The Screaming Season (11 page)

I batted at him, tears spilling. “Damn it, you’re my backup. You’re all I’ve got!”

He let me hit him. Then he grabbed my fist and said, “It’s freezing out here. You’ll get sick. Go inside.”

“We have to go back to look for the bag,” I said.

“Not tonight. Soon.” He made a steeple with his fingers and pointed them at me. “Promise.”

Then he turned and headed back toward the parking lot, and I pushed into the door. I shuffled down the hall as quietly as I could, whispers like the hushed conversations of ghosts following me every step of the way.

“Oh, my God, we have to tell Linz right away,” Julie semishrieked.

Or maybe just the whispers of dorm mates.

I pushed open the door to the room I shared with Julie to find everyone there, sitting in the dark on my and Julie’s bed. The white head glinted, as if it turned to look my way.

“What?” I asked.

Julie would have screamed if Marica hadn’t slapped her hand over her mouth.

BOOK TWO: DEEP DARK SECRETS

Anger is a wound gone mad.

—Vanna Bonta

—Kabir, 1440 – 1519

NINE

“GOD!” JULIE WHISPERED as Marica uncovered her mouth. “Linz, you scared me half to death.” She leaned backward and flicked on the lamp on the nightstand between our beds. My friends stared at me as if I were a ghost, and I couldn’t help but turn around and look behind myself to make sure there
wasn’t
a ghost behind me.

Julie hopped up from the bed. “Linz, what happened to you?” she cried. “Did Mandy beat you up?”

“
What?
I had an accident,” I said. I hadn’t thought through what to tell them. I figured my outing with Miles had better stay a secret. But I didn’t know what else to say.

“An
accident
? What kind of accident? Where did you go? Did you fall out of your hospital bed?” Claire asked me. The others shushed her, and I shut the door. Our housemother hardly ever checked up on us, but if she did investigate the ruckus, I would be busted.

“I . . . found a motor scooter,” I said. “Outside the infirmary. And I took a ride. And I skidded.”

“Your forehead is all bumpy,” Julie said, reaching out to touch it. I instinctively pulled away, but she gently took my hand and walked me closer to the nightstand. I saw the white head, its porcelain forehead gleaming. Sometimes David Abernathy drilled right through the forehead to do the lobotomies. Had he believed the bone would grow back? Or did his victims have little holes there forever? Is that what killed them?

“Did you black out? Because blacking out is bad,” Ida said. “Do you feel sick to your stomach?” She moved her hand in front of my face; and as she did so, I swore the head
moved
. I kept that to myself too. They hadn’t seen it. They never saw things like that. And if I brought it up, they would take it as proof that I had some kind of brain injury.

“I just need to sit down,” I said, and Julie eased me down onto my own bed, positioning me as if I had lost control over my arms and legs. I was shaking hard. I sneezed.

“You should get out of your wet clothes,” Julie said. “I’ll get your pajamas.”

“What were you guys talking about? And why would Mandy beat me up?” I asked as she crossed to my dresser and Claire yanked up my bedspread and wrapped it around my shoulders. Though I acknowledged her kindness with a nod, inwardly I winced. Now my beautiful antique coverlet—compliments of Marlwood—was caked with mud. How would I explain that to our housemother?

I pulled back the covers and started to take off my sopping clothes. The layers peeled away like sheets of ice. There was a big bruise on my left forearm and a large scrape on my shoulder.

“Well, while you were out joyriding,” Claire said, “so was Mandy. Well, not with any joy.”

“No joy,” Elvis agreed.

“I’m getting some bandages from the first aid kit in the kitchen,” Julie announced, leaving the room.

I raised my brows and looked at Claire, waiting to hear the rest. The others girls were nodding at me, as if I had missed the dish of the century.

“Troy broke up with her,” Claire said. “And she went cuckoo.”

“He what?” I asked. My heart actually leapt. I felt it. He’d done it. I’d stopped believing that he actually would.

“Yeah. He said she was too messed up,” Claire reported. She was grinning like a fox on a hunt, or a vampire contemplating a nice big neck vein filled with the blood of fantastic gossip. This was huge, and even better, it had happened to Mandy Winters. Extra bonus: they knew Troy and I were crushing and that only his lack of spine—his officially breaking up with Mandy—had kept us from being a couple.

Until now.

“Mandy left campus,” Ida added. “We figure she went to cry on Miles’s shoulder. Which is six kinds of skanky, but there it is.”

“No,” I began, almost telling them that Miles had been with me, but I stopped. I replayed what had happened: Miles had told me his car was in the shop. But what if Mandy had it? He had taken me to the roadhouse to paw through her things, but he’d been incredibly careless with them. What if there was nothing but a pile of fake “clues” that he and Mandy had created together?

And why drive over there in the first place? What if
she
had waited for us on the rainy, dark road and Miles had crashed on purpose? Would he deliberately risk getting hurt like that?
If he wanted to help his sister scare you to death, then yes, given how crazy he is,
I told myself.
Scare you, or . . .

. . . kill you.

I shuddered even harder.

“How do you know all this?” I asked, and my voice cracked.

Claire raised her hand. “I was in the bathroom. I saw the light go on in her room. Lara was in there and Mandy was going just crazy, throwing things.”

“No way,” Julie said. “What about their housemother?”

Claire snorted. Our housemothers were legendary for doing as little as possible, especially if it came to getting in the way of rich girl self-expression.

“So I crawled out the bathroom window and snuck over there. I had made it to the hedge when they came outside. I hid and listened. And I heard
everything
.”

“Go, Claire,” Elvis said appreciatively.

“Mandy was completely freaking out. She said she was going to go kill someone.”

“No,” I whispered. By then I had stripped out of my wet clothes and pulled on my fleece bathrobe.

“Your name was not mentioned,” Claire assured me. “I figured she was going to kill Troy.”

“But we like Troy,” Marica argued. “Now he can be Lindsay’s
novio
.”

“Well, we’d rather have her kill him instead of Lindsay,” Claire said, and Marica nodded. “Anyway, then she split. I wasn’t about to follow her in my pajamas and flip-flops.”

Elvis huffed. “I don’t know why not. I mean, we’re all dying to know what she did next.”

“No, we’re not,” Julie said firmly, returning with a roll of gauze, a box of bandages, some tape, and a pair of scissors. “I don’t care at all what happens to her.”

Julie did care. She had moved into Mandy’s charmed circle for a time, then been tossed back out. Despite her loyalty to me, she had enjoyed her moment in the sun. But in the bipolar ways of mean queen bees, Mandy had abruptly yanked away the privileges she had bestowed on Julie. She ditched her to go skiing with Miles during winter break, and then she drove back to Marlwood without her, even though Julie—and her parents—had been counting on the ride.

As for me, I was grateful down to my soul that Mandy had dissed Julie. Because Julie had been full-on possessed, and now that she was free of Mandy, she was free of the possession. Hurt and embarrassed because of it, but Julie nonetheless.

“I wonder why Lara didn’t go with her,” Ida said. She stood up to help as Julie began to wrap gauze around my head. I wasn’t sure what they were hoping to accomplish.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to go to juvenile hall?” Julie asked, sniffing.

“Oh, please, as if any of them would ever get busted for anything they did,” Claire said. “Look at Kiyoko.” Everyone fell silent. I
had
looked at Kiyoko. I was the only person in the room who had seen her dead body. Her eyes had been shiny and silvery, like fish scales, a sure sign that she had drowned. But by the time she washed up onshore, she was frozen. Her hair was so brittle it broke off when they laid her in the body bag, zipped it up, and Life Flighted her away.

“
Chicas,
we are taking away from
Lindsay’s
joy,” Marica declared. She beamed at me. “Troy did it!”

“Yes.” I finally let myself smile. Several of my layers of individuality were more thrilled about Troy’s manning up than they were terrified about what happened earlier in the evening. Handsome, wealthy, funny, warm Troy, who had tried much harder than Riley ever had to be honest in his dealings with the fairer sex. Troy, who had whispered, “I love you,” when he thought I was asleep. To
me
. After I had hit him with a hammer. That Troy.

“He’s trying to talk his parents into spring break in San Diego,” I told the others. A couple of them cheered softly, Ida and Julie doing the grinning-teasing-eyelash-fluttering thing girls did when one of their own moved from unrequited crush to victorious coupledom.

“We are
so
going to have to double-date,” Julie crowed. “Spider wants to take me to a party at the Stinking Rose restaurant in Beverly Hills. It’s all garlic. They have a private room called Dracula’s Grotto.”

“Cool,” I said, beginning to shake off my fear in anticipation of good times to be had with Troy. This
could
end happily. I had almost stopped believing in the notion of a good time without a catch.

“There,” she added, stepping away from her handiwork as she cut the gauze with the scissors and tucked the loose end into the headband she had created for me. Then she frowned slightly at me. “Ooh, creepy.”

Marica grimaced. “She’s hurt worse than it looks.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I got up and moved to the mirror over my dresser—roses etched into the antique glass—and peered at myself. With the heavy bandage around my head, I looked like a wounded colonial soldier. Directly in the center of my forehead, a circle of bright red blood was seeping through the layers. The lobotomy zone. Did it
mean
anything?

I stared at it, bracing myself for a wave of fear and panic, but I felt . . . okay. Almost detached. I did have a bump on my forehead. It was bleeding. There was nothing supernatural about it.

“Maybe we should unwrap it,” Julie suggested, handing me my cloud pajamas.

“No, it’s okay.” I took the pajamas. “Thanks.”

I headed for the shower, bracing myself for a fresh wave of fear. I spent the majority of my days and nights at Marlwood in abject terror—either mine or Celia’s—and we had shared many horrible moments in the Grose bathroom. But this time, as I put down my pj’s and took off my bathrobe, I felt nothing. It was so odd and unexpected that I burst out laughing.

I showered, washing my hair, shaking it out as if I were some kind of poodle, remembering the bandage too late but leaving it on for the sake of my friends. My pajamas smelled like clean cotton.

I went back into my room, bundled up in the too-cute ski parka CJ had sent me (not even she could be right one hundred percent of the time when it came to clothes) and told everyone I was going to sneak back into the infirmary so I wouldn’t get in trouble. Julie insisted on going with me. But I didn’t want her to come back alone, so Marica volunteered to come too.

We headed out like the three Musketeers, tiptoeing around puddles and trying not to make any noise. I couldn’t believe that Troy had finally done it. It was so amazing. This had been one of the most extreme nights of my life.