I wasn’t supposed to go back yet. As far as I could tell without my phone, it hadn’t been the few hours that Josh said he needed. My cheeks still raged with heat, my limbs jerked when I moved. There was no chance that I could sit calmly in a café somewhere. He’d seemed so self-satisfied, that creep in the jacket. Like he’d put one over on me, duped me somehow, and he was stopping by to gloat. My heart was still hammering, minutes after he’d disappeared from view.
I stormed back the way I’d come, through the residential streets, with no idea of what I would do. Anything at all except behave myself. Anything but follow instructions, even if they came from Josh. I wished I’d swung that bottle; the longing to have done just what I didn’t do jumped inside me like a giant pulse. I even wished I was handcuffed, my black penny loafers tracking stinking blood all over the patrol car. That kiss lingered, branding me with my failure to act while I’d had the perfect chance. Now that I thought about it, there hadn’t even been witnesses.
I wasn’t looking where I was going. A pair of little girls, crouched low, loomed almost under my shoes. My knee knocked one of them in the head as I swerved, stumbling onto the grass. The bag with the champagne whacked my thigh, hard enough to bruise. What were they doing, blocking the sidewalk like that?
Okay. They had their chalks out and they were drawing on the pavement. Bloated psychedelic flowers, a lumpy, leering mermaid. They turned to gawk at me with wide, vacant eyes. There was something idiotic about them. Empty as corpses. Or maybe it was just my foul mood telling me that.
“Sorry,” I made myself say. “I didn’t see you.”
“Olivia, let’s draw a dragon next!” It was the blond girl who’d spoken, to her darker friend. But she was still staring at me, just as expressionlessly as before. “Olivia, you like dragons, don’t you? Let’s make it purple.”
“I said I was sorry,” I snapped. “Even though I didn’t feel like it. Now it’s your turn to say, That’s okay.”
“I think it should be red,” Olivia said. Her two fat braids fidgeted in midair as if they were sending out signals. Then, tentatively: “I don’t feel so good.”
“Not yet,” her friend admonished. “That’s for later.”
I started to step around them. I might give their drawing a few hard scuffs on my way. Olivia reached out and grabbed my hand, her expression suddenly moon-eyed and piteous. “I don’t want to die,” she said. Clearly to me, this time.
Her hand looked as tender and doughy as any five-year-old’s would. Silky, pale brown skin, tiny dimples, chubby fingers. So the sensation of her fingers pressing mine came as a shock: her skin felt like crumbling bark. Her flesh gave the airy, hollow impression of dry-rotted wood. I yanked my hand back.
“You look fine,” I babbled. “Don’t be silly.”
I’d lunged out of range, but Olivia was still reaching for me. “I know I’m not whole-me,” she said. “But I’m enough-me. Enough that I don’t want to die! Don’t let them take me.”
I looked at the blond girl, even though all I wanted was to get the hell away from them. “Are you two in some kind of trouble?”
“She’s just playing,” the blonde said hastily. “It’s part of our game.”
“If somebody’s threatening to hurt you,” I said, “I can call the police. And I’ll wait with you until they get here, and make sure you’re safe.” Though I couldn’t, I realized. I’d flung my phone on the lawn, to punish it for screaming at me.
“No, no,” the blonde said. Olivia’s plump little hand still waved vaguely in my direction, her fingers grasping and releasing nothing. “We are having lots of fun, playing our game. About the dragon. And how it’s going to eat her. Olivia, say how much fun it is! If you say it, we can make the dragon red. Like you want.”
Olivia looked at her, and then back at me. “It’s so much fun!” she said hesitantly. “It’s all about a dragon.”
“Well, the princess is going to come and save you, right?” I said. “And slay the dragon, in the nick of time? Spill its guts. Then the two of you can dance on its inert body.” Josh should be proud of me. I was making such a stupendous effort to be kind, when that was the last thing I wanted to be. My heart still hadn’t settled down and there was a jarring, kinetic urgency running through my limbs.
“I’m not sure,” Olivia said. She looked concerned.
“It’s going to eat her,” the blonde pronounced with finality. “Goodbye! Have a nice evening!”
“Goodbye,” I said. Though I was aware that the wrongness that had begun by infesting our house had moved on, spreading first through the whole town, and now it had reached these two kids. They weren’t quite how children are supposed to be. Healthy, well-adjusted kids don’t feel like dead logs, for one thing. But I wasn’t sure what I could do about it. They’d said they were fine.
I wasn’t feeling all that together either. On consideration. I might be as off and as wrong as everything else.
When I got back to our house my phone was still where I’d thrown it, nestled in the glaring grass. The phone was silent now, its screen gone dark. I sat down beside it and stroked the plastic, wondering who it was that had been shrieking out of it—begging me, I was almost sure, for help. If I hit the Power button, would it start screaming all over again? I wasn’t sure I could face it. In my memory its timbre was girlish and thin and frantic. And possibly familiar.
Another voice mingled with it. Josh had flung open the windows and he was singing—such a fantastic voice, all dusk and velvet. I wasn’t the only one who thought he could go pro. Knocking pots around. I could hear what was probably the electric eggbeater.
It made me sick with longing for when we’d both been kids, somehow. We’d gotten into the habit of hiding together, clutching each other, in closets or behind furniture. I’d tell Josh stories about my life and he’d make them into rambling, improvised songs, just for me—except that in the songs everything was different, I was always victorious in the end, and it was easy for people to love me. Like, if I told him that my mom had left me alone in the car for hours, he’d have the car start flying, and I’d rescue a boy who’d fallen off a cliff or something.
I knew we were just daydreaming, but it made life feel a tiny bit more possible than it had before.
Once the sun was streaking sidelong, and the air had gone golden, I walked up to the door. Josh must have heard me coming because he was instantly there, pouncing on me with a puff of the flour that covered his shirt. He squeezed me and rubbed his cheek on me and said, “Oh, Kezzer, you’re home! I was just getting worried, you’ve been gone so long, and you didn’t answer my texts or anything! Your dinner is so totally ready!”
“I didn’t have my phone with me,” I said. “But I did get the champagne.”
Even though what I’d meant to say was, Josh, what have you done?
“Well, that’s something.” Josh pouted. And in fact the world didn’t feel nearly so unbalanced now that he was with me, and my long afternoon didn’t seem as crazy anymore. Maybe I was overreacting. I do have a problem with doing that. “I’ll pop it in the freezer for a little bit. Oh, Kezzer, you’re a mess. There’s flour all over you! You get changed and I’ll start serving.”
Somehow I did what he said. In my own room, I stared at my shepherdess for a moment, her baby-blue lips smiling through a tangled rain of costume jewelry. She was exactly the same as ever, with shiny black hair and a lace dress painted with pink and blue blotches. The clothes spilled out of my drawers the same way. Lexi’s framed photo of Josh and me laughing by the gorge, our faces topaz with candlelight, still hung on the wall, with the same inscription in gold ink: To the coolest friends in the world. Heart U both! Lexi.
Another photo, of my dad—except that he’d turned out not to be—in uniform. Josh hated it, that I wouldn’t throw out that picture. He once drew an X across it, from corner to corner, in scarlet lipstick on the glass. I could still see the red smudge left under the frame’s edge after I’d cleaned it. That hadn’t changed, either.
And what had happened today, really? So my phone was broken. So the bookstore had been closed. So I hadn’t actually killed anyone, just wanted to—like that was new. Some kids had acted screwy. Children’s brain chemistry is weird. They’re all basically on drugs all the time anyway.
I shucked my T-shirt—oversized, gray—knocking my hat onto the bed in the process. Slipped on a man’s tuxedo vest as a shirt, which was a look I knew Josh liked, and put on fresh jeans. Took a quick look in the mirror, to make sure I was the same as usual. Tall, bony, blond, with hair like poisonous spines. Fine. Except that I needed my bowler hat.
Sennie, sweetheart, don’t cry. Who cares what the darn test says? You’ll always be my little duckling. Now, say quack, quack, quack. That’s how ducklings say “Goodbye, Daddy.”
The one time Lexi had called me by that name, I’d been ready to give her a black eye. Not that she’d had any idea why it got to me.
I walked over to the bed, keeping my eyes averted from the photos, and leaned in for the hat. It had fallen brim up, and it looked like something wet and glossy had gotten stuck in the bottom of it. A black plastic bag, wadded up? How had that happened, when I’d kept my hat on all day? I bent closer.
The object was black and bright acid green. Softly domed, glassy, and circular, big enough that it perfectly fitted the hole where my head should be. Tiny pleats of variegated color, olive and ochre, running through the wide green rim that surrounded a core of midnight.
Iris and pupil. A giant eye was nesting in the bottom of my fucking hat, and it was watching me. I screamed. The pupil dilated, like it could hear me.
My room was the nearest one to the kitchen. Josh came running, leaped down the stairs, slammed back my door. And it was there, in that triangle of space pinned between us, me and Josh and my spying hat, that the force of what had happened came to me. Billowing up and down, huffing alien air in my face. The truth, or what I could sense of it, was a charged zone beating in our midst and holding us apart.
Though only for a moment. Josh broke free first, stomped over to the hat, and stared into it critically.
“Oh, for God’s sake. Can’t you give us some privacy?” He snatched the hat by its brim and flipped it over, smacking it down on the mattress. I could feel the eye going out, fizzling to nothing like a flame. “Oh, Kezzer, I’m so sorry that happened! I don’t ever want you to be scared. You, um, you probably should be careful not to leave your hat turned up that way. All right? The thing is—I know that’s your special hat and everything—but you were wearing it that night. It might decide to cause trouble.”
“Josh,” I said. I only realized how hard I was breathing by the distortion it forced into his name. “Josh, where are we?”
He hesitated. “We’re home, Kezzer. You know that.” He reached for me, but I held myself back. So rigid that he gave up, for the moment.
“Home,” I said. “It seems different.”
“That’s because we weren’t really home before, and now we are. We finally, finally are. We’ve both been so lost, for years now, Kezzer, don’t you see? But now for the first time in our lives we have a real home, and it’s all ours, and no one can ever make us leave, or force us apart.” He was getting louder. “Please, please just let us be happy!”
“You did this,” I said. How, though? “Did you do this?”
Another pause. He seemed flustered. “Kind of? All I want is for you to appreciate it. Kezzer, Mitch and Emma were scared of you! They just tried hard not to show it. The way people do with dogs, like fear would make you attack, or something. And they couldn’t stand how much we love each other, because neither of them has ever felt anything even close to what we have! They were dying, really dying, for you to leave. I heard them talking about how I would get over it before too long! Like I ever, ever would!”
He’d started crying. I couldn’t stand it. I went to him and wrapped him in my arms. “Baby,” I said, “it’s fine. It’s going to be fine. I’m just—processing.”
Josh snuffled. “So you’ll come eat dinner? I’ve been cooking all day!”
“Let’s go eat. I’ll open the champagne. We’ll celebrate”—I couldn’t say you coming home, somehow—“that we’re back together. Okay? And then I need to get my revenge, for how you slaughtered me at Parcheesi.”
Josh laughed at that, hard and sputtering. I stroked his hair.
He slid his hands under my vest and up my bare back. I don’t do bras. Very softly, because I didn’t want to upset him again, I pulled away. “So, what did you make for us?”
A flicker of worried sadness passed over his face, then shifted into a grin. “I told you it was a surprise, Kezzer! A fabulous surprise. I made us absolutely everything you can imagine.”