Wren’s burgundy lips were in stark contrast to the whites of her teeth. “Her. Keres.” She nodded at the illustrations pinned to the wall next to me. “Isn’t that the one you had your eye on last time?”
My focus was immediately drawn to the lithe faerie with her tattered wings, curved blade, and trail of dripping blood. “How did she get her name?” I asked.
Wren resumed sweeping. “Keres was the name for the daughters of Nyx. Legend has it, they were female death spirits and sisters of the Fates. That one’s my favorite. The black Ker, which meant Violent Death.”
I lingered over the beautiful portrait a moment longer. “I haven’t earned her yet,” I said. “So just the same for now.”
“Another line then?” She shook her head. “What is it with you? It’s hard not to take line drawing as an affront to my artistic abilities.”
I stepped forward and took a seat on the same black leather chair that I’d occupied on the previous visit. “It’s not intended that way. I’m saving her. For a special occasion.”
Wren shrugged and leaned the broom in the corner. “Aren’t you a little young to be out tonight?” she said, rolling her stool and equipment alongside.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m hardly a stickler about the rules, but you’re missing curfew.” My face must have read blank because she continued. “The county’s on lockdown again. Don’t you watch the news?”
“No,” I answered honestly.
The mosquito buzz of the needle switched on and she dipped the sharp end into the pot of black ink. “A boy’s gone missing again. And another one’s been found dead. This time they’re college boys, but I don’t think that makes it any better.” I clenched my fist just before the needle broke skin. “This place has seen more than its fair share of death, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.” I watched the ink bubble over my flesh. “Who gets to decide what’s fair?”
She paused. Her green eyes lifted and met mine. The door to the parlor opened and we both instinctively turned to see who was there.
Lena was brushing dark strands of hair from her forehead. “I got your message.” She held up her phone. “You shouldn’t even be out.” Her glance passed between Wren and me and I could tell she wasn’t saying all that she wanted to say. She crossed the room to us and stared down at my arm, the line on which Wren had begun retracing. She took a step back and gawked. When she spoke, her voice was a croak. “You’re getting a second one,” she said.
Wren wiped away the excess ink. I watched. As the darkness of the line deepened, so did my giddiness.
The surprise on his face. The sound of smashing skull. The spray of blood fanning out as though from a sprinkler system.
The line encompassed every bright point in my mind’s eye. “Yes,” I said, unable to fight the smile that was dancing at the edges of my mouth.
“There are cops everywhere.” There was a quake in her tone that told me she wasn’t worried the cops would haul us in for breaking curfew. She knew—or at least she guessed—the meaning of the second line and now the first.
“I tried to tell her,” Wren said. She pulled out a wad of gauze and taped it over the fresh tattoo on my wrist.
The thrill of the needle’s pain dissipated as the meaning of what Lena and Wren had been telling me crashed like a giant gong being beaten within five inches of my eardrum. I’d been stupid. So stupid. If cops were on the scene, if cops could be led to me, the end of my plan was in mortal danger, which in turn meant the remaining boys—California, Lucky Strike, and Circus Master—were not. I might never finish. There might never be justice. My throat squeezed like I was having an allergic reaction.
“How much?” I said, standing up too quickly so that the blood rushed from my head. Even I could hear the strangled note in my question.
Wren rolled her equipment back against the wall and stripped off her plastic gloves. “You can get me next time.” Next time. The thought was comforting even if Wren had no idea what she was saying.
Lena let out a quiet whimper. I cut a glance at her and she shut up.
“Definitely,” I said, rolling down the sleeve of my hoodie. Because there would most certainly be a next time. The problem had just gotten trickier to solve. Luckily, I was good at solving problems.
Lena followed me outside where the air was leaning on the side of warm and the first hints of cottonseeds could be caught in the breeze.
“I thought you wanted me to meet you.” Lena stopped me with my fingers on the handle of the car door.
“I did. I didn’t know about the curfew, though. Sorry about that. I shouldn’t have asked you to come.” I wasn’t the type to apologize, so I wasn’t sure why I was bothering now. All I knew was that Lena had chosen to be blind, but when Brody’s body turned up, she couldn’t pretend any longer. Not once she’d made the connection. I began to climb into the car.
She took another step forward. “You’re not going home.”
I hovered, partway in, partway out. “Yeah. So?”
She shook her bangs away. “Then why call me? Or better yet, why leave now?” The thing was, Lena didn’t seem angry or scared; instead she seemed like a girl whose boyfriend was breaking up with her.
You know something now, Lena, I wanted to tell her. You know something and I don’t want to have to hurt you, but I will … if you get in the way.
Lena had been useful. She’d been my eyes and ears during the day. She’d been part of my new ritual celebration at night.
When I looked at her, I saw the girl kneeling and crying on the asphalt and found a tiny cranny in my entire destructive being that wanted to save and protect her. But even more than that, I felt a sort of sisterhood with her and all the other girls on the videos. “I told you,” I said. “I didn’t know about the curfew.”
“Wait,” she said before I could close the door. “I know what you did. What you’re doing now.” White-hot fury passed over my face. Don’t threaten me. Don’t back me into a corner like an animal. Because despite the desire to protect her, despite the kinship, I couldn’t quit.
“Oh?”
Lena glanced over her shoulder, toward the tattoo parlor behind us. She hugged her frail arms around her body. “You killed them. Both of them. The boys that hurt me…”
“It wasn’t just you. There were others. Me for one.” My lips curled over my teeth as I wrestled back the memory.
“I know you saved me. You’re the only one who’s ever done something like that for me. Everyone else would have thought I deserved it. But you stopped them. I’m not going to tell anyone. You can count on me.”
I tried to read her face for any hints of insincerity, but couldn’t find them.
“Get in,” I said. “Before anyone sees us.” She obeyed. We sat side by side, the radio turned to low. “Okay, then tell me what you know.”
While I stared out the dust-streaked windshield, Lena filled me in on the news reports and the theory that a killer had come back to Hollow Pines County.
“I suppose that gives me a little less room to work with, then, now that people are paying attention.”
“What are you going to do?”
I leaned back into the headrest and closed my eyes. “Work faster, I guess.”
I listened to the sound of her swallow. “And how are you going to do that?”
I hummed as I thought. What I needed was to process in bulk. Like an assembly line. Or a fast-food restaurant. But processing in bulk meant they needed to be in bulk. Which meant—“You know anything about editing video?” I opened one eye to ask.
* * *
BOTH OF OUR faces were cloaked in the shadows of the school building, which completely hid the moon from view. I held Mick’s camcorder tightly in my grip. “I don’t know about this,” I said. An uneasiness had settled in my belly at the thought of entering Cassidy’s territory where I didn’t feel at home as I normally did in the dark, abandoned places of the city.
Lena fiddled wi
th a key ring and fitted it into the lock. “It’s fine.” She twisted it and wrenched the door open, propping it open for my entry with her elbow. “I’m here all the time.”
I peered into the high school auditorium, lit only by the glow of a few sparsely placed battery-operated emergency lights.
Inside, velvet curtains hung on either side of an abandoned stage. I kept my footsteps light. Rows of empty seat backs stretched upward on a steady incline. My teeth were set on edge. I peered up into the rafters where the sleeping spotlights hung, waiting. The school felt like her. Cassidy. It was as though I could feel her imprint now that I was inside, haunting me like a ghost.
Lena let the door fall shut behind her. Her eyes twinkled in the dark as if the stars had come inside with us.
My eyes began to adjust and I hopped up on the stage. I strode to the center and stared out at the imaginary audience, picturing what it’d be like to have a spotlight blinding me. “Look at you,” I said with a note of pride and trying to ignore the invisible presence of something other. “Breaking and entering already.”
The thought was attractive to me even in my discomfort, the idea that we were invading Cassidy’s space, taking over another piece of her life, or at least we could try.
She crawled up on stage after me, crossing toward the back where the set pieces of a play loomed like forgotten dolls. The mural behind her depicted waves of grain and an old windmill. Lena gleefully kicked back into a wheelbarrow, crossed her legs, and propped herself up to look at me.
“It’s, well, it’s a little bit sexy,” I admitted.
She laughed softly. “There has to be some perk to being a theater geek, I guess.”
“What play’s this for anyway?” I went over and lifted a sheet from a hanging clothesline. The laundry tag on it read Pottery Barn.
“Oklahoma!”
“Oklahoma?”
Lena quirked an eyebrow. “You’re not saying it with the exclamation mark. I can tell.”
Absently, I ran my finger over the fresh line tattooed into my wrist. The skin there still stung. “So you’re an actress? Do you sing?” I asked, exploring the set pieces. A wood facade stood on its own. Out of it was cut a window with tattered curtains that looked like old tablecloths.
“Hardly.” She crawled out of the wheelbarrow. “Lights and media specialist,” she said. “Fancy name for someone whose face nobody wants to see on camera.”
“I don’t know about that.” I grinned and flipped the viewer on the camcorder open and peered through the lens at her. Lena’s figure had a yellowish night vision tint to it. I hit the red button at the top and a caption on-screen popped up to read, “record.”
Lena ducked behind one of the hanging sheets and poked her head out. “What are you doing?” she squealed and disappeared under the prop. “Are you seriously recording this?”
“Say hello,” I said, moving around to the front of the stage to get a better angle.
She stepped out. A compressed smile pinched her cheeks. “You’re insane, you know that?” She cocked her head. “Hi there.” She waved and then suppressed a round of giggles with her fist.
“Do something,” I commanded. If we were going to be here, I wanted Cassidy to somehow feel it like I felt her. I wanted to exorcise her.
“Do what?”
“I don’t know. Something, anything.”
Lena hesitated, then cleared her throat. “To be or not to be…”
“Lame.” I lowered the lens. “Tell me something that nobody else knows.”
She shifted her weight. “Nobody?” Her hands twisted together. She stared off into the auditorium wings where a tangle of ropes and pulleys waited.
“I…” She started to say something and then appeared to change course. “Hate sleeping with socks on my feet. I can’t go to bed.”
I rolled my eyes. I lowered the camera to my chest so I could look at her dead on. “Something real,” I said. “Something for just us.” I raised the camera up again, nodded, and waited.
Lena looked off to the side wings of the stage and then, slowly, back at the camera. “Okay, then…,” she said. “I tried to kill myself last year.” I zoomed the shot tight on her pale face until practically all I could see were her eyes. I heard her sigh. “I took a handful of my dad’s sleeping pills and swallowed them all. Ten seconds later I realized what I was doing and forced myself to throw them all back up.” She looked straight into the camera. “Not too impressive, I know.”
“Why’d you do it then?”
“Because my mom committed suicide when I was little. I guess I just figured the same thing was probably in me, too. Bound to happen sooner or later.”
I walked left, and shot her profile. “But it’s not, then?” I asked, trying to imagine the Lena in front of me cold and lifeless with bluing lips.
“I guess I just don’t know yet. Like if you hadn’t found me that night. If those boys had … I don’t know. Maybe then … Maybe I’m just, like, waiting for my first big tragedy before I fall completely apart.”
I let the camera scan from her eyes to her mouth. She licked her lips nervously. She turned to me. Outside the viewfinder, I could see her roll her eyes. “Okay, not funny anymore. I feel like a moron. What is this, reality TV?” She walked toward me with her hand outstretched until it blacked out the screen.
“Hey!” I protested.
She wrestled the camera away from me. “Now let’s see who’s camera shy. Do something,” she said, mimicking me.
I held up my two middle fingers and walked back from her and then held them up to where the audience would sit, to the rows and rows of empty chairs. Somehow when I did this I felt like I was showing up Cassidy. A rush of power pulsed through me. I was here. I was invading her space. It was happening at last. I was taking over.
“Oh, that’s nice. Real nice.” Lena kept the camcorder aimed at me.
“I wasn’t made to be nice.”
“Hey, you called me lame.”
Then at once, Lena and I both froze. She lowered the camera. The whites of her eyes ringed her pupils. “What was that?”
“Shhhh … keep your voice down.” I listened. There was a metallic click followed by the whir of the air-conditioning starting up overhead.
My muscles unwound. “Just the unit clicking on.” I felt the flush behind my cheeks, radiating like a sunburn. My breathing was heavy. “Let’s go, though. We need to make sure we get this finished. We don’t have much time.”
She didn’t stop to ask why. Whatever I was, whatever we were, Lena had accepted it. She snapped the camcorder shut. “It’s this way.” I imagined her heart pounding beneath the thin sweater she wore and wondered if the possibility of getting caught made her wary or made her want to chase the rush, too.
I glanced once more at the stage, then followed Lena up the dark center aisle. We reached a short flight of stairs, scaled them, and found ourselves in a small glass room with a bird’s-eye view of the auditorium.
“This”—Lena plopped into a rolling chair and spun around—“is my domain.” She brushed her hands over the controls. There were two large monitors in the corner and a panel of switches and sliding knobs.
I took the seat beside her. “Great. Now tell me, what can you do with this?” I pulled out the memory card and placed it on the soundboard.
Lena took it and inserted the memory card into the side of the computer. She punched a few buttons and the screens lit up. She tilted her chin to stare into the blue glow. One monitor populated with the rows of thumbnails that I’d first seen in Mick’s room. This time, I told myself, I wouldn’t flinch.
Lena double clicked and the beginning of the video loaded on the first monitor with an editing bar along the bottom ribbon. I watched her face as the video began to play on low volume. Her forehead wrinkled. She chewed the side of her thumb and scooted her chair closer to the screens. “What is this?” She clicked to another clip and sucked in a sharp breath. “Am I on here?”
“You’re
in good company,” I said.
She followed up with more taps of the mouse and then she froze the screen and zoomed in on her own tear-streaked face. “What do you want me to do with … all of these?” she whispered. “Marcy, I’m not sure I like this.”
“I want you to make them come to me. All of them. Tell a story. Make them understand that if they don’t come, they all have something to lose and the whole world will know who they are. Oh, and I’m going to need to ship you a few things. That I order. Okay?”
I’d pulled closer to Lena as I spoke. She smelled sickly sweet, like overripe raspberries and Bath & Body Works lotion. I could hear the spit slide down her throat when she swallowed. “Okay.” Her breath tickled my face. “Okay, I can do that.”
She returned my gaze for another moment and then turned back to the computer and began a maddening flurry of keystrokes. She was possessed. It was like seeing a girl get sucked into a screen and disappear before my eyes. That was how entranced she was by the work. I watched her slice and cut reels of footage and rearrange them. She placed earbuds into her ears and replayed the bits until she made a decision about them. Occasionally, she’d twitch at what she was watching on the monitor, but mostly her face stayed neutral, businesslike.
I began pacing the room behind her. Late night hours slid into early morning. I leaned on the back of her chair and watched over her shoulder until at last she pulled the headphones from her ears and tilted her chin up to me. “It’s finished, I think,” she said.
I nodded and she pressed “play.” At the end, we had the story of three boys. Jessup Franklin, junior, “devoted” boyfriend, son of wealthy Silicon Valley parents, the one I’d called California. Alex McClung—the skeleton-faced, cigarette-toting Lucky Strike—senior, son of a respected professor at the university. Then there was the worst of them all. The face of nightmares. The smile with a forked tongue. Tate Guffrey, senior, former backup quarterback, son of a Dearborn congressman. Circus Master.
The faces flickered across the screen, each one prominently featured, zoomed in on, examined, and interspersed with taunts and jeers and girls. I was noticing that both Lena and I were missing from the reels when the final shot panned. It was Lena on her knees.
Teen Hyde Page 16
