Die Smiling (11 page)

“I'll be starved afterward.”

“After what?”

“After you give me the welcome I deserve.”

“You got yourself a deal, Dr. Black.”

“Tell me about it.”

I was glad the talking was done for the moment, glad I didn't have to think about lifeless, staring eyes and smiles that dripped blood. Black could do that for me, just by his touch, and he was very good at it. Practiced, even, and at least for a little while, I didn't have to think about Hilde lying dead in the morgue, her mouth in a plastic evidence jar.

The older one couldn't wait for Saturday to come. She was so excited she could barely sleep. It didn't even bother her that Sissy was prissing around in the new tiara she'd won and talking about how pretty it was. The older one just tried to stay away from her and her stupid crown. Momma was taking Sissy to be photographed in her new blue sash and crown on Saturday, which would make it easier to slip away and meet the boy.

She waited until around two-thirty, then walked up the alley behind the houses, searching for the red gate. She found it without trouble, but there was no one outside on such a cold winter day to notice her entering the boy's yard anyway. She latched the gate behind her and picked her way carefully across the frozen grass. There was a pool house with lots of fogged-up plate-glass windows, and she stopped to look inside because she had never seen a heated indoor pool before. There was even a swirling hot tub and a great big TV to watch. She turned and headed for the back steps that led up into a large, glassed-in sunroom.

The boy had a really nice house, huge, and a lot newer than their old farmhouse, and it was painted a really pretty yellow color, almost like canaries. The sunroom was long and furnished with wicker chairs and sofas with orange-and-blue floral prints, and the boy was sitting in a wicker rocker beside an orange fireplace shaped like a funnel. Logs were crackling and snapping inside the grate. He unlocked the door and let her in, and she stood by the fire a minute, warming her backside.

“Here, give me your coat. I'm glad you wore that white shirt in case any of that bleach stuff gets on it.”

“You sure your mom won't come back and catch us?”

“Oh, yeah. She has double duty at the piano teacher's place so the twins can each get some practice in. And she wouldn't care, anyhow. She likes us to invite friends over. You wanna Coke, or something to eat? We've got some chips and onion dip, and stuff like that.”

“No.” Suddenly she felt a little nervous, and she looked around at all the expensive furniture and elaborate paintings with little lights attached to the frames and wondered what it would be like to have a momma who liked her to have friends over and took her to piano lessons.

“Dad's got some beer stashed down in the basement fridge. Wanna try some?”

“No. Momma'd kill me if she found out.”

“Screw your Momma.”

The older one liked the sound of that. “Yeah, screw Momma.”

The boy took her hand and led her into a real big dining room with an elaborate crystal chandelier and lots of other crystal goblets and bowls sitting around on glass shelves, but he stopped halfway to the living room and looked into her face. “She beats you, doesn't she? I saw some bruises on your neck once when I sat behind you on the bus.”

The older one nodded and was surprised when tears welled inside her eyes. She'd never told anyone that before; it was the deep, dark secret of their house. Even Stepdaddy didn't know what Momma did when he was at work. Somehow it felt good for someone else to know about it and look at her with sympathetic eyes.

“Don't feel so bad. My dad hit me once, too.”

“Really? Why?”

“I got mad and slapped my mom once when I was about nine, and he walloped me good. I sure never did that again.” He laughed. “I don't want to, anyhow, she and I get along a lot better now. I was just a stupid kid when I did it.”

She couldn't quite bring herself to laugh about what her momma did to her.

“C'mon, Mom keeps the stuff upstairs in her bathroom.”

The older one followed him through the house, looking around in awe at the wonderful place. It was really cool, beautiful, like rooms inside houses in the soaps she watched. Everything was all decorated pretty and everything was in its place, with lots of pretty plates sitting around on little wooden stands. The carpet was so deep that your shoes sank a little into it and was a creamy beige color, and she didn't see a spot of dust anywhere, not even between the banister rails. The house was completely silent, and something made her stop at the bottom of the steps and hesitate.

“Can't we do it down here somewhere?”

“Nope. Somebody might come to the door and see us.”

Upstairs, he led her down a long hallway and into a huge master bedroom decorated in pale blues and browns. The bed had four posters and was so tall that it had little miniature matching steps just to climb up to the mattress on. She stopped at the footboard and admired it.

“Can I sit on the bed?” she asked.

“Sure, lay down on it, if you want to. It's all made up. Nobody'll know.”

She climbed up the steps and sank down in the silky-soft brown satin bedspread. “This feels as soft as velvet.”

“Yeah, it's made out of silk. It's got velvet on the other side, though.”

The boy ran up the steps and took a big jump on the bed. It bounced her whole body right up off of it, and she laughed until he fell on top of her and held her hands imprisoned over her head.

“Hey, let go.”

“Oh, c'mon, give me a little kiss. I'm gonna get rid of your freckles for you. You owe me.”

“Uh-uh. Get off me, you're heavy!”

“Give me a kiss and I will.”

“No.”

“Then you'll just have to keep your freckles, won't you?

“That's mean.”

“Hey, you want the bleach stuff, or not?”

She wanted it, really, really wanted it, and she was pretty sure she wanted to kiss him, too. Her body was feeling kind of funny now with the boy straddling her hips. His nose was nearly touching hers, and she could smell nacho cheese and potato chips on his breath.

“C'mon, all I want is one little bitty kiss. I've never kissed a girl before, and I wanna see what it's like. You ever kissed a boy before?”

“No, and I don't think I want to.”

“Try it, you'll probably like it. You're old enough now. I bet you even got your period.”

“What's that?”

He laughed and rolled off her. “Your Momma hasn't told you about periods, either?”

“No, what is it?”

“I know what it is because of my older sister. It's when you bleed down there a little. It comes once a month, I think.”

“Uh-uh, you're lying.”

“You'll see.”

She sat up and looked down at him. He was lying on his side with his head cupped in his palm. He was smiling and looking up at her. She decided then and there that he was really, really cute. Almost like the guys she looked at in the teen magazines in the school library.

“Let me touch you there.” He pointed to the front of her shirt.

“Uh uh. You're being nasty.”

“Just once. Not even under your shirt, and we'll get the stuff out of the bathroom.”

She considered and decided it wouldn't hurt to do that. “Okay, I guess.”

The boy reached out and put his forefinger on her nipple, and she felt a thrill course down through her body. He removed it at once and smiled, and then he said, “I guess we'll have to get married now, huh?”

Laughing, he jumped off the bed and she climbed down and followed him, wondering what his kiss would have felt like. She knew lots of girls kissed boys behind the hedges in the schoolyard, but she never had. She never thought any boys would want her to.

“Here it is. Put this towel around your neck. That's what Mom does with the girls.”

She obeyed, and he took out a little applicator from the box and squeezed some blue gel onto it. “Okay, hold still. You got a few more than the girls, so we might have to do this a bunch of times.”

She watched in the mirror as he gently spread it around on her face. “Is it gonna burn?”

“Not much. You got to let it get absorbed for a while, then you got to wear a baseball cap if you go out in the sun, or anything.”

“I don't have a baseball cap.”

“Well, I'll let you borrow one of mine. Dad brings me a ball cap from every place he goes on business. C'mon, I'll show you my collection.”

They moved down the hall to his room, and when he opened the door, she gasped in surprise.

“Wow,” was all she could think to say at first.

“Like it?”

“It's a little scary.”

“Nah. It's just movie posters and stuff. I like this game, too, called Dungeons and Dragons. You heard about it?”

“Uh-uh.”

“It's fun. You know you can be a knight or a wizard, or a princess, stuff like that, and go on missions, and things.”

“Like King Arthur?”

“Sort of. Wanna play while that stuff gets absorbed in your skin?”

“Okay, I guess.”

His bedroom was large and painted dark blue and had all sorts of posters and pictures of dragons and castles and sword-wielding knights hanging around everywhere. But there were even more posters advertising horror films, like
Nightmare on Elm Street
and
Friday the 13th
and
Halloween
. When she saw that he had a Freddy Krueger costume, she smiled and remembered her vow to kill Sissy.

“Did you dress up like Freddy at Halloween?”

“Yeah, Mom and Dad had a big Halloween party for all their friends, and they got that for me to wear. I love it. Here, look at the glove with the blades for fingers.”

She picked it up. “These are real knives, aren't they?”

“Yeah. But I'm not going to use them on you.”

They laughed together.

“Have you ever seen
Nightmare on Elm Street
?”

“Yeah. Sometimes my stepdad watches those kind of shows late at night, and I hide on the stairs and watch them, too.”

“I've got all of them on tapes. We can watch them anytime you want. I love those slasher movies, you know, with all that blood and gore and stuff.”

There was an IBM computer sitting on a big desk and a large color TV that was on with the sound turned down. He also had a fancy stereo set and dozens of music cassettes. He had just about everything the older one had ever wanted.

“Man, your parents must have lots of money.”

“Yeah, Mom and Dad get us pretty much whatever we want.”

He walked over to a rack on the wall that held ball caps of every color. He tossed a green one to her that said
FLORIDA GATORS
in yellow letters. “Here, and you can just keep it. My sister brought me that last summer from Florida. She's gone over to Europe for a few months now to do some modeling. That's what Mom wants my little sisters to do, too. Be big supermodels.”

“You're really rich, aren't you?”

“Yeah, my Dad inherited a lot of money from his grandparents down in Miami, and now he's a doctor and makes a fortune in stocks, and stuff, too. That's why my Mom married him, 'cause he's so rich. He married her because she's so pretty. I've heard them say so but they laugh afterward, so I guess they're just joking one another. I'm gonna be rich someday, too. Me and my sisters will inherit all this, like my dad did.”

“We're not rich at all. My momma couldn't even buy me a Christmas present. Stepdaddy bought the other kids stuff, but not me.”

That got his full attention. “Damn. That's a bummer. Not even at Christmas, huh? I got that Dungeons and Dragons game for Christmas. I haven't messed with it much yet. Want to learn how to play it with me?”

There was a round table by the windows with four swivel chairs, and he sat down in one of them and she pulled up the one next to him. He took out the board and explained a little about how to play, and she listened, but she was really more interested in how long it would take to get rid of her freckles.

“You think any of my freckles will go away today?”

“Who knows? I doubt if it'll work that fast, but Mom just kept applying it until my sisters' faded away. We can meet here every Saturday when Mom's gone with the girls until you got it just the way you want it. We'll play games and listen to music and then you have to let me kiss you once in a while, too. That's payment for me getting you this stuff free of charge, but it won't be so bad, you'll see. Maybe we can be friends, and everything. Maybe you'll even like kissing and stuff. Okay?”

She watched his fingers turning pages on the game's instruction book, and she thought about the strange, sweet stirring she had felt inside when he touched her chest. She wondered again if she'd be as pretty as Sissy when she got rid of her freckles and if other boys would want to touch her like he did. Then she said, “Okay, I'll come here, but you can't tell anyone. You have to swear.”

“And you'll kiss me once in a while?”

She nodded, and he smiled and looked very pleased.