Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (47 page)

Blood close to boiling, Rideau
wadded up the receipt and stuffed it into her purse.  She took out her cell phone, which was still getting poor reception, and was able to look up a couple of reputable taxi services.  Her hands were shaking as she called three of them before she finally found one that was still driving in this weather.

When the taxi arrived,
Rideau was glad to see it had chains on its tires.  She got up and pulled on her coat.  Warily, she lifted the red coat and went over to the front counter to grab a mint on her way out.  Once inside, she told the driver, “Grand Hotel Vidgof.  You know it?”

“Of course,” he said. 
“Big, fancy hotel.  You have a room there?”

“Yes,
” she said distantly.  Her mind was racing with possibilities, leaping at phantoms.

As they pulled out of the parking lot,
the driver made chitchat.  “Are you new to the city?”

“No,” she said, shivering
as much from nerves as from the cold burrowing into her bones.  Rideau rested the red coat on her lap, and was curious when she felt something rather heavy was inside it.  She found the right pocket, reached inside.  “I’ve been here a few times before.”

The driver started to say something, then suddenly slammed on the brakes. 
“Damn mongrels!”  Rideau nearly hit her head on the back of the passenger seat.  She looked ahead.  A pack of four gray-and-black dogs had slinked in front of the headlights.  They paused for a moment and looked at the taxi.  The driver honked several times, but the dogs just kept looking at the car.  At
her
.  Rideau looked at those reflective eyes, mesmerized for a moment, trying to decipher their meaning while her mind tried to contend with Dominika’s many revelations.

Then, the dogs finally slinked away, vanishing into the blizzard.

“Damn things are running amok tonight.  I’ll bet I’ve almost hit five or six.  The storm must be driving them mad.  Not the best time for a visit, eh?” said the driver.

Rideau’s hand wrapped around the cold, hard object
that Dominika had left inside the red coat.  Rideau knew at once what it was.  “Maybe not,” she said, folding the coat back up and sitting on the seat next to her.  “Or maybe so.”

Normalcy had been restored.  Kaley was just a girl again.  Just a girl, and nobody’s life was in her hands.  It was just another day at school.  There had never been any Spencer Pelletier, never been any Others or any Prisoner, and, thankfully, never any children held at the mercy of rapists and pimps.

If only she could believe that.  If only she still lived in the world that the
kids around her lived in.

Still, she was able to retain some of her old self.  For whatever reason, it was just easier to accept her life at school at this point.  The butterflies in her stomach were fluttering around in anticipation of what Laquanda and Nancy might say or do, now that their forces were once again combined.

Kaley accepted her tray—not tacos, just meatloaf,
yeck!
—and tried to find a seat at the table nowhere near the Mondo Bitches.  But, wouldn’t you know it, there was nowhere else to sit.  Most people didn’t really like either Nancy Boyle or Laquanda Everest.  However, neither did they go out of their way to tell the Mondo Bitches this; easier to just avoided them.  The Mondo Bitches suspected others loathed them, of course (Kaley could sense this much), and it didn’t bother them.  As a matter of fact, they had started to revel in it.  If neither of these girls married rich, then years from now, Kaley predicted they would be diddling any bad boy that threw beer bottles at passing cars, would be knocked up just before or just after graduating high school, and would live a life bouncing between cashier jobs and fighting for alimony and child support checks.

Like Mom
, she thought, walking over to take her seat, which was right next to Laquanda.  As a matter of fact, imagining Laquanda Everest or Nancy Boyle as younger versions of Jovita Dupré was incredibly easy.  Surely they would have children of their own someday, and their own private horror story would be having children that they both loved and despised; loved for some maternalistic instinct, and despised for their youth and potential to have lives that they themselves had not.  That future possibility seemed laid out before her as plain as words on a page.  What a terrible outcome for both parent and child.

Kaley used her plastic fork to push around her meatloaf.  She wasn’t feeling very hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten since before leaving the house that morning
(Spencer hadn’t shared any of his fries, and she’d been too afraid to ask).  A glance at the clock showed the time: 12:35
PM
.  Had it really only been four hours since the nightmare began?  And was it really over?  What were the four kids in the car doing right now?  And what about Peter, the boy she had sensed in the trunk?  Were they safe now?

“
Pshh
, this is some ol’ bullshit,” Nancy complained.  “This meatloaf ain’t even cooked.”

“I know, right?” Laquanda agreed.

The usual lunchroom chatter was little more than the buzzing of busy bees to her now.  Kaley’s mind was far afield, and yet also directed inward.  Mindlocked on Peter and the others’ safety, she barely tasted the food she shoveled into her mouth.  She felt bogged down by all that she had experienced in the last year. 
Is this the way it is?
she wondered. 
Is the whole world built from evil?
  It was a thought as terrifying—perhaps even more so—than the Prisoner himself.

Was everyone just some version of Dmitry
Ankundinov?  Some version of Jovita Dupré?  Some version of Zakhar Ogorodnikov?  Some version of the Mondo Bitches?  Some version of the corrupt Atlanta PD officers that had allowed the
vory
and the Rainbow Room to prosper?  Was it true that evil…oh,
God
, did Spencer Pelletier have it right?  Was
evil
the normal state of the universe, and
good
some kind of aberration?  Were greed, lust, and the search for power the fundamental forces behind every living creature in the universe, and was good just some kind of mutation that occasionally, and mistakenly, cropped up?

It made a certain kind of sense.  How else could any species exist if it didn’t become competitive?  And what else was competition born from, if not the marriage of envy, lust, and the need to control one’s own environment, as well as the environment of others?

If that’s true, what does it mean for me and Shan?  What does it mean, if evil is natural and good is unnatural?

Just thinking about it placed a heavy burden on her chest, and made it difficult to take another breath.  Like being back inside that prison room at the dock house, it was easier just to lie down and give up.

Ward yo heart, chil’
.  Nan’s advice, coming out of nowhere.  Completely useless now.  Surrounded on all sides by evil, how could
anyone
ward their heart entirely?  How could
anyone
prevent themselves from being polluted?

You can’t
, Kaley thought. 
You can’t win
. 
It’s not possible
. 
It’s going to sour me, just like it’s soured Mom
.  In time, she imagined her life might not be so different than Nancy’s and Laquanda’s.

“You want your potatoes?” Nancy asked.

“Nah,” Laquanda said.  “You can have ’em.”  After the exchange was done, she asked, “You see
Jersey Shore
last night?”

“
Eck!
” Nancy said.  “I can’t believe that Mike, like, said he wanted to be a stripper.  It’s like, what
ever
.”

“I know, right?  Strippers are
all, like, skanks.”

Kaley knew where this was going before the girls ever did.  There was a natural progression to things like this.  People like Nancy and Laquanda could begin speaking on topics seemingly unrelated to anyone or anything around them, however, they were inherently negative people, and so they would find the worst
thing to say on any topic.  People were inherently negative; Kaley had read that, for every positive experience people had with waiters or salesmen, they only told between two and three people, but for every negative experience they had, they told between ten and twenty people.  This jibed with what she saw in almost every heart around her.  Laquanda and Nancy thrived on such negativity. 
Easier to bring people down than raise yourself up
, Kaley thought.

Mixed with their free-roaming hatred for others they deemed beneath them, Nancy and Laquanda would eventually cast their eyes on someone weak in their immediate proximity.  It took them no time at all to do exactly this.

“This one right here might make a good stripper someday,” said Laquanda.  She wasn’t yet talking about Kaley.  Laquanda was pointing out Charity Elsworth, a girl with a beautiful name, but one that, of course, kids who found her buck teeth and pointed chin unattractive had found a way to twist into an awful nickname: they called her “Charity Case.”

“Yeah, she’s skank enough,” tittered Nancy.  Charity was in Nancy’s class, and so sat across from her (likely not her first choice for seating) and was pretending not to hear.  Charity kept eating, hoping to be ignored.  That ploy didn’t always work.  In fact, it often invited more criticism.  “But stripper’s about as far as she could go.”

“You don’t think she’d make a good prostitute?” inquired Laquanda.

“Teeth like that, she couldn’t give no decent blowjob.  She’d chop that wood down like a beaver.”  The girls cackled.

Kaley felt Charity’s shame wash over her.  Kaley looked over at the girl.  So small and mousy, wearing a faded black Pearl Jam shirt, a pair of faded and ripped jeans (not designed that way, just old), and a blue-and-black flannel shirt tied around her waist.  She pushed her long, greasy hair behind her ear.  Her face was reddening, because she knew she was being talked about, and because there was no escape.

The shame was difficult for Kaley to contend with.  It went deep inside her and took up residence.

“
The door has closed
,” came a voice on a sourceless wind.  It sounded like dry leaves rustling across pavement, a few snapping twigs in there somewhere.  Kaley felt the gust of wind barely blowing in her ear.  Like a draft, it traveled around the lunchroom, tossed some hair about, as well as a few papers of students using precious lunch time on assignments.  “
You should not have gone after her
. 
She felt threatened, so she closed the door
. 
Yet, I see another gap
. 
She is being challenged again
.”

The Prisoner.  He was real, after all.  She had imagined none of it.  Not that she
truly thought she had, only hoped.

It sounded like an argument was going on between the Prisoner and
one of the Others.  She sensed a violent struggle…

Then, she became aware of water trickling around her feet.  Kaley looked down and saw that the murky water had returned,
in copious amounts, and it was foaming furiously.  At first it moved around her toes, swirling faster and faster.  Then it was at her ankles and spreading rapidly across the lunchroom floor.  Soon, it was climbing the walls, spreading across the ceiling, and forming swirling eddies.  Something was already swimming beneath the water on the ceiling.

Kaley shut her eyes. 
God, if you’re listening, if you’re not just some absentee landlord like Spencer says, please,
please
, make it go away
.

“I dunno, Snooki’s been acting weird,
too,” Nancy was saying.

“That bitch crazy,” confirmed Laquanda.

Just as Kaley’s mind had been in two places before, so too was it now, only now her focus was split between the changes happening to the lunchroom and the mild-to-powerful annoyance brought on by the Mondo Bitches.  Each inflection of Nancy’s and Laquanda’s speech, every dip and rise in their wannabe Valleyspeak, and every vicious aspersion they casually cast upon celebrity and commoner alike, gnawed at Kaley to her core.

“Man, I’
m itching all over!” said Nancy, scratching at the back of her neck.  “I think it’s this new detergent my mom’s been using.”  She chuckled and added, “Hope I didn’t catch Kaley’s sister’s nasty crotch crabs.”  The two girls busted out laughing.

Then, something shifted inside of Kaley’s guts.  It felt like a large stone fell from her chest into
her intestines.  Red-hot anger moved from the back of her brain to the front, pushing on the backs of her eyes.  All at once, she was looking through Shannon’s eyes, sweet little innocent Shannon, so far away and yet so close, afraid for some girl named…Freckles?

There Shannon was, still in class—her belly was full, she had already taken her own lunch—and looking down at the numbers on her paper.  A math test, perhaps?

Tears.  Kaley felt them on Shannon’s cheek.  Shan was upset.  Very upset.  There was feedback, a kind of
we’re-not-going-to-take-this-anymore-are-we
feedback, and Kaley felt suddenly euphoric.  Floating on silken rage, she suddenly saw the path she ought to follow.