By the time I get in the house Kezz has vanished—probably in her room, slumped on her bed and scowling into empty space—and the bitch of it is, we still need to go to their party tonight. We should probably eat dinner first, and I should really try to clean her up and get her into some kind of cuter outfit. Even though Kezzer just said the meanest, most destructive things possible, as if she’d spent weeks refining the calculations for how to maximize hurting me. Even though she’s in a vile mood too, and she’ll bring all that attitude along with her. Which, okay, Prince and them won’t mind, because they think that Kezzer’s worst tantrums are adorable, and they probably even prefer her in a rage. But she can still ruin my night.
You know what? I’m not cooking for her. I’ll eat by myself.
I’m just dumping some leftover stew into a pan when I hear it: footsteps, sounding really definitely human, creaking across the ceiling right over my head. Would I recognize the sound of Lexi’s steps? I listen as hard as I can, and I try to call up one of Prince’s brain-movies so I can see what’s happening, but it doesn’t work. It could be her. But I’m not positive. And either way, it is just grossly, horribly not-okay that somebody is violating our space.
I storm to the foot of the stairs. There’s nothing but darkness up there, same as always. “Hey!” I yell. “This is private property!”
The footsteps stop dead, but that’s the only answer I get. I don’t usually believe in violence, but sometimes you have to make an exception, and all at once I’m ready to literally kill whoever it is up there—if I can get my hands on them. It’s a tricky thing to do, though, when the stairs will throw me halfway across the room if I try anything.
“Why don’t you come down and talk?” I call up. “This doesn’t have to get ugly. Are you hungry?”
No answer, but I get the sticky, draggy sensation of somebody listening hard, and wondering hard, there in the dark. Maybe I can make out the sound of breathing, right at the top of the staircase?
God—I didn’t even think about a weapon. Now, that was an oversight. I slip back to the kitchen and get the biggest, sharpest knife we own, hyperalert all the time for any tiny groaning-floorboard sounds, then dart back to the stairs. I keep the knife behind my back, because whoever it is—Lexi, Lexi, Lexi, or, well, probably—can see me, right?
“So, are you coming down, or what? Because this is getting ridiculous.”
Silence, or maybe a faint shuffling. And—does it even make sense to say this? But I’m getting less sure that it’s Lexi’s silence. Like, the tone seems wrong. It’s meek and sad and pitiful, and maybe I don’t know Lexi as well as I thought, but I know some things she isn’t.
Then, really softly: “Joshua?”
Whose voice is that? It’s so quiet it’s hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure the Lexi hypothesis is wrong now. Which actually, maybe, makes this extra horrible after all? “Yeah? If you know me, why don’t you come downstairs where we can see each other? No offense or anything, but the way you’re acting is pretty disturbing.”
A pause. A snag in the breathing, up there? “Joshua. Why did you send me to die?”
I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and say that this is not a question anybody passionately wants to get from a creepy stranger lurking in their house. My heart slams in my chest. “What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t even know who you are.”
“I know I’m not whole-me,” the voice keeps on, in this whimpery, nagging way. “But I’m enough-me! Enough that I thought—maybe you could love me a little? Enough that you wouldn’t—”
“I never did anything to you!” I’m screaming, out of the blue, out of my mind. But I shouldn’t, I should stop, because it’s really better if Kezzer doesn’t hear this. Oh, except she must have by now. So why doesn’t she come stick up for me? “I never hurt you, or anybody, and I am so, so sick of these—these insane accusations, when they’re the last thing I deserve!”
A sob. If this ghastly thing invading our home comes down here, I swear I will kill it repeatedly.
“I didn’t die, though,” it says. She says? “Not for long. But I don’t know what they did with my heart. Am I allowed to miss it? And then I crawled through all the cold and the mud, for so, so long. Joshua, you never, ever should have hurt me that way!”
God. It almost goads me into trying to run up the stairs to take care of this freak, but I put the brakes on. The thing is, those stairs are nasty, vindictive little jerks, and every time I step on them they throw me back harder. I don’t need a broken spine.
But the way I’m feeling, I have to do something. My body is full of this spastic energy and my hands aren’t totally under my control anymore, and I’m still holding the knife. I’m screaming and it’s not even making words anymore, and—is it even on purpose?—I stab one of the stairs, hard.
The knife jerks out of my grip and sticks trembling in the wood. For a second I just stare at it: the steel blade jiggling with light.
Blood starts oozing out around the blade. Because of course that’s not wood, not really. My own voice rings in my skull, repeating something I said—when did I say it? They’re you, Kezzer. Those stairs are made of—who you are, and we both know that!
I get one more second to wish I could take it back before the staircase erupts in my face.
Millions of them, it must be millions, like they’ve been breeding and replicating all this time. Pointy elbows shove into my eyes and guts and I’m covered in pinching teeth, like a school of paper piranhas. I must go staggering back, but I only know it when I hit the floor and feel the mini-Kezzer-things crumpling under me, then snapping back so my whole body jumps around. I shriek and slap at them, but there are just so many, and everywhere I see those pieces of Kezzer’s face like fragments of a smashed LP. An eye in a zag of half nose, a half mouth full of razor fangs.
And they aren’t all her, either. A brown eye with glitter liner glares an inch from me, like I’m looking into a mirror, and I hear this sick, thin version of my own voice growling at me. They jump on my face with jagged heels and the back of my head bangs the floor again and again. I’m shrieking so loud my throat feels torn. Where is she?
“Kezzer! Help me!”
Teeth pierce my ankle. I can feel my skin rip free: a hot jolt of pain, and the sickening sound of it, the moist shredding kah-kah-kah.
“Kezzer!”
Is she really not coming? Doesn’t she care? Another patch of flesh tears off my neck and there’s that rusty blood stink and I’m crying, not even from the pain, or because my own staircase is going to eat me alive, but because Kezzer is abandoning me. She’s in her room, listening to me die.
Then I hear something banging back—oh, the front door? And Kezzer’s running toward me. “Get off him! Get off!” She must have grabbed the broom from somewhere, because I see it swinging just above my face, scattering mini-Kezzers in a jagged cloud. She drops the broom and seizes them by the fistful, yanking them off, and they scrunch like tinfoil in her hands. “You will not hurt him! You will—freaking—not! I don’t care what he’s done, I don’t care. You know he’s not right!”
The horrible little paper-cut teeth slide out of me.
They all let go and scatter, some of them cheeping in this bad-dog kind of way.
She crumples over me, smoothing back the hair from my face, and bursts into tears. “Oh, Jesus, baby, you’re bleeding.”
“They were going to kill me, Kezzer.” The pain in my ankle and the side of my neck feels cold now, this weird icy singing, and I must be bruised all over. “You weren’t here, and I swear—they would have just ripped all my skin off! You weren’t here!”
Kezz scatters little kisses on my face. Oh, I guess this counts as making up? She wipes her tears on her sleeve and gives me about as sweet of a smile as she can ever manage. “Baby? Can you walk, if you lean on me? Because I need to get the first-aid kit, and I don’t want to leave you. Not this close to—”
She glances over at the stairs. They’re back, just the same as before, except for the blood still oozing from the fifth step up. The knife is there, stuck in the wood. Does she see it? Maybe she’ll assume the blood is mine, from one of those bites.
How long until she asks me what happened? Kezzer learning—about what that thing upstairs said to me, about how I stabbed—anyway, she can’t find out about that.
But then she looks from the stairs to me, and her expression is suddenly a lot harder. This look of knowing despair, and—that can’t be loneliness, because it’s impossible that Kezzer could feel lonely with me! Without a word she stands up and walks over there, yanks the knife out and drops it on the floor, then takes off her hoodie and uses it to blot up the blood.
“I can walk,” I say, to make her pay attention to me again. She comes back and slides her arm around me, biting her lip, and helps me up. Maybe I hang on her a little more heavily than I technically need to. “Where did you go, Kezz?”
“Just for a walk. I was—” Oh, now she’s not looking at me. “I needed to get out for a minute.”
She gets me to the bathroom, sits me on the toilet’s lid and carefully peels my clothes off, and wipes me down with peroxide while I yelp. I have so many minuscule wounds that there’s no realistic way to bandage all of them, but she gauzes up the two big ones where those vile munchkins actually chomped my skin off. She keeps her eyes fixed on what she’s doing and doesn’t meet my gaze much, or talk, and it’s starting to bug me.
But then she kisses my forehead, and it feels like it always does: like another wound, but the best kind of wound, full of rustling softness instead of pain.
Just like the first time I saw her. Just like the first time I took her hand, and felt how the glow of her lit my whole body, opened up my guts. I didn’t care that she wasn’t talking, because I knew right away that, no matter how messed up everyone else was, we could stay in that glow forever.
“Kezzer?”
“Let’s hope those cuts don’t get infected. What the hell do we do if you need a real doctor?” She’s still looking away, and all at once I get it: she’s been crying this whole time. She doesn’t trust me enough to let me see that?
“Kezzer?” I’m so, so sorry, I almost say. I’ve done something horrible. Where is that coming from? Somewhere deep, the words gagging up just when I don’t expect them. I swallow them back down. “Um, we still have to go out tonight.”
Kezzer grimaces and I get a nanosecond glance from her before she slumps down to kneel on the bathmat and leans her head on the tile wall. “One of those stinking parties? You’re not in any shape for that.”
“We have to though! You know how touchy they get when we don’t show up.” If we stay in, the house will be surrounded by midnight. They’ll bang on the walls, make hideous noises. Every window will be full of their faces, and they’ll distort and ripple their heads in the freakiest ways you can imagine, chittering at us. “It’s seriously better if we just go. You, um, you kind of need a shower.” Kezzer just stares at the floor. “I’ll help with your outfit.”
“Fine,” Kezzer says at last, but harshly. “We’ll party our asses off.” She gives a sick laugh, then finally looks up at me. She’s still freaking out about what I did to the stairs, I can tell. Tears smear her flushed cheeks. Her accusation prods me right in the eyeballs, even without her saying a damn thing, and my vision turns sparkly and warped. I almost get mad again, but then something inside me sticks out a foot and trips my anger before it can get going.
Because I really don’t want to blame Kezzer. I don’t want to look at her like there’s something gumming up my eyes and I barely recognize her anymore. I just want to love her and not worry about anything, not ever again, and dance with her and belong to her where no one can ruin what we have together. And I want her to relax and trust me enough that we can finally be lovers for real, because she still doesn’t; her muscles seize up every time I touch her. Why does it have to be so hard, just to be happy?
“Kezzer? You know how much I love you?” Why do I sound like I’m begging?
“I love you too, Josh,” Kezzer says—but, God, her hard-ass stare is saying something different. “If you’re still in there.”
I think it’s best if I try to ignore that last part. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.