Lou Anne hovered over my bed. “Are you ever getting up?” She was still in her nightgown, but she’d already done her hair—I knew because I’d listened to the dryer run while I pretended to be asleep. “Come on, Cass! You can’t lie around all day.”
I pulled the pillow over my head. I always get up way before my sister, usually right about when Mama and Daddy leave for work—but I didn’t want to get up now or ever. I listened to my sister scuff down the stairs and hoped she’d leave me alone.
Ben let me make Lucy’s dress, even said it looked nice when I slipped it on over my shirt and jeans. He knew that the girl who started sewing that dress had burned to death, but he didn’t tell me. He’d let me put that dress on, and I couldn’t even talk to him about it or I’d get Cody in trouble.
Lou Anne’s slippers shushed back up the steps. “Cass?” Her voice was soft, maybe being nice, maybe just trying not to wake up Missy in the next room. “Brought you something.”
When I opened my eyes, she was holding out a bowl of Lucky Charms. “Here.”
I sat up in bed and took the bowl.
“Now tell me what’s wrong. Something about Benji, I bet.”
“How do you know it’s about Ben?” Ben hated to be called Benji.
She fluffed her hair. “What else would it be about?”
Lou Anne thinks everything is about hair or guys—and she knew I didn’t care about hair. She sat down on the very edge of her bed opposite me. “So…talk. Maybe I can help.”
Mama says I got the brains and Lou got the looks. I don’t think either one of us considers that a compliment, but being pretty, and older, my sister has a lot more experience with guys. Maybe she could help. But I couldn’t talk about Ben, not without telling her everything. I tapped the spoon on the edge of the bowl, trying to decide.
“Come on, Cass.…You know you want to tell me.”
Actually, I did. “Okay. But you can’t tell Mama and Daddy.”
“Of course I won’t.”
That was one good thing about Lou. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d kept a secret from our parents.
Still, I made her pinkie swear, and then I told her about Nowhere and the fire and Ben letting me put on a dead girl’s dress. Her eyes kept getting wider and she kept interrupting with Lou questions like, “Isn’t it buggy in that woods?” and “Where do you go to the bathroom?”
I told her to focus on the Ben part, then I asked for her advice.
While she thought, I finished my soggy cereal—I’d given her a lot to think about.
We sat on our beds, our nighties pulled down over our knees and tucked under our feet. She was still thinking and I was drinking the last of the milk in the bowl when someone knocked on our front door. I took a quick peek out our bedroom window. “Shoot, Lou, it’s Ben! You get it.”
“No way! You think I want your boyfriend to see me in my nightie? What would Daddy say?”
“What would Daddy say if Ben saw me in mine?” I held my folded hands up to her, begging. “And I can’t talk to him now. You haven’t told me what to do.”
The knock came again.
“Oh, all right.” She looked down, then wrapped herself in her bedspread. Dragging it behind her, she padded down the stairs.
I closed the door, but not all the way.
I heard the front door open and Ben’s voice. “I know it’s kind of early, but is Cass around? Figured we’d shoot hoops or something before it gets really hot.”
“She’s still in bed, Benji.” Which wasn’t a lie.
I heard the front door close. I expected Lou Anne and her bedspread cape to trail back into the room, and then she’d tell me what to do, but she didn’t come back. I looked around the edge of the door. “Lou?”
Downstairs was awful quiet. I stepped into my shorts, pulled a T-shirt over my head, then caught myself in the mirror on my sister’s vanity. My hair was all flat on one side and Lou hadn’t even mentioned it.
She must’ve really been feeling sorry for me.
I opened the bedroom door quietly, then hung over the stair rail. When I didn’t hear anything, I snuck, barefoot, down the stairs.
No Lou in the kitchen. No Lou anywhere.
“Lu-Lu?” I looked up and my little sister was calling from the top of the stairs, dragging her bunny, Flop, by one ear. Her reddish hair looked slept-on too.
I held out my arms in a big shrug—Missy likes everything big. “I don’t know where Lu-Lu is, Missy, but I’m here.” When she opened her arms too, I loped up the steps and carried her down on my hip.
I sat Missy in her chair and gave her a bowl of cereal too. She knocked over her juice. I was under the table mopping it up when the front door opened again and Lou Anne came in, trailing her blanket and holding her head high like a queen or something.
I stood up with the wet sponge in my hand, about to ask her where she’d been all that time when I saw Ben flash by outside the window, running down the street. Orange juice was dripping on the kitchen floor, but I didn’t care. “What did you do, Lou?”
She draped her bedspread over a kitchen chair, then pulled a baby comb out of the drawer by the sink and ran it through Missy’s hair. “I just talked to him.”
My heart raced. “About what?”
She waved her free hand. “About, you know, everything.”
“But we pinkie swore…”
She stopped combing. “To not tell Mama and Daddy, right?” She must have seen how scared I looked, but she just waved the hand holding the comb. “Listen, Cass. This is what girls do for each other. They smooth things out. I know, Jemmie’s your best friend.” She touched herself in the middle of the chest with the comb. “I’m just your sister. But Jemmie doesn’t know about smoothing things out with a boyfriend. She doesn’t even have one.”
“But if you told him everything, you got Justin and Cody in trouble too.”
Lou’s eyes widened. “Shoot. I forgot.” She fished a couple of barrettes out of the jar and put the comb back in. “I was concentrating on you and Ben. That’s the important thing.”
“What did he say?”
She snapped a pink pony barrette into Missy’s hair. “He said he’d meant to tell you, but it was never the right time.”
I leaned toward her, going up on my toes. “And you said?”
“And I said it’s always the right time to tell your girlfriend the truth.”
“And he said?”
“And he said something about killing those guys,” she admitted.
“Killing them?”
She held up a hand. “So, it didn’t go exactly the way I planned.” Even though Ben was long gone, she stared out the window like she was watching him run down the street, then turned to me. “My best advice? Give it a rest. Let him miss you.” She held up one finger. “I guarantee he will, Cass, and then he’ll come begging.”
Begging? Lou Anne didn’t know Ben very well if she thought that.
She put her hands on her thighs and leaned down to Missy. “Good morning, baby girl! What are we going to do today?” Lou got all carried away, fussing over Missy and baby-talking her like she hadn’t just wrecked my life.
I didn’t cry till I got out of the house and sat down in the old rocker behind the bush. I put my head down on my knees and sobbed.
I could hear water spraying next door. I thought it was covering my crying until a voice yelled, “Hey!” from the other side of the fence. I jerked my head up and Jemmie’s brown eye was looking at me through the knothole.
I wiped my nose on my arm. “What’re you doing?”
“Watering.” A spray of water jetted over the fence, falling on me and my chair. I heard the squeak of a faucet being turned off, then her eye was back at the hole in the fence. “You having yourself a pity party for one, or would you like some company?”
I took a shaky breath. “Guess I could use a little company.”
“Coming around!” she yelled.
Holding in a sob, I listened to the soft slap of sneakers as she ran along her side of the fence.