The Replacement

  I closed the drawer and turned to face her. “You can come in, you know.”

  She took a couple steps, then stopped again.

  “Janice—my lab partner, Janice—she gave me something,” she said. She was holding a paper bag. “She said it was a special kind of . . . holistic extract.” The sound of her voice was weirdly shrill, like I was making her nervous. “She said—she just said it would be good for you.” She crossed the room to my desk.

  “Thanks,” I said, watching as she set the bag down and backed away. “Emma—”

  But she’d already turned and walked out of my room.

  I picked up the bag and opened it. Inside, there was a tiny bottle made of brown glass. It had a paper label, and someone had written: Most Beneficial Hawthorn. To drink.

  Instead of a cap or a cork, the bottle was sealed with wax. When I cracked the seal with my thumbnail, the odor of leaves was sharp, but it didn’t smell spoiled or poisonous.

  I trusted Emma. All my life, she’d made it her mission to take care of me, to make sure I was okay. But drinking something unidentified was a very sketchy thing, and while I trusted Emma, I wasn’t at all sure that I trusted Janice.

  But more insistent was the feeling that if something didn’t change, if things just kept going on the same way they had been, I was going to wake up one day and not be able to get out of bed. Or, more likely, I was going to go to sleep and not wake up at all.

  I touched the mouth of the bottle, then licked the residue off the tip of my finger and waited. After a few minutes of rummaging through old homework assignments and laundry, I figured Janice’s hippie voodoo hadn’t killed me yet, so I took a good-sized drink and then another. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad. It kind of tasted like Everclear and dirt.

  I put the empty bottle back in the bag and found a shirt with a collar and not too many wrinkles. I was pulling the shirt down over my head when I realized that I suddenly felt better—all-over better. I’d been exhausted for so long that I’d sort of forgotten I felt exhausted until I didn’t anymore. I stretched and the muscles in my shoulders felt good, flexing restlessly.

  In the bathroom, I stood in front of the mirror. My eyes were still dark but not freakish. They were just normal, black at the pupil and a deep, muddy brown in the iris. My skin was still pale, but it would be called “fair” instead of “terminal.” I looked like a regular person, going out on a Saturday night. I looked normal.

  I went back into my room and studied the bottle. The label was plain, heavy paper, with nothing else written on it besides the mysterious notation Most Beneficial Hawthorn and the instruction to drink it. I knew that hawthorn was a low, thorny tree that grew out along the country roads, but the label gave no other indication about what the drink actually was.

  My head was cluttered with questions. What was it really, and how did it work? Was feeling better the same thing as a cure? Had Emma saved me? Even while my first instinct was to doubt it, I felt the grin spreading across my mouth. Huge, relieved. I hadn’t felt this good in weeks. Months, maybe.

  I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to do something that took a lot of energy. I needed to jump around the room or laugh uncontrollably or find Emma and hug her until she started laughing too and we both couldn’t breathe and had to sit down on the floor. I wanted to do handstands or backflips, but there wasn’t enough space. I wanted to run. I turned off the light and went out into the hall.

  “Emma.” I leaned my forehead against her door, then when she didn’t answer, I pushed it open. “Emma, what is this stuff? It’s amazing.”

  But Emma wasn’t in her room or anywhere I could find her.

  For the first time since my encounter with the guitar player the night before, the voice in my head had faded. Maybe dying wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Maybe there was a way to have a real, actual life, to be normal. Something in me didn’t really believe it. That small piece of me stood apart and watched with deep suspicion as I studied a tiny bottle that was too good to be true. But the rest of me didn’t care. There was too much pleasure in feeling free.

  When I heard Roswell’s car in the driveway, I bolted downstairs. On the front porch, I was hit by a barrage of smells: the raw vegetable reek of carved pumpkins, and the scorched smell of burning leaves, and faint but there, the swampy odor of the dry lake bed out on County Road 12. The night was deep and vibrant and ferociously alive.

  Three blocks away, I heard Mrs. Carson-Scott calling her cat inside and that was normal. Then I heard the faint jangle of the bell on its collar and the rustle as it crept through the bushes. Even the cars on Benthaven sounded like they were right there in front of me.

  Forget Tate. Forget dead kids and bloody lockers and the deep, pulsing ache I got whenever I thought about my family or my future. This was my life, right here.

  And I wanted it.

  PART TWO

  THE LIES PEOPLE TELL

  CHAPTER NINE

  ALL THAT GLITTERS

  At Stephanie Beecham’s, the street was full of car doors slamming. The noise of voices was steady as people filed up to the house and around back. They were mostly in costumes, even though Halloween wasn’t until Tuesday.

  The whole neighborhood was decorated for the season. There were paper skeletons in the windows and jack-o’lanterns on all the porches. The rain had settled down to a steady drizzle. In Stephanie’s front yard, someone had staked a burlap scarecrow of Gentry’s own monster of legend, the Dirt Witch. Its hair was made of wire and twine, and someone had drawn a snarling face on the burlap in marker. It loomed off to the side of the porch looking huge and sinister.

  Roswell and I walked up the driveway without talking. He didn’t have a costume exactly, but he was wearing a pair of pointy plastic teeth that fitted over his real ones. He kept giving me strange sideways looks.

  “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You didn’t—ow!” He touched his lip and then his new plastic teeth. “You didn’t open the window. You know how long it’s been since you didn’t open the window in my car?”

  And I realized that was true. I was fine, even after fifteen minutes in the car. “Is that a problem?”

  “No. But it’s weird.”

  I nodded and we stood at the top of the driveway, looking at each other. Behind us, someone was shouting the words to the school fight song, high and off-key.

  We headed for the open side gate and started around to the back of the house.

  The back door opened into a big, brightly lit kitchen, where too many things were shaped or painted like cows.

  And there was Tate. Because she was everywhere, creeping in at the edges, getting all tangled up in my life, and she couldn’t leave it alone. She smiled when she saw me, but it was a fierce, triumphant smile, like she’d just beaten me at some kind of game.

  She was leaning against the counter between Drew and Danny. She wasn’t wearing a costume either, but she had on this bizarre sort of headband. Two shining stars stuck up from it, swaying back and forth on long stalks. They were raining glitter everywhere.

  I took a deep breath and tried to act normal, sliding past her on my way to the refrigerator. I got a can of Natty Light off the shelf on the door and retreated across the kitchen.

  Danny was at the sink, knocking around with measuring spoons and bottles, doctoring up some kind of mixed drink. He had on a store-bought skeleton costume with a gray zip-front hoodie over it, like the title character in the movie Donnie Darko. Drew was dressed like Frank the Rabbit of the same film, but his mask was off and lying on the counter.

  When he was done adding sloe gin and grenadine, Danny shoved the glass across the counter at Drew. “Try that and tell me what it needs.”

  Drew took a sip, then coughed and set the glass down. “That’s awful.”

  Danny scowled and tossed a dripping tablespoon at him. “You’re awful. I’m looking for constructive feedback, asshole. What does it need?”

  Drew th
rew the tablespoon back. “It needs to be taken out and shot.”

  “Make your own damn drink, Mr. Mixology.”

  They punched each other in a friendly way, then Danny slipped the bunny mask over Drew’s head and they started for the living room. As they walked out, Drew reached over and yanked Danny’s hood down over his face.

  Roswell had already made a timely exit—probably to see where Stephanie was. I was alone with Tate, not sure whether to start planning my escape because as unappealing as the idea of talking about her dead sister was, I was pretty sure she was just going to follow me, and it might be smarter to get the conversation over with while no one else was around.

  I could see the shape of her, the curve of her body under the T-shirt. I knew I should stay back, but suddenly, all I wanted was to touch her. I crossed the kitchen and stood next to her so at least we wouldn’t be shouting our secrets at each other across a room. Her mouth was set in a hard, cynical smile, and nothing good could come of it. Her hair smelled like grapefruit and something light and fluttery that seemed out of place on her, but it was nice.

  “What are you supposed to be?” I asked, reaching over to flick one of her antennae.

  “Oh, I don’t know—I’m a robotic praying mantis. I’m a Martian. I’m aluminum foil. What are you supposed to be?”

  I set down my beer and pressed my hands flat on the counter. I’m not me—I’m someone else.

  I’m a normal, ordinary person, born to a normal, biological family, with brown eyes and fingernails that don’t turn blue just because the cafeteria ladies used steel trays for the french fries instead of aluminum.

  But I didn’t say anything. Her eyes were hard and mysterious. She reached for Danny’s failed drink without looking away from my face.

  I dropped my chin and watched the floor. “Stop looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  Like I’m stupid and pathetic and you hate me?

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing.” I glanced up and gave her a helpless look. “Just, what are you even doing here?”

  There was a fast, pop-y track playing on the stereo—you know the one—how everything will be all right and you just have to be yourself and try your hardest and it’ll work out and all that other bullshit. In the next room, girls were dancing together, singing along.

  “The amazing thing about this song,” Tate said, in a voice that sounded aggressively cheerful, like she wasn’t changing the subject completely. “The amazing thing about this song is that it contains absolutely no irony.”

  Her gaze was direct, full of a sadness so raw and crystallized that I could see the shape of it. It ringed her pupils in rusty starbursts, but she was grinning—this terrible, ferocious grin. It made her look like she wanted to tear someone’s throat out.

  I leaned against the counter, trying to think of something to say that would end the discussion and not drag it out. I needed something definitive that would take care of the problem once and for all. She just finished Danny’s drink in one long swallow, grinning up at me.

  I couldn’t work out what she actually wanted. Her sister was dead. Whether being dead happened in a pretty box on Welsh Street or someplace else, it didn’t make a difference. Dead was irreversible. It was permanent. You couldn’t do anything about it, and still, Tate seemed determined to take it back, like with the right answer, she could fix everything.

  Her eyes were hard, and glitter showered from her headband, dusting the shoulders of her jacket. “Do you believe in fairy tales?”

  “No.”

  “Not even the nice, grown-up kind where you follow all the rules and you work really hard and get a good job and a family and everything is happily ever after?”

  I snorted and shook my head.

  “Good. Then you should be just as righteously pissed as I am that everyone around here loves a nice game of Let’s Play Pretend.”

  “Look, you’re taking this way out of context. I’m sorry about your sister, I really am. It’s awful. But for the love of God, this is not exactly my problem.”

  Her smile looked frozen on suddenly, and she opened her eyes wide. Her voice was high and mocking and mean. “Oh, let’s play pretend, Mackie! Let’s play the part where you grow a pair and face basic facts and stop acting like everything is sunshine and unicorns! Let’s play that you start treating the girl like she has half a brain and tell her all about how sometimes, nasty little monsters show up in the bed where her sister used to sleep. Why don’t you tell her about that?”

  My cheeks got hot, like I’d just been slapped in the face. “Why?” I said, and the question sounded very loud, coming out in a harsh bark. I brought my voice down to a whisper. “Why should I? What’s in it for me?”

  She looked up at me and shook her head, making silver sparkles dance all around her. “You really think that everyone is stupid, don’t you?”

  For a second I stopped breathing. Then I leaned close and made my voice as hard and as mean as possible. “So, now I’m supposed to be some kind of expert on why your family’s all tragic? What did I ever do to make you think that any of this is my responsibility?”

  Tate’s laugh was short and scornful. “Believe me, if I’d had a choice, I would have picked someone with a little more backbone. You’re kind of all I’ve got.”

  I threw the beer in the sink, where it foamed up in a white froth, and pushed myself away from the counter. Away from the kitchen and Tate’s hard, merciless grin.

  For the first time since Drew and Danny’s art project, I thought about my locker and for a second, I got the idea that maybe Tate was the one who’d scratched Freak on the door. The idea died a quick death, though. The graffiti had happened the day of the funeral, which pretty much ruled her out, for the simple reason that I hadn’t pissed her off yet.

  In the living room, the sound system was louder, the crowd thicker. I made my way between superheroes and slutty witches, trying to find a place I could escape to.

  “Mackie!” Alice was sitting on the sofa, smiling, waving at me. “Mackie, come over here.” Everything about her was so effortless, a glossy island, normal, relieving. Just what I needed.

  When I sat down next to her, she moved closer, so that her leg pressed against mine. She smelled like tequila and some kind of powdery perfume that made my eyes water.

  She was dressed like a cat, which I thought was a very obvious costume. It was easier to think of her in a cotton tennis uniform, far away and spotless. But there was no avoiding the clip-on ears and the waxy black whiskers drawn on her cheeks. Every third girl was a cat.

  “Hey,” she said leaning closer. Her hair had come loose from one of the clips and it skimmed my arm in tangled waves. “We should go somewhere quiet.”

  Her lips were slick and shiny looking. In her mouth, the barbell still hummed at me—a mean, wicked little song. I wondered if the Most Beneficial Hawthorn was strong enough to protect me from the steel. Whether I even really wanted what I thought I wanted. I wanted to kiss her and not in the pure, longing way you want to kiss someone. I wanted it the way you sometimes want to jump into very cold water, even though you know it won’t feel good. I wanted to go numb. To see what it felt like to be someone else.

  She moved so that her chest was against my shoulder. “Do you want to go sit somewhere?”

  “We are sitting.” My hands were sweating.

  She gave me an annoyed look and tipped her head to one side. “I bet there’s someplace more private, though—upstairs? Bedrooms or something.”

  I didn’t know how to answer. Yes and yes and no and yes.

  I glanced in the direction of the stairs and then I almost stopped breathing.

  Two girls were standing halfway up the stairs, leaning their elbows on the banister and whispering to each other.

  One was pretty, wearing a huge, puffy dress, complete with a crown and a silver star wand. She looked soft and pinkish, the kind of girl who gets kissed awake at the end of a fairy tale, but she was sh
ort. Really short. Standing next to me, she wouldn’t have come up to my elbow. Also, she had the biggest ears I’d ever seen on a real person.

  She was standing up on the baseboard with her feet struck through the slats, holding on to the banister. She was talking up at the other girl, who wasn’t small or pink or cute.

  The second girl’s face was shiny, like skin after a bad burn. There was a jagged ring around her neck. No blood, just torn flesh and raw edges. Her grin was lunatic, almost as wide as the gash.

  She was looking out over the crowded room, and when she smiled, she was smiling at me.

  I turned to Alice. “We should go outside.”

  She shook her head. “It’s cold out.”

  Across the room, the girl stepped away from the banister and started down the stairs. Even from the couch, I smelled the low stink of something dead. It wasn’t a costume.

  I grabbed Alice harder than I meant to, yanking her up off the couch. “Let’s just go outside, okay? Let’s go for a walk.”

  Out in the backyard, people were standing around in little clusters on the covered patio, laughing and smoking, drinking beer out of plastic cups. I tried to breathe slower, but my heart was beating hard and fast in my throat.

  Next to me, Alice was wrestling with the cat costume. “God, this tail is so obnoxious.”

  It was, but not in the way she meant. Suddenly, she was right in front of me, pushing herself up on her toes.

  In her mouth, the barbell twanged at me. Her hand on my arm was warm. Her lips were less than three inches away. I swallowed and tried to figure out why this wasn’t the best moment of my whole life.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, breathing out another gust of tequila and stainless steel. She put a hand on her hip. “Look, are you gay or something?”

  I stared at her. She was beautiful in the porch light and very far away. I shook my head.