Slice of Cherry

by Dia Reeves

  In the kinetoscope the minions stopped the wheel and let the tattooed boy drop to the ground. The flamingos converged on him and began pecking around the knives poking out of his body.

  “Bird food,” Fancy said. “Such a sad way to go.”

  Kit laughed and swiped at her sister’s face. “Real sad. You look like you’re crying blood.”

  “What?” Fancy scooted forward and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. “Crap! Evidence! ” The sisters scrambled out of the truck.

  “It’s their blood, not ours,” Kit said as Fancy fished out some wet wipes and scrubbed the door handle free of prints. “People’ll just assume something vicious climbed into the truck and wasted ’em.”

  “I don’t think you’re vicious.”

  The sisters whipped around and saw the scrawny boy still in the handicapped space, bleeding and sweating in the sun, his face swelling like a balloon even as they watched. He tried and failed to pick himself up off the ground; it looked like he had been trying and failing for a long time.

  “Great,” said Fancy. “A witness.”

  “Not a witness.” Kit went into bubbly-mode and helped the scrawny boy to his feet. “More like our best friend, right? Seeing as how we just saved your life.”

  He seemed slightly dazed, possibly due to having been kicked in the head several times. “I didn’t dream that, did I?”

  “Nope.” Kit let him lean on her as she helped him into the shade near the Escalade. “You got your ass kicked in real life, son. You should know better than to walk around town all alone. What if those transies had been a pack of cacklers?”

  “I know.” He looked chagrined. “I was supposed to meet my friends, but that’s not what I meant. You disappeared with those transies. I mean, where are they?”

  “Someplace they can’t hurt anybody anymore,” Kit told him.

  “Bill?” A group of people in tennis whites—or rather, tennis blacks—hopped the low fence separating the park from the parking lot. They were covered in scratches and blood and looked almost as bad as the sisters. But it was their friend they seemed concerned about. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Fucking transies, man,” he said, holding his ribs as he toddled into his friends’ collective embrace.

  “Better transies than cacklers,” said a girl with a blue head-band. “We got jumped by a whole pack of ’em on the way over here.”

  “See?” Kit told Bill.

  Bill’s friends looked at her and Fancy, at the blood coating them rather liberally. “They get y’all, too?” asked the girl with the headband.

  “They’re such a menace, aren’t they?” Kit answered noncommittally as she grabbed her sister. “Well, have a nice day, y’all!”

  The sisters left Bill in the care of his friends and pedaled home.

  “What if he tells his friends the truth, Kit?”

  “That we sent a gang of assholes through a door?”

  “And came back soaked in blood.”

  “Transy blood. Nobody cares about stupid transies, Fancy. And the people who will care, like their families, won’t believe the truth. That we took their kin to another world and stabbed them to death.”

  “What’s wrong?” Fancy asked, baffled by Kit’s tone. Kit had been so happy before, and now she clearly wasn’t. And that strange look was back.

  Kit sighed. “What happened in the happy place . . . it wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

  “Didn’t you have fun?”

  “Yeah, at first, but then . . . it felt like we were the bullies.”

  “Us?”

  “That last guy? He kept begging us to stop.”

  And now Fancy recognized the look. It was pity. Pity. For transies who had shown none to the scrawny boy in the park. “Next time we’ll use a gag,” said Fancy as pitilessly as possible, to show Kit how it was done.

  Fancy scratched at her blood-caked inner elbows, feeling grimy and itchy all over. “Look at me. If you’re gone pity somebody, pity me. How disgusting am I?”

  “You look fine,” said Kit. Pitilessly. At least she was learning.

  “We gotta figure out a way to do this that’s less messy. I mean, how can you stand it?”

  Kit regarded her, eyes big with surprise. “I’m not sure.”

  Fancy sat on the back porch at Madda’s feet eating peach ice cream and staring at the pictures in Budget Travel magazine. One photo in particular had caught her eye: a laughing woman splashing in the surf in Cancun. Fancy desperately wished she had a huge chilly body of water to splash in. It was so still and hot, she could almost hear the grass smoldering in the sun.

  A handful of peas landed on Fancy’s magazine. She looked up and saw Kit working her way through a mountain of pea pods and scowling at her. Fancy brushed off the peas and turned the page. She saw an even better photo of a man ice fishing in Russia.

  Another rain of peas interrupted Fancy’s reverie; little green dots peppered her ice cream. When Fancy just ate around them, Kit exploded.

  “Why does she get to eat ice cream while I’m sitting here working like a slave?”

  “You know she gets overheated, Kit,” said Madda calmly. “Don’t be mean.”

  The phone rang inside the house, and when Madda got up to answer it, Fancy poked out her tongue at Kit.

  “You’re such a faker.”

  “I am hot,” said Fancy. “It’s frigging summertime in Texas, stupid girl,” Kit informed her, and then stole her bowl of ice cream. “Everybody’s hot!”

  “Girls!”

  The sisters went inside and saw Madda at the kitchen counter packing a picnic basket with food: peanut butter, her persimmon preserves, half a loaf of homemade bread, and leftover chicken and pasta salad.

  “Kit, I need you to go to the square and deliver this food to the Darcys.”

  “Why can’t the Darcys cook their own food?” Kit asked, eating the remainder of Fancy’s ice cream.

  “Something crashed through their kitchen window.” Madda crossed herself. “They chased it out but not before it destroyed nearly everything, including their kitchen appliances. This is just until they get on their feet.”

  “It’s too hot to ride our bikes to the square,” Fancy said.

  “Fancy, you don’t have to go just because Kit is going.”

  “It’s okay if I die from heatstroke, just as long as precious

  Fancy gets to stay home and eat ice cream in the—”

  “Oh, fine!” Madda snatched the car keys from her pocket.

  “Take the car, but hurry back for dinner.”

  “We will!” promised the sisters.

  Kit hooked her arm around Fancy’s shoulders and hustled her outside, laughing. “I get to drive the Honda! I get to drive the Honda! After we drop this off ”—she tossed the basket into the backseat—“we can go to the record store.”

  “Or Mexico!” Fancy closed her eyes and imagined herself in the surf.

  “And be back in time for dinner? Maybe next time, mamacita.”

  Arriving at the Darcys’ muted the sisters’ good mood a bit. Stepping onto the lawn was like stepping into a war zone. The lower wall of the two-story house was punched through, as though a car had driven out of it. The sisters could see the remains of the kitchen from the yard. A hairy six-legged beast was strung up in the tulip tree near the walkway, dripping yellow blood into the grass. Fancy assumed that was what had burst out of the house, though it didn’t look strong enough or big enough to have caused so much damage.

  They found a woman near the tree thanking everyone and falling all over herself in gratitude. She was very teary, but Fancy couldn’t tell what was setting her off: her destroyed house, the outpouring of help she was receiving from her neighbors, or the creature that had been hanged in her tree. “It’s so barbaric,” she kept saying.

  She got even tearier when Kit gave her Madda’s basket of food.

  “She sent her persimmon preserves!” Mrs. Darcy exclaimed.

  “I al
ways knew Lynne was sweet, thinking of my troubles when she’s got so many of her own.”

  She hugged both of the sisters. Her tears smeared against Fancy’s cheek, and when Fancy finally pulled free, the side of her face felt as though it had been licked.

  “Ma?”

  A girl near Fancy’s age, maybe a few years younger, wearing overalls and an engineer’s cap came forward to tug on Mrs. Darcy’s arm. “What is it, Jessa? Girls, this is my daughter.”

  “Hi,” said Jessa perfunctorily before tugging once again on her mother. “I’m gonna help Pop board up the hole in the wall. Okay?”

  “You are not.” Despite all the crying, Mrs. Darcy didn’t seem to be a pushover. “You stay away from all this dust and asbestos and who knows what all. You know how your lungs are. Now go get these girls a cool drink from the cooler out back.”

  “No thanks, ma’am,” said Kit as Jessa pouted. “We’re on a tight schedule. Madda’s expecting us back in time for—”

  “Kit?”

  Gabriel came up behind them, pushing an empty red wheelbarrow to a stop beside Kit. He was wearing a gold cross similar to the one he’d given Kit at Cherry Glade. Probably he had a drawer full of crosses that he passed out to silly girls like candy. He was wearing a T-shirt that read 1 timothy 1:15, some high-minded bit of biblical wisdom, Fancy was certain, but the look he gave Kit wasn’t at all Christian.

  Gabriel hugged Kit as though they were old friends, and Kit greatly disappointed Fancy by not punching Gabriel in the face for his presumption. Instead she just giggled like an idiot.

  “You were great in class yesterday,” he said. “Your jazz improvisation was the best one, just real natural.”

  “That’s because Fancy’s been making me listen to a lot of Depression-era crap lately.”

  Since Kit had referred to her, Gabriel finally acknowledged Fancy’s presence with a quick nod. “So y’all came to help Miz Irene?”

  “Yes!” Kit answered.

  Fancy elbowed her.

  “Just for a little while?” Kit was practically begging. “Just long enough to help haul some of this junk away?” Kit took her sister’s long-suffering sigh as an affirmative, and pretty soon Fancy found herself hauling trash in the hot sun, desperately wishing for an ice-fishing hole to fall into.

  A little while had turned into forty-five minutes, and after Fancy rolled Gabriel’s red wheelbarrow of broken house to the curb for the millionth time, cursing Kit and her hormones for the trillionth time, she heaved the wheelbarrow onto its side. It hit the ground with a cold, satisfying clang. She then went in search of Kit, and if her sister still wasn’t ready to leave, Fancy was fully prepared to drag her away kicking and screaming.

  Inside the Darcys’ house, Fancy went upstairs and, through the doorway of a spare room full of camping equipment, saw Gabriel kneeling over a girl on the floor. Kissing her. And the girl wasn’t Kit.

  Fancy must have made a noise because he looked up and said, “I have more kisses.” His voice made her skin crawl. “Plenty of kisses for you, too.”

  Fancy recoiled from the ugly expression on his face, ready to disbelieve she’d seen that level of ugliness on such a pretty face.

  Almost.

  Fancy ran downstairs and searched until she found Kit in the backyard with Mrs. Darcy. Fancy grabbed her sister and dragged her inside the house, Mrs. Darcy right on their heels demanding to know why Fancy looked so upset. When they reached the room where Gabriel was, he was no longer kissing the girl. He was pushing down on her chest.

  “Oh my God!” Mrs. Darcy screamed. “Jessa!”

  Before she reached her daughter’s side, Jessa started gasping and coughing, and Gabriel sat back. “Finally, kid. That took forever.”

  Mrs. Darcy squeezed her daughter to her chest. “What happened?”

  Gabriel said, “Mr. Darcy sent me up here to find a tarp, and I saw her passed out on the floor, not breathing.”

  “I told that girl to mind her lungs.” Mrs. Darcy gave Jessa a good shake. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “I just wanted to help,” Jessa said.

  Mrs. Darcy gave her another big squeeze. “My poor baby. We gotta get you to a doctor.”

  Jessa said, “I don’t need a doctor.” “Shut up!” Mrs. Darcy beamed at Gabriel. “But first thank this young man for saving your life.”

  “Thanks,” said Jessa shyly.

  He waved away her thanks, as modest and bashful as if he hadn’t just had his tongue down her throat moments before. While she was unconscious.

  “He’s a real treasure,” said Mrs. Darcy to Kit, who was also beaming at Gabriel. “I’d keep a good eye on him if I was you.”

  She took the words right out of Fancy’s mouth. Fancy understood now why Ilan was so mean to his brother. Gabriel was beyond weird—he was dangerous.

  “‘I have plenty of kisses for you, too.’ And he was looking dead at me when he said it.”

  Kit bumped Fancy aside with her hip and then mopped the bit of floor where her sister had been standing. “So what?”

  “So he’s disgusting, that’s what. Hitting on me while he’s making out with an unconscious girl.”

  “He was reviving her, not making out.”

  “Then why would he say what he said?” Fancy hopped onto the dining table, out of her sister’s way. She picked a strawberry from the fruit bowl, a breeze blowing in from the open door. Madda had left for work, and now that the sun was gone, it was much cooler.

  “He was probably just trying to freak you out,” said Kit. “I do stuff like that to people all the time.” Kit scowled at Fancy, who handed her the uneaten green part of her strawberry, expecting her to get rid of it. “Especially obnoxious people.”

  “I’m not the obnoxious one,” said Fancy, scowling right back. “Why didn’t you tell me Gabriel was in your music class?”

  “Didn’t I?” Kit’s face was carefully blank as she threw away Fancy’s strawberry remains. When she saw her sister reaching for more fruit, Kit pulled her off the table and jabbed the mop at her feet. “Stop snacking and go do your own chores. I know you haven’t even watered the garden yet.”

  “Fine,” said Fancy, her dirty feet leaving tracks on the wet floor. “Be that way.” She stepped through the back door and recoiled with a squeak from a girl coming up the porch steps, dragging a boy behind her.

  “Sorry,” the girl said, not sounding like she meant it, posing in the porch light like it was a spotlight. She was athletic and wearing a backless unitard and shorts, the sort of thing Kit would wear, only this girl had much better posture and infinitely more grace. “Are you Fancy?”

  “Who wants to know?” Kit answered, joining Fancy at the door.

  The girl pushed the boy in the back. “Go to the nice girls, Mason.”

  “Okay,” said Mason, and he came to a stop before them, docile as a sheep. A glazed look dimmed his eyes, but otherwise he looked normal: tall with brown, gel-sculpted hair and a rather homely face. Under his unremarkable jeans and T-shirt, though, was an amazing body—headless-statue amazing.

  Kit looked him over, appreciative but confused. “What is this?”

  The girl cocked her hip. “God, do you need me to say it? I want him dead. Right now.”

  FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:

  DADDY WAS LYING IN THE ROAD. HE WASN’T DEAD BUT HE WAS A BIG BLOODY MESS, LIKE A CAR OR TRUCK HAD RUN OVER HIM. HE WANTED ME TO HELP HIM TO HIS FEET, BUT I’D JUST HAD MY BATH AND DIDN’T WANT TO TOUCH HIM.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I can’t believe you want us to kill him,” Kit said, poking the boy, Mason, in the stomach. “He’s got such great abs.”

  The girl on their porch, the one who wanted Mason dead, put her hands on her hips. “It would be nice if you’d take this seriously. I don’t aim to be here all night.”

  Kit gave Mason’s abs one last poke before giving the girl her full attention. Fancy would have just slammed the door in the girl’s face—who needed to deal with that kind of att
itude?— but Kit always did have an unhealthy interest in people. “Who sent you here?”

  “Don’t worry,” the girl said. “I drove myself. And I parked down the road so no one would see me pulling up to your house.”

  “I mean how do you know about us? Did you get a letter?”

  “What letter? It’s all over town what you did for Bill, rescuing him from a bunch of transies. Transies who are now missing. So now I need you to make Mason disappear.” It was like she was ordering them to take out her garbage.

  Fancy and Kit looked at each other, communicating silently.

  All over town?

  Town schmown. No one can prove anything.

  Kit turned to the girl on the porch, and repeated it aloud to her: “No one can prove we did anything.”

  “What am I?” the girl said. “A lawyer? I don’t need proof. I know what I know.”

  Kit got right in the girl’s face. “That guy, Bill, was being beaten. Did you know that? We don’t make people disappear without a reason.”

  “Don’t give me that. You’re the Bonesaw Killer’s daughters. You don’t need a reason. Everybody knows that psycho stuff is genetic.” For a girl who thought the sisters were psychos, she seemed remarkably unconcerned about being alone with them. “But don’t do it right away,” she said. “Give me an hour to get to Ryan’s house, to see and be seen, and then you can do it.”

  When the sisters just stared at her, she huffed. “Do you want money? Here.” She rummaged through her hobo bag and fished out a wad of bills rolled together. “Four hundred bucks,” she said, “and worth every penny.”

  Fancy had to take the money because Kit had turned away from the girl and was poking the boy, Mason, in the abs again. His only response was to smile at her.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I drugged him,” the girl said impatiently. “It was the only way to get him here. His grandma died, and he was babbling about having to go out of town for the funeral. But I need this taken care of now. Tonight. I won’t be able to focus on the audition with this hanging over my head. Do you dance?”