Bad Girls Don't Die (24 page)

It was wrong. It was dangerous. My parents wouldn’t be proud—they’d be horrified.

My hand felt along the wall for something to grab on to, to get the strength to pull myself back inside. I was distracted by the swirling roar of whispers in my head, scolding me and beseeching me to
Come play
,
Come play
,
Come play.
. . .

What my hand found was a small piece of metal, tied with a loop of ribbon, hanging off a tiny nail in the wall.

I grabbed the metal, and the whispers went silent.

With a burst of strength I hauled myself back inside and shut the window, locking it, and climbed back into bed. In the moonlight I stared at the object in my hand— a flat silver heart, cut in half with a smoothed-over zigzag edge. There were letters on it,
S
,
H
, and half an
A
, and below them,
M
,
E
, and the round back of what could have been a
Q
or an
O
. . .

Or a
G
.

When I woke up the next morning I would have thought the whole thing was a dream, except for the presence of the charm and ribbon, which I’d wrapped around and around my little hand and held on to like a talisman.

For years I slept with that heart under my pillow. I never really stopped to wonder where it came from or who it had belonged to. I liked it, on some deep level, and I thought, on the same deep level, that it liked me back. It was my lucky charm.

The whispers never bothered me again.

After eighth grade, when Beth and her mom moved away, I gave up on the concept of luck. If there was any such thing, I figured, I was getting the bad end of it. Better to reject the whole idea outright than to keep inviting bad luck to kick me around.

So I packed the charm in my treasure box of knickknacks and forgot it existed.

To put it simply, our attic is an abomination.

Box after box of old clothes, worn-out bed linens, and faded, ripped towels. My childhood toys, passed on to Kasey and then hidden away and forgotten. A few pieces of furniture covered in white sheets that glowed in the moonlight like phantoms.

It’s like a graveyard for household goods. It’s intimidating even in daylight.

As I stepped off the ladder onto the creaking floorboards, I took a deep breath, flicked on the dim overhead light, and looked around.

Just had to find my treasure box.

Which was in the attic . . . somewhere.

It was clearly hopeless. In the two years since I’d stored it, approximately eight million more pieces of junk had been shoved in front of it.

I plowed all the way to the back wall and found nothing. I moved Kasey’s old pink clock radio out of the way and reached for a box behind it.

The radio turned on all by itself. I nearly jumped out of my skin until I realized where the music was coming from. Then I saw that the clock was on—red numbers and everything—and the radio was playing, and all the while I could see the cord neatly coiled up around it. Not plugged in.

I spun around to see if someone was in the room with me, but I was alone.

The tinny twang of a pop-country singer poured out of the speakers, occasionally fading out under a wave of static, and without thinking, I kept my hands held out in front of me, as if the clock was going to fly at me and I was going to block it.

“
And though we may be apart, you’re always in my heart, so baby please come home. . . .
”

I stared down at the radio, afraid to touch it. What if I got a shock?

“Because home is where the heart is. . . .”

The radio switched off.

I stepped back.
Home is where the heart is.

All week that phrase kept popping up. Carter had said it to me in the car. It was in my fortune cookie. It was the title of the school librarian’s book. It was almost like someone was trying to tell me something.

Well . . . I
was
looking for a heart.

Home is where the heart is.

Home.

I looked around.

My eyes stopped on the old dollhouse, wedged between a bed frame and a stack of old boxes.

It was just a guess, a dumb hunch. I was embarrassed and a little irritated at myself for even considering it. But I walked over to the dollhouse anyway, and peered in the window.

My treasure box.

Home is where the heart is.

I knelt on the floor, the box lit up by a shaft of moonlight, and carefully lifted out each item until I came to a little velveteen coin purse. I loosened the smooth braided rope and held it upside down over my hand. The heart charm and its ribbon tumbled out and landed in my palm.

I went back down to my room and spent the next hour and a half staring at what had once been my most prized possession, trying to figure out how something I’d trusted so much as a little girl could be connected to someone who turned out to be so evil.

Mom’s car pulled into the garage at 11:50 p.m. When I heard her come up the stairs, I followed her into her room and closed the door.

I had a plan.

“Oh, Alexis,” she said, yawning, “what are you still doing up?”

“Can I sleep in here tonight?”

“Well . . . of course you can. Is everything all right?”

“Yep,” I lied. “I just need to turn off my bedroom light.”

I closed the door behind me and went back to my room. The heart charm was right where I’d left it, on the dresser. I debated for a few seconds, then tucked it into my pocket, switched off the lamp, and went back into the hall.

I almost ran smack into my sister. She stood in the middle of the hall, her body angled toward Mom and Dad’s bedroom, eyes fixed on the doorknob.

I froze.

Slowly, slowly, she turned to face me.

“Hey, sis,” she said, her voice soft and casual.

“Kase . . . is it you?”

Her face looked angelic in the soft gold of the hall light. “Of course it’s me, Lexi.”

“What are you doing?”

She looked around, then shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Well . . . maybe you should go back to bed,” I said.

Her lips pressed together in a pout. “See?” she hissed. “This is why I had to find a better friend than you. My
other
friend never bosses me around.”

We stared into each other’s eyes.

“I just don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” I said at last.

“Then you should be more careful whose bedroom you snoop around in,” she said, turning on her heel and stalking back into her room.

The door closed behind her, all by itself.

A
SUDDEN SHOCK OF BRIGHT LIGHT
hit my eyelids, jerking me out of my sleep. For a moment I wondered where I was, and then I saw the pale blue floral of the bedspread and remembered.

Mom stood at the window, dressed and made up, her dirty-blond bob neatly turned under.

“Sorry,” she said. “That was brighter than I thought it would be.”

I looked at the clock—7:12.

“I’m going in early today,” she said. “You’ll be all right getting to school?”

“I’ll manage,” I said, sitting up and swinging my feet to the floor.

She kissed me on the top of my head and hurried out. I heard her knock on Kasey’s door and then call a goodbye from the hallway.

I waited until I felt the rumble of the garage door closing after her and went back to my own room. I grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt (careful not to wear school colors again), then took the world’s fastest shower and ran down to the kitchen and swigged a cup of orange juice.

“Where’s the fire?” Kasey said darkly from the kitchen doorway.

I didn’t answer. For now she just seemed to be regular grumpy morning Kasey. I stuck my hand in my pocket and felt the smooth edge of the heart charm, suddenly wondering if it had been wise to bring it downstairs with me. If Kasey got too close to it, would she— would
Shara
—gain some evil power from it? Would she recognize it and demand it back?

What if it reminded her of Megan?

I let go and brought my hand out of my pocket.

“I have to run,” I said, rinsing out my cup and setting it on the counter. I grabbed my backpack from the bottom of the stairs and left.

I walked toward the school as far as the stop sign on the corner, then went all the way around the block and came back to my house from the other direction. I crept across the side yard and stood behind the overgrown bushes while I waited for Kasey to make her appearance. Surrey Middle started at 8:30, so she should have been out of the house at 8:15, but she came sauntering out at 7:54 and started down the street in the opposite direction from the middle school.

She held a stack of notebooks in her arms as she strode down the sidewalk, oblivious to anything around her.

Including me, as I followed a half block behind. I tried to stay out of her eye line, but I didn’t have to worry. She was hell-bound for her destination and didn’t even look behind her once.

I followed her the five blocks to the quaint little downtown shopping district, where moms with strollers and men and women in suits seemed to dominate the sidewalks. No one noticed my sister as she trudged up the stairs of town hall. I went in after her and just caught a glimpse of the back of her sweatshirt as it disappeared down a hallway.

“Pardon me, miss,” said a man sitting next to a metal detector. “Can I help you?”

“That’s my sister,” I said. “I have to ask her something.”

“She was here all day yesterday too,” he said. He waved me through the metal detector, and I darted through the crowds to see where Kasey had gone.

I found the long hallway and went all the way to the end, where there was a single door. The metal sign on it read HALL OF RECORDS.

By the time I got to school, first period was half over. I figured I might as well go to the office and get my late slip before Mrs. Anderson sent me. But when I told the secretary I’d been over seeing my dad at St. Margaret’s Hospital (for lack of a better story), she wrote me a pass without marking it in the book.

“You take care, now, dear,” she said, handing it over with a sad smile.

Between classes I stopped by my locker and felt a dozen pair of eyes on me. The cheerleaders were all staring warily from their row of lockers. They were clustered so tightly that I couldn’t see Megan.

But really, it didn’t matter. What could I possibly say to her?

I arrived at fourth period and sat in my usual desk at the back of the room. I was flipping through my textbook when I caught a flash of red and white out the corner of my eye.

“Hey,” someone said.

I glanced up to see Megan standing next to me.

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“Um . . . will you sit next to me?” she asked, playing with the hem of her satin cheerleading uniform.

I hesitated for a millisecond, wondering if the people around us were paying attention. It was long enough that Megan’s eyes flickered away self-consciously.

“Yeah, of course,” I said, picking up my bag off the floor.

I followed her across the room; she gestured to an empty desk.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Chloe sits there. She’ll move.”

I set my stuff down and got settled. Another girl in a cheerleading uniform, Chloe, came wandering over and exchanged whispers with Megan. Then she went across the room to my usual seat.

I looked expectantly at Megan, thinking she had a question or something.

She wrinkled her nose and gave a sad little tip of her head. “No real reason,” she said. “I just wanted to be around someone who understands.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out how to stop thinking about—”

“What? This sucks!” I looked up to see Lydia standing a few aisles over, glaring down at Chloe.

“It’s cool, Lyd,” I said. I tried to wave her over so I could explain, but she didn’t budge.

“No,
not
cool,” she said. “They took your chair.”

Everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, seemed to be enjoying the conversation.

“No,” I said. “They didn’t. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried,” she said. She drew up to her full five-foot-nothing. “I’m
pissed
. On your behalf.”

“Lydia,” I said loudly, because loudness is the only thing that gets her attention. “I’m fine. Go sit down. Leave it alone.”

“But I—”

“I
want
to sit here,” I said, and the whole class fell silent and stared at me. I figured, what the hell, and added, “Next to Megan.”

Lydia sputtered and sniffed and plunked down in her own seat.

I turned to Megan and rolled my eyes.

“Sit with me at lunch?” she asked.

This time I nodded right away, not stopping to look around and worry about who was watching or what they were thinking.

And as class progressed, I found myself actually looking forward to lunch. Not just because it was something new, but because I felt a connection with Megan. More than all the haunted house stuff. More than my crushing sadness over the circumstances of her mother’s death, and the circumstances of her discovering those circumstances.