by Micol Ostow
So that night, I just kept to myself, and waited.
DAY 4
THE FIRST REAL CHANCE I HAD FOR JULES’S LITTLE SURPRISE came the next night. Dad mumbled something about a poker game and tore out after dinner, peeling off down the drive like if he moved fast enough, he could outrun his own shitty soul. Mom tossed the takeout containers—tonight was crappy Chinese instead of crappy pizza for a fun change—and went to give Abel his bath, and then it was just Jules and me, her with some girlie romance book, the kind with loopy silver writing on the cover, as she sprawled out in the sewing room, buried under piles of fuzzy, pilling blankets.
I was pretending to read, flipping the pages of my beat-up paperback back and forth, but the truth was that the brunette had met a real nasty fate a few chapters back, in that elevator scene, and honestly, now it was all getting a little boring.
The story needed more blood, is what I’m saying. I hate being bored.
I was stretched out on the floor, my legs buried under a puddle of blankets so only the holey toes of my socks peeked out. Jules’s gift-thing was shoved under the couch I was leaning against, and she was curled up on the saggy cushions above me. The sofa was pushed up opposite a fireplace, and with the way the air was so clammy and cool, I thought a fire would have been nice, like I could even picture the orange glow of the burning wood shining out on us. A fire would go nice at Amity, I thought. But I was too lazy to make one, you know. That night, or any time later. That was kind of too bad.
I wrapped a hand around her leg and she gasped, startled. “Connor!” Her book hit the floor with a dull thud, missing me by an inch or two.
“I got you something.” I reached under the sofa and groped for the fuzzy thing, grabbed it, and pushed off my covers, standing. I thrust it at her, all hot and awkward all of a sudden. “It’s stupid.”
Her face twisted in that confused, surprised look she had, the one that was still happy, even with all of the what’s going on? underneath. It was a Jules face, one she mostly used with me. Seeing it gave me a small, warm flicker that didn’t come too often.
“What is that?” She reached for it, squealing.
I shrugged. “Stuffed dog. From the gas station. The quick mart, you know. Pretty stupid.”
Jules loved, I mean, just went totally bonkers-like for dogs. She never really got over it, you know, after Butch died. I always felt kind of bad about that, even though it couldn’t be helped.
Even though I never can help myself.
The dog, this little stuffed one, it was really stupid. It was small, like the size of an apple, or a little bit bigger, and its fur was white with longer black fuzz at the ears. It wasn’t squishy or nice, I mean—it looked and felt like something you’d buy at the convenience store even without counting the nuthouse-green T-shirt it wore, all printed in peeling silkscreen with the logo of a brand of wiper fluid across the front.
“I love him,” she said, mouth stretching wide like she meant it, truly. She kissed it on its fake-leather nose.
“Careful. It probably has fleas.”
She reached out the hand that was holding it and shoved the toy at my shoulder. “Grouchy Connor. You’re such a faker. Everyone knows down deep you’re just a big softie.”
Well, that wasn’t true. But I did have a soft spot for Jules.
“It was nice of you to think of me, bro,” she said.
I grunted. “You know.”
It didn’t happen often—and it especially didn’t happen with everyone. But every once in a while, you know, I could be normal. I could be the way other people are all the time. I could be nice.
Once in a while.
DAY 5
I WAS TIRED, LIKE IN THAT WAY THAT YOU FEEL ALL DEEP DOWN IN YOUR BONES, IN YOUR CUTS, like they say: dead tired, you know? And I for sure wasn’t ready to get out of bed. But it looked like I didn’t have much say in the matter.
“Connor.”
Poke.
Crap.
“Connor.”
“Okay! Jesus. Okay.”
Goddamn Abel. I clenched my fists, tight, the urge to strike making my teeth rattle.
He’s only six, I reminded myself.
The thought didn’t do too much to kill the twitch in my hands, but I pushed the impulse down as best I could. Tried to bring up that confused-happy face of Jules’s from last night again. Six.
I thought back to when I was six years old. That’s what Jules would have told me to do, what the counselors downstate would’ve suggested. Empathize was their word for it. And even if it didn’t exactly come natural to me, I could go through the motions well enough. When I felt like it.
Draw on a memory, they’d say. Find something real.
Six. There are things I remember about being six years old, sure. Some specific things, real things. Stuff I’d rather not talk about, mostly.
But, you couldn’t compare—I was never anything like Abel. Not even back then.
Probably a good thing for Abel.
I flipped to my side, away from the stark bedroom wall, and sat up, folding back the corner of my sleeping bag and squinting. What time was it anyway? That sunlight was blinding.
It took another minute or two, but when my eyes could finally focus, there was Abel—no big surprise—shifting back and forth, nervous and twitchy, at the foot of the bed. His pajama pants sagged at the knees so he seemed even younger than he was. Smaller. Vulnerable, I mean.
But that didn’t change the fact that he woke me up, on purpose. My temper flared, no matter how I tried to remember six years old and stuff.
“You know you’re not supposed to bother me, especially first thing in the morning.” That was something my brother learned early on. The hard way.
He opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“What is it?” I asked, louder. Why can’t you just SPIT IT OUT? I wanted to shout. I bit my tongue, almost hard enough to draw blood, like wanting to taste it, even.
“I’m hungry.” His eyes were round.
Hungry. That coppery blood taste in my mouth. It wasn’t real, I knew. Where did it come from? “Why didn’t you wake Mom? Or Jules?”
He shrugged. “I tried. Mommy wouldn’t get up.”
Well, fine. Sometimes that happened. Fair enough. She wasn’t exactly a stranger to the wonders of modern medicine, and if she took something to help her sleep last night, she was probably all six feet deep in the Valley of the Dolls right about now.
“And Jules’s door is locked.”
Now I sat up real straight, peering at Abel. He wasn’t the hardiest kid, you know—not the most resilient, I mean—but he wasn’t slow or anything like that. So him saying that Jules had locked her door—that was weird. Really weird.
Because none of the bedrooms in Amity had locks on their doors.
I’d checked right away when we first arrived. Privacy is important to me, for a lot of reasons, you know. The boathouse door wasn’t the only one constantly hanging half open. I knew the bedrooms didn’t have locks. But whatever the kid may miss here and there, I mean, Abel wasn’t a liar. He wasn’t lying now. I would know, too—I could usually spot a lie from ten feet away.
“Her door can’t be locked, Abe.” I swung around on the bed and stood.
“But it is,” he said, like, well, that’s that, which I guess it was to him.
“Nope. No locks,” I insisted, moving across the floor, out the door, and down the hall to Jules’s room. Abel padded after me. I could tell he was working up to one of his righteous fits for if—when—he was proven wrong. I was actually sort of looking forward to it. “Look.”
I reached out, grabbed Jules’s doorknob.
I twisted it and shoved my weight forward.
The doorknob rattled in my hand. But it didn’t turn, didn’t spring open like it should have.
Like it would have.
If it weren’t locked.
I had one of those rare flashes of annoyance at Jules. Mainly I was jealous she figured out a way to
jam her doorknob when I should have been the one to come up with that first. If I had, I’d be the one still asleep instead of standing, dumbly, in my sweatpants, waiting for the I-told-you-so smile to appear on Abel’s face.
But Abel knew better than that. He also knew better than to say out loud, Well? Though he was thinking it hard enough that it was all either of us could hear.
I glared at him. “I don’t know,” I said, running my fingers through my hair. “It didn’t have a lock on it before.” Because it didn’t. I’d checked it. I would have known. Would have seen.
I mean, I notice those kinds of things.
I pressed my index fingers against my temples and closed my eyes for a minute. Why was it so bright in the hallway? I opened them to see Abel grinning up at me. I wanted to smack him. Or worse. That sharp, metal taste filled up my mouth, again.
“I don’t know, Abel,” I said again. “Maybe it stuck in the humidity. Wood can warp in the heat, you know?”
But we both knew that was just some dumb explanation, like grown-ups make for things they can’t explain.
“Maybe,” Abel agreed, his eyes saying otherwise, and again I wanted to reach out and … something.
Something not good.
I tried to push the thought back.
“Go wash up.” I choked back all the ugly things I really wanted to say to him right then. “I’ll fix you some cereal.”
Anything to get out of that hall, away from Jules’s door and the way it was mocking me. I could’ve tried going through the bathroom to get to her—should have, maybe—but by then the bloody, coppery taste running down my throat was strong enough so all I wanted was to get down to the kitchen and wash it down with a glass of water, or something.
Abel didn’t move, and the urge to rage at him, to scream and lash out, it rushed at me again. It was just so bright there in the hallway. Like crazy-making bright. A person couldn’t be expected to behave rationally with that kind of, I don’t know, unearthly glow going on. “Come on.”
He balked. “I don’t want to.”
“Too bad.” Life was full of disappointing lessons, and I could teach him all about those. I didn’t want to spend one more second in that hallway. The sunlight streaming in from the stained glass at the end of the hall was like a laser. For a minute, I wondered if it could actually cut straight through me. For a minute, I thought that wouldn’t be so weird, so impossible, I mean, here in this place. “Go.”
He made a face. “The bathroom … smells,” he offered finally. “I don’t like it.”
Jesus. “It’s a bathroom,” I pointed out. “It’s not going to smell like roses.”
Abel shifted. “Not like … not like that,” he said. “There’s a … there’s a way, a way that it smells. Like … like something awful.”
Blood. On my tongue, in my throat, rushing through me like electricity. “It’s a bathroom.”
“It smells like something … bad. Like something wrong,” he insisted. “I don’t like it.”
The redness flared behind my eyelids again, and I actually, physically, felt my body twitch, pitch toward him, wanting to reach out, to twist and crunch and—
But that was an overreaction, what the school counselor back downstate would have called a distortion. Abel was six. Just a kid. All he was doing was behaving like a six-year-old kid.
It was a bathroom. It smelled weird. No big deal, right? There was no godly reason in the world that my nerve endings should be humming like they were exposed, like my skin’d been peeled back in one long yank, like I was standing here, in the searing light of this hallway, with my insides on the outside, raw and runny.
I counted to three.
“It’s just a bathroom, Abel.” I forced each word past the edges of my teeth. “Maybe the pipes are rusted or something. But you still have to wash up. Now.”
“I—” I could tell he was thinking about protesting again, but the look on my face must have changed his mind. “Fine.” He shuffled toward the bathroom like a death row inmate, shoulders slumped, staggering slightly.
I gagged and swallowed that make-believe bucket of blood back down.
I MADE IT MAYBE ALL Of TEN FEET DOWN THE HALL BEFORE ABEL SCREAMED, loud enough to rattle my bones and then some. Truly, the last time I could recall hearing a sound like that coming out of that kid was when he was four and dislocated his shoulder after he was caught messing around in Dad’s tool kit. Dad wasn’t too happy about that, don’t you know.
I froze in the hallway, thinking that his banshee-scream would probably wake the others, so I wouldn’t have to deal with him and his stupid breakfast after all. Or if he woke Dad, there’d be worse stuff to deal with than Abel’s breakfast. But even after a beat or two, no one came—weird, really weird—and holy God, the screeching wasn’t quieting down at all.
So I doubled back into the bathroom to see what was going on.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED TO FIND WHEN I GOT THERE—I guess I’d already decided that the godforsaken screaming was just Abel being a freak—so I for sure wasn’t prepared to peep into the doorway and see him crouched, tucked under the sink, rocking on the tiled floor, knees pulled up to his chest, bawling away.
“What the hell, Abel?” I asked, leaning down and reaching an arm out to pull him up.
He swatted me away and shrieked even louder. “I told you I don’t like it in here,” he gasped between sobs. “I told you.”
I grabbed at his wrists and dragged him to his feet. “Yeah, you told me. And I told you you were being crazy. So quit it right now.” I glanced around the bathroom. “There’s nothing in here to be afraid of. Unless you’ve got some hang-up about ugly vinyl shower curtains. So get over it.”
He rubbed at his snotty nose with the back of his hand. “It’s blood,” he muttered.
Blood?
I could still taste it in the back of my throat. The thing about blood is: it’s one of those real, tactile things that ground me, I’ve been told. And not in a good way. Blood made this moment, this situation, a little more interesting. Especially with the imaginary tang of it still coating my tongue.
“What are you talking about, Abel? Did you hurt yourself?” I reached for his hand again, but he pulled back.
He shook his head, real resolved-like. “Not me. Not my blood.”
“Where?” A look around the room told me he was either seeing things, or just plain lying. Oh come on. That voice inside me was real steady, real sure. Come on.
“The sink.” He kept his gaze on the floor like his head was glued that way. “When I tried to run the taps.”
I sighed. “It’s an old house, Abel. The pipes are probably rusty. What you saw was probably rust. Not blood.” Of course, whatever it was that he saw, it wasn’t blood. Of course not. Come. ON.
Never mind what you saw in the window that night, Connor.
Because I was different, right? I am different. The way that I see things—the things that I see—they aren’t the same things that normal people see.
“Look.” I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him so he was facing the basin, so he couldn’t look away, forcing his clenched fists back down to his sides. I took his face between my palms and swiveled it, enjoying—I have to admit this now—the pulse of his skinny neck tendons. “Look.”
I twisted the cold water tap.
For a minute, nothing happened. Like, nothing at all, not even that gassy little puff of stale air that coughs up when old plumbing gets goosed after years of no use. I’d been so ready for a thick stream of metallic liquid that the empty moment felt swollen, full-up with badness, or something like. I held my breath, fixed on the tap, wondering if it actually was blood that was going to come rushing out.
Wondering if I wanted it to be.
I exhaled slow, and then there was a giant, creaking groan, and a gush of putrid … sludge, that was really the best word for it, a brownish sludge that came streaming down in heavy chunks, filthy rainfall that was halfway between a liquid and
a solid, really.
Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t blood—blood wasn’t thick and clotted that way, I knew, not when it was running fresh—but this was repulsive. Completely disgusting, like last night’s leftovers run through the garbage disposal, taking a brief curtain call on their way to the town’s sewer system.
My stomach hitched, and I closed my eyes, trying not to react. Whatever was coming out of that tap was nasty, for sure, but it wasn’t blood, and I’d be damned if I was going to feed Abel’s little freak-out.
But … that smell … it was awful. That image of trash collecting in a drain came back to me, and I shuddered, my stomach flipping over again. The taste of blood was gone from my mouth and I actually wanted it back just then, like truly wished for it, is how bad whatever was coming out of the sink was.
All of a sudden, that image came back to me—a shotgun again, like the one I saw in that creepy half vision, half dream that first night. The one that appeared with the banging of the boathouse door, I mean. There wasn’t any banging in the bathroom—there wasn’t any sound except for pipes creaking and Abel bawling and the hiccupping gushes belching from the faucet—but I saw that shotgun just the same, and caught a whiff of gunpowder under all the stinking rot filling up the room. I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes, but it didn’t make the image go away.
“See?” Abel tugged at the hem of my shorts. “See what I mean? It’s blood.”
Oh, I saw all right. It wasn’t blood, but it was awful, reeking of decay and dripping with … I didn’t even want to guess. I could see it clear as I could see my own hand in front of my face. Clear as I’d seen that shriveled, stripped-down corpse—because, yeah, let’s just say it, that’s what it was, what I saw—in the window that first night.
But it still wasn’t blood. And I couldn’t let Abel know how, whatever it was, it was making me want to crawl right out of my skin. I was having another overreaction, and I couldn’t let it show.
