Don't Breathe a Word (9 page)

“Yeah, I’ll say that’s weird. Are you going to call her?” Phoebe asked.

“I’m going to do better than that. I’m going to drive up and pay her a little visit. See how she’s feeling after getting stabbed and all that. I’ve got her address.” Sam jumped up from the couch and grabbed the lone key and his worn leather bomber jacket. “Coming?”

“Damn right,” Phoebe said, practically beating him out the door.

Chapter 10

Lisa

June 7, Fifteen Years Ago

S
ometimes, when they rode together, Lisa imagined they were attached, two parts of a whole, a Siamese twin girl cemented together where her chest pressed into Evie’s back. Evie’s black Harley-Davidson T-shirt was damp with sweat while she puffed and grunted, wheezed along like some ancient steam train:
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.

You can
, Lisa told her with her own breath.
You can do anything you want, as long as you have me.

Evie didn’t have her own bike, but she was the stronger rider, so Lisa perched on the seat holding her feet up, her arms wrapped around Evie’s thick waist. Evie stood, legs pumping, feet cranking the pedals, her fingers tight on the handlebars, never touching the brakes no matter how fast they went.

They raced down Spruce to Main Street, Sammy beside them on his BMX bike, going up on curbs and sidewalks, popping wheelies.

When they got to where Main Street forked with Lark Ridge, they took a right, the dirt road following the stream out past the Tuckers’ farm, their wheels humming, crickets singing, the smell of fresh-mown hay in the air. Then it was right again, on the old fire road, which was little more than an overgrown dirt-bike trail. The air was cool and moist. Twigs lashed their faces. Lisa held on tight as they hopped and bumped over stones and roots, fishtailed through sand, dodged a fresh pile of horse dung. A quarter mile in, they stopped, parked their bikes against trees, and made their way down the bank to the whirlpool. It wasn’t really a whirlpool at all, but the kids called it that. It was a place where a curved boulder crossed the creek, stopping the water enough to form a deep pool. The bottom was covered in smooth polished pebbles and sand. Minnows swam there and, if you held still long enough, sometimes they’d nibble at your toes. Water striders skated across the surface; brook trout hid in the shadows. The mosquitoes and deerflies were god-awful, but as long as you stayed in the water, you were okay.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” Sammy called, peeling off his star map T-shirt, kicking off his sneakers, and diving into the water in his shorts. Lisa peeled off her shorts and T-shirt, stripping down to her bathing suit, which was blue and covered in a light print of fish scales. Evie called it her mermaid skin. Evie took off her heavy boots and belt with the knife. She wore her shorts and layered T-shirts into the water. She didn’t own a bathing suit. Her huge boy’s shorts billowed in the water and the shirts clung to her skin, the edges of her white men’s V-neck peeking out from under the Harley T-shirt. She was a lousy swimmer and spent most of her time crouched in shallow water.

Sammy dove down to the bottom and popped up, hair slicked back and nearly down to his shoulders now that it was wet.

“You need a haircut,” Lisa told him.

“And you need a reality check,” Sammy said, going under, then coming up again and spitting a long stream of water at her. “Fairies!” he said, once his mouth was empty. “How can you actually believe that?”

Lisa shook her head. “How can you not?”

“Because there’s no such thing as little green creatures with lacy wings. I hate to be the one to tell you, but Tinker Bell’s made up, Lisa. You can clap your hands all you want, but believing isn’t going to make them real.”

Evie scowled, her arms cutting the water in slow circles around her, making her own little whirlpool. “Maybe they’re not like that,” she said.

“Huh?” Sammy said.

“I’m just saying,” Evie went on. “Maybe they are real, but they’re not anything like what we think.” She plucked at the front of her T-shirts, pulling them away from her body, but when she let them go, they snapped back into place, sticking worse than ever.

“And what are they supposed to be like then?” Sammy asked.

Evie shrugged. “More like us, maybe. That’s what my mom told me once. That it isn’t like in all those cutesy little picture books—real fairies look like humans, only they’re not. They’re like our shadows, she said. Dark. Magic. Here one minute, gone the next.”

Sammy laughed as loud and hard as he could. Soon his laughter was mixed with the crashing of footsteps running down the bank.

Lisa turned. “Shit,” she said. Gerald and Pinkie. And they weren’t alone. Behind them were Gerald’s two best friends, Mike and Justin. And a girl Lisa sort of recognized from school—a friend of Pinkie’s named Franny. The girl was as pale as Pinkie and had braces.

“Let’s go,” Lisa said to Sammy and Evie.

“But we just got here,” Sammy whined. Lisa threw him a furious look.

“Yeah, stay,” Gerald called. “We’re all friends, right?” Then he turned to Mike and Justin and said something in his made-up, Minarian language. Lisa caught only the last few words, “Bach flut nah.” The other boys laughed.

Gerald could be moderately obnoxious on his own, but when he was around Mike and Justin, he always acted like a total idiot, showing off and saying dumb stuff that didn’t make any sense and was supposed to make him seem all impressive and super smartassy. It was ridiculous, really. Mike and Justin didn’t need to be impressed—it wasn’t like there was any danger of them ditching Gerald. They were airplane-model-building, computer-gaming geeks, just like Gerald. Three peas in a pod. But for whatever reason, Gerald had to be King Pea. Lisa smiled at this newly thought-up title.

“What’s so funny, Nazzaro?” Gerald asked.

Lisa shrugged. “It’s just that whenever you speak that language of yours, you sound all phlegmy—like someone with a bad cold clearing his throat.” She made her best cat-coughing-up-a-fur-ball noise to accentuate her point.

Gerald’s face turned red.

“Hi, Sam!” Pinkie called, waving so hard she nearly fell into the stream. She had on long sleeves, gardening gloves, and a pink baseball hat draped with mosquito netting.

“Hey,” Sam said, nodding in her direction. “You coming in the water?”

She shook her head.

Gerald laughed. “She only swims in pools. Can’t stand the feel of muck or pebbles under her feet. And the fish and bugs are way too much for her. She’s what you call delicate, Becca is. Aren’t you?” he asked, looking at his sister. “Then there’s all the diseases and parasites, right, Bec? All kinds of nasties floating around in there.”

“Oh man, tell me you haven’t been showing Becca your parasite book again, have you? That’s just cruel,” Mike said. He peeled off his T-shirt to reveal a pale white chest that was sunken in at the center, as if someone had crushed his sternum with a baseball bat.

“It’s fascinating stuff, really,” Gerald said, not taking his eyes off Pinkie. “Amoebic dysentery, giardia, cryptosporidiosis. Then there’s the bacterial stuff: cholera, E. coli, typhoid. That water there is teeming with tiny little organisms just looking for a nice warm body to call home.” He winked at Pinkie.

Mike gave Gerald a playful cuff on the shoulder. “Don’t mind him,” Mike said. “He’s just a little obsessed with the microscopic world. It’s all the research he does for our game. There’s nothing in that water that can hurt you, Becca.” With this, he took a running leap into it, Justin right behind him. Both boys squealed as they hit the cold water.

“See, Becca, it’s safe enough to drink,” Mike called, scooping some up in his hand and slurping.

“You’re going to be pissing protozoa,” Justin teased.

Mike took a second sip. “Amoeba, yum!”

“Actually,” Sam said, trying to sound older by lowering his voice, “most microscopic organisms are safe to ingest. The truth is, our bodies are full of bacteria all the time. We’ve even got E. coli in us, living in complete symbiosis most of the time.”

Lisa rolled her eyes. What was this—attack of the geeks?

Franny moved closer to Becca, leaned in, and whispered something in her ear. Becca nodded, then they both giggled, looking at Sam, then away.

Lisa couldn’t stand girls like that, no matter what age. Girls who tittered and breathed secrets in one another’s ears. Dainty girls who didn’t want to get dirty.

“Come on in, man,” called Mike. “You only feel like you’re freezing your balls off for the first thirty seconds or so.”

Gerald took his T-shirt off carefully over his glasses, kicked off his running shoes, and made his way slowly toward the stream, stepping gingerly over stones, as if his feet were ultrasensitive. He stopped at the edge.

“What have we here?” he asked, picking up Evie’s belt and knife.

Lisa took in a sharp breath. This was trouble. Bad trouble.

“Looks like a bushwhacker to me,” Mike called from the water. “Bach gloon neot?”

Gerald laughed and nodded. “Totally!” he snorted, pushing his dark glasses up his nose.

“Drop it!” Evie snarled from her crouched position downstream.

Gerald unsnapped the sheath, pulled the knife out, and whistled. “Quite a blade on it. Could kill an elephant with this thing, probably. And what is this down by the handle? A little dried blood? Christ, Stevie, what have you been cutting up?”

“Shit, man, maybe it
is
blood,” Mike said. “You know what they said about her great-grandfather, how he made some kind of pact with the devil and did sacrifices and shit out in those woods? Maybe Stevie’s just following in his footsteps!”

Gerald shook his head. “A pact with the devil? Nah. I heard Old Doc O’Toole was the
son of the devil
. He had powers. Could hypnotize people with his eyes. That’s what my mom said. Hell of a family tree you’ve got, Lisa.”

“Enough, Gerald,” Lisa warned, swimming toward him.

“I’m just saying. You might be in danger, Lisa. I mean if cousin Stevie is going around like a young psychopath slicing and dicing cats or something, wouldn’t you be concerned? Didn’t you know that’s how Jeffrey Dahmer got his start—cutting the heads off of dogs and cats and impaling them on sticks.”

“Eew!” squealed Pinkie.

“No way!” said Franny.

“Yes way,” Gerald said. “Totally true.”

“Put it down!” Evie growled. She was still crouched, her body a tight ball, the water up to her neck.

“Oh, and are you gonna make me? Not so tough now, huh? Now that I’ve got your big, bad blade of death here.”

Pinkie and her pale friend looked on in silence, both of them frowning. Mike and Justin were treading water, watching. Mike moved closer to shore, walking toward Gerald, water pooling in the well of his sunken chest. “Looks like a sacrificial blade to me, for sure,” he called. “I’d be careful if I were you, man. It might have some serious mojo.”

Lisa got to the bank and stepped out, moving toward Gerald. “Give me the goddamn knife.”

Gerald gave a disgusted-sounding snort. “Not much of a man, are you, Stevie? Getting your pretty little cousin to do your dirty work for you. She is pretty. Don’t you think so? I know you do, Stevie.”

“Ooh!” crooned Justin from the water. “Stevie has a thing for her cousin? That’s so sick!”

Evie stood up, arms rigid at her sides, hands clenched into fists.

Gerald hooted. “Nice swimming trunks!”

Evie’s green fatigue shorts hung down to her knees, her belly bulging out above them. Her legs were pale and covered with dark hair. The wet T-shirts clung to her so that you could see the curve of her breasts, even the outline of nipples beneath the bald eagle and flag. The words
AMERICAN LEGEND
were stuck to her belly, jiggling as she walked.

Mike and Justin laughed. Pinkie let out a little squeal, then covered her mouth and looked away, tittering. Franny did the same.

Evie moved toward Gerald, her eyes blazing, a low growl coming from the back of her throat.

Gerald flinched, then held up the blade, waving it through the air like a conductor’s baton or a magic wand.

“And I don’t think I’ve ever seen boobs like that on a dude before. Have you, guys? Maybe Stevie’s one of those . . . whatdayacallit?”

“Hermaphrodite?” Justin said.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Half girl, half boy. An It.”

Evie froze in her tracks, knee-deep in the creek. She crossed her arms over her breasts, her chest heaving as the growl broke apart and her eyes filled with tears. Lisa could see the outline of the key hanging from the bootlace around Evie’s neck. Evie’s fingers fumbled their way under the neck of her shirt, reaching for it.

It’ll save both of us one day.

Lisa had to look away.

“Here you go, It,” Gerald said, dropping the knife and heading out into the water, away from Evie.

“Asshole!” Lisa yelled after him.

Evie continued her slow walk to shore, where she stood bent over and dripping as she pulled on her boots. She sheathed the knife and looped the belt around her waist, buckling it with shaking fingers.

Lisa started putting her own clothes on as Evie walked past Pinkie and Franny. Franny gave her an awkward smile. Evie ignored it and began climbing the path up the bank.

“Come on, Sammy,” Lisa called.