Envy (Fury) (24 page)

She realized her hands were caked with frozen dirt—and they were still shaking.

“JD, I . . . don’t know what to say,” she said. Her mind was swirling; darkness clouded her vision, and she was suddenly worried she might faint. He’d followed her here? How long had he been watching? Had he seen her kill a snake? Call up to the heavens? Talk to Sasha Bowlder’s ghost? It was too much. “I’m so . . . ,” she sputtered. “Just please. Don’t . . . don’t tell anyone. This never happened. I was just—”

Anything she said would be too much. And so, in the same direction she’d come, she ran. Away from the graveyard, away from the dead snake and Sasha Bowlder’s grave. Away from JD. “Em!” he called. But she ran faster, and lost him.

•  •  •

Wrapped in a thick robe after a long, hot shower, Em sat at the kitchen table and rubbed her temples, staring at her journal. The page in front of her was blank. She’d spent the last hour trying to warm her shaking body and calm down—while scrubbing the mud from under her fingernails. The scene at the graveyard kept replaying through her head, but she couldn’t even get it down on paper. That poor snake. The blood. The dirt. JD suddenly appearing out of nowhere. She couldn’t believe he’d followed her.

He still cares
.

No. She wouldn’t allow herself to entertain the idea. Still, she wondered if he would call, check up on her. Or—
god, no—
tell her parents? It was bad enough that her grades were running parallel to her social status, sinking as quickly as she was distancing herself from her old life. She had nothing to show for her distraction and disconnection, other than a handful of tests and papers bearing the dreaded inscription
See me
. If JD told anyone what he’d seen, she would pretty much be written off as totally insane.

The doorbell rang. A shot of anxiety ran through Em’s whole body. She was home alone—her parents were both working their night shifts at the hospital—and while she had been happy for the solitude at first, she cursed it now.

Was it JD at the door, coming to harass her? Or (and she didn’t know if this would be better or worse), was it someone else? Ever since the Ali incident, when the blond Fury had shown up on her doorstep like a bloodthirsty stalker, unexpected visitors left her with a thumping heart and clammy palms.

“Hello?” she called out from the kitchen. She started to move toward the front door. At the last moment she took a knife out of a drawer and curled her fingers around its wooden handle. Better safe than sorry. And if it was JD, well . . . he already thought she was out of her mind.

“Hello?” She said it again as she got closer to the door.

“Emily? Winters? It’s Eileen Singer. Chase’s mom.” Em lost her grip on the knife, and it clattered to the floor.

“Mrs. Singer?” Em fumbled with the deadbolt.

“Are you—Emily Winters?” Mrs. Singer was wiry, small, and wrinkled: once beautiful, now raw. Em had only seen her a few times. She spoke with a tinge of the Maine accent that one rarely heard in the southern part of the state—drawing out certain sounds and narrowing her mouth around others.

“That’s me.” She motioned to her robe. “I, um, just got out of the shower,” she added, as though she had to explain her ensemble to Chase’s mom.

“I had to look you up,” Mrs. Singer said, sounding relieved.

“It’s, um, it’s nice to see you, Mrs. Singer,” Em said. What did Mrs. Singer want? What was Em supposed to say to her? “I hope . . . I hope you’re doing okay. Would you like to come in?” She stepped away from the doorway, opening the view into the house, cringing at the sight of the steak knife lying in the middle of the floor in front of the stairs.

“No, thank you.” Chase’s mom jutted her chin toward a cardboard box at her feet. There was a spiral notebook sticking out of it. Em recognized it instantly. “I just came back to town for a few days, to clean out our house—the trailer.”

Em nodded, remembering the night she’d met Chase there, after his fight at Galvin’s Pond with Zach. She remembered the cramped kitchen, the stained countertop, the peeling linoleum. The way Chase’s muscled body had seemed too big for the space.

“I’m leaving for good,” Chase’s mom continued, tucking her
graying hair behind her ears. “Heading for Pennsylvania. My sister lives there. Anyway, I was going through Chase’s room—” Her voice caught here, and Em panicked. What should she do if Eileen Singer started sobbing on her stoop? But the meltdown didn’t come. Mrs. Singer cleared her throat and went on, “These are some of . . . Chase’s things. I kept the important stuff. But the notebook had your name in it. So I thought you might want it back. Or know what to do with the rest of it.”

Em bent over to pick up the box, thinking about how awful it was that both Sasha’s parents and Chase’s mom had been left with nothing but some
stuff
to represent their children. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in for a minute, Mrs. Singer?”

“I’m sure,” Chase’s mom said sharply. But she lingered still. They stood there for a moment. Then, “So, you two were friends? I didn’t know many of the . . . other kids he spent time with.”

There was another silence as Em weighed how to answer this question honestly. “We were always part of the same group,” she said, placing the box down just inside the door. “Well, ever since eighth grade. My best friend was dating his best friend—Zach—for a long time. But it wasn’t until recently that he and I . . . really started getting to know each other.”

Chase’s mom was watching Em talk with big, sorrowful eyes. They brightened a bit there.

“Not, like, in a romantic way,” Em heard herself saying, unable now to stop the waterfall of words. “But I started to understand
him more. We were working on some poetry together.” That last part wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough.

“I worked all the time,” Mrs. Singer said now, looking past Em at some unfocused point in the background. “I never got a chance to meet his friends.”

“Well, he had lots of them,” Em said with authority, tucking her fists into the cuffs of her sweatshirt. She flashed to the shirt Crow had lent her, how it had thumbholes in its sleeves, just as many of hers did. “He was an amazing athlete, and the boys loved him. And so did most girls,” she said with a smile, trying to gauge Mrs. Singer’s reaction. “He was very popular. We all . . . I . . . miss him. A lot.”

Chase’s mom exhaled forcefully, as though she’d been holding her breath. “Thank you, Emily,” she said. “Thank you for saying that. I miss him too.” Then she started back down the walkway, turning around just once more to say, “Good luck to you. And thank you again.”

Em watched her go with a lump in her throat.

Once Mrs. Singer had gotten back into her car, Em closed the door and kneeled down right in the front hall to start picking through the belongings in the box. Most of it was crap: school papers, receipts, a small Best Sportsmanship trophy from Chase’s sixth-grade rec camp, a cell phone charger. All of it seemed to be covered in a thin layer of dust, and Em kept having to wipe her hands on her pant legs to get off the grit. The lump kept swelling
in her throat. It seemed inconceivable that this collection of random things could be her last connection to larger-than-life Chase.

At the bottom of the box were several printouts of the poems she’d “helped him write”—i.e., wrote herself—for Ty. And at the bottom of one of those was a small note, written in script.

Remember, you are bound to us,
it read. Em squinted at it, read it again to make sure she was getting it right.

Had Chase written this? Was it a message? For her, for Ty?

No, it was obviously a girl’s handwriting. With a shudder, she flashed back to those final moments at the Behemoth, before the Furies had disappeared into the night. The red beads shining against Ty’s pale palm. Ty’s words to her:
I’m warning you—they will bind you to us forever.

Bound. Forever. What exactly had she promised the Furies? And why was the reminder here, with the rest of Chase’s things?

Em ripped up the crinkled piece of paper, and then the other poems too. She brought the scraps into the living room and threw them into the fireplace. All of the memories those poems brought—of Chase, of Ty, of Zach, about whom several of them were written—made Em sick. Then there was the rest of the box too. . . . She was about to bring it down to the basement, when one last thing caught her eye. A small Mead flip-top notebook. It was full of brief jottings, written in Chase’s messy chicken scratch.

Em flipped through the pages. The notebook seemed to be his “Ty cheat sheet”—short musings about their time together, things she’d told him, what she liked and didn’t like.

They took me to Benson’s last night,
one entry read.
But not the biker bar. A different one, around back behind a Dumpster. I barely remember anything except red lights, amazingly hot women, and gold. Gold liquid, gold snakes, gold tongues. Weird. Route 23. Did we kiss?????

Em read it over and over to make sure she had the right place. Benson’s. She’d passed it a million times, and she, Gabby, Fiona, Lauren, and Jenna had a pact that they would go there this summer once they all got fake IDs to drink beer and do karaoke with the leather-clad motorcyclists.

But a secret swank club downstairs? Where the Furies hung out? It was hard to imagine.

Em knew she had to check it out as soon as possible. Any information was valuable information. And she knew she needed her partner in crime. She raced to the kitchen, grabbed her phone, and dialed.

“Hello?” Drea answered the phone like she always did—as though she was surprised, every time, that it would transmit her voice.

“Drea. It’s me,” Em said. Quickly, urgently, she told Drea about Mrs. Singer’s visit, about the poems, the notebook, and the clandestine club. She left out the part about attempting a blood
sacrifice at Drea’s best friend’s grave. “We need to go there. Like, tomorrow.”

“All right,” Drea agreed. “But how are we going to get in?”

“Well . . . Chase got in,” Em said doubtfully, not wanting to admit that she hadn’t considered the teensy problem of their age.

“He also happened to be with three gorgeous girls who happen to have supernatural powers,” Drea sighed.

“So we’ll get fake IDs,” Em burst out, as though the matter was settled.

“In a day?” Drea scoffed.

“Drea! Do you have any better ideas?” Em felt the burning in her lungs, the painful determination to get as close as she could to the Furies as quickly as possible. The closer she was, the more chance she had of destroying them.

Drea said nothing for a few moments. Then she spoke with sly satisfaction. “Crow. We’ll ask Crow. He can get them for us. I know he has one. I think one of those guys in the band makes them.”

At the mention of Crow’s name, Em got goose bumps. Involuntarily, she thought of his mouth on hers, her hand tangled in his hair. “Will he do it fast?” Em said, forcing herself to sound calm. She couldn’t understand her own emotions. She didn’t have romantic feelings for Crow, not ones she wanted to act on. So why did she still feel so attracted to him?

“Let’s call him now,” Drea said. Em didn’t reply. “Okay, Em.
I’ll
call him. You stand by for more.” While Em waited for Drea to call back, she threw her hair up into a bun. She was brushing her teeth when Drea’s call came in.

“What’d he say?” she mumbled, her mouth still full of toothpaste.

“Well, he wanted to know what they were for,” Drea said, and Em rolled her eyes. Like Crow cared that much about their well-being. “I told him we wanted to go to a twenty-one-and-over show in Portland. This band called the Low Anthem. Next time you see him, pretend you love them. I’ll make you a CD.”

“Drea, come on,” Em said impatiently, spitting out the toothpaste. “Did he say yes or no?”

“He said a lot of things,” Drea said teasingly. Em’s heart stopped for a second. Had Crow told Drea about their kiss?

“What did he tell you?” she asked. She could feel her cheeks burning.

“Whoa, killer,” Drea said with a laugh. “He said he worries about us and blah blah blah. I told him not to be a buzz kill. Anyway, he’ll do it. He’s going to pull our pictures from Facebook, and he says he’ll get his guy to do it by tomorrow. That’s rush delivery for us. But I think it’s just for you.”

“Shut up, D,” Em said. But she was too excited to really be annoyed. Tomorrow they would be one step closer to the Furies.

•  •  •

They met Crow on Thursday evening in a 7-Eleven parking lot between Ascension and Benson’s, just off Route 23. Both girls told their parents they were going to the USM library to study for chem and then do research for their independent projects. In reality, the chem test had been that afternoon, and Em was pretty sure she’d bombed it. As for her research paper, well . . . this was research. It was research about the only thing that mattered anymore.

In the parking lot Em could feel Crow’s eyes on her. She felt as if he was absorbing her all at once, taking in everything about her: the skintight black jeans, her hair (she’d straightened it, and it reached to the bottom of her rib cage), and her heeled boots, which made her even taller than she already was. But he didn’t say anything, didn’t whistle, didn’t raise his eyebrows. Nothing. There was no indication that they’d kissed, that he’d talked about not wanting to her, or that she’d run off into the rainy night afterward. He did, however, give Drea—who had forgone her typical safety-pinned layers in favor of a red miniskirt, patterned black tights, and a leather jacket—a long, low whistle.

“Shit, Feiffer, weren’t you saving that outfit for prom?” Crow asked with a smirk. “I thought you were going to wear it just for me. . . .”

“Very funny, Crow,” she shot back. “Are dropouts allowed at prom?”

“Probably just as waiters,” he said, flicking the hair out of his
eyes. With a flourish, he produced the fake IDs. “Here are your cards of false identification.”

They paid, and as Em handed over her cash, Crow’s fingers brushed her wrist. The goose bumps returned, but she ignored them. She resolutely refused to make eye contact with Crow. It was better to pretend that nothing had happened.