The Pretty Ones (11 page)

“Barrett, you have to promise me,” she said. “If you get caught, I'll have no one.” She knew it was strange—insane, really—that she was more concerned about the police apprehending Barrett than him killing people. But maybe that was the whole problem. Maybe she
was
crazy, spending her days imagining doing terrible things to the girls who wronged her, who made her feel less than human. At least Barrett had the courage to do what Nell could only fantasize about. At least he had the strength to take action rather than spend his life as little more than a shadow. But that kind of courage was dangerous. He feared that she would become someone other than herself, and she worried that his valor would erase him from her life completely.

“If you do something bad and the police find out, if they take you away, what will I do?” she asked, her anger diluted by the worry that gnawed at every nerve.

Barrett took a seat on the edge of his wingback chair, Robert Louis Stevenson lying between his feet, his small notepad overturned upon the floor.

“Have you stopped to think that maybe they'll come after me too? And even if they don't, I can't live alone. You
know
I can't. What choice will I have but to try to find Mother? What choice will I have, Barrett, other than to go live with her again?”

A muted moan escaped his lips. It was a cross between agony and anger, as though the mere thought of Nell living with that woman was tearing him up inside. Severing ventricles and veins. Twisting organs like tightropes.

Nell abandoned her kitchen chair. A thin film of pink frosting still clung to the floorboard seams. She padded barefoot across the small expanse of their two-bit apartment. The boards, rough and crooked, impossible to clean completely, creaked beneath her feet. She sank to her knees at the foot of Barrett's chair and laid her head next to his knee. “You see how bad it could become?” she whispered. “If I'm left alone, I may as well die.” She smiled to herself, feeling his fingers drift across the top of her head like a breeze. “And acting out of anger, out of jealousy . . .” He tensed at the word. “I know you're jealous, Barrett. Don't deny it.” He removed his hand from her head. “You're worried,” Nell continued. “Worried that I'll find someone else.”

Barrett rocketed from the chair, pushing her away.

No, he wasn't jealous. Jealousy would have meant that
he
wanted to go out with Nell to restaurants and discos and God knew wherever else. But he didn't want anything to do with that. He didn't want
her
to have anything to do with that. That was the whole point, his whole reasoning behind his actions. He was doing his brotherly duty. Saving her from herself.

She watched him stomp across the living room for no reason other than to put distance between them. “Well,
I'm
worried that you'll find someone else!” she yelled at his back. “You're going to abandon me! You're going to leave me, and what'll happen to me then?”

He shot her a glance over his shoulder, one she'd seen a hundred times before.

I would never. I couldn't,
it said.
How many times do I have to tell you? How many times before you get it through your head?

But she couldn't bring herself to believe him. How could he
not
leave? She was a pathetic mess. A loser. The apartment was a dump. Kings Highway was like a war zone. Barrett was smart and witty and charming and talented—he couldn't speak, but he could write, and that's what was important. It was how he'd leave his mark on the world, how the universe would remember he existed. She should have been pushing him out of that apartment with both hands out of love, not trying to keep him locked away out of fear. If she found a friend or two, maybe she'd have the courage to let him go. If she managed to do that, maybe she could be the sister Barrett deserved.

It was decided, then. She'd do everything she could to slough off her current image.

She'd become someone else. For him.

Anything
for him.

“Barrett.” Her fingers drifted across the threadbare pad of his chair. “You have to promise me, okay? Promise me you won't do it again, no matter what.”

He turned away again.

“Barrett,
please
!” She raised her voice again, not caring who heard them through the walls. “I'm trying to make things better for us. I'm trying to make our life different. Don't you want that, for things to be different?”

His body language shifted ever so slightly. His stick-straight stance relaxed just a little, as if bending beneath his own secret yearning for change.

“You just have to trust me,” she told him. “Things are going to get better, you'll see. Everything will be all right. I promise. We just need to believe in each other, trust each other. And I still trust
you
, Barrett . . . even after today. I still trust you, but you need to trust
me
too.”

That was a tall order for either one of them. They had spent their entire lives being overprotective. To ask for a little leeway was as good as asking to be altogether let go. But there was no way around it. If they continued to clutch at each other so fiercely, they'd choke each other to death. Barrett had already killed Linnie. It was only a matter of time before he wrapped his hands around Nell's throat and squeezed.

“I love you, Barrett,” she said softly. “And I'll never leave you. Never, for anyone.”

That wasn't what he wanted to hear. Leaving was one thing, but there was something more important to him, something bigger.

“And I'll never become like her,” she said. “I'll never turn into Mom.”

.   .   .

When the sun rose on Brooklyn, Nell tied a yellow ribbon into her hair to match the daybreak. The B train squealed down the tracks. Her own image reflected back at her in the scratched-up plexiglass. That bit of graffiti—
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU'LL BE
—
shot across her line of sight. The train blasted into an underground tunnel, sending the overhead lights into a hyperactive horror-movie flicker before they resumed their cold fluorescent buzz. A black man walked up and down the train car, shaking a metal camping cup in each rider's face. He ignored a businessman's offhanded threat of calling the cops.
See?
Barrett would have scribbled at her.
Everyone's breaking the law. No one's afraid.
The man smelled like trash-can sludge. And while Nell would have been quick to ignore his begging, she reminded herself that today was the first day of the rest of her life. Today, things were going to change, and that change would be a direct result of the effort she put in.

Drawing a small crocheted coin purse from her bag, she shook a few loose dimes into the palm of her hand, readying herself for the homeless man's cup. As Nell waited for the man to make his second and final pass of the car, she noticed the woman sitting next to her staring at the coins, as if contemplating stealing them for herself. When their eyes met, the woman—a babushka if there ever was one, a floral-print scarf tied around her white hair—shook her head in disapproval.

“You should not,” she said in a heavy Baltic accent. “You give to him and he remember you. He come back again.”

Nell frowned at the dimes, not sure what harm it would do to give the guy a break. She'd read a newspaper article about how many homeless men were Vietnam vets, too unskilled or traumatized by what they'd seen overseas to keep a job. That man, no matter how bad he smelled, may have been someone's brother, someone's Barrett. Her gaze drifted back to the man with the cup. She pictured him in army fatigues rather than the tattered clothes he was wearing now. He may have been handsome once, may have clutched a rifle to his chest while sloshing his way through the rice paddies. And before that? He may have lounged in a wingback just like Barrett's, poring over books, dreaming of his first novel hitting the stands. Fame. Fanfare. Now? Poverty. Desperation. The New York City subway a moving, screaming home.

“You do not know what he will do with money you give,” the woman murmured beneath her breath. Despite the early hour, Nell could already pick up the faint scent of onions wafting up from the old woman's hands.

The man came closer, his cup clattering above the scream of train wheels on the tracks.
Help me
, the clamor implored.

“Maybe he eat, or maybe will drink, or maybe he buy knife and kill for more money. You don't know, you see? Do not give.” The woman placed her gnarled, onion-scented fingers over Nell's hand, hiding the coins from sight as the man limped by. “You do not know,” she whispered. “You only know what
you
do.”

Nell pulled her hand away from the woman, but her fingers remained closed over the coins that were growing warm in her palm. She imagined the homeless man counting out change in a secondhand store, trying to haggle the price of a butterfly knife. Stress response syndrome could turn the city feral. The knife, held tight in his grasp, would be ready to strike at anything that dared come too close. Or maybe he'd take the money to a diner and buy himself a ham sandwich. Maybe he'd spend it on an ice cream cone—an extravagant luxury in the face of destitution and heat.

The man scuttled past once more. What sounded like a single coin clamored against the tin cup. Not enough for food, for weaponry, for hope.

Nell averted her gaze as he wandered by.

“
Dobra djevojka
,” the woman said. “May God keep you.”

Nell considered responding to the woman's blessing, but the kerchiefed lady rose from her seat as the train approached the upcoming station. She hobbled onto the platform, only to look back at Nell before the doors slid shut. Crossing herself, her lips moved soundlessly as Nell squeezed the dimes in her hand. There was a quiet irony to the woman's advice, telling the sister of a man who'd murdered a girl in an alley to count her blessings like saved loose change. And if Nell revealed Barrett's secret? If she had leaned into the old woman ever-so-slightly to whisper into her ear:
My brother is a killer
. What would the woman have done? Would she have sage words of advice for her? Would she have blessed Nell then?

The train came to a shuddering halt at 42nd Street and Bryant Park. Nell rose, the warm coins rolling out of her palm to her feet. The endless rattle of the homeless man's cup stalled. Rather than moving on to the next car, he had taken a seat a few yards away, tired, more than likely hungry. But his hearing was sharp. Somehow, he was able to hear the ping of cupronickel against the floor over the stomping of feet. Over the pneumatic hiss of the doors opening and closing. Over the murmur of morning conversation. He rushed her like a hungry dog, as though he was about to attack. But rather than laying his dirty hands on Nell's clean blouse and office skirt, he skidded onto his knees and began to collect the coins.

Nell stepped off the train. She didn't look back.

.   .   .

Savannah Wheeler stepped up to Nell's desk a few minutes before lunch.

“Hey, we were wondering if you'd like to have lunch with us.” She looked over her shoulder. Miriam Gould, who stood a few feet behind her, offered up a halfhearted smile. Adriana Esposito didn't bother looking at Nell, clearly over the invitation before it was ever made. Mary Ann Thomas was nowhere to be seen.

Nell stammered, unsure she'd heard correctly. “W-what?” She had been expecting lunch with Savannah—that was why she had tied the ribbon in her hair. Plans of bravery and asking to join her for a bite to eat had circled Nell's thoughts all morning. It was, however, a surprise that Savannah beat her to the punch, extending an invitation rather than Nell having to inquire.

“Well, you're hungry, aren't you? Don't you want to eat?” Savannah shrugged, as if to say the offer wasn't that big of a deal. “We're going across the street to Moe's. They've got great pastrami on rye.”

The truth of it was Nell wasn't hungry. She never was—not for breakfast or lunch. But when she had started skipping meals for that very reason, Barrett had immediately noticed. He'd left her a long note taped to her bathroom mirror about the dangers of buying into beauty ideals. He'd dropped words like
anorexia
and
purging
into his decree. Put ideas of emergency rooms and IVs into her head. Reminded her that if she ended up in the hospital, she could lose her job. Their income. Their home. Their entire way of life. Nell put aside her hope of losing a few pounds and ate anyway, despite feeling full. She'd clear off Barrett's empty dinner plate—always left on the kitchen table for her to tend to—and make herself toast and jam. She'd pack a lunch, afraid that Barrett would check the fridge for signs of what she'd taken with her in a brown paper sack, and eat that too. Because throwing out good food was unacceptable. They were on a budget. Bologna sandwiches didn't grow on trees.

Except that Nell
was
carrying extra cash today. Her sandwich was going soggy in her desk cabinet, but she'd deal with the guilt of wasting it for once. She could afford to drop a few bucks on lunch, if only today. But Adriana and Miriam, were they really okay with her tagging along?
That doesn't matter
, she thought.
Savannah invited you, not them. They don't have to come along if they don't want to.
She was set on change, and neither Adriana nor Miriam were going to deter her.

But the booth at Moe's happened to be sticky and far more uncomfortable than she had anticipated. It was as though the person who had sat in it last had slathered the table with pancake syrup and then shrunk the booth down to half its size. It reminded her of the frosting she had yet to completely get out of the kitchen floorboards. Tacky, like tiny octopus tentacles adhering to the bottoms of her bare feet.