“I don’t want to hear lies,” she said. “Take it back.”
“No!” I shouted. “All the girls at school loved it. Loved it on me. I felt special. Like Lydia. Don’t you understand?”
“It’s you that’s special, not the dress,” Mom said. “Don’t you understand?”
“You have no idea what it’s like. Spending your whole life ashamed. Wanting to be somebody else.”
“Either you take it back, or I will.”
I ran to my room and slammed the door. I changed clothes and put the dress on a hanger, pitying myself the whole time before hobbling out to the kitchen.
“This dress made me really happy,” I said to my mom, who was taking a lasagna out of the oven.
“Be happy in your own skin,” she advised. “Go on now, take that back and then wash up for dinner.”
“Yeah, right,” I complained as I trudged down the stairs and across the street to Higgin’s.
Miss Serling barely looked at me as I walked back to her sitting at the register.
“Lydia is over there, or have you forgotten?” she said.
“I’m here to see you.”
“Really? What on Earth for?”
“I think this belongs to you,” I said, handing over the dress.
It felt like my heart would beat out of my chest. I know Miss Serling could hear it, that’s how nervous I was. She looked at the dress and then at me several times in rapid succession. Her face reddened with anger.
“I knew I should’ve kept a closer eye on you!” Miss Serling grabbed the dress before I could complete my denial and held it up behind the counter checking for damage or stains but found none. “Good thing for you.”
“So are you going to ban me from the store or something?”
She mulled it over for what seemed like forever and rendered her verdict.
“Well . . . you did bring it back,” she said. “And it’s undamaged. I won’t ban you, but don’t ever let anything like this happen again. If I have to go to Mr. Higgin, he won’t be as generous. He prosecutes shoplifters all the time, you know.”
She threw me a look of pity, which I hated more than anything. It doesn’t matter if she banned me or not. I was too embarrassed to come back. I walked out the door without even stopping to talk to Lydia. I figured she’d probably overheard anything she needed to know.
When I opened the door to leave, the bell at the top rang, but I also thought I heard something else.
Laughter.
“Stop laughing at me!” I yelled to Miss Serling behind the counter, months of pent-up resentment breaking through. Only, when I turned around to see her, she wasn’t there. I must be going mad.
The week passed, and every day I fought the urge to visit Lydia. Instead, I watched her flaunt a plum silk dress from my bedroom window. She stood there so beautiful, free from all the worries, all the drama that real girls like me had to face each day.
Mom and I didn’t discuss the dress, but the girls at school kept asking when was I going to wear it again. I just smiled coyly and laughed. I secretly feared that one of their moms would hear something from Miss Serling and find me out. Humiliate me.
The very next morning I opened my eyes and dragged myself over to my closet to find something to wear. And find something I did. That very dress that Lydia wore all week, the plum silk one, hanging right there in my closet!
I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. How, I wondered, did this get here? Was my mom rewarding me for being honest? Or Miss Serling making a kind of peace offering? Or maybe Mr. Higgin just plain felt sorry for me?
With the school bus nearly here for pick up, I didn’t have time to think about it, nor did I want to. I swept my hair up like Lydia’s, put the dress on, threw an old dress into my backpack, and left for school. Thankfully, Mom wasn’t back home yet from her night shift.
I hopped on the bus and flashed Lydia a thumbs-up. There she was, in a new metallic silver party dress. It was divine, and the pleats at the bottom glistened like new-fallen snow. I wanted it more than anything I’d ever set my eyes on. It dawned on me that I was still wearing hand-me-downs, only now they were from a dummy.
Everyone had their eyes glued on me as I sashayed down the hall. Even more than the last time. They were thrilled to see another one of the dresses they’d been admiring in Higgin’s window on me. I had more friends at school and on Facebook now than I could count. It was like I was their Lydia. And it’s oddly the only time I really felt like myself. But all I could think about was that new silver dress. I had to have it.
At the end of the day, I changed in the school restroom before getting on the bus home. I didn’t need any questions I couldn’t or wouldn’t answer from Mom. I folded up the dress nicely and hid it in my backpack.
In the weeks that followed, every dress that Lydia wore appeared in my closet while I slept, starting with the silver party dress. I followed the same routine. Kept it to myself, left before Mom got home in the morning, and changed into old clothes at school every afternoon before I got on the bus. I was living my dream, and I didn’t care how or why anymore.
Halloween night. Higgin’s window was all decked out in menacing black cats, bats, and witches’ hats. At the center of it all stood Lydia, wearing a black velvet dress with a rounded ivory collar totally appropriate for the season. I just had to see it up close.
“Happy Halloween, Miss Serling.”
“You’re not dressed up?” she asked.
My heart sank. I’d been found out. Busted. All she had to do was look in my backpack to see the dress.
“For Halloween,” she continued. “You’re not dressed up?”
“Oh, right. No, I don’t want to be anything this year, actually,” I said. “I’m going as myself.”
“Are you sure about that?” she asked before disappearing into the back.
I proceeded to Lydia, studying her new dress carefully. Envying it. I literally couldn’t wait for it to turn up in my closet. I needed to have it. Now.
“Closing time,” Miss Serling called out from the register.
“Okay,” I called back. “Happy Halloween again.”
As Miss Serling put her head down to count out the register, I opened the door to sound the bell and then ducked behind a few racks. After a few minutes she walked right by me. I had to sneeze, but held it in with all my might. She turned out the store lights, stepped outside, and locked the door, leaving me alone with Lydia.
The purplish-black Halloween lights in the display window mixed with the moonlight, causing the shadows from the spooky decorations to grow in the room and cast an eerie glow on the mannequin. The wind howled outside as trash cans toppled and lights flickered and went out, just like my birthday candles.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been here in a while . . . ,” I said, my voice trailing off as I looked behind me. “Your dresses are a big hit with everyone at school. You’re so lucky that you get to wear them firsthand.”
Just then a dress fell off the rack next to me. It was teal chiffon and irresistible. I couldn’t help but rush to put it on. “I’m really popular now and happy. All thanks to you,” I said as I fixed my hair in an updo and checked myself out in the mirror. “I just wish it could last forever.”
After admiring myself for a while, I got tired and decided it was time to go. I reached for Lydia’s hand in a gesture of thanks and to say good-bye. As I grabbed hold of it, I found that I couldn’t let go. I looked to see if I’d caught her sleeve on my bracelet, unable to get free.
“Let me go!” I screamed.
I was overcome with fear and felt woozy.
The last thing I heard was the bell jingle on the door and the slightest giggle fade into the wind.
The next morning I opened my eyes, relieved, thinking that last night was only a nightmare.
But I quickly realized something was terribly wrong.
I wasn’t in my room.
All I could see were Halloween decorations from Higgin’s
window surrounding me, and the hustle and bustle of the street outside. A familiar voice was barking orders from behind me.
“Let’s get these decorations down now and a new dress on the mannequin,” Miss Serling said in a rushed voice. “Or we’ll be here forever!”
A girl and her mother approached me from across the street.
It was MY mother.
And ME.
Only I was in the store window. Trapped in the mannequin.
I am Lydia.
“This is Lydia, Mom,” the girl who used to be me said to my mother.
“I’ve never seen her up close,” Mom said. “She’s so beautifully dressed and lifelike, isn’t she?” My mother lingered in front of the new me.
“Yes. I used to think I wanted to be just like her, but I know now I’d rather be me,” Lydia said, holding tight to my mom’s hand.
“And you have all those beautiful dresses that Higgin’s gave to you because of your honesty. You will look just like her.”
Lydia laughed. It was the exact same laugh I’d heard in the store.
It finally dawned on me that Lydia had planned this all along. She didn’t give those dresses to me as gifts, to make me happy. She was putting them in my closet for herself! So she’d have nice clothes to wear when she took over my life!
And the candles on my birthday cake? She blew them out! Before I could officially wish to be like her, she wished to be me!
The happy mother-daughter duo waved good-bye to Miss Serling through the window. I tried to shout, but nothing came out.
Come back! It’s me! Come back, Mother, please! I silently screamed again and again, Lydia’s sweet smile now frozen across my new face for eternity. It’s MEEEEEEE!
Feed the Birds
by Stephen Ross
I SOMETIMES STILL HEAR MY AUNT and uncle screaming.
Late in the evening, when all is quiet in this large old house, I sometimes still hear their cries outside from somewhere deep in the forest; even though it has been many years since they ran out into the night, screaming with absolute terror and fear.
I don’t miss them.
My mother and father drowned at sea when I was twelve, and I was left to the care of my only remaining family: Uncle Average and Aunt Zelda, two of the sourest specimens I had ever met. They had no children, and they lived here at Abercrumble House, a large, two hundred-year-old house in the middle of a forest and ten miles from the nearest town or village.
I can still remember the day I first came to live here at Abercrumble. It was the year 1872, in winter. Chubwitt, the family lawyer, a thin pencil of a man, escorted me and my two suitcases to Paddington Station in the heart of London, where he put me aboard a train bound for the village of Hertley on the edge of the Hertley Forest.
I had a first-class compartment to myself, and three small apples in my coat pocket to eat on the journey. And as I watched the city fade, and the countryside grow, I felt I was going to have a lonely life; with an aunt and uncle I had never met and of whom my mother and father had seldom spoken.
This sense of dread became concrete when my train arrived in Hertley.
“I don’t care for children,” my uncle announced in a gust of frosted breath when I met him on the freezing-cold station platform. “I’m only taking you in because you are the child of my wife’s dead sister.”
My uncle was dressed in a dark gentleman’s long coat and hat. He had a mess of gray hair and a bushy gray mustache beneath his nose. He was very tall and very large. Standing in front of him on the platform, I could barely see his face for his wide chest. It was like standing in front of a large hill, with his head sitting up on the top.
We rode in his carriage, a completely black carriage drawn by two horses with a gold letter A on the door beneath the window: A for “Abercrumble.” A for “alone.”
I really felt quite miserable. The driver sitting up at the front holding the reins was a short, bald-headed old man with two droopy eyes like those of an old, faithful hound. My uncle addressed him as Fulton, and as I had climbed into the carriage, Fulton had given me a smile; the only one I saw that day.
As we rode deep into Hertley Forest, my uncle said something to me, and I’ve never forgotten the way he said it: “Don’t feed the birds.” He was staring out the window of the carriage, lost in thought.
I noticed he had a large, rusty key hung about his neck on a string; I would learn that this key was always with him.
He turned to look at me. His eyes were black. “Do you understand? Do not ever feed the birds.”
“Birds?” I inquired. I had seen none, and apart from the thud of the horses’ hooves and the rumble of the carriage wheels on the dirt track, I had heard nothing, either. In fact, Hertley Forest appeared entirely empty; a deep, damp, dark entanglement of winter dead trees, with a narrow, winding pathway leading endlessly through it.
No one lived in Hertley Forest except for Average and Zelda Abercrumble; no one else wanted to live in it. Abercrumble House stood in the middle of the forest and had been the home of the Abercrumbles for over two hundred years. And with no children, Uncle Average was the last stop on the Abercrumble family line.
As the carriage rode into the clearing that contained the house, I leaned out the window to look. Abercrumble House appeared as though it had been conjured up in a nightmare: a lopsided construction of three floors, with stone walls black with moss, and windows clouded with centuries of dust. At the left front corner stood a solitary tower entwined in rotting roots. It rose up high above and seemed to threaten anyone looking up at it with a swift coming down and swatting like a fly.
My large uncle made another pronouncement: “Do not go up into the tower. It is dangerous and forbidden.”
I had formed the opinion that my uncle liked to make rules. I had no idea what his occupation concerned, but he would have made for an excellent schoolmaster. He walked with a walking stick, too, and I could easily imagine him slamming it down onto school desks as he instructed you of all the things you were not allowed to do.
An elderly woman stood on the steps leading up to the house’s front entrance. She had gray hair tied tightly back and was dressed in mourning black. She looked thoroughly unpleasant. At her feet the steps were littered with dead and rotting leaves.
“Is that Aunt Zelda?” I asked.
“No,” Uncle Average answered. “That is Mrs. Fulton. She is the housekeeper.”
The Fultons were the only staff at Abercrumble. Fulton (Mr.) was the groundsman and tended to everything outside the house: the grounds, the horses, and repairs to the roof; and Mrs. Fulton tended to everything inside: the cooking, the laundering, and the dust.
The front door opened into a wide, empty front hall with a checkerboard floor of black slate and white marble tiles; they looked so old and worn they had surely been laid down by the Romans.
Mrs. Fulton showed me to my room. “It was sad news to hear of your mother and father,” she said.
She carried one of my suitcases, I the other. She led me upstairs to the second floor and through a maze of shadowy hallways. I had the feeling she was a woman of few words, as she said nothing else on the journey.
The inside of the house was cold, dark, and empty. There were no rugs on the bare wooden floors, no pictures hung on the walls, and nothing at all in the way of decoration. It was only the afternoon, but I felt as though I needed a candle and a priest. It was as though something had died in all the gloom.
Mrs. Fulton led me into my bedroom, dropped my suitcase on the floor, sneezed, and left.
My room was quite big and rather empty. There was a bed, a chair, a dresser, and an echo. The view from the window was of the forest, and I imagined its long, moss-mottled branches loomed large in every window of the house. I understood that one of Fulton’s primary duties as groundsman was to prevent the forest from growing right up to the house and strangling it.
I unpacked, and then I went and explored, and naturally, the first place I wanted to
investigate was the tower. I found the door leading to its staircase without any difficulty. It wasn’t locked, and I headed up without delay. I loved a mystery, and there had to be something up at the top; why else would my uncle have told me to keep out. I certainly didn’t see any danger. It was just an ordinary spiral stone staircase, and all the way up there were regular slits in the wall that let in daylight.
At the top of the stairs there was a window and a red door. Looking out the window, I could peer down into the clearing in front of the house and then out across the tops of the trees of the forest. It was like looking out across a vast barren sea of wilderness, with a gunmetal winter sky above keeping watch over it.
The red door was locked. I peered through its rusty keyhole but could see nothing of the room on the other side. I presumed the key that hung about my uncle’s neck would unlock it.
I heard a rustle behind me. Two small birds sat outside on the window ledge. They were black, and each about the size of my hand. They were looking at me through the glass in a most peculiar way, as though they were studying me. I had never seen birds do that.
They flew away.
I tracked their flight down into the trees, and curious, I decided to follow them. I headed back down the tower’s spiral staircase and then back up to my room, where I fetched my coat.
As I was walking out through the front door, my uncle spied me as he was coming out of the drawing room.
“Are you going outside without a scarf and a hat?” he called out.
“I’m dressed warm enough,” I answered.
“Don’t you catch a cold,” he warned.
Another rule.
I left the house.
I followed the winding pathway through the forest for a quarter mile, until I came to about where I thought the birds might have gone to perch.
I could hear nothing, apart from a gentle breeze through the tree branches and the faint sound of the last leaves falling. How could a forest be dead, I wondered, as this one certainly appeared to be? It was as though all the color had been drained from it.
I saw movement.