It took me ten steps to cut the distance between us. I counted them. I also made them count. I walked with a swing in my hips that begged to be lingered over. He did.
“May I?” I asked, cocking my head and holding my hand out for his cup.
His brows pulled together, but he offered me his plastic cup. I brought it to my lips and took a swig. The sickly sweet scent of beer poured over my taste buds.
“Do I know you?” he asked in my ear.
“I don’t know. Do you?” I said coquettishly, and took another sip.
“You look familiar.” He squinted his eyes, trying to place me between the flashes of strobe light.
“Maybe it’d help jog your memory if my clothes were off?” I said this as though it were an invitation, not a jab. As though it weren’t the figurative tip of a blade poised at his jugular.
The corners of his mouth tugged upward. He motioned for his two friends to leave. They pounded fists together like they were the ones in on the joke and I was the one left on the outside.
“Did you say ‘clothes off’?” he asked when they were gone. His eyes were bright and shiny. He was thick around the neck and stocky from there down. He didn’t have the wolflike grin of Circus Master, but that didn’t stop me from hating him.
Watching me and doing nothing. Recording me for entertainment value. Did he really think those were crimes I could allow to go unpunished? Think again, Short One.
“Not here,” I said. I had to brush my lips against his earlobe so that I didn’t have to scream. I imagined that he had a clear view down the front of my shirt. That was okay, I figured, when all he could do was take it to his grave.
“Where?” he asked. He snaked his fingers between mine. They were clammy. Up close, he smelled like a sour mix of cologne and alcohol.
I leaned in close again like I was going to tell him. Instead, I used my tongue to trace his ear and felt him shudder. Without another word, I pulled at his hand, leading him through the crowd. I was so close. When we reached the door, a thrill raced through me.
As we stepped into open air, I felt another rush; it was Christmas morning and any moment now, I was going to get to unwrap my present.
Short One blinked. Compared to the party, the world outside felt muted. He dumped the contents of his cup in a bush and tossed it on the lawn. “Back to your place?” he asked. He was so presumptuous. Good, let him be. I wondered if he’d placed my face yet or whether he was too drunk to decipher where he knew me from. Or even worse, whether I’d been too unmemorable for him to care.
“My car,” I said. “It’s not far.”
He stared up at the dark windows. “We can use one of the frat brother’s rooms, you know. We don’t have to leave.”
I wrinkled my nose and tried to sound nonchalant. Nonchalance was sexy. “This will be better,” I said. “Trust me.” I allowed myself an air of mystery. Trust me. As though I had some grand plan fully designed around his pleasure. He must think that was how the world worked. A whole universe orbiting around him and his friends for the taking. That was okay, though. I’d be a good teacher. I had a lesson planned just for him. I tugged at his belt loop and he didn’t argue any further. He was so simple.
* * *
“WHAT’S YOUR MAJOR?” he asked.
Trees lined the end of the boulevard, enveloping it in a leafy canopy and blocking out the stars. I leaned into him, wrapped my arm around his waist, and played the part of a girl who wanted nothing more than to take off her clothes for a boy. I relished the feeling of control, the way that I could touch his arm and his skin would erupt in goose pimples or how I could bump into his hip and he’d make a satisfied noise and pull me closer. It was like pulling the strings on a marionette. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot and the closer we marched to his demise.
“Undecided,” I said.
He hummed approvingly. “I don’t know, either. I might blow this whole place entirely. I’m going to be a comedian. Like Conan or Jon Stewart or something. People think I’m freaking hilarious.”
“Is that right?” I turned into an alleyway, pinched between two buildings. I’d read the signs when I found the place. One was a faculty-only library and one was a church fellowship house. Both were empty at this time of night. The walls blocked out the noise from the road.
“Hey, where did you park?” he asked, looking around at his new surroundings. I checked over my shoulder one last time to make sure that no one had followed.
“Just down there.” I pointed. It wasn’t a lie. My car waited at the end of the back street. “This is a shortcut. Why? Are you scared?”
He chuckled. “I think I’ll be all right.” Of course he thought he’d be all right. Guys weren’t taught not to walk alone at night. Guys weren’t taught not to leave their drinks unattended. Guys weren’t taught to carry Mace or whistles or to consider carefully whether or not to fight back. That was his mistake.
He started after me toward my car. Puddles gathered into the alley’s seam. A few stray trash bags lined the way, spilling their guts onto the blacktop.
“You’re kind of freaky, you know that?” Short One said.
I smiled back at him. “You have no idea.”
Noise roared in my ears. My pulse beat wildly. I could feel my heartbeat all the way up in my eye sockets. Chaos ruled every particle in my body. A few feet from my car, I stopped. I turned to stare up at him. “Here,” I said softly.
He moved closer. “Here?” The corners of his eyes crinkled in confusion. In another life maybe he would have grown up to be a comedian. I nodded. I ran my fingertips up the back of his arm. His eyebrows raised. “Oh…” His voice was a rasp. “Here.”
Short One bent down and kissed me. His tongue was rough and his lips were dry. I kissed back, hard, until our teeth knocked. His hands felt for the bottom edge of my shirt. I let his fingers play with the hem. Slowly, I bent my right knee. I let my hand slip into the top of my boot. I pressed the hilt into my palm and slid it across my jeans.
Cool air tickled my belly button. He kissed me harder. Gently, I held his bottom lip between my teeth, just like I’d seen in the movies. Slow, sexy, and just the right amount of dangerous. Only problem: This wasn’t the movies.
I clamped down on his lip, biting through skin. My head swam with the taste of coppery blood.
He yelped and jerked away. “You bitch!” Anger flashed in his eyes. I saw my face reflected in miniature inside the dark fathoms of his pupils. I tightened my grip and aimed for the bull’s-eye.
He wouldn’t be watching anymore.
NINE
Cassidy
I knew it was too early from the moment that I woke up. My phone lay dark and silent on the nightstand beside me, the alarm clock still set. The first strands of dawn had begun to trickle ghostly tendrils through my bedroom shutters. Instinct told me to roll over, stuff my pillow over my face, and enjoy whatever bonus time I found myself with in bed.
But the overhead fan was giving me the chills and I noticed that I’d kicked my sheets to the foot of the mattress. No wonder I’d woken up. I shivered and sat up to grab the top edge of my duvet cover. Dark spots on the fitted white sheet underneath caught my eye. I leaned closer and rubbed my fingers into one of the stains. It smeared.
Outside my window, birds were beginning to chirp. As I adjusted to the light, I saw that the blotches were a deep, rusty red. I sucked in a breath. My cycle must have started during the night. I hadn’t been prepared. “Dammit.” I crawled off the mattress, clutching the oversized T-shirt I’d worn to bed to my legs.
But when I examined myself, I nearly screamed. Blood coated my hands. Smudged red fingerprints stained my shirt. I swallowed hard. It was so much. I patted my torso, my arms, my legs. I had to be injured somewhere. Nothing was hurting right away, though. Was I in shock? I rushed to the bathroom and locked the door tight. Breathe, I commanded. I stared into the mirror and saw that red flecked my cheeks and forehead. The whites of my eyes created empty saucers
in my skull.
I stripped my T-shirt off and kicked it to the floor. Still no signs of a wound, though many parts of my body were coated in blood. I turned on the showerhead and jumped in without waiting for the water to warm. The cold was an electric jolt to my system. I scrubbed my arms. Russet-tinged water streamed onto the white porcelain and swirled around the drain. Steam billowed up toward the ceiling’s air vent. I scrubbed until there was nothing left to scrub and my skin was pink with scratches, but otherwise, there wasn’t a mark on me. When the water began to scald me, turning my flesh from pink to angry red, I turned the knob and the cascade died. Soaking wet, I dried myself in a towel and changed into a clean pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and my old pair of sheepskin boots. I dropped the bloody shirt into the back corner of my closet and pulled the comforter over my sheets.
On the white paint of my bedroom door, I saw remnants of a red handprint. How did the blood get there if … if …
My heart thudded. I slipped out of my bedroom, careful not to make a sound, and padded down the hallway. A single droplet dotted the hardwood at the top of the stairs. My throat closed up. Gingerly, I lowered myself onto the next stair and then the next. Fear bloomed in my gut as I approached the landing, terrified of what I might find downstairs.
But as I entered the living room, then the dining room, then the kitchen, I found nothing out of place except that the back door was slightly ajar. On the bronze knob, there was another bloody imprint, barely visible. I wrapped my hand over it and twisted.
The morning in front of me felt dreamlike, the air cool, but swampy. Glancing once more over my shoulder toward the still-sleeping house, I ventured onto the dewy grass. My family’s backyard wasn’t fenced. Our home backed up to the greenbelt, a few miles’ worth of untouched foliage with crisscrossing paths for runners and hikers.
My sheepskin boots swished through the wet blades. At the end of our property line, I let my fingers brush against the thick leaves of my mother’s elephant ear plants. I’d helped her transfer them from the pots to the soil the first summer that we moved here. A few of them looked as though they’d been trampled. I frowned and bent closer to the ground. A patch of grass nearby was stained red.
Several feet after, I could see another streak of red and a curved path where the grass had been crushed, as though something heavy had been dragged across it.
The hour was still early. Fog hovered low to the earth. I followed the path of the red streak and the urge to run began to chew at my legs. The only problem was I couldn’t decide which way.
Morbid curiosity drew me farther. I ducked under a low-hanging tree, crossing into the greenbelt’s thicker foliage. I had to look more carefully for the signs of red now, for where the dirt and the leaves were smashed down together. I stumbled over roots and tangled vines until a small clearing opened up. There, I found a mound of freshly turned dirt. The smell of damp mud filled my nostrils. I stared at the embankment where the trampled path clearly ended.
I recognized the size and shape of the pile of dirt at once. It was a grave. Trembling, I squatted beside it and brushed the raised crest away until the ground was even. A bird took flight from a branch overhead and I nearly choked on a scream that didn’t come out. It’s only a bird, I told myself.
Then, call the police. That was my next thought. That was what I could do. Maybe what I should do. But I remembered the blood in my bed, on my hands, on my face, and hesitated. I stayed there, studying the earth until, after several long moments where my ribs pushed against the backs of my knees as I breathed, I dug my hand into the dirt and tossed away a clump.
Soon, I was on all fours, scrabbling in the ground like a dog. Only a few inches down, my mud-caked fingernails snagged fabric. I flicked away clusters of dirt until I’d uncovered a T-shirt and a torso. My mind struggled to recall the last thing I’d eaten. Whatever it was, it was slowly creeping the wrong way up my throat.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s okay.”
My movements became quick and sporadic as I hurried to excavate the rest. I pawed at the soil. My fingertips touched skin and hair and then it was finished. I sat back on my heels and covered my mouth with my hand.
There, lying in the cold ground, was a boy whose face I recognized. And he was now in a position that I’d found myself fantasizing about many times over the last few weeks.
He was dead.
I pressed the inside of my wrist to my lips and took shaky breaths, fighting to keep down the bile that was tickling the roof of my mouth. It was like I’d wished it to be true and now, inexplicably, it was. My tongue felt too big.
Dirt and blood coated the boy’s hair. His right eye was closed. A knife wound pierced the left eye socket. The remnants of an eyeball filled the hole like the whites of an undercooked hard-boiled egg. Violent, red-soaked gashes tore open the T-shirt. Too many to count.
Sunlight had begun to trickle down through the leaves. Silver glinted beside the boy. I reached down next to his arm and pulled out a serrated knife. I turned it over in my palm. The hilt was black with a metallic border. I recognized the small logo at the end as the same brand as my mother’s collection. Hadn’t she been missing one this weekend?
I felt my lungs deflate, sucked of oxygen like a plastic bag. Soon my family would be waking up. Soon they’d be wondering where I was. I rose to my feet and paced back and forth past the head of the body. Think, Cassidy. What should I do? I tapped my fingers to my forehead. Minutes spiraled away from me. I had no idea how this boy—this corpse—had gotten here, but I knew there was blood on me and there was a body merely yards from my house. I was a smart girl. Anybody that did the math would think I had something to do with it.
From the road, I heard the loud grumble of the garbage truck trundling up the street. The world was stirring. Quick decisions were the only kind I had time for, so I made one.
I began to push dirt back over the cadaver, then stopped. I patted down his shorts and felt underneath his muddy back for a wallet or a cell phone. Who was this boy? I knew his face. I knew what he’d done to me. But that was it. I wanted to know his name. Except he’d been stripped of his things.
Out on the road, there was the beep of a reversing truck. Never mind, I thought and resumed shoving dirt. I didn’t leave a mound. Instead, I packed the mud as tightly as I could over where he lay. I foraged for leaves and sticks and branches and placed them over the spot where I’d reburied the boy to camouflage it.
When I was finished, I studied my handiwork. The disguise was good, good enough to nearly convince me this had all been a nightmare and I was coming to after some bizarre sleepwalking incident. Or at least it would have been, if it weren’t for the knife cast in the soil nearby.
I picked it up and stowed it in the pocket of my sweatshirt before cutting briskly back into my yard. I shut the kitchen door and pulled it until the lock snapped into place. I slipped off my boots and held them in one hand so as not to track in dirt. Checking the wooden block where my mom stored her knives, I saw that one was indeed still missing.
A clammy fever swept over me, like cold hands had just wrapped around the back of my neck. I rinsed the knife under the faucet and stuffed it with the rest of the silverware in the dishwasher before returning to my bedroom to change for the second time this morning.
When I came back downstairs, Honor was eating an English muffin at the breakfast table. “What’s up with you?” she asked.
I’d changed into clean pajamas. “Nothing, just sick,” I said. The kitchen felt so normal now that it was filled with my sister and the sounds of our parents getting ready in their bedroom. My heart ached for normal. A wave of nausea swam through my belly and for a second, I really did feel sick.
“Since when?” She took a bite of her English muffin. A dollop of jelly stuck to her cheek. She smeared it with her finger and licked it off.
I went to the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of orange juice. The liquid sloshed inside and I hurried to hide my shakin
g hands. “Since this morning. Why the investigation?” I worked hard to keep the edge out of my voice and failed.
Honor shrugged. “I just thought you were turning over a new leaf or whatever.”
I glanced out the window, beyond the trees, imagining the horror that was hidden outside. My knees threatened to buckle. I needed to sit down.
“I am,” I said. “I’m just not feeling well, okay?” I snapped. “I’m allowed not to feel well. Even the president of the United States gets sick.”
She rolled her eyes and brought her empty plate to the sink. I held my breath as she slid the dishwasher tray out and placed it onto one of the clawed racks. “If you say so.” I ogled my sister, remembering how she used to draw me pictures anytime I had so much as a cough. Hello, new teenage attitude. “Have you told Mom yet?”
“Told Mom what?” My mom appeared from the dining room. She wore dark jeans and jeweled flats with a crisp white top. She sat her purse on the countertop and started digging through it. I nearly lost my composure when I saw her. What would she say if she knew?
I couldn’t bear the disappointment.
“Cassidy says she’s not going to school today.” Honor tossed her long hair behind one shoulder. I forced myself to remember that Honor knew nothing. This new mood of hers was probably just about those stupid pictures I deleted from her phone. I supposed I should be happy that my sister didn’t know what real problems were.
Mom stopped digging to look at me. A crease formed between her eyebrows and I recognized the return of the worried look, the one that held the smallest bit of mistrust and an even larger dose of frustration. “What’s wrong?” Finding her car keys, she dropped them on the counter. “Are you sick? Because you know if you can just wait it out there’s a three-day weekend coming up. Maybe you can catch up on your rest then.”
I pulled the sleeves of my shirt down over my hands. They were shaking even harder now. I hugged myself. “I think I’m coming down with something. Really, I just don’t think I should go today. Is that all right?”
Teen Hyde Page 7
