by Chuck Wendig
“It really does get better, you know.”
She looks back. “If you say so.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ambien that night puts her down like an old horse: she doesn’t sleep so much as she falls into a six-foot grave and ceases to exist for a while. She’s afraid to find out what happens this time, but come morning, she wakes up in her bed the same way she went to sleep: no shoes on, no ice cream in her mouth, no spoon in her hand.
Down in the kitchen, there’s Paul—not a night now where he isn’t staying over, which doesn’t scare her as much as she thought it would, or maybe as much as it should. Something about it even feels comforting, which is itself uncomfortable—it makes Atlanta feel like she’s dropping her guard.
Part of her thinks: Maybe this is how normal people feel most times.
Like, they trust other people. Don’t figure on them being monsters.
Huh.
Paul is eating cereal. “Your mom’s still in bed,” he says.
“That’s kinda her jam,” Atlanta says. “Sleeping.”
He looks at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be getting to school?”
“Oh. Uhhh.” She almost tells him that she got suspended. But now there’s another weird feeling inside her—she doesn’t want to say that because of what he’ll think of her. Wait, slow down, why do I care what he thinks of me? She tries to shake it off. In her head she imagined three days of vacation—suspension always struck her as a pretty dumb punishment, like, why don’t they make you go to more school, weekend school, night school, whatever—but now she’s not so sure. So instead she goes through the motions: packing up her bag, grabbing a couple store-brand Pop Tarts from a box. “Good point. I’ll see you later.”
“You’re not walking, are you?”
She told Shane last night not to pick her up. “Shane’s my ride.”
“He should’ve been here by now.”
“Maybe he’s running late.”
“Smart money says you’ll be late, then. Come on.” He stands up, slips on his sneakers, grabs his keys from the table. “I’ll drive you. I gotta go to work soon anyway.”
“Paul, you really don’t have to.”
“I want to.” He smiles. “Come on.”
Well, here we go.
She lets him drive her, because what choice does she have? He takes her to school, and along the way she’s pretty quiet. He tries to make conversation—tries to open her up about the hunter safety class coming up this weekend, but she tunes out most of the conversation. Which makes her feel bad because Atlanta likes the class and, despite her every mental muscle screaming otherwise, actually likes Paul, too.
He drops her off at the school platform and he says: “Have fun at school,” which is maybe the dumbest thing anybody ever says to kids. She thinks she might have more fun at a gyno appointment.
So, as a response, she leans in through the passenger’s-side window and says, “Have fun being a fireman.”
And he gives her a bemused look. He chuckles: “The fireman thing isn’t a job, Atlanta. It’s a volunteer-only gig.”
“Oh. I just thought—oh.” She frowns. “Where do you work, then?”
“VLS.”
“The fracking people?”
“How’d you know that?”
She shrugs. “I know things.”
“I guess you do.”
“Is it safe? Fracking? I hear things.”
He waves it off. “All just to score political points. You hear it causes everything from groundwater pollution to . . . earthquakes, even, but none of that’s true. Safe as a school bus ride.”
“School buses are, like, superdangerous. Those things crash all the time, and the kids don’t have any seat belts.”
“Oh.” He shrugs. “Safer than that, then.”
But the way he says it, she’s not sure he believes it.
“Have fun fracking,” she says.
When he’s gone, she hops off the school platform. The rest of the crowd heads toward the school, but Atlanta—she swims upstream. Goes another way.
She heads toward the parking lot.
She looks around, doesn’t see what she’s looking for. By now most of the kids have streamed in through the doors, and the parking lot has only the stragglers in it—those with heavy packs over their backs, keys jingling in their pockets as they bolt toward the school so they’re not late for homeroom.
Atlanta hears someone coming up behind her.
It’s Bee who announces herself. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Atlanta says. “You’re rolling in here kinda late.”
Bee shrugs. “Morning sickness.”
“Oh, hey, really? I’m sorry.”
Bee leans in, smiling. “Nah, not really,” she says. “But they don’t know the difference. One thing the preggo-sitch has gotten me is a standing doctor’s note.”
“Cool.”
“What are you doing out here? Aren’t you late?”
“Got suspended.”
“No shit. Why?”
Sigh. “I sorta hit Mandy Newhouse with a lunch tray.”
It takes a second for the wave to break over Bee’s beaches, but when it does, she starts laughing—hard, then harder, then so hard Atlanta thinks she might fall down and puke all over herself. Bee wipes tears away and says, “That’s basically the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. Was it really satisfying?”
“Aw, man, you have no idea.” They laugh. Then Atlanta says: “Hey, you up for a senior skip day?”
“Like I said, standing doctor’s note. What’s up?”
“Hop in the car. You drive, I’ll talk.”
When she finds out where they’re going, Bee’s face goes gray. “Really?”
“Uh-huh. I didn’t see her car in the lot, which means she’s still not at school. So, I figure, let’s hit up her house, see if she’s home. If not, then we’ll just . . . I dunno, ding-dong-ditch or something.”
The car winds its way through the maze of minimansions that comprises Gallows Hill.
“I’m gonna stay outside,” Bee says, pulling up to the curb. She doesn’t even pull the car up the driveway.
“You can’t drive up?”
“Atlanta, please.”
Oh. “Oh.” Now she gets it. “I’m making you . . . I’m making you return to the scene. I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Man, I’m such a dummy. I’m sorry, Bee.”
“It’s cool. I can hack it.” But then Bee licks her lips and stares out. “I remember waking up over there.” She points toward a manicured flower bed next to a rocky waterfall feature. “I woke up hearing that little stupid waterfall.”
“We can go,” Atlanta says.
“No. You’re doing this for me. I’ll wait here. You go on ahead. See you when you get back, okay?”
“Okay.”
Ding-dong.
Nothing.
Ding-dong.
Foot tap. Tap, tap, tap.
She cracks her knuckles.
Chews her lip.
Rings it one last time:
Ding-dong.
Atlanta doesn’t hear footsteps, doesn’t hear voices, doesn’t hear anything.
But Samantha’s car is right there in the driveway.
Maybe, she thinks, they went away. Heaven knows the richie-riches can do that whenever they please. Just pick up and go. Vacation homes. The concept is hard for Atlanta to even understand. She’s moved around a whole bunch and most of the folks she became friends with didn’t get many vacations, and when they did, it meant packing up a tent or a small pop-up camper and hitting some KOA site to roast weenies and melt s’mores. Around here folks liked to go to the “Shore,” which is really just another way of saying “New Jersey.”
But these people here, they’re different. They have their home house, and then they have, like, extra places. As if life is one big Monopoly game. Collecting houses like they’re little plastic pieces on a game board.
People with houses to spare confuse the hell out of h
er.
Whatever. Nobody’s home.
On a lark, she tries the doorknob—
The door drifts open.
Huh. How about that.
She steps into the peachy foyer. Her footsteps echo.
No sounds. No footsteps, no housekeeper, no television white noise, no running dishwasher or air conditioner or heater. Samantha’s house is a dead space.
So Atlanta decides to poke around a little.
In the kitchen, she pops the big double-door stainless steel fridge. Inside are foods she’s heard about but thought half of them were jokes: almond milk (Ha ha ha you can’t milk an almond, she thinks); a kale-kombucha drink (it looks like something a swamp monster threw up); some kind of meat or fish wrapped up in a brown wrapping with a label on it that says BARRAMUNDI (okay, somebody’s just making that word up).
In what appears to be one of several living rooms, she sees a coffee table with a small “fireplace” right in the middle of it—looks like two glass windows with an arched, shiny burner right in the middle. In another room they have a TV on the wall that might literally be the same size as Atlanta’s own dining room table. You could take that TV off the wall, turn it over, and eat off it.
In the bathroom: towels embroidered with the word Guest. Towels so light and so fluffy she figures they must be made of something exotic, like koala or wombat or something. By the sink: a series of hand soaps and lotions, like she’s in a fancy hotel or something. The toilet has a heated seat.
A heated seat.
If that’s not just the tippy-top of Rich People Mountain, Atlanta doesn’t know what is.
She’s about to turn the light off in the bathroom when—
There.
A noise. A faint tap, tap, tap.
She listens, tries to pinpoint where it’s coming from. The ceiling, she thinks. Which means it’s coming from upstairs.
She knows the house well enough by now—and she goes up the same staircase as before, when she found Skylar in one of the bedrooms.
Up here, the tap, tap, tap becomes a different sound:
Drip, drip, drip.
Just a faucet gone leaky, she thinks. There, a humbling moment, a small connection between the rich and the poor: We all get leaky faucets.
Still, she figures, good time to poke around up here, too.
So she does. Heads in through bedroom doors. Each bedroom its own decor: all some shade of modern. All clean and spare and with bold colors and simple furniture. European, is how Atlanta imagines it, though she’s not sure what that means or why she thinks it.
She’s near now to the drip, drip, drip sound.
One door down.
She finds it cracked open and—
Even in the crack, she sees the human hand.
Draped over the edge of a soaking tub.
Someone’s here, she thinks. At first she doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to startle the person, and she turns to go and—
Whap.
Bangs her knee on the doorjamb.
She winces, rubs it.
In through the crack, the hand hasn’t moved.
Hasn’t twitched, even.
Oh, no.
No, no, no.
Atlanta knows not to do it, knows that her best course of action here is to turn tail and fly this coop quick as her little wings will carry her, and yet here she is, easing the door open with the flats of her knuckles.
Samantha Gwynn-Rudin is there in the tub.
Eyes staring out, empty as drinking glasses. Black marks banding her skin—face gone alternately pale and dark in striations. Her head is craned back over the porcelain lip of the full tub, her chin sticky with what at first Atlanta thinks is food but then realizes is what happens to food after you puke it up.
The tub is full. The faucet drips. And water drips over the edge on the floor. A puddle gathering on the white subway tile.
An empty pill bottle bobs in the water.
Other pill bottles lie scattered about the floor, too.
A few pills here and there. Blue, pink, white. Round, long, triangular.
Atlanta has to stifle the sound that tries to come up out of her.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Samantha, oh, man.” She tries to think: What now? What does she do? Call the police? How to explain this? Holger told her to stay out of trouble and now she’s here, trespassing. With a dead girl in a tub, a dead girl who she rather publicly had a fight with recently.
Maybe she can call the cops from the house phone here. It’ll seem anonymous. But maybe I’ve left fingerprints around.
If this is really a suicide, that won’t matter.
But if they see it as anything but . . .
They ruled Chris Coyne’s death a suicide, too.
But it wasn’t. Not really.
And here Atlanta’s prevailing thought is: Chris, I miss you. She misses him so bad it feels like she’s a doll with her stuffing ripped out. Last month or two she’s been able to keep that feeling tamped down, filled up, but here it comes roaring back. A tsunami wave about to overtake her.
Focus. Focus on the here and now.
Samantha was mixed up in something bad with . . . well, Atlanta doesn’t know who, but she can dang well assume it’s with some bad or worse people.
So, maybe the solution is to just leave. Someone will find the girl’s body eventually. The parents. The housekeeper—er, Delfina the house manager. Calling the cops now won’t make Samantha any less dead.
Atlanta backs out of the room slowly.
And downstairs, the sound of keys jangling, rattling.
Voices that start muffled and get louder.
Footsteps.
Someone’s here.
Shit, shit, shit.
Quiet as she can muster, Atlanta darts back down the hallway, near to the staircase—just close enough so she can see over the railing.
Two people coming in. People she recognizes not from meeting them in person, but from the portrait downstairs. The mustached dad, the sharp-angled mother. Next to them sits a pair of roller suitcases, Gucci. He’s crying. Blubbering and blowing his nose. The mother sighs, steps past him, says: “I’m resetting the alarm.” And then punches a code into it. The alarm panel goes green.
The mother heads toward the curved staircase. Begins her ascent.
Right toward Atlanta.
She quick ducks into the first open door, trying to be quiet.
But the mother stops on the stairs, halting her climb.
“Richard?” the woman says. “Did you hear something?”
But the man blows his nose again: honnnk.
The woman makes a hm sound, then keeps coming up the steps.
Atlanta peeks around the edge of the door frame, sees Samantha’s mother walking down the wall. Chin lifted, eyes forward. Such poise and grace. A kind of fierce and frosty determination.
The tall woman makes a beeline for the bathroom.
Atlanta peeks out.
Samantha’s mother pauses at the doorway, staring in at her dead daughter. She stands like that, stock still, for ten seconds, then twenty, just staring, mouth pulled taut like a fishing line—
Her hand flies to her mouth. A strangled cry comes out. Her knees start to buckle, though she never goes all the way to the floor. The tears come, then. Loud, shrill sobs. Her whole body shaking.
It goes like that for a minute or so.
Then the woman clears her throat. Stands tall once again. She steps into the bathroom and now Atlanta hears her blowing her nose.
Back out in the hallway, Samantha’s mother calls: “Richard? I need you to make the call. Richard?”
From downstairs, a bleated call: “I can’t. I . . . not now. You do it.”
“Jesus Christ,” the woman hisses under her breath. “Fine! Where’s the phone?” To which the man doesn’t answer. Atlanta only hears him weeping.
And here, the woman looks down the hall—
Atlanta ducks back into the room.
F
ootfalls, coming closer.
“Phone, phone, where’s the goddamn phone?”
Atlanta quick pivots, hides behind the half-open door of the room—
—just as the lights flip on.
Atlanta finds herself standing and hiding in what must be (or have been) Samantha’s room: It’s a teenager’s room, but only barely. Walls purple like smashed grapes—if Atlanta had to compare the room to anything, it’s what she figures a Wild West boudoir would look like. No art on the walls, though. No posters. Big bed, four tree-trunk-sized pillars anchoring the frame. Stereo. Makeup. Clothes on the floor. A bong on the drawer because, well, why not.
And next to the bong: the stun gun from the other night.
Samantha’s mother steps into the room.
And, like before, stands there, staring. Another sob rolls through her and again, she quickly stifles it—amazing, if completely crazy, emotional control.
She clears her throat, then begins looking around the room for the phone. Lifts a pillow. Lifts the blankets. Begins toeing clothes away.
All the while, doing a circuit around the room.
Closer and closer to Atlanta.
Now, she’s staring at the bong. The woman sighs.
Then she starts to turn toward Atlanta. The door starts to move, and the woman’s head starts to turn—
Atlanta’s hand darts out, grabs the stun gun.
The woman sees her.
Her eyes narrow. “Who are—”
Atlanta winces and sticks the stun gun right under the woman’s armpit.
Those narrow eyes go big as moons.
Atlanta flings the stun gun to the ground and bolts. Down the steps so fast she trips over her own feet, starts to pitch forward—her hand darts out, catches the railing, and she regains her balance without losing momentum.
She hears someone yelling for her—a man. The father. Richard.
Shoulder out, she flings open the door.
There, at the end of the driveway, the road is empty.
Bee is gone.
And once again, Atlanta Burns finds herself running through the yards and houses of Gallows Hill—past tall privacy fences, across yards so manicured they’ve got those dark bands and light bands made from a perfect mowing effort.
She tumbles out onto a side street—
