arranged hay, that a sense of relief overwhelmed her.
No one’s here yet, she thought. I can handle this.
Eric helped her relax even more. He noticed her come in, set down a coiled power cord, and hollered something to Casey.
The volume in the barn came down a tad as Eric, smiling, made his way toward her standing in the barn’s entrance.
She thought he looked more handsome than ever, for some reason, at that moment.
“You look fantastic in blue,” he said.
“Thanks,” Bailey said, beaming. Partly, she beamed because Eric was smiling so brightly at her, and partly, she beamed because Jany had been right about the shirt. Jany had a knack for all things social, a knack which Bailey herself sorely lacked.
She slipped her hands into her back pockets so they might stop shaking.
Eric seemed fidgety, too, Bailey decided. But he was probably only nervous about getting everything working by 8:00 p.m., when the first Freddy flick was supposed to begin.
“I could use some help running power cords,” he said, “if you’re up for that kind of fun.”
“I can help,” she said.
She felt relieved to help, actually.
When she followed Eric over, both Brad and Casey greeted her warmly, but without stopping their work.
Eric handed her one end of an orange power cord.
“Drag this to that outlet there on the wall,” he said, pointing.
She backed toward it, uncoiling the cord as she went.
He took the opposite end to a big black box that sat on the wooden floor. The floor was dusty from the hay. The hay-smell in the barn was very pungent, but it was a euphoric smell, and Bailey like it.
Once she’d plugged in her end of the cord, she walked back across the dusty wooden barn-board floor to Eric, who plugged the female end into a black cord jutting off the back of the box. Then he flipped a switch, that lighted red, powering the unit on.
“What is that thing?” Bailey asked him.
“A subwoofer,” he said. “All the low-end comes through these, like the sound when Freddy’s right behind you. There’s another sub over there.”
One black subwoofer sat on the floor on each side of the barn. Four big speakers, raised on stands, surrounded the hay bails, aiming into the center.
“Will I be totally freak out?” she asked.
“Hopefully,” he said. “If you aren’t, I’ll feel like a sissy. I’ll be acting cool, but inside I’ll be a coiled spring.”
“You’re just saying that,” Bailey said.
“I wish I were,” he answered.
“If it makes you feel safer, you can stay close to me,” she offered. “You know how brave I am.”
“Believe me, I’m counting on it,” he said.
Bailey continued to help set up, mainly pulling cords straight, tucking them under hay bales, and plugging them into outlets. The work made her feel good, welcome and important to the evening, almost a part of the planning.
Clearly, that was how Eric wanted her to feel, too, she decided, because once the cords were set up, and the speakers and the projection screen were ready to go, Eric asked her to help with the arrangement of the hay bales. Soon, Eric, Brad, and Casey were all heaving bales according to where Bailey thought they should go.
It was an empowering delight.
They were still positioning bales when people began to arrive. Mostly guys at first, with Eric playing host at the door. Brad and Casey continued asking Bailey about bales, and treated her as if she were actually in charge.
It was a relief, Bailey thought, to be doing this, which was wonderful, as opposed to what she’d envisioned throughout the day, especially the vision of her walking into the party as Eric Cady’s date, and all eyes flashing to her.
That horror was so opposite reality that she shook her head in disbelief she’d even been worried at all.
Until Carla Cummings walked in.
“Oh, you found some slave labor, I see,” Bailey overheard Carla mention to Eric at the door. “I didn’t know Bailey Howard ever left her house. Wow!”
“Bailey’s my special guest,” Eric answered.
“No one told me this party was catered by the Chicken Shack,” Carla said wickedly. “Kudos, Cady. You know how to throw a party.”
“No chicken dinner tonight, Carla. Sorry,” Eric said.
Bailey seethed just looking at Carla. It was difficult to believe that any woman could actually embody enough viciousness to throw another person’s happy mood straight into the gutter of despair within one second of setting her trampy, cum-soaked feet onto the scene.
Bailey’s decision overcame her in a rush.
Screw Carla Cummings!
She was taking zero shit from Carla Cummings tonight!
Not toni
ght, and probably never again!
Because it wasn’t right, treating people like dirt.
Bailey imagined what Jany would do. She imagined what Jany would say. Use your assets, Jany would have told Bailey. Play your aces.
But what were her assets?
What were her aces?
She had but one ace, she realized suddenly, and tonight one ace was all she needed.
Eric.
Yes.
It was his party, and he had chosen her, Bailey Howard.
So she walked over confidently in her blue jeans, blue shirt, and blue shoes, and with her chin held high, but not arrogantly so, she linked her elbow with Eric’s and said to Carla, “Eric asked me here to protect him, because scary movies make him jumpy. So I’ll keep him safe.”
Then she squeezed his arm and looked up into his eyes fawningly. She kept looking at him, ignoring Carla, until his face broke with a smile he refused to hold off.
“That’s true,” Eric said. “I do get jumpy.”
Carla scoffed and said, “Well, te smell of chicken makes me sick. Yuck.”
Without glancing from Eric’s eyes to Carla, Bailey said, “This is an unnecessary question, Eric, but do you like chicken?”
“I do,” he said. “I love chicken, in fact.”
“That’s what I thought,” Bailey said.
From there, it took only a smile from Bailey to Carla for Carla to walk away.
Chapter 11
By 7:45 p.m., Bailey estimated there were more than fifty students in the barn, most of them jocks and clingers from Freemont High, most of them people she rarely spoke to. A couple of faces, she had never seen before, but she eventually figured out they were students from Clayton High, and they had come with Jackson the Sackston.
Tony Avery and Kylie Westin had been lingering next to Eric, and consequently beside Bailey, and Bailey thought Kylie was being especially nice.
Casey Crawford brought Eric a wireless microphone, so Eric could address everyone with a few basic party rules from atop a front row hay bale, which raised him even taller than he already was.
But first he said, “Where did Nancy Spielman go?” And when Nancy stood up on a bale, he said, “Come here, Nancy.”
She walked across the second row of hay bales, then hopped down and up again onto the first row where Eric was standing.
“What?” she said into the microphone.
Eric leaned over toward her ear and whispered into the microphone, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.” Then he made his tongue long and waggled it close to her ear.
Everyone laughed.
Nancy shied away at first, then blushed, then stood there.
Someone shouted, “Let’s see your tongue, Nancy!”
She showed it quickly before jumping off the bale.
It didn’t seem to Bailey that anyone really understood the reference Eric was making, until he explained it.
“That was one of Freddy Krueger’s most frequently quoted movie lines from the 1980’s,” he said. “For those who have never heard of Freddy Krueger, tonight you’ll experience the kind of horror flicks our parents grew up on.”
He raised a box set of movies for everyone to see.
Someone shouted, “Go Freddy!”
“That’s right, go Freddy!” Eric said into the mike. “I have all seven of the original movies here, and we’ll start with A Nightmare on Elm Street at eight o’clock. We’ll then cue up Freddy’s Revenge at ten o’clock, and then Dream Warriors at midnight, and so on, until the last person leaves. If we get through number four, I’ll be shocked.”
“All seven!” someone shouted.
From where Bailey stood, with Kylie Westin and Tony Avery on her left, and Eric Cady standing high on the bale to her right, she couldn’t see the shouters.
“It’s almost eight,” Eric continued. “Let’s all thank Casey Crawford for the audio setup, and Brad Townsend for the projector and gigantic screen.”
He motioned to the speakers and screen.
Cheers went up for Casey and Brad.
Bailey just beamed. She was already having fun. The party seemed almost like a pep rally, but thanks to the bales of hay and the wooden barn walls and the heavy timbers supporting the roof, this gathering lacked the ringing echo of a gymnasium.
Casey had a wireless microphone, too, and he added what he felt was an important note, saying, “Please keep all beverages away from the equipment. Thank you.”
“Other rules,” Eric said, “are as follows…”
“No rules!” someone shouted.
Bailey found it interesting that only the guys were rowdy enough, at this point, to be shouting. Most, it seemed to her, were trying extra hard to be cool. Certainly, she didn’t feel a compulsion to blurt out some random, useless thing.
“Number one,” Eric continued, “don’t toss the empties all over the barn. I’m not cleaning up your mess. There’s a recycle bin over there.” He pointed to the far left side of the large, open room that they were gathered in. “Number two, if you brought alcohol, don’t leave the property drunk. I’ll kill you myself.”
“Or Freddy will!” someone shouted.
“Exactly,” Eric said. “If the cops show up, you damn sure better tell them I didn’t know you brought it. I’m personally drinking peach-mango lemonade tonight, and providing the same.”
“Bullshit!” someone shouted.
Eric ignored that and continued on, saying, “No smoking in the barn. No drunks in the loft.” He pointed to the left side of the barn. “Over there, we have the Psychedelic Crash Pit, complete with sound-activated party lights and a strobe, for those who aren’t drinking and find Freddy Krueger too scary or too boring to watch. Please be careful swinging on the rope. That’s it. It’s now eight-oh-five. We’re late. Find a hay bale to sit on. Start the movie, Brad.”
* * *
“This is fun,” Bailey whispered. “I’m glad I came.”
“So am I,” Eric said.
“Me, too,” Tony added.
Eric elbowed him. “Shut it, Bony.”
Kylie told her boyfriend to watch the movie and leave them alone. That was nice, Bailey thought. She had firmly decided that Kylie Westin was a decent person. Certainly, she was beautiful on the outside. That went without saying. Time would tell if she was equally beautiful on the inside.
“I can’t believe Johnny Depp is in this,” Bailey whispered to Eric. “And look how young he is.”
“I’m pretty sure this was his first movie,” Eric said. “He comes last in the credits, as introducing Johnny Depp.”
“So far, that’s the most interesting part,” Bailey said.
She liked scary movies, but this one, like most of the horror films from the tail-end of the twentieth century, focused almost entirely on psychotic killers who slashed any nameless, random victim that came within his reach. Only the method of killing changed. In this case, a leather glove retrofitted with five razor-sharp knives.
Come on!
Where’s the motivation? Bailey wanted to know.
What happened to character development?
Mostly—and tonight illustrated this—the goose bumps rose because of the music. The low-end rumblings of Freddy’s furnace room, the eerie, chalkboard-scraping sound of Freddy’s knives on a handrail, the guttural chuffing and ripping open noises of wet torso cavities…all those sounds of music gave these genre flicks their horror.
Compared to books like Great Expectations, the storylines were weak, and it was difficult to care if someone lived or died when their best line in the movie was, “Hello…? Hello…? Is somebody out there…?”
Still, they were fun. And more importantly, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Johnny Depp’s first movie, in which he played a teenager named Glen, was going down in Bailey’s personal history book as the one that excused her for nestling closely on a hay bale in the dark in a barn with Eric Cady, a real teenager, a heart-throb who actually knew she existed, and liked her.
And
Bailey could tell now, sitting together with Eric in anticipation of another Freddy killing, that he was about to make some move. She could sense him fidgeting. Peripherally, she could see the change in his breathing rhythm, could see him swallow a lump of anxiety, and not because of the movie.
His fingers opened and closed slowly, scratching the dark blue cotton of his jeans.
Her ears were perked and strangely sensitive to any sound he made. She could feel his body heat against her shoulder. She could smell the cologne he wore, and she liked it. She wondered if he could smell hers. Of course, he can smell it, she thought. The only other fragrance floating in the air is the smell of hay, and fresh lilacs sitting atop a bale of hay would probably smell pretty good to a man. She certainly hoped so. Besides, if she could smell him, then she knew he could likewise smell her.
It was ironic to admit she was smelling him, she decided. But how could she help it?
And he was fidgeting more distractedly than before, she realized, especially those left fingers scratching the cotton of his jeans.
Johnny Depp was being dragged into his mattress now.
Who cared!
Her palms were damp with perspiration.
She clandestinely wiped her right hand on her jeans.
Then she reached forward just enough to take his hand in hers. Their fingers laced immediately.
He glanced at her sheepishly in the darkness, the flicker of movie light shining off his face as he smiled. At first, his smile seemed one of complete embarrassment, rather than complete relief, but then it changed to complete relief, and he exhaled deeply and with satisfaction.
And the whole time she watched his face.
Until he turned his head and smiled now with full brightness of perfect teeth, and he leaned over toward her and whispered, his breath peach-mango, into the bubble of her glowing happiness, “You’ve got guts, Bailey.”
And she said, “Yes, I know.”
And she truly believed it.
She truly believed now that she was courageous and brave…for doing that, if for nothing else.
Chapter 12
Creepy Teacher: A Psychological Thriller Page 6
