“And then . . . ?”
I was done. My whole body was sore and tired, and I took that as a really good reason to get up and get ready for bed.
“And then nothing. She had all the bad town kids thrown in jail.” I sighed. “Happily ever after. The end.”
“Wait, Lexi . . .”
“What?”
“What about the doll?”
“Forget about the doll,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs, okay?”
Kasey’s bright eyes still drilled into me. In the darkness they looked strangely blank.
I stared at her for a second, and the doll from my dream came out of my memory: Your sister is crazy.
She took a deep breath. “What?” she asked, even though I hadn’t said anything.
“Forget it,” I said. “Come on. I’ll go first, make sure the coast is clear.”
No point in both of us getting in trouble.
Kasey waited at the bottom of the stairs. I opened the basement door and crept out into the hall.
All clear.
I opened the door slightly. “It’s fine, come up.”
Then I went to the kitchen, so if Mom came downstairs, we’d look innocent.
I got myself a glass of water, sat at the table, and slowly sipped it.
Five minutes later I noticed with a start that the glass was empty and Kasey still hadn’t appeared.
I went back to the basement door and opened it.
“Kase?” I asked.
No answer, just a rustling sound from the corner.
I took a slow step down, the blood in my veins suddenly electrified.
I went around the U with little chills running up my spine. A Kasey-size shadow was way back in the darkest corner of the room, near the long-abandoned tool bench, making clanking noises as it dug through piles of discarded junk. Werewolf, my brain said. Zombie! I snatched the flashlight off the card table and switched it on.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
My sister looked up at me, squinting into the beam of light. “Oh, hi.”
“Answer me,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I heard something,” she said, wiping her hands on her pants. “And then I . . . I thought I would see if I could find your ancestor report.”
“Why would it be down here?”
She shook her head. “I thought you moved your old file cabinet down here when you got the new one.”
“No. They’re both in my closet,” I said. “Now come upstairs.”
She started slowly through the sea of junk, using her left hand to steady herself.
“Are you holding something?” I asked.
“What?” she said.
“In your right hand.”
“No.”
“Are you . . .” I sighed. “Forget it. I’m going upstairs.”
The headachy, sleepy feeling was coming back. I wondered if maybe we had a toxic mold problem. As an afterthought I pointed the light at the pipes on the ceiling. Now that I was standing up, I was close enough to see the red marks for what they really were—
Skulls and crossbones. Dozens of them, stamped on sloppily.
Nice. So glad to know we’d been breathing poison air all night.
I climbed the stairs and went back to my spot at the kitchen table, drawing deep breaths to clear out my lungs.
Kasey followed me as far as the kitchen doorway. “Can you go get your ancestor report?” she asked.
“Why don’t you go get it?” I asked. “Look in the cabinet on the left, top drawer—eighth-grade history, Miss Cardillo.”
Kasey nodded, then looked sheepish. “Will you make me mac and cheese?” she asked sweetly, crinkling her nose. “Pleeeease? I’ll do the dishes.”
I shrugged. I was feeling a little better. “Sure.”
She took a second, concentrating on something down to her right side, something hidden by the wall so I couldn’t see it.
“What is that?” I demanded.
She froze and looked up. Caught.
“What’s what?”
“Whatever’s in your hand.”
“I don’t have anything in my hand, Lexi,” she said.
I stared at her, and she gazed serenely back at me.
Just to be a little mean, I clicked the flashlight on and shined it at her face.
And maybe I was just tired or something, but—
Her eyes . . .
They were green.
Vivid green.
“I . . .” I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Never mind.”
“See you in a sec,” she said, disappearing up the stairs.
A FEW MINUTES LATER Kasey came hippity-hopping into the kitchen with the report in hand, singing to herself. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and sat down.
She twirled a piece of her hair around a finger and flipped through the pages while I collected the dirty dinner dishes and put them in the dishwasher.
Somebody had to clean up. Mom would be content leaving them until the weekend. Dad might have done it when he got home, but it gave me something to do while Kasey read over my stuff and decided how much she could risk copying without getting caught.
“Mom’s grandma was born in Surrey?” Kasey asked.
“Is that what it says?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Then . . . yes.”
“Ooh,” she said, unfolding a big sheet of newsprint. “Your family tree is pretty.”
I glanced at it and remembered how the teacher was so impressed that she hung it on the wall. That was back when teachers still liked me.
“I’d better make a new one,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table and skipping toward the stairs.
Content with the clean kitchen, I took out a saucepan and filled it with water for the noodles. I set it on the stove and remembered that I hadn’t wiped off the table.
I went back to the dining room with a dishrag, and when I looked out into the hallway I saw that the basement door was open, just a crack.
Kasey must not have latched it all the way.
I started toward it.
As I approached, the door slowly opened a few more inches.
“Kasey?” I asked. Maybe she was messing with me. I’d heard her thump up the stairs, but she could have sneaked back down.
In theory.
I could hardly force myself to take another halting half step.
A cool puff of air seemed to move across my legs, and a faint, bitter smell drifted into my nose.
“Kasey,” I said in my best jokey voice, “present yourself.”
“I’m right here.”
I spun around to see Kasey looking at me from the kitchen doorway.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I turned back to look at the basement door—
It was closed.
“. . . Nothing,” I said. “I guess.”
“Come help me,” she said.
I went back to the kitchen table and sat down. She’d brought a shoe box full of pens and markers and a giant piece of poster board. One nice thing about a mom who works in the office supply industry, you always have plenty of art supplies on hand.
“You do the trunk,” she commanded, passing me a brown marker. I obeyed and found that drawing eased the fluttery, nervous feeling in my stomach.
“Sorry about what happened with Mom,” I said.
Kasey shrugged.
“That’s why I’m not ever having kids,” I said. “It sucks to have to pick between your job and your family. Besides, I can live without drooling rug rats hanging off me.”
She didn’t even crack a smile.
“Mimi’s mom stays home, right?” I asked. “And look how horrible Pepper turned out. So it’s just as well.”
Kasey sighed. “I don’t care.”
“So if you don’t hang out with Mimi, who do you eat lunch with now? What about Devon?” I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Devon was best known as the kid who could name ev
ery Star Trek episode ever made—including all the spin-offs.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kasey said, looking away.
A thought nagged at me. “Kase,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “That day . . . did Mimi try to . . . do something to one of your dolls?”
My sister’s eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Yeah, well, I did. And I’m the big sister.
Kasey’s eyes lit up.
“Look, time to put the noodles in,” she said, pointing to the pot on the stove.
The water bubbled enthusiastically in a roiling boil.
My hands immediately turned clammy and cold.
“Kasey,” I said, “I didn’t turn the burner on yet.”
Her face went white.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Kasey stared at the stove, then leaped off the stool and grabbed the pot by its handle. I staggered backward, thinking for a moment that she was going to throw the hot water on me. Instead she poured it in the sink and dropped the pot in too.
She turned and stared at me, but it was as if she wasn’t really looking at me. Like I was a stranger who looked vaguely familiar.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Kasey’s wide eyes got wider.
“Something really weird is happening,” I said.
I thought about the story, the way it poured out of my mouth without permission. About the basement door swinging open. The cloud of cold air in the dining room.
With a start I remembered the lights we’d seen outside the night before.
“What could it be?” I whispered.
Kasey wrinkled her forehead. “Lexi, don’t be mad, but . . . I think . . . maybe you’re just tired,” she said.
“No!” The burner! “The water was boiling and I—”
“Lexi,” she said, putting her skinny arm around my shoulder, “I turned the burner on.”
“But . . . when? Why didn’t you say something?”
She swallowed. “When you were in the dining room a minute ago.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“You need to relax,” she said. “You’re getting yourself all worked up.”
I glanced around the kitchen, which was lit warmly and smelled pleasantly of the spicy beef I’d just thrown away.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
“I know I am,” she said. “Now, sit. Finish the tree.”
I obeyed, feeling too bewildered to protest.
I don’t think I’m a great artist, but Kasey seemed enthralled by the lines I drew. She leaned forward, her chin on her hands, and watched me.
“You’re making me nervous,” I told her.
“Sorry,” she said, slumping back.
I concentrated on the silhouette of the tree trunk, plump and shapely, with gentle curves and little hollows. I drew a stub of a branch that had broken off, and another spot where a fresh layer of bark almost covered a gash in the side of the trunk.
I was vaguely aware of Kasey fidgeting across the table, making a click-click noise, and I could tell she was interested but trying not to show it.
Finally I sat up and looked at my drawing.
Wow.
Click-click.
It was totally different from anything I’d ever drawn. Usually I did well enough to get by in Pictionary— casual but effective line drawings.
There was nothing casual about this tree. It was covered in details. Even the drawing style was somehow different. The lines looked like they’d been drawn by someone else. . . .
Just like the story had been told by someone else.
Click-click.
And suddenly I felt sick.
Click-click.
I pushed my chair away from the table and looked up at Kasey. “STOP!” I shouted, scaring both of us. She paused midclick, and her eyes widened in distress when she realized what she’d been doing— Opening and shutting the back cover of my camera. Letting light spill in and expose the negatives. “I’m sorry!” she squealed as I yanked the camera from her hands and snapped the cover shut. “Lexi, I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t talk to me, Kasey!” I said. “Or I will be forced to murder you!”
I rushed out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
Kasey followed me into the foyer but kept a safe distance away, staring up at me, her mouth an O, her eyes red and streaming tears.
“I can’t believe you!” I called down to her, and thet I went into my bedroom and slammed the door.
Mom’s voice came faintly from behind her closed door. “
Girls, stop yelling. I’m trying to work!
” I let out an angry grunt and smacked my pillow.
A few minutes later I heard Kasey trudge by and close her door. I felt kind of bad, but not bad enough to go comfort her.
Let her think about what she’d done.
Alone.
I DIDN’T SLEEP WELL. Can you blame me? I kept having those falling dreams, where you jolt yourself awake just before you hit the ground.
After waking up and checking the clock every half hour or so, at 5:30 a.m. I decided to get out of bed. I’d be sleep-deprived, but at least I’d have time to work in the darkroom.
Walking to the tiny guest bathroom at the end of the hall, I tried not to think about my ruined film, which left plenty of mental space to think about all the other strange things that had happened the previous night. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled as I passed Kasey’s door, but when I reached the darkroom, a sense of calm washed over me. A sense of well-being.
As soon as I turned on the safelight (don’t be too impressed—it’s just a red lightbulb) and snapped the black curtain into place to keep light from leaking through the cracks around the bathroom door, all thoughts of boiling water and unstable sisters and absentee parents melted away.
A lot of people shoot digital pictures now, which is fine—it’s just not for me. To me, taking digital pictures is like finding something. But working with film is like making something.
Besides, I cherish the time I get to spend in the darkroom—away from my family.
It’s a pretty decent setup: an old enlarger (bought used from the junior college) and a table Dad and I built over the bathtub to hold trays of chemicals. Rolls of film and finished prints hang to dry on a clothesline behind the table.
What’s funny is that when we moved in, the tub was already dotted with chemical stains, and we found darkroom supplies under the sink. So somebody else had had the same idea once upon a time. I guess a house like ours brings out people’s creative tendencies. Maybe, in its own wacky way, Kasey’s doll collection could be seen as an expression of creativity, not just a passive consumerist obsession (which is what I call it when I want to get a rise out of her).
I rolled the film into the coiled silver cage and filled the cylinder with film-developing chemicals. While that processed, I carefully took my camera apart and cleaned the lens.
When the timer dinged, I unrolled the film and clothespinned it to the cord hanging over the tub. I turned Mom’s old hair dryer to COOL and spent a few minutes drying the film off. It had to be totally waterless—handling it when it was just mostly dry or a little tacky would ruin the images.
Next I cut the long strip of film into rows of five frames and made a contact sheet. That means you lay the film right onto the photo paper (so they’re in “contact” with each other) and get a whole page of little tiny blackand-white photos. You use that to choose the pictures you want to make larger prints of. You can’t just print everything or you’ll waste a lot of photo paper, and photo paper is expensive. Not every picture is worth blowing up.
I hit the button and reached for the negative sleeve, then leaned down and held the negatives to the light— expecting to see a whole lot of nothing, after Kasey’s disastrous actions last night.
A huge breath I didn’t know I’d been holding escaped from my lungs.
They weren’t ruined.
<
br /> I got a piece of photo paper out from the triple-sealed black bag under the sink and set the page of negatives down directly on it, then hit the expose button. The light shined on them for a few seconds, then went off. I grabbed the paper and dropped it into the first tray of chemicals—the developer, which is where the images start to show up on the paper. I love watching this stage, seeing what comes out first.
I lifted the contact sheet out of the developer and put it in the next tray, the stop bath, which stops the emulsion from reacting to the developer chemicals. From there they go into the fixer, which gets rid of any extra light-sensitive materials left on the paper, and from there they go into a tray of cold water. Then they get inspected by me with my little magnifying glass.
I set them on the enlarger and turned the timer as far as it would go. I leaned in to look at the photos.
They were beautiful. You could see black sky, a big white moon, and the pinpricks of tiny stars. The house loomed in the foreground, glowing a kind of milky gray. The whole thing was slightly hazy—which I could assume was Kasey’s fault. Never mind that it was kind of a cool effect . . . I was still totally annoyed.
Finally I got to the pictures I’d tried to take of the strange light. The image was slightly shaky, thanks to my inability to stand completely still, but there was definitely something there. And the motion blur even helped a little.
Hmm.
I leaned in for another look, and noticed a little white dot in the frame—a circle of light that seemed to be floating near the house.
I’d cleaned my lens right before I went outside, but a spot of dust could have snuck in.
Well, it was a good picture anyway, and I could fix that white dot if I enlarged it.
The last couple of photos, the ones close to the end of the reel, were actually ruined. One picture was half clear and half overexposed—you could just see the bay window in the study and part of Kasey’s bedroom window before it faded to bright white. The mysterious glow near the tree was just barely distinguishable from the light leak. And of course, that was the only one where I’d managed to hold still enough that the picture wasn’t blurred.
I studied the blob of light. In this particular frame I could see that it wasn’t completely shapeless. It was oblong, and had stripes down the sides, and toward the top it got a little narrower and then rounded back out.
Bad Girls Don't Die Page 6
