The Screaming Season (29 page)

“Oh, you look so great,” she said. But she was getting shakier. It was getting closer to go time.

Then she was glossing my lips and adding something sparkly to my cheeks. She sprayed my hair and misted me with perfume from Spain that had an unpronounceable name.

“Close your eyes,” she said, grabbing one of my hands with both of hers and leading me toward her full-length mirror. She was excited for me, happy for me. This was the part of Mandy that sucked me in, and made me want to like and trust her. She had charisma to spare, when she felt like sharing it. Girls like Mandy were storms, then clouds, then sun. And the sun was so warm that you wanted to bask in its glow when it was out, daring the burn.

She tugged on my wrists. There were heaps of clothes everywhere, and because my eyes were closed, I was stepping on them in my ridiculously high heels, which were a bit tight. I was definitely wearing my Doc Martens on the walk back to the party.

“Ready?” she asked.

I wasn’t. I was terrified that when I opened my eyes, I would see Celia in her tattered linen shift, staring at me with her white face and her black eye sockets. Or worse, wearing my face. I had a horrible image of Mandy putting makeup on over a bare skull, running lipstick over rotten teeth. That I wasn’t going to be there in the mirror.

“Mandy,” I said in a low voice. “I can’t look.”

There was silence.

“I know,” she whispered finally. “I’m afraid to look too. Here.” She pressed on my wrists and I made a half turn.

“Now,” she said.

I opened my eyes. We were facing each other. We would be each other’s mirror. Mandy smiled at me and shook her head in amazement.

“Behold. You are transformed.” She wrinkled her nose. “I think I did too good a job. No one is going to look twice at me.”

“You look fantastic,” I said honestly.

“Really?” I had never heard her sound so unsure. Dressed in thousands of dollars of designer clothes, wearing the best makeup money could buy—much of it hand-mixed to the specifications of her San Francisco “style team,” she still wasn’t certain that she looked good. It completely blew my mind.

“This is you, being nice,” I said. “Being really nice.”

“I have it in me,” she confirmed, “to throw the occasional bone.”

“No. You are part nice. You’ll just have to accept it.”

She smiled shyly. Mandy Winters, shy. Down beneath all the wounds, there was a sweet girl fighting to get out.

“This is you, rising from the misery,” she said, almost as if she could read my mind. “To party again.”

She started to reach out her arms, the way she had in the operating theater. Then she pulled back, again. And I was the one who initiated the hug, wrapping my arms loosely around her. She was bony.

“Don’t mess me up,” she said, holding back.

Hugs could mess people up.

Wise Mandy.

MANDY LENT ME a beautiful black wool maxicoat and a little purse. I put in lip gloss and then, on an impulse, the lighter and the gum. I wore my Doc Martens and carried the high heels.

We went back to the operating theater, broke out the bottles, and cranked up the music. The girls started arriving, gawking at the tables and chairs, asking how we got all this stuff into a condemned building. I really couldn’t say. It had happened before my time in the Mandy brigade.

My dorm mates arrived in a group, and none of them recognized me. Rose told me she wanted to marry me. Julie still said nothing, but she couldn’t stop staring. The music throbbed and the candles flickered, and no one but me could hear the echoing screams of dead girls pleading for their lives.

Our guests included dozens of girls and a few guys, including Julie’s Spider, who made a point of coming over to me and giving me a hug. He told me how great I looked, then fixed Julie with a meaningful stare as she kept her distance. She finally smiled at me, but her heart wasn’t in it.

You were right,
I wanted to tell her.
I broke your head. I am crazy.

Tension was building in the room—and in me, and in Mandy. As part of our detective work, she was playing a “game” where she would sit across from someone and hold their wrists with her fingers pressed against their pulse. Then she’d ask them questions. If their pulse sped up, they were lying. I watched carefully, taking mental notes.

“Have you ever done something really . . . evil?” she asked Charlotte Davidson.

Charlotte was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, “Yes.”

“Was it here at Marlwood?”

Paling, Charlotte nodded. Then, without prompting, she blurted, “I peed in the pool.”

Everyone who was looking on—a circle of at least twenty people—burst into groans and laughter. Charlotte looked down, humiliated.

“Oh, my God!” Lara shouted. “That’s disgusting!”

Why did you tell her that?
I wondered as Charlotte wobbled to her feet and shambled away. She was completely mortified.
What made you think you had to?

Mandy made party guest after party guest answer her questions. There were no more confessions like Charlotte’s. Susi didn’t tell about her bed wetting. Gretchen’s OCD stayed private. And there was no way in hell that Maeve would reveal her dreams of becoming a guy.

“Okay, enough of this,” Mandy declared. “New game.”

I had approved of this one in advance too. This time, you had to let Mandy look you in the eyes. Sitting practically nose to nose, staring, she would tell you if your pupils were dilating, which meant you were lying. Because excitement made pupils dilate, and lying was exciting.

Spider was her first victim. He made faces at her while she tried to embarrass him with her questions:
Do you lie awake at night thinking about Julie? Have you ever written Julie a love poem?

Laughing, he played along. As Mandy and I had agreed, I watched the watchers. I kept track of who came and who went. I looked for suspicious activity.

The night wore on. Lots of drinking, dancing. More guys from Lakewood showed up. Troy was not among them, and his schoolmates had the decency not to mention his name.

“Okay, now, let’s see, how about Marica?” Mandy said as she plowed through victim after victim.

Marica sat down in the hot seat. Mandy leaned forward to gaze into her eyes. Then Mandy jerked back her head and looked over at me.

She was completely white. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

Marica made a face. “What is it? Do I have bad breath?”

People laughed. After another moment, Mandy threw back her head and joined them.

“No. I saw a zit,” she replied, and looked at me again. I dipped my head. She had seen something in Marica’s eyes.

A ghost?

There was more laughter. Mandy cleared her throat and leaned forward again. I zeroed in on Marica, watching her like a hawk.

“Have you ever kissed a girl and liked it?” she asked Marica.

“I sure have,” said a voice behind me. A very familiar voice. A voice that had shattered my world.

I turned around.

TWENTY-FOUR

RILEY.

I almost fell off my high heels.

Riley,
here
.

Now.

He was tanned, light brown hair surfer sun-streaked. His brown, gold-flecked eyes wide with amazement. His Grossmont High blue and gold letter jacket bulked over his broad shoulders, and a white T-shirt was loosely bunched around his nonexistent hips. He had on a pair of faded jeans and scruffy cowboy boots. A look I had always loved. Loved. Yes, yes, yes.

Troy was a distant memory, if, oh,
if . . .

There was no if. No one drove fourteen hours by accident.

He stared at me as if he had forgotten how to speak. I panicked, wondering if he was seeing someone else—Celia—until I remembered that I was glammed up as I had never been glammed before. He had seen me in the Jane days, but these were the Mandy days.

“Whoa,” he rasped, and Mandy rose gracefully from her chair and threaded her arms through his.

“This must be Jason,” she cooed. Riley blinked at her. “Oh, sorry. Lance? Tim? Estevan?”

She smiled at me. I understood that she was implying that I had a harem of guys—or at the very least, that I had never mentioned Riley around her. Hard-to-get-back tactics. She might not know who Riley was, but she did know how to push a guy’s buttons.

She added quickly, “Possibility on Marica. Big pupils. Not sure. Got . . . spooked.”

“Yo comprendo,”
I replied. I understand.

“No need to panic,” she said.

I looked at Riley again, who was clearly puzzled by our conversation. “What are you doing here?” I blurted.

“These kids need something to drink,” Mandy announced. She looked around. “Lara?”

Lara, who was wearing a tux, rolled her eyes and started to fold her arms across her chest. She was not going to fetch me anything. Then she must have realized that Mandy would keep at her until she capitulated, so she stomped over to a table and grabbed an open bottle of champagne. She started to bring it over to us. Mandy raised an eyebrow. Lara clenched her teeth, wheeled around, and grabbed two plastic champagne glasses.

She stomped over to me and practically threw them at me. Mandy plucked the bottle out of my hand and poured the bubbly into the glasses, handing one to each of us.

Riley was gaping openly at me. I no longer felt like a circus clown; I was actually grateful to Mandy for giving me the works. Because I was working it, and it was working.

“Can we maybe . . . go outside?” Riley asked me.

“Gladly,” I said, cool as cool.

I slid a glance Mandy’s way, and I was taken aback by what I saw. Her cocky smile had slipped; her shoulders were hunching. She wasn’t frightened; she looked wistful and sad, the princess of everything except for a prince.

She really loved Troy,
I thought.
He broke her heart. All that stuff we did, trashing his things, that was just bravado.

I felt so sorry for her, having to keep appearances up, to be solid and in control. Troy had complained about being paired for life with Mandy by their families. But she had liked it. Correction: loved it. And it was gone.

If she caught me pitying her, she would probably say something calculated to embarrass me. She was already pulling herself back together, plastering a smile on her face.

“Take a break,” she said regally. “I’ll do a recheck of you-know-who.”

Of Marica, I translated, and nodded at her.

Riley looked surprised, unsure how to respond to this girl who was acting like my employer, but said nothing as I grabbed my little purse for the sake of the lip gloss inside it and led the way out of the room. We didn’t talk as we walked back through the tunnel and out into the chilly night. I had forgotten to take the gorgeous wool maxicoat Mandy had lent me, and I shivered, hard. Riley took off his letter jacket and draped it around my shoulders. I inhaled the scent of him—leather, cinnamon, soap—and my throat tightened.

I knew exactly how Mandy felt, longing for some guy.

No one else was outside. Our breath condensed as we walked along without touching. I liked the sensation of the satin lining of Riley’s jacket against my skin. The brittle stars overhead tracked us. I stepped on branches in my high-high heels. I held onto my little shoulder clutch as if for moral support.

We reached a large gray boulder, very much like the one that Troy and I had sat on when we’d run into each other—literally—the first day of Thanksgiving break. I smiled to myself. I was so done with Troy.

“What happened to your forehead?” he asked me.

“I fell off a scooter. But I’m okay now. Really.”

“It looks painful.”

“It isn’t. Not right now.”

I smiled at him. He flushed. It was a joy to behold.

“Sit?” Riley asked, and I nodded.

Hip to hip, we sat down. Our fingers brushed and Riley closed his hand around mine. Electricity jolted through me. I couldn’t stop smiling.

“So there’s hope,” Riley said, wiggling my hand.

I didn’t say anything. Like the rest of my life, the situation was unreal. But unlike the rest of my life, it was great.

“I meant everything I said in my voice mail,” he began. “Lindsay, I don’t even know why I—I went in there.”

My parents’ bedroom.

“I was so stupid.” He unfolded his hand, as if anticipating that I was going to pull away. I didn’t move. I held my breath. I wanted to hear it all. “I didn’t even like Jane. But she was . . . I . . . ” He ran his hand through his hair. I remembered sand and salt, getting busted for kissing on the beach. In the arms of Riley Kinkaid.

After all the nightmares, this was such a beautiful dream. Joy surged through me in huge waves. After all the horrible, scary things that happened, Riley was too good to be true . . . just as he had been before. I was scared, but I knew he meant what he said. He’d driven fourteen hours to find me, in my haunted dungeon on the hill.