“Don’t tell your mother.”
Libby plunges her blue plastic spoon into a thick swirl of custard to the tune of her dad’s warning. They are the only two people on the veranda, seated at an octagon table and bathed in the glow of Ponticelli’s fluorescent sign that boasts the flavor of the day: PUMPKIN SPICE CHEESECAKE.
He only says it for good measure; he knows she knows better. Just as Libby knows why they eat their ice cream out here, chilled from the inside out, instead of getting it to go on the way to the Compound—easier to destroy the evidence. It isn’t she who will get Dr. Mom’s lecture about her weight or the unnecessary sugar intake, it’s her dad.
Libby drags a finger across her lips, pulling an imaginary zipper, to give him peace of mind. She won’t tell.
“Good girl,” he says, and despite the cold, Libby feels her cheeks warm. Moments alone with her dad are rare. Moments of her receiving praise from him are rarer still. It isn’t that he doesn’t love her. It’s just that they have very little in common. He connected better with her brothers growing up for obvious reasons—they’re all men, for one, and two, they all have “normal” interests, such as computers and baseball and searing steaks on a grill. They even look like him, sharing a strong jaw and high cheekbones, a mouth that either curves into a severe, contemplative frown or a sincere smile.
Libby has none of these attributes. At fifty, her dad looks like he’s carved from marble. She looks down and can’t deny the fact that her gut resembles a roll of raw bread dough, the way it rests atop her jeans. She’s soft.
Libby takes another bite of custard. It’s rich and creamy, fragrant with nutmeg and cinnamon and everything that makes pumpkin spice. She catches her father’s eye. He grins, mischief dancing in his eyes. She grins back.
For all their differences, Libby has even less in common with her mom. She’s rigid and petite, beautiful and angular. While her brothers are a perfect blend of both of their parents, Libby cannot understand how her mom plus her dad equals her. More than once, she’s legitimately wondered if she was switched at birth.
“Listen.” Her dad’s voice pulls her back to the here and now. “I know you’re sixteen and you think you’re invincible…”
Libby feels her brows knit, like someone is pinching the skin between them.
“… and your mom and I don’t want you to stop living your life and having fun and whatnot. But you have to be on high alert, okay, Lib?”
Okay, Lib? Her lips move silently in sync with his. She nods to show she understands, but continues to watch his mouth, anticipating what he might say next.
“Libby, look at me.”
Her jaw tightens. She drags her gaze up to meet her father’s eyes.
“Someone is out there killing girls your age.”
Girls. He said killing girls. Plural. Dimples stipple her chin. She takes a breath and scrapes another spoonful of custard. “I don’t exactly fit the bill, Dad.” Hearing the statement as it leaves her lips, it almost sounds as if she’s pouting. Like she’s not good enough to be killed like straight-A-student Madison Caldwell or Little Miss Steal-the-Show, Chloe Winthorp.
He obviously believes Chloe is dead, then. Is that what her mother believes, too? And yet, how many times already has Libby heard her mom comforting Rowan, assuring her that they will bring Chloe home?
She never specified dead or alive, she supposes.
Semantics.
“What do you mean, you don’t ‘fit the bill’? Those girls were sixteen, Libby, like you. They went to Monroe Academy—like you—and lived on Belgrave Circle—again, like you.”
Fifteen, she thinks, but doesn’t correct him. Born at the end of August, she’s the oldest girl in her class. More than once, she’s wished her parents would have sent her to school a year earlier. Maybe then she’d be able to blend a little better, though she doesn’t know that a year would make all that much difference. Kids are mean in any grade. But, being that much closer to graduation by now would have been nice.
Libby stabs her spoon into her custard. It’s softened too much to hold it upright. The utensil slowly, pathetically falls forward until it rests against the edge of the plastic dome lid. She sighs and straightens her posture. She fixes her father with a serious stare. “Those girls were a lot smaller than me, Dad. Easily overpowered.” She pauses and looks down at her soupy ice cream, her appetite gone. “For once, me being fat plays to my advantage.”
“Honey, you’re not fat. Please don’t—”
“—tell it like it is?” Libby finishes his sentence for him. “Mom’s right. Don’t think I can’t hear you two through my bedroom floor.”
Her dad’s face falls. A muscle in his neck twitches as he, no doubt, replays the most recent argument he and her mom had over their teenage daughter’s weight. No more salty snacks in the house. No added sugars. No soda. Look at the nutrition label, Daniel. The first listed ingredient is corn syrup!
Restrict. Restrict. Restrict.
The only snacks at the Lucas household are unsalted chickpea puffs and bags of apple slices. She honestly cannot remember the last time she had pizza that wasn’t made with cauliflower crust or drank something that wasn’t sweetened with agave or stevia.
The Winthorps always have the best snacks. Pudding cups and cheesy popcorn. Cherry Pepsi. And all the cereal she and Chloe could eat. How many evenings in the past month alone had they carried bowls of Count Chocula up to her room and sat pretzel-legged on her bed, eating and watching Friends?
They call me Neck Roll at school, Libby almost tells him, but she thinks better of it. She will see her peers soon enough as they all huddle into the haunted house together. All she wanted was to enjoy a clandestine cup of custard with her dad and she just ruined it by bringing up her weight. She hates whenever her mom does this, and now she’s gone and done it herself.
But he brought it up, didn’t he? He made it seem like she could be a plausible next target for whoever killed Madison and Chloe. How little he knows about the girls in the neighborhood—including his own daughter, she thinks a little guiltily.
They finish their custard and discard their cups in the overflowing garbage bin. It’s a quiet drive the rest of the way to the Compound, with Libby’s dad speaking only to tell her to make sure her “Find My iPhone” feature is activated and to text him when she’s ready to leave.
Now, she waves as he pulls away in his black sedan. She knows he will just go park in the lot and read his Kindle. As soon as she turns, her personal space is invaded by a face covered in white, cracking paint. Eyes red and black, like a pair of bull’s-eyes, severed by matted tendrils of polyester hair. The colored contacts are a nice touch, she muses as the ghoul stalks off on stilts that make them over seven feet tall; the eyes are usually a dead giveaway.
The air is thick and smells like rotten eggs. It clung to her as soon as she got out of the car, permeating her hair and clothes. A fog of fake smoke obscures the grounds, but she can see the haunted house complex just ahead, a line snaking out from it like a tentacle or a tongue. Strobes flash, elongating shadows.
Her heart skips. Reeves Singh is in that line.
There are only two kids behind him. Libby jogs to the end, confident she can squish in among his group. The flannel tied around her waist waves behind her like a cape. Catching her breath, she nonchalantly positions herself beside them as a bloodcurdling scream tears from the entrance. The people closest back up like a herd of sheep, as though whatever elicited such terror is coming for them next.
Reeves talks to his friends as if she isn’t there. In her sixteen years on this planet, Libby has learned one defining truth about herself, which is that she is an oxymoron. Fat and invisible.
It makes eavesdropping easy.
“… can’t pin anything on you,” Kayden Thompson says. “So you got in an argument, so what?”
Reeves shoves his hands in his jeans pockets. He heaves a loud sigh that rattles from his chest. He’s probably been crying a fair amount. Madison was his girlfriend. He loved her once, even if they fought a lot. “It was just … bad timing.”
He shakes his head.
“You don’t think they’re looking into you as, like, an accomplice?” asks Derek Janssen. “Like maybe Chloe wanted Madison dead and you helped?”
Listening to her own hypothesis being spoken aloud by someone else, Libby feels validated. Perhaps there had been something between Reeves and Chloe. Just hearing the way he says her name hints at some stowed-away emotion, and Chloe had mentioned a crush, once.
Reeves shrugs. “They didn’t say that, but…”
Kayden snorts. “As if they’d tell you.”
“Especially if you’re a suspect,” adds Derek.
Reeves appears to shrink at the word “suspect.”
The line moves. They shuffle forward. A demonic clown cuts through, forcing them to abruptly stop. Libby stands on tiptoes to peer at the bobbing heads, and imagines them all to be apples in a barrel waiting to be sucked up by the mouth of some giant monster. Any minute now, a giant Cyclops will take the top off this tent like lifting the lid off a kettle and sink his teeth into one of them. She notices Sari Simons’s Afro perched atop her signature camouflage jacket and cosmological backpack. Who is she with? She squints to see and bumps into the boy in front of her.
Reeves turns. “Oh, hey, Libby.” He tries to smile politely, but it’s obscured behind a mask of melancholy.
“Hi,” she mumbles, and immediately realizes she spoke the word into her chest.
“You come with anyone?” Reeves asks, his eyes automatically scanning the crowd.
“Oh, yeah. My cousin is just, um, in the bathroom.”
“Who’s your cousin?” pesters Derek.
“She doesn’t go to our school,” says Libby. She catches a surreptitious glance exchanged between the boys, but they don’t press. They might suspect her of lying, but good luck proving it.
The line moves forward again. “Better tell your ‘cousin’ to shit or get off the pot, Neck Roll,” Kayden jeers. His last syllable is cut short when Reeves elbows him in the ribs.
Attempting to read Reeves’s lips, she can’t quite make out what he says to him. But it looks something like, Leave it be.
She almost allows a small smile to creep out, when she suddenly wonders whether or not the “it” Reeves was referring to was the situation itself, or her.
Semantics.
Sticks and stones.
They’re all the same.
Another shriek hurls toward them. It’s so loud, Libby swears it blows her hair in front of her face. Instinctively, she huddles closer to Reeves. When they plunge inside the ramshackle building, he lets her clutch a handful of his jacket so she doesn’t get lost in the pitch black.
The temperature plummets a whole ten degrees, if not more. She went spelunking once, with her parents on a family vacation to Mexico. It feels a little like that, with the cold, dead air and the inability to see your hand if you hold it two inches in front of your face.
“Shit, it’s dark!” Kayden commentates.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” scoffs Derek.
A door slams. Libby’s ears perk. She clings a little closer to Reeves as the two boys in front jump. A sibilant hiss swims through the air, raising the hairs on the back of her neck.
“Ssssss…” goes the noise in the dark. “Ssssstay with ussss…”
“Forever! Forever! Forever!” comes a singsong chant.
They turn a corner into a dimly lit room where porcelain dolls have come to life. One has her face cracked down the middle. Another is missing an eye. “Come play with me!” She dances over to Libby. Her dress is torn and bloodstained. A teddy bear’s head hangs from a rope around her neck. “What’s your name, ssssweetheart?”
Libby shakes her head.
“It’s Libby!” shouts Kayden.
“Libby! Libby!” The dolls begin to march and sing. “Libby’s going to stay with us forever! Come back, Libby! Libby!”
It’s more disturbing than it is scary. Still, Libby holds tightly to Reeves. He doesn’t seem to mind. Rather, he seems relieved about the fact that he isn’t bringing up the rear, his back exposed.
Somewhere in another room, the whine of a chain saw severs the air. Libby hurries forward, desperate to keep up with the boys. They make their way through the haunted labyrinth, wandering into a cellblock where undead prisoners drag their shackles and rap their chains against metal bars. Next, a movie theater shows a black-and-white zombie film to an audience of corpses who suddenly stand up and begin traipsing after them.
“Run!” Kayden yells.
He takes off, Derek hot on his heels.
“Come on!” Reeves grabs Libby’s wrist. It’s the closest thing she’s ever experienced to holding hands, except for the nights she and Chloe lay in bed and made up stories about Franklin the ghost. Reeves’s hand is cold, but warmth emanates through his grip. A shiver shoots up her spine as the chain saw gives another shriek. It sounds like the night is unzipping itself.
They come to a screeching halt at the edge of a precipice. The drop could only be a couple of feet, but with shadows as dark as an oil slick, it feels vast. A swinging bridge stretches across it. Suspended above are dismembered body parts drenched in fake blood.
Boards creak when Derek steps onto it. Kayden follows. Libby ducks to avoid a bloodied torso swinging her way when suddenly, a hulking figure appears at the other end of the bridge, chain saw wielded overhead. The ground falls away beneath her as he steps all his weight onto it.
“Go back! Go back!” one of the boys cries.
Libby scrambles backward and feels solid ground beneath her again as she jumps back onto the precipice.
“This way!” Reeves yanks her to the left. They run through a mesh tarp that reeks of mildew and old spray paint. The cacophony from the swinging bridge fades. The temperature drops another ten degrees.
“Is this still part of the attraction?” Libby wonders aloud. Just a little way ahead, a red EXIT sign glows. She catches a glimpse of Reeves. Sweat drips from his dark curls and shines on his forehead. She can feel her own perspiration beading above her lip. Her shirt sticks to her back.
“I think so?” Reeves goes to explore. Gravel crunches under his sneakers.
“Watch out!” Libby pushes him back a step before he trips over a dummy. It’s grotesque with its eyes gouged out, mouth open in mid-scream.
Then she notices the camouflage jacket and the blue flower barrette.